Luke 12:49-56 English August 15, 2010, 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? The opening verse I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled is not one we see very often on bumper stickers or refrigerator magnets. As residents of fire prone southern California, it s a part of our very nature to avoid fire, especially as we head into the later part of August, when everything has been baked all summer long by the relentless sun and dry winds. The idea that Jesus would be bringing fire is troubling. The imagery of fire is used in other places in the Bible to represent all kinds of things: purification, judgment, the presence of God, a sign of the last days, or a source of warmth and light on a cold dark night So we wonder, what exactly is Jesus getting at? 1
Here I found the work of Bruce Malina to be most helpful. Bruce suggests that the phrase that Jesus uses is an idiom. to bring fire to the earth refers to the lighting of an outdoor adobe oven, which was called earth. So to say to bring the fire to the earth, it was a way of saying I want to get things started or let s start things cooking, or like my dad trying to rouse us to tackle our Saturday chores let s get fired up! Jesus sees this next season of ministry unfolding before them and he is eager to get started. As Jesus and the disciples walk along, Jesus is sharing his feelings on what the current moment of their ministry together is meaning for him. They have left the hills and villages of Galilee in the north and are on the road south to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the established cultural and religious capitol of Israel. There Jesus will be directly confronting the religious and political establishment. During their time together in Galilee, Jesus had been constantly preaching and teaching and healing but what lay ahead in Jerusalem was taking it to another level for Jesus. I have a baptism with which to be baptized and what stress I am under until it is completed. Jesus does seem stressed out its like he s a little crabby and impatient for the disciples to understand. 2
He s got one eye brow arching up as he asks them, Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth?! I wonder if the disciples dared to respond that the angels who sang in the skies over Bethlehem on the night he was born the Angels had mentioned Peace Peace on earth and good will to all, or maybe the disciples wanted to point out that Prince of Peace was one of his nick names. Jesus continues adamantly Bring Peace on Earth NO! I don t bring peace I bring division. Wow, that sets us back!!! And then Jesus goes on to layout exactly what he means by that. He uses the family as his example, the very heart of social and cultural unity. Ideally, I m thinking, the family would be a bedrock of peace and unity. But Jesus lays out the kind of fault lines that will run through families on account of him father against son, son against father, mother against daughter, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law. 360 degrees of Family conflict. 3
The family, the foundation of a society s stability and unity gets divided when Jesus comes to town. So what kind of family values does Jesus have? Is he saying that its God s will for a family to have these deep divisions? I don t think so, I find it more of a description than a prescription. It seems like Jesus is just describing what happens to family loyalty when he walks into our lives asking us to put God first. Just like Jesus describes the Israeli weather patterns later on in the passage : clouds rising in the west of course you know its going to rain, and it does. South wind begins to blow of course you know there will be scorching heat, and there is. Its not that its God s desire for rain or heat, but it s a description of what happens when moisture laden clouds rise up on the western horizon and head inland or when the wind comes off of the dry desert to the south. So too, this division between family members is what happens when people encounter the love of God in the person of Jesus. Its not God s desire, but it is often how it plays out. 4
In her work on this passage, Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor paints this great picture of a family sitting around the dining room table one night, minding their own business, when the gospel falls like a sword across their dinning room table and quivers there, with half the roast on one side and half on the other, green beans scattered everywhere. Some of those sitting around the table are struck to the heart. She says, They want to pull the sword out and run straight into the street with it, swinging it above their heads and making perfect strangers listen to what just happened to them. Others want to clean up the mess and get on with supper. Sure, it is the gospel, they say but there is no reason to get all upset about it. Being a good Christian is not all that different from being a good citizen, after all. You just stay out of trouble and be nice to your neighbors and say your prayers at night. There is absolutely no reason to go making a spectacle out of yourself. And then there is always the family member who does not see a thing, who does not believe in swords and who goes right on eating as if nothing ever happened, muttering under her breath about how everyone in this house is stark raving mad. 5
Jesus does not despise the family, but he did redefine it. For him, family was not a matter of whose chromosomes you carry around inside of you but a matter of in whose image you are created. This opens up our definition of family considerably its not about sharing the same eye color or last name, its about serving the same God. Which means that our family expands beyond counting to include women in clackity shoes on their way to church, the man pushing the squeaky shopping cart piled high with recycled trash, the teens with piercing and spiky hair eating their lunch on the steps of the church our family even expands to include other Christians who think differently that we do on issues of immigration, and gay rights and health care reform. Well now, Jesus, that definition of family can inspire some division. Just look at it in action, in just a little while we will gather around the communion table where God has prepared a place for each of us, for all of us who want to know God, we ll break bread, share the cup and celebrate God s love for us. 6
Understand, this is radical hospitality on God s part. And it can be divisive, because maybe when its time for all of the guests to take their seats at God s heavenly banquet maybe I discover that instead of being seated with my family or with my like-minded friends, what if God has put me at a different table and I find myself with people that I was pretty sure should not have been on the guest list? And they might be thinking the same thing about me! God s radically inclusive love confronts us, it challenges us, and as we wrestle with it, we tend to clobber those around us. As people who follow Jesus we ve picked up a thing or two from him about living with conflict. Whether its divisions in the family or conflict with friends, when they come (and they almost always do) we know to hold each other in love, no matter how deep the sword cuts. We know that when we start treating people mean out of love for Jesus, something is messed up! Jesus himself gives us that example remember the disciples shooing away the children and Jesus told them, let them come unto me! 7
