NRS Luke 12
49 "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53 they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
54 He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, 'It is going to rain'; and so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. 56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

Sisters and Brothers in Christ, may the Lord comfort your hearts and establish your faith in truth; for the sake of Jesus the Messiah. Amen.

This morning's gospel is typically described as one of the Bible's "hard sayings." On one level, I suppose that most of the Bible's sayings are hard, even the most familiar, or especially the most familiar. "For God so loved the world" is a well-known verse, but it's hard, maybe impossible to understand why God would so love this fallen, broken world that the Lord would surrender the only Son into the hands of people like us. But I guess what makes today's lesson so hard is that it seems so out of character with the Jesus we know from elsewhere in Scripture. Here Jesus proclaims that he came to earth to bring division, but at his birth the angels sang, "Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God's people on earth." Just a few verses earlier in this same chapter, Jesus said, "Have no fear, little flock," but here, in words laced with fear and foreboding, Jesus announces that he has come to bring fire, "and how I wish it were kindled." How can Jesus bring God's love to the world, and at the same time want to see it in flames? Paul declared that in Jesus there is reconciliation and the bringing together of Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free. And yet today we hear Jesus prophesy conflict and schism, with "father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother." Ouch!

Christian fundamentalists like to focus on this "fire and brimstone" Jesus as a way to urge the heathen to repent and be saved. I've never thought of myself as a fundamentalist, but when I first started preaching, I have to admit this fire-bringing, division-making Jesus had me a little spooked. I thought that if in the course of a sermon I didn't tick off a major part of the congregation, then I must be letting Jesus down. Of course, though, when people did get angry, I'd make like some great martyr and plead that I was just doing my job. But Jesus is not, you know, a stick with which to go poking people in the eye, and he's not a club for preachers, young or old, to go pounding on their churches. Yet still, how do you square Jesus the light of the world and the hope of the nations with Jesus the bringer of fire and the maker of division?

Well, consider this: Is there anything really more divisive than peace and love? Doesn't the world we know depend upon, to some degree, people being at one another's throats? How often is a group's identity founded on their distrust and hatred of another group, nation, or religion? Think about Hitler and Nazi Germany. A major part of Hitler's rise to power came through demonizing Germany's Jews as immoral, unpatriotic, and deceitful. People like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who refused to accept that party line, often found themselves in the same concentration camps alongside the Jews they defended. Likewise, for how many centuries did Catholics and Protestants define themselves over against each other? Catholics
caricatured Protestants as rejecting the one true Church (capital 'C'), while Protestants heard wild stories of Catholics storing guns and ammo in their church basements to fight for the Pope. And isn't this the same nonsense going on in politics today? Abraham Lincoln once famously appealed to "the better angels of our nature," while politicians today get elected by throwing red meat to the base.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Jesus had come preaching death to the Romans and expulsion for all those filthy Gentiles. I don't doubt that message would have earned him a cross, but probably not as one despised and rejected by all. I think the single most dangerous thing Jesus did was not to draw more lines between the clean and unclean, the righteous and unrighteous, the saints and the sinners. What got Jesus into the most trouble was that he included all people in his vision of the Kingdom. He ate with the respectable and unrespectable alike. He heard the cries of both the rich and the poor. He welcomed both Jew and Greek, and he redefined family to include all who do the Father's will as his mother and brothers and sisters. In a world built on dividing the world between in and out, with us or against us, blessed or cursed, this was very dangerous stuff, and it still is today.

You know that in many parts of the world, including our own country, people who marry across racial lines often risk their relationships to family and friends, and much else besides. Class, wealth, and family background continue to play major roles not only in who you can marry, but where you can work and what school you can attend. And religion often functions more as kind of social marker than as a way of worshiping God. Even to suggest erasing these lines and bringing down those walls is typically heard as a kind of treason either to race, nation, or family. So is it any wonder Jesus became such a polarizing figure to people whose whole identity rested on being separate, being apart, being different from all those other people on the other side of the fence?

But can't you also understand how eager Jesus was to see that world of race, clan, and tribe go up in flames? Jesus did not come into the world in order to send people to hell. He did, however, come to bring down a world that kept, and still keeps people from recognizing one another as children of the same heavenly Father and therefore brothers and sisters to one another in our common mission to fill and replenish the earth. And in place of this world's kingdoms, Jesus instead brought to us the Kingdom of God, under whose rule all find equal justice and where all may approach the table of the Lord without money and without price (Isaiah 55:1),

As you know, this last week I was in New York City for my daughter's back surgery. The day after her operation, as per the doctor's orders, we took a little walk around the block where she lives in Brooklyn. Up the sidewalk there was a street festival being put on by the local synagogue. Around the corner we stopped at the Chinese green grocer's to look over his fruits and veggies. Across the street there was a bodega and a Latino seafood restaurant I wanted to check out. My daughter pointed out a family that had built a shrine to the Virgin Mary off their car port. As we headed back to the apartment, two little girls skipped by wearing their traditional Muslim head scarves. When I was growing up, the very idea of all those different races, religions, and language groups living in such close quarters would have been unthinkable. But not to Jesus. Not to Jesus.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.