August 18, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church, San Francisco.
Our image of Jesus is that he is gentle, meek and mild. At Christmas, we sing in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, “Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die.” Or in Silent Night! Holy Night!, “holy infant, so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.”
After what we just read, rather than to call Jesus mild, we might call him, “riled!” In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus describes his ministry as divisive. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” he asked. “No, I tell you, but rather division.”
Is this the sort of Jesus we want? Lord knows we already have enough things that divide us—politics, nationalism, ethnicity, economic status, social standings, educational level, religion, denominations, cultural issues (such as gun control, abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage, etc.) and more—without having a divisive Savior.
For me as your pastor, I’m here to be pastoral—keeping all the sheep and flock fed, watered, getting along with each other, and to increase the sheep! And consider what we’re saying when we labeled someone as having a “divisive personality.” The meaning is “disruptive, unsetting, alienating, troublesome, controversial, contentious causing or tending to cause disagreement or dissension.
Even the Bible itself says, “Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that, have nothing to do with him” (Titus 3:10).
So do we want a Jesus whose stated purpose for coming to earth is to bring division? Not peace. Division. No wonder our image of Jesus comes mainly when he was just an infant, so tender and mild.
There have been these religion and health studies that sometimes suggest that there’s a correlation between frequent church attendance and health. One study said that people who attend church regularly, as opposed to people who attend infrequently, enjoy lower blood pressure. Now you ought to be pleased that this service has a good effect on your blood pressure! However, I wonder what effect today’s Gospel have on your hypertension? Whatever purpose Jesus had in mind in saying the things that he says to us today, it could not be to promote better cardiovascular health!
Jesus says, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” Jesus is not only not gentle, meek and mild, he is divisive to our peace and harmful to your health.
Division
In math, doing division is the hardest after you have mastered addition, subtraction and multiplication. Thank God for calculators!
Division is a troubling word, and as it happens, divisive talk and actions from Jesus or about Jesus keep showing up in the gospels. Look at this.
When John the Baptist was announcing Jesus’ coming, he said, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:17). That’s divisive.
In the early days of Jesus’ ministry, when he visited the Nazareth synagogue with his reputation as a preacher and healer preceding him, the congregation initially “spoke well of him” (Luke 4:22). But Jesus wasn’t content to leave it at that, and intentionally provoked them with his “hometown” comments to the point that they wanted to dispatch him over a cliff (Luke 4:16-30).
When Jesus spoke to a crowd at the festival of booths in Jerusalem about the rivers of living waters, some hearers decided he was the Messiah. Others doubted it, however, and the gospel narrator says, “So there was a division in the crowd because of him” (John 7:43).
When a would-be follower told Jesus he first wanted to bury his father, the sense of Jesus’ response was that the man should leave his family obligations behind, which, if the man had done so, would have effectively divided him from his family (Luke 9:57-60).
And in our reading for today, Jesus talked about setting father against son, mother against daughter, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and vice versa in all three cases. That’s pretty divisive! If there weren’t divisions already embedded in these relationships, Jesus expected even some more!
And let’s not forget that the Matthew account of today’s reading has Jesus saying, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Ouch!
Divisive talk and actions from Jesus or about Jesus keep cropping up in the gospels.
Divisive Call
When we look carefully at the divisive words in the incidents involving Jesus that we just reviewed, we realize that it was not Jesus personally that was divisive, but his call. And that call demanded—and still demands—some significant decisions about what takes priority in one’s life.
For example, in the text before us, Jesus’ words about bringing not peace but division were spoken to his disciples (Luke 12:1-22). His purpose seems to be to correct any misconceptions they held about what following him entailed. When he asked them, rhetorically, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth?” he was challenging their assumptions that he was going to establish the messianic reign Israel had looked for, where they would be an independent people again, secure in the borders of a land flowing with milk and honey.
The disciples were thinking that Jesus would lead them to defeat the Romans and the Gentiles. That, as we know now, was not where Jesus was headed. He was already feeling the shadow of the cross, and, if the disciples were going to stay with him, they needed to know that the way ahead would force them to not only rid their expectations of messianic victory and peace, but also to make hard choices about who had claim on them.
We may not have as much of a divisive Jesus, but the divisive call of Jesus is a reality.
Jesus’ call today still has a divisive element to it. He calls us to divide ourselves from those who urge us to morally stray, to not put family loyalty above doing his will, to not believe or follow those who act as if peace and happiness lies in possessions and ending up with most of the toys, to stand up against societal voices that build up the self at the expense of others. In our individual case, the divisive part of Jesus’ call may be quite specific and personally tailored to our life.
For me, I stand against any justification of war when I became a conscientious objector. This divides me from most people who believe in the US military. I identified with all creation made by God and chose to be a vegetarian. This divides me from those who are not vegetarians. I became a minister and said to my family and friends that living for Christ trumps all other things. Let me tell you that this has not been easy for Joy and our family. As a minister, people feel uncomfortable when they first meet me because they feel that they can’t be themselves in my presence. This means that I don’t get invited to some parties!
