Sermon - August 18, 2019 - "Divided We Stand"

Luke 12:49-56 – Intro

In Matthew’s gospel, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

And just a few chapters later, in the same gospel, Jesus said to his disciples,  “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

When we hear these two quotes side by side we may be saying to ourselves,

“Would the real Jesus please stand up.”

This morning we’re going to hear Luke’s version of the latter quote.

The one that feels out of place.

Here Jesus says, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

Taken as a whole, this is not an easy passage to hear or read.

In fact when I heard Emma was going to be our liturgist today I emailed her to give her a heads up that the scripture reading was a difficult one.

Even Andrea, our Office Administrator who creates our church bulletin, looked at the text I gave her to print and said,

“Whoa, what’s up with Jesus this week?”

But before we listen to Emma read the text I want to draw your attention to the quote on the front of the bulletin cover.

A verse we also find in the gospel of Luke – it’s an excerpt from the song Mary sang while she was pregnant with Jesus.

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty… according to the promise he made to our ancestors.”   (Luke 1:46-55)

As we consider these words that Mary sang about what God promised to do through her son – we might also ponder how such a drastic change in our power structures might be accomplished without a whole lot of people objecting and resisting and being less than peaceful as a result. 

 

The Rev. Maureen R. Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

August 18, 2019 – Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 12:49-56

 “Divided We Stand”

When I was in the 4^th grade I had a teacher named Mrs. Rogo.

She was one of the few lay teachers in our Catholic Elementary School where most of our instructors were nuns.

Mrs. Rogo was a soft-spoken gentle woman;

she was caring and compassionate and she had seemingly endless patience as she taught English, social studies, and math to our overcrowded class of 35 ten-year-olds.    The nuns, on the other hand, made me a bit nervous –

with their starched habits and their stricter “don’t mess with me” demeanor  - but I always felt comfortable around Mrs. Rogo.

One day we came in to Mrs. Rogo’s class to find brand new textbooks on each of our desks.

It was the mid-1970’s and in the spirit of the Metric Conversion Act, it had been decided that we were all going to learn the metric system.

But having spent most of our young lives learning about pounds, yards, and quarts - measurements we could visualize just by stepping on a scale or imagining a football field or looking at a carton of milk – try as we may,

the unfamiliar names and numbers of the metric system just would not settle in our heads.

For weeks Mrs. Rogo went over the same chapters in the textbook,

again and again, to no avail.

Finally, one afternoon as she set us to work on yet another metric conversion assignment, our kind, gentle and patient teacher reached her breaking point. 

As I struggled to complete my worksheet I could hear Mrs. Rogo moving up and down the rows of desks looking at the children’s work and offering her disapproving comments.

Finally I felt her settle just over my left shoulder as my pencil hovered nervously over the answer sheet.

I had no idea what I was doing, so in a panic I wrote down a number,

any number.

It was most certainly not the right number, because before I knew what was happening, kind, gentle Mrs. Rogo had grabbed me by my elbow, pulled me out of my desk and dragged me up to the blackboard.

There, with anger and frustration shaking her voice, she explained to the class once again, the proper way to do metric conversions using me as the example of how not to do it.

I was mortified and terrified.

And although years later I came to understand that teachers are human beings and they have bad days and breaking points just like we all do,

In my 10-year-old mind, my image of Mrs. Rogo as a kind, gentle, endlessly patient teacher had been forever changed.

And the comfort I once felt in her presence became tinged with shame and fear.

I imagine that in light of the gospel text that we heard today, some of us may feel the same way about our teacher, Jesus.

The angry, divisive words that we hear come out of his mouth in this passage seem incongruent with what we know about the man we call the Prince of Peace.

We know Jesus to be a kind, loving, compassionate, peace-loving teacher who came to bring harmony and balance to the world.

So when the Jesus we encounter here talks about bringing fire down upon the earth, bringing not peace but division…

setting mother against daughter, and father against son…

It just doesn’t make sense.

And when Jesus goes on to call his followers hypocrites because they continue to not understand what he’s been trying to teach them, we may feel chastised as well.

It’s as if he’s wrenched us out our seat and dragged us up to the blackboard in frustration, because no matter how many times he’s explained his reason for being here, we still don’t get it.

These words - this behavior – they don’t FIT the profile of the Jesus that we’ve come to know and love.

So what do we do with this passage?

We could choose to ignore it, like many modern day Christians do.

In fact, while perusing some of my clergy social media groups this week,

I was surprised to see how many pastors said they would not be preaching on this passage today.

They expressed concern that this text may be too difficult for the people sitting in the pews to understand.

Or that it may be too disturbing for you to hear.

Or that it requires a sermon that many felt would be too heavy or too long for a summer Sunday in August.

Apparently we check our brains at the door when the temperature rises above 80 degrees.

In reality, pastors don’t like to preach on this passage because it makes pastors uncomfortable as well.

The ranting and raging that Jesus does here doesn’t fit our image of the kind, peace loving Jesus either.

So when this passage from Luke comes up in the lectionary cycle, once every three years, it’s tempting to just tell the congregation,

“You know, Jesus is having a bad day today, he’s a little stressed out.

