Luke 12:49-56
August 15, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Last Sunday, I preached a painful message from Isaiah 1 that challenges our worship practices to go beyond the saying of our prayers, the singing of the songs or even partaking of the Lord’s Supper as ways that we think would guarantee protection from life’s dangers or to insure us eternal life. Until we seek justice for the vulnerable, the disadvantaged or the oppressed, God said he would not even listen to our prayers.
Today’s teachings from Jesus are just as scorching as Isaiah’s prophecy. It’s another difficult and painful message for us to hear. What happened to the gentle shepherd of our Sunday school lessons? The “Prince of Peace” is saying that he has not come to bring peace to the earth but divisions. Jesus said,
“I came to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!”
This is not a Jesus who is meek and mild, always sweet and gentle. But rather, this Jesus is a God in Christ that enters into the world and is stressed out over the fact that his mission is not yet completed. So get ready because we can expect sparks to fly. Jesus brings “fire on the earth.”
Family Divisions
I can still remember plastered on the buses and on late night TV commercials the saying, “The family that prays together stays together.” In our society today when we see too many families falling apart, we read that Jesus comes to divide father against son, mother against daughter, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, father-in-law against son-in-law. We have problems enough in our families. Jesus is supposed to help our families stay together—our Family Camp theme this year is “Healthy Households.” Isn’t Jesus supposed to be the glue that keeps us together?
But Jesus says, “I came not to bring peace, but division.” While Luke has softened this a bit for us, in Matthew 10:34, Jesus sounds downright violent: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
There’s a story about St. Francis of Assisi who became a knight in the wars with Perugia, and had a fabulous future in front of him. His father was proud of his son, but the problem was that Francis kept going to church and praying, asking God what he wanted him to do. Over time, Francis became convinced that God did not want him to be a dashing knight, but rather to be a follower of Christ. Christ wanted Francis to serve the poorest of the poor.
Francis heard the scripture say, “Sell all that you have and give it to the poor.” And he did just that.
But his father took exception, for what the boy gave away wasn’t really his to give away but was given to him by his father, who had no urge to take the Bible literally. He threw Francis in jail, and then took him to court. Francis said, “No longer is Pietro Bernardone my father for, from now on, my father is in heaven.” Jesus sets father against son and son against the father.
At a distance, we may admire Francis as noble and heroic. But the pain is real and long-lasting. Although my own father died when I was a junior in high school, I always wondered what he would have said when I decided to attend seminary instead of becoming an electrical engineer. As a first generation Chinese American, he knew that making it successfully in America means going into engineering where the money was. He bought me little motors and dry cells so that I would be interested in how things work. My father was a wonderful father in many ways, but when it came to following his dream for my life and my call to enter seminary, I don’t think he would have been happy with me.
I knew that I wasn’t a saint, but I was convinced of what God was calling me to do. My younger brother who was going to law school at the time wondered if he would still have a brother when I became a minister. He thought he needed to call me “Reverend” all the time. My brother felt that there would be a permanent distance between us once I became a minister. Can we serve Christ and still have a family?
Some of you who serve the church know this. You get excited about serving Christ, but those you are kin to, a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling don’t understand. You find yourself set against them, and it’s painful, because what you are so excited about is something that those you love can’t easily understand.
When we follow Jesus, there will be division in families; the earth will move, the wind will blow and fire will consume and we are challenged to choose between Jesus and what the world offers.
Fire and Water
Why the harsh words from Jesus then? What is behind Luke’s gospel message for us today? When Jesus spoke that he has “a baptism with which to be baptized,” he wasn’t referring to the baptism that he has already experienced from John the Baptist on the river Jordan. For Jesus, he was anticipating his testing of his faith, the suffering and death on the cross, and the glory of resurrection. This awaiting fate of his purpose was causing him stress until he completes his mission. With this thought in mind, Jesus wanted to shake up his followers’ complacency.
Jesus is stressed out to get his disciples to understand how painful his mission will be. His teachings, it seems, may have lulled people to sleep, and Jesus is intent on shattering their expectations. “Do you think I come to bring you peace? No, I come to bring you division or I come to bring you the sword!”
The passage for this morning is a refreshing correction to the notion that faithful Christians should always feel peaceful complacency, or that Jesus represents the status quo. Jesus does not call us to a continuing state of bliss, peace or comfort in this life. Jesus calls us to radical struggle, change and transformation, and this is never easy for individuals, for families, for communities or nations.
With our culture’s emphasis on family values, Jesus would not be very popular with Dr. Phil today. Instead of presenting a portrait of the perfect Norman Rockwell family eating and talking together; Jesus offers us a family of slamming doors and stone-silenced meals. This is what can happen when family members puts God before his/her own blood.
Even Jesus himself experienced family tensions when he was told that his mother and brothers came to see him, and he responded that his mother and brothers was everyone who heard God’s word. Jesus didn’t despise the family but rather redefined the family. For Jesus, family was not a set of genes you were given but rather whose lineage you were created in. It was not a matter of who had the last name, but who serves the same God.
The preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor once said, “the gospel is not a flashlight but a fire. It can cut and it can burn. The gospel is not a table knife but a sword. It is free and it can divide.” Following Jesus can sometime create tensions with those whom we love because they don’t understand.
