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The thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, 08/14/2016
Facing the Fire
Sermon on Luke 12:49-56, by Frank Senn
Texts: Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Luke 12:49-56
Jesus says he comes “to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” It is important to emphasize that Jesus is the one bringing fire to the earth, and he needs no help from zealous followers intent on hastening whatever they might think Jesus is bringing about. He’s not talking about launching a crusade. There will be no “Christian soldiers marching as to war.” He’s talking about the fires of judgment. He will bring fire to the earth because people will have to decide whether to be for him or against him.
Much of this division will have to do with the baptism with which he was baptized---a baptism not of water but in his own blood as he undergoes suffering and death at the hands of the religious leaders and political authorities. His humanity shows as he contemplates what lies ahead of him. He admits that he’s under much stress “until it is completed.” But as his words and actions lead inexorably toward that outcome, people will need to make decisions about whether to follow him or to oppose him.
The angels proclaimed “peace on earth” at Jesus’ birth. But he does not come to bring peace on earth but division, even within families. We can imagine the divisions that Jesus caused within Palestinian households during his lifetime. The Jesus movement did not fit comfortably into any of the parties in Israel. His actions were confusing. He attacked the Temple, so he couldn’t have been a Sadducee; they supported the Temple. The Essenes believed that the Temple and its priesthood was illegitimate, but Jesus was not out in the desert with the Essenes leading the renunciate life of a quasi-monk. He could actually enjoy life. He was accused of eating and drinking with outcasts and sinners. But he not only kept himself impure by dining with ritually unclean people, he didn’t observe the purity rules about washing before eating. So he couldn’t have been a Pharisee, who were very scrupulous about observing such customs. Sometimes he could sound apocalyptic notes and might be taken for a Zealot. But in other contexts he refused to live by the sword or summon twelve legions of angels to establishing the reign of God on earth.
Jesus was someone entirely different, and his movement was entirely different from the movements in contemporary Palestine. The only thing that could be said about his movement is that it wasn’t big enough, or didn’t have enough important people in it, to give the authorities in Jerusalem pause before trying to do away with him. The followers he did have weren’t even very loyal, since none of them hung around when he was nailed to the cross, except a few women.
But after his resurrection and ascension, and equipped by the promised Holy Spirit, Jesus’ followers did demonstrate their loyalty, even to the point of bearing their own crosses of martyrdom. By the witness of their own blood they too attracted followers for Jesus. And that too caused divisions within families, among both Jews and Gentiles.
And so it has been with the followers of Jesus ever since. I was very struck by the story of a student I met in Indonesia who said that when he converted from Islam to Christianity he expected to be ostracized and even beaten by his Muslim friends, but the beating he received from his own family was difficult to bear.
We in America don’t face the fire of persecution because of making a decision to follow Jesus. Oh, individual Christians and church institutions occasionally get in trouble with new laws because they don’t want to provide services for same-sex weddings or pay for contraception for their employees. I don’t want to belittle that, and I do think our country is big and diverse enough that we ought to be able to find ways to respect individual consciences and religious values. But we don’t experience knocks on the door in the middle of the night and being hauled away for interrogation and torture in some place where our families don’t even know where we are. We aren’t uprooted by Isis and forced to leave towns and villages where our families have lived since the earliest days of Christianity.
In our society, Christianity is still regarded as safe and acceptable. And I wonder whether that is a major factor in why the number of “nones” on religious surveys appears to be growing? Because although there is clearly a growing hunger in our society for genuine spiritual transformation, people quite reasonably assume on the basis of some experience that the Churches are far too associated with the status quo to be offering anything with any power to change lives. So they look in other directions. In our urban areas you see about as many people walking somewhere on Sunday morning with a yoga mat as with a Bible in hand.