Jesus says that he has come to provoke division rather than unity. He prophesies that after him, homes will be wrecked, families will be split apart, and children will turn against their parents.
While we live at a time when divorce rates are higher than ever, family courts are swamped with problem kids and problem parents, there’s family stress everywhere, Jesus appears to be addressing his own disciples. He is telling them that they will have marital stress and they will have family division, not because they have done something wrong as spouses or as parents, but rather because they are following him!
At Youth Camp a couple of weeks ago, a number of youth shared about how their parents were not yet Christians and prayed that maybe by their words and deeds that their parents might consider attending church. Many of these youth see division between themselves and their parents when they want to follow Jesus.
When Kenley Mew came back from this recent Thailand Mission trip, Jesus calls him to resign from his job and got hired as an English teacher in China for one whole year. Jesus is calling Kenley to be apart from Peggy. Jesus is saying quite clearly that he has come to split up families. Joy and I left our home in Pennsylvania and our children in the East Coast when we came to FCBC 15 years ago. We are still divided by the width of this country from our son and his family in North Carolina.
How can it be that the one at Christmas came to bring peace provokes such division?
Baptism by Fire
A pastor performed a baptism of a graduate student when he was a campus minister. This young man had gone through a dramatic conversion experience and had requested to be baptized in order to become a Christian. He was a graduate student from China.
The campus minister counseled him before his baptism and made sure that he had a good understanding of the Christian faith and the questions that we would ask him in the baptism. On a Sunday he joyfully baptized the student during morning service.
The campus minister was proud of himself, not only because he had assisted God in making a new Christian, but he had also brought his camera. After the service he made a big deal of having him stand again at the baptistery and have his picture taken. He took a picture of the student and then took a picture of the student standing with him. But the student was somewhat reticent to have his picture taken. The campus minister thought he was shy.
But on the way out of the parking lot, one of his friends said, “I don’t know that you will need to give him those pictures to send back home to his family. They have assured him that if he does this, he could never come back home. They will definitely disown him. Furthermore, since the Chinese government is supporting his scholarship to the university, he is fairly sure that once this word gets out, he will lose all of his funding to study here.
This young man’s baptism was somewhat similar to what Jesus was talking about in describing his own baptism as a fire—a threatening, destructive, and devastating experience (12:49-50). Following Jesus calls us to split up families once the word gets out.
We know that there are places in the Bible that say following Jesus does result in one kind of peace. In John 14:27, Jesus says to his disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” Yet, we read that first-century followers of Jesus didn’t live very peaceful lives, at least not as we would describe it. Several of the apostles were arrested for their preaching and then martyred. Paul was beaten, arrested, stoned and finally executed. If that’s peace, no thank you!
And we know that Christians today, like everybody else, go through painful, upsetting times that are anything but peaceful. So the peace of God means something other than the absence of struggle and discord, something other than living in a comfortable existence.
The peace of God is something like a magnetic center of calm toward which the person who is committed to Christ is drawn back in the midst of or after turmoil. The peace of God is an anchor that keeps us from being swept away in the storms of life. Frederick Buechner says that, “for Jesus, peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love.”
C.S. Lewis says that the Christian faith is a thing of great comfort. But it does not begin in comfort. It begins in distress, and there is no way to get to the comfort without first going through the distress. Jesus will eventually pronounce “peace” on his followers. But not before he walks a narrow way to the cross and suffers and dies amid great conflict and distress. There is something about the way of Jesus that leads to peace, but only through disruption and division.
The divisive element in Jesus’ call reminds us that Jesus did not come so that we could have a happy family life—though the peace of God may contribute to that. It reminds us that Jesus did not come so that we could get along with our siblings—though the peace of God may help us to live with the conflict or enable us to make the first move toward reconciliation. It reminds us that Jesus did not come so that we could get along with our coworkers and neighbors, though the peace of God may help us stay connected during the discord.
No, none of that. But the one reason Jesus did come was to call us to follow him. Depending on the circumstances of our lives, that may be a very divisive call, and it promises no peace at all…except the peace of God.
Let us pray.
Jesus, we are trying to follow you. Some days, discipleship is a great joy, particularly when you are in a gracious mood and you say things to us we like to hear. We like to hear you talk about peace, about forgiveness, about eternal life, and other sweet-sounding blessings.
But there are other times when you are difficult to follow, difficult to take, when being a disciple is a real pain. Sometimes you say things to us that we can’t understand. And at other times you say things to us that we can fully understand but we really don’t like! In these moments, we don’t know what to do with you.
But maybe that is the point. In following you as your disciples, our job is not to do something with you, but rather to have you do something with us. We are full of misunderstanding, misapprehension, and fear when you speak to us such demanding words. We wonder if you made a mistake in calling us to be your disciples.
And yet, you did call us. Perhaps you know what to do with us. Even now in prayer we are changing. You are transforming us, you are pulling us toward yourself, re-making us into the faithful followers you would have us be. Let it be. Amen.