A common view of the meaning of “fire” in the Bible refers only to judgment. We see this in Genesis 19:24 when “the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven” or in Luke 9:54 when James and John entered a Samaritan village and they refused to receive Jesus, the disciples asked, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”
But in our passage for this morning, there’s another meaning that suggests more than judgment. The destructive power of fire is not merely associated with judgment, but with purification and cleansing. In Leviticus 13:52, the priests are instructed to burn the clothing of lepers to contain the spreading of the disease. And in Numbers 31:21, Eleazar the priest under instructions from Moses cleansed the soldiers after battle, “This is the statute of the law that the Lord has commanded Moses: gold, silver, bronze, iron, tin, and lead—everything that can withstand fire, it shall be clean.”
The power of fire changes things from the old to the new. When we say, “baptism by fire,” we affirm the power of the Holy Spirit to come to that person to change from his old ways to new ways. The person is cleaned once again.
The fire that Jesus brings to the earth is costly because it requires his baptism on the cross and the forgiveness of our sins. And if we are to be his disciples, we can’t just see Jesus as that gentle shepherd in our Sunday school lessons. Jesus invites us to be cleansed with new life in baptism. And like Jesus who is so stressed out with completing his mission, we too may be stressed out when we choose God over our families to complete our missions. He is bringing fire on the earth that will cause divisions among our closest relationships including our families.
This is not an anti-family message nor was Jesus against the family. But the point is that when we follow Jesus, the costly consequences may trigger divisions and opposition.
New 9:30 Worship
Today’s worship service is the last pilot service of our new 9:30 English worship before we begin to worship weekly commencing on September 12th. Before we launched this service on June 20th, some people were worried and concerned that this would cause divisions in the church. Instead of bringing unity, the fear was that we may cause parents to be against their children and children to be against their parents.
Some may see this new service as the difference between the old ways and the new ways, between the ways of our elders and the ways of our children. We may be tempted to see this as a generational division.
But the truth of what is behind this new worship is the fiery passion behind Jesus’ disciples at this church to follow Jesus with costly consequences: the worship praise team practicing long hours to prepare music for our worship; the design team that coordinates the myriad of details for each Sunday morning; the volunteers who spruce up the Rec. Center and hang up banners and set up the equipment. Choosing Jesus over anything else to accomplish the mission God is calling us to trigger divisions and costly consequences.
Most of us want a Jesus who would bring us peace that is comfortable and easy. We can tame Jesus into a boring religious leader. And perhaps the greatest challenge we have in the American church is “boredom.” The crowds who were listening to Jesus preach expected a peaceful and uniting leader; not one who would divide their own families. If we didn’t launch this new worship service, we would be bored! This service is a remedy for boredom!
In Luke 12:54, Jesus challenged his disciples to be able to interpret this present time. “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens.” When we were able to see that our church was blessed with the resources and skills to offer a new English worship that utilizes a praise band and focusing on expository preaching, we interpreted this present time for God’s purposes. You were ready to start a new worship service!
Not only do we appreciate the mission of Jesus, the presence of Christ or the advance of God’s redemptive purpose in history, we are also called to engage in this world at this present time. And if we don’t, Jesus calls us, “hypocrites!” The purpose and mission of this New 9:30 Worship is to be faithful to Jesus’ call for us to follow him as his disciples. The Gospel is always demanding and it can be divisive.
The Good News
From the harsh words we hear from Jesus, what is the Good News here? The good news is to shake us out of our complacency and put our lives in order. Jesus is warning us that anything but worshipping God alone must be first in our life. If anyone or anything becomes more important in our life than God, then all of our relationships become dysfunctional.
This message was as shocking in the culture of first-century Palestine as it is for us today in the twenty-first century. In that society, the relationship with one’s parents was of primary importance. If anyone wanted to get married, begin a career, master a trade or embark on a journey, they did so only with the approval of their parents. Jesus’ shocking message is that although family relationships are extremely important, they are secondary compared to the primary relationship with God.
We know that if we try to make any human relationship the number one priority of our life, we will put expectations on someone that no human being could ever fulfill. In our families, we have failures in communication (I forgot our wedding anniversary last Thursday!); we are dishonest with each other; there are these unbearable tensions and distance, and we don’t know what to do.
But the good news is that only God can satisfy the deepest longings of our soul. If we make God number one in our life, our human relationships will become healthier. We are free to love our families without becoming dependent on them. Instead of trying to have perfect human relationships which we know is impossible, our relationship with God enables us to offer and receive forgiveness and mercy in our human relationships. When we choose God first, we realize that all of our human relationships will also find their proper places in our lives.
The good news is that we only “play to an audience of one—Jesus Christ!” It is not important what our boss, family members or friends say about us. The only thing that is important is what God says about us. When we interpret the present times, we discover that there is a decision that we cannot avoid to make. We must choose God and God alone.
When we make God number one, we realize that the fire that Jesus came to bring to earth is not a fire of judgment but a fire of purification which strengthens us for the sacrificial service we do on earth. Thanks be to God!
Let us pray.
Gracious God, we are troubled when we have divisions and tensions in our families and we pray for better understanding in our relationships. But as we accept the purpose of our lives to worship and serve you and only you, we pray for that fire to purify and cleanse our lives and become a living sacrifice for your kingdom on earth and the promise of eternal life in heaven. In the name of Jesus Christ who taught us that he has come to light a fire under us. Amen.