Remember a little farther along in Luke s Gospel when Jesus and the disciples reach the crest in the road that overlooks Jerusalem and Jesus takes into his heart what lies before him and he weeps over Jerusalem, He weeps for the very people who will be doing him wrong. Remember the last supper, Jesus has all 12 disciples around the table for their last meal together, all 12! Even though Judas has already cut a deal to turn Jesus in, and Jesus knows it, Jesus still welcomes Judas in love. So if Jesus behaves like that when confronted with division, then it raises the standard for us. We don t want to catch our selves overly invested in the letter of the law yelling, ranting, saying hurtful things and by doing so we are miss the heart of the law which is this radically inclusive love that Jesus incarnates. In today s text we find Jesus all fiery. It seems that we generally give a lot more air time to Jesus as being calm and accepting he rolls with Nicodemus midnight visit and his wacky theology - Jesus is kind & soft spoken as Peter fumbles in his early days of ministry - he is compassionate & calm with the woman who had been caught in adultery. 8
There is ALOT to like about the calm and peaceful Jesus its comforting, but its not the full picture. Today s text gives us a piece we often miss about Jesus. Here Jesus is aware of the impact that the radical love of God brings. Remember, in the person of Jesus, God s radically inclusive love took on flesh, where ever Jesus goes, his very presence proclaims God s love for us all. Jesus knows the impact this has and he challenges us to be aware as well. you know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? You see the signs and you know what s coming with the weather Jesus tells the crowds - why can t you transfer that skill set and see the signs of the present time and see what s coming in Jerusalem? Reading the signs requires us to enter the present moment, free from illusion and denial, and really take in what we see. That can be difficult when we don t like what we see. I remember one summer day, my sisters and I were having a blast playing out in the backyard and a storm blew in, the sky was churning 9
and black clouds stretched across the sky, we were so into our game that we ignored the clouds and kept playing, the wind picked up and the rain came down in sheets, so we grabbed our dolls and set up shop on the back porch, unwilling to have our play time rained out. Then, the sky turned a strange shade of olive green and the wind stopped, we could hear a freight train roaring down the street, (but we didn t live near any train tracks). Just then my mom opened the sliding glass door and snatched us inside and we tumbled into the basement to wait out the tornado. We had been so focused on our games, that we had refused to read the signs of the weather shifting for the worse and we barely had time to scramble to safety. After huddling in the basement for a half hour, we climbed back up the basement stairs to discover the tornado had passed without touching down. The disciples were walking down the road with Jesus. They could see the signs that said Jerusalem 50 miles. Of course they knew they were headed to Jerusalem, they knew too that their beloved friend and teacher Jesus was on a collision course with the religious leaders and if the recent past was any guide, it was likely that Jesus would be getting in trouble with the authorities as well. It was almost certain that the 10
baptism Jesus was talking about was his way of telling them that he would die there. At one level, they knew all these things to be true, but they were refusing to interpret the signs, they were refusing to wrap their heads and hearts around the baptism that loomed ahead for Jesus in Jerusalem. By refusing to enter into the present moment, they were opting out of the very thing that God was doing. We often do the same thing as the disciples. We know the economy is making some major shifts, we know that the ecological balance of the earth is awry, we know that we are spending way more on prisons and war than education and wellness. But we can t seem to bring ourselves to wrap our heads and hearts around what God calls us to. So instead we choose to focus on something that distracts us, maybe our work, or shopping or keeping up friends on Facebook, and we fail to enter in to the present moment, we fail to interpret the signs of what is to come. We can play this same game with our faith as well we can get so caught up in an abstract debate about who God will welcome into heaven or focus entirely on one issue within the church and we miss what God is unfolding in front of us in the present moment. We are so committed to 11
seeing what we want to see that we fail to see what is filling the sky or the air around us. Seeing the signs and interpreting them being present in the moment this is an often overlooked spiritual discipline. As people in the city who live complex lives, we are often multi-tasking just to survive. Driving, texting, returning calls, checking emails, making a grocery list. Personally, I run at least 5 minutes ahead of local standard time. And if we re not stressing about what is to come, we are stewing on what happened last week, or last year at Thanksgiving when Uncle Bub s sexist comment transformed the pleasant celebration to a free-for-all. All those strategies - multi-tasking - stressing about the future - or obsessing about the past - pluck us right out of the present moment, right out of the opportunity to see the signs and see what they mean for us and God s work in the world. 12
The Good News is that we can learn to practice that Spiritual Discipline of being present in the moment. We can exercise that spiritual muscle Faithful people throughout the ages have met that challenge by learning: Meditation Chanting practicing mindful movement like walking or tai chi centering prayer or painting. We can practice slowing down and choosing to do just one thing at a time, we can be mindful of our breath, we can receive each moment as a gift from God, that has never been given before. We can receive each day as a gift from God, a day that has never been given before. Jesus calls us to open our eyes, to open our hearts to the present moment. As we receive Jesus, who is actually the radically inclusive love of God in the flesh, as we receive Jesus, 13
we find ourselves face to face with fire fire that warms and fire that consumes, we find ourselves face to face with a sword a sword that sets us free and a sword that divides. May we also find our selves with courage and faith to enter fully into the present moment that God has given us. amen 14