Why don’t we pay a visit to Isaiah this week and see what he has to say,

and then we’ll come back and check on Jesus next week.

Maybe he’ll have calmed down by then.”

But skipping over this passage because it makes us uncomfortable,

is like skipping school on the day the teacher shares the one thing that is the key to understanding what was taught during the entire year.

If we skip over this passage, then we miss the point of the Gospel.

The point of the Gospel is that God is inviting us to radically change our lives, and our world.

And while the GOOD NEWS is that these radical changes will ultimately benefit us all….the not so good news is that we human beings don’t often do well with change.

The one thing that Jesus liked to talk about more than anything else was the coming of the Kingdom of God.

A new creation, a new earth, that God is calling us to help build –

a new inclusive existence where the fruits of God’s unconditional love will be received and shared equally by all.

This is the world that Jesus’ mother Mary sang about in her Magnificat.

But while the goal Jesus has set before us is to help build this peaceful,

inclusive world,

we can’t get there without experiencing an upheaval in our current world,

we can’t get there without causing a shift in the structures of power,

we can’t get there unless the marginalized are lifted up and the privileged take a step down…

And we know none of this is going to happen without conflict.

Because there aren’t many who will let go of power and privilege willingly.

Jesus tells us we can’t get to peace without first experiencing division.

Division that will rise up between those pushing for change and those resisting it.

We’ll experience division within nations, within communities, within churches, within families.

And the gospel itself will be the dividing force.

In Jesus’ time, the nations stretching from Spain to Judea did experience peace, but it was the peace of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana.

For centuries Rome kept the peace throughout this region of the world,

but they did it by conquering and oppressing all who stood in their way.

The nations were not fighting each other because Rome had them all within its firm grasp.

This was an outward peace that was held up by internal injustice and oppression; this was not the kind of peace that Jesus spoke of bringing.

This was the kind of peace that he came to overthrow.

The Gospel, the good news, the message contained in this seemingly innocuous book that we read from every week to learn how to be good Christians, is the force that Jesus deems strong enough to overturn an Empire.

This book that tells us to be kind to each other,

and to be caring and compassionate in all our interactions.

This book that tells us that God loves us all equally,

and that we are meant to share all that God gives us.

This book that tells us that we are to love one another as we love God and ourselves.

We may find it hard to believe that this little book has the kind of power needed to overthrow empires.

But perhaps we’ve heard the Good News of the Gospel so many times, and seen so little of it truly put into action,

that we become understandably dismissive of its power.

We’ve become comfortable with the words and the stories of Jesus, but in our desire to maintain that comfort we often push aside the parts that make us uncomfortable, or confuse us, or push us to challenge the parts of ourselves that we’d rather leave untouched.

We also may struggle to draw a connection between what was happening in Jesus’ world and what is happening in our world.

For many, the gospel is not the Good News, it’s the Old News.

And we have trouble seeing how the Gospel of Jesus, which was considered radical and dangerous in the face of first century Judaism and the Roman Empire, can still be considered radical and dangerous in the face of 21^st century individualism and the Empires we’ve built today.

As a very frustrated Jesus pointed out to his disciples –

You know when the clouds rise overhead that it’s going to rain,

and when the south wind blows it will bring scorching heat,

you  know how to predict the weather by what you see around you,

but you don’t know how to interpret this present time by trusting your experience of what has come before.

Our present time is rife with division.

Some would say this is true of all human time.

But when we see the signs of what has come before happening again,

we seem to think that this time is different –

This time the ways we find to dehumanize, exclude, and punish one another are justified and civilized -  so we tell ourselves.

Two thousand years after Jesus came to tell us this is NOT how God intends for us to live, we still don’t get it.

So it’s necessary for us to read passages like this one from Luke’s gospel to remind ourselves that the Good News of Jesus is not all about being kind to neighbors and being a good person or bringing comfort to ourselves.

It’s also about bringing about a peace that can only happen by turning all that we know upside down.

As much as we love the compassionate and peaceful teacher we have in Jesus, sometimes we need to encounter the frustrated and angry teacher -

Who will pull us up out of our seat and drag us up to the blackboard –

To move us out of our complacency and compel us to listen…

and learn…

and change.

The reality is, we’re not going to change ourselves or the world in the drastic way that God invites us to, not without God stepping in and making it happen.

It’s beyond our human sized limitations to do such a thing, and we have too much of a vested interest in keeping things that benefit us personally, just the way they are.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t look at that far off mark and do what we can to inch towards it.

To not sit back and stay silent in the face of injustice and oppression because we fear conflict and division - but instead move towards it.

To call it out and put our hearts and our bodies and our voices on the line for those who can’t.

Knowing that this is what the gospel calls us to do.

I know this is not easy to hear.

And this sermon may be too long or too heavy for a summer Sunday in August, especially if you’re already feeling weighed down by whatever is on your heart.

But whatever it is that is weighing you down, the Good News is that God is inviting us all to imagine a world in which we can just let it go.

And we are invited to help build that world one act of courageous love at a time.

Keeping our beloved teacher, Jesus, alive in us.

Thanks be to God, and Amen.