But I would suggest that if we are perceived as being people who live comfortably with the status quo values of our society, then we are a long way from the kind of Christianity envisaged in the readings today from Luke’s gospel and the letter to the Hebrews. In the gospel reading, Jesus suggested that the impact of what he was about would be like setting fires, and that it would be divide people as they found themselves taking opposing sides in their responses to him. And in the letter to the Hebrews, the exercise of faith is depicted as something over which kingdoms rise and fall and people are hounded out of towns and mercilessly persecuted.
It seems to me that one of the reasons we have given the impression that Christianity is safe and innocuous is because of the way we think about faith. We often talk about faith as if it were something we have. We hear expressions like: “She’s got a lot of faith.” “You need to have a little more faith.” “Do I have enough faith?” Those sorts of statements make faith sound quantitative and like something we own. Faith becomes a commodity we draw upon when we need it. It’s really about us and our needs.
But in the Bible faith is not a thing that can be possessed. It is something you do. It is something you act upon. It is an act of obedience. Jesus gives us a command to love one another, and so in obedience we do. We might even love unloveable people and try to support and defend them. Jesus tells us to go and do like the good Samaritan did, and so in obedience we go. We might even provide hospitality and material assistance to people that others in our society might want to keep out. Those acts of faith can cause disagreement within families and get us in trouble with our neighbors and fellow citizens.
This August 5 was the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march for integrated communities through the Marquette Park neighborhood in Chicago. Dr. King had been living in a tenement apartment on the south side of Chicago for much of the year and the march was to demonstrate the need for open housing in Chicago real estate. Marchers were needed. I believed in integration and as a seminarian in Hyde Park I made the decision to join that march. It became an ugly situation with shouting and shoving and throwing rocks and bottles. Dr. King was hit in the head with a rock. I confess that I was scared. I was anxious to peel off the back of the march and find my way out of there and get back to the relative safety of the Hyde Park neighborhood.
Real faith is an act of obedience. It is also an act of trust. If we trust that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of the world, we are exercising an active choice among the values presented to us and backing one side over the other. And once we start doing that, the sparks begin to fly and the fires break out---the fires that Jesus brings to the earth.
If we say that we are willing to trust Gods’ radical hospitality more than the world’s self-protective closed border policies, and press our government to allow more immigrants and refugees into our country, we may be risking the good will of our neighbors. If we say that “Black Lives Matter,” we are accused of not supporting the police. If we say that gays and lesbians and transgendered people are entitled to equal rights and protection under the Law, we risk the disapproval of the culture warriors. But this is what faith is like. It’s taking sides among the values available to us, and if we act on those choices, faith can get us into trouble.
Now all that might sound decidedly uninviting. “Where is the good news in this?”, you might reasonably ask. Well, both readings point to the answer. Jesus speaks of a baptism of fire, but a baptism is not only something you are plunged into. It is also something you emerge from with a new identity and a new life filled with God’s Holy Spirit. The baptism of fire, like the baptism of water, is the birth place of new life. And where there is life there is hope.
So, likewise, in today’s reading from Hebrews we hear of God’s people “by faith” passing “through the Red Sea as if it were dry ground.” They were passing over from slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the promised land. But entering the promised land first required getting passed Jericho. By faith they trusted that by blowing their trumpets and marching around the city for seven days the walls would fall down. So they acted on that faith and marched on into the land of Canaan.
Our reading goes on to recount the sufferings God’s people experienced because of their faith---a grisly list of mocking, flogging, chains and imprisonment, stoned to death, sawn in two, killed by the sword, destitute, persecuted, tormented. The author of Hebrews says the world was not worthy of such heroes. But he summons those sufferers as a “great cloud of witnesses” who cheer us on as “we run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” Cheered on by the martyrs and following Jesus’ lead, we too shall cross the finish line and enter the promised land.
So the good news is that we are not called to face the fire for no reason. Rather we are called to face the fire simply because that’s what lies between us and the realization of God’s purposes on earth. There is no way around it. If need be, we have to pass through fires of judgment as we follow Jesus and his vision of a world in which freedom, love, and, yes, peace at the last, make life worth living now as we press forward in the hope of attaining the only life worth dying for. Amen.