love — Andy James

Everyone Needs a Good Pharisee

October 26, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 and Matthew 22:34-40
preached on October 26, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I spent most of this past week being a good pharisee. Last Sunday after worship, I flew to Louisville, Kentucky, for the annual Polity Conference of the Presbyterian Church (USA). This conference brings together presbytery staff and stated clerks like me to talk about the rules and regulations of our church and how we live them out. Most people would find the discussions quite boring and esoteric, but for folks like me it can be quite interesting! Then yesterday, I spent the day at Stony Point Center attending part of the annual synod assembly of the Synod of the Northeast, where we also talked rules and regulations all day long as the synod considered new bylaws and sought to implement a new understanding of their mission. I think all this attention to church law over the past week probably solidifies my qualifications and perhaps even my reputation as a good pharisee.

Now in Jesus’ time, the Pharisees were one of several groups of Jewish leaders who brought a particular focus to their religious practice. They along with the Sadducees show up in our text from Matthew this morning. The Sadducees were mostly known for their belief that there would be no resurrection of the dead, and the Pharisees were known for their attention to Jewish law. The Pharisees had a pretty negative reputation with Jesus, and that has carried over to his followers. They were always challenging him on his actions and interpretations of the law, always seeming to try to catch him in a mistake that would give them the chance to declare that he was not a faithful Jew, always pushing back on his words and actions that seemed to imply that the law was only a guide and not something that needed to be followed carefully.

So it is no surprise that one of Jesus’ last encounters with the Pharisees in the gospel according to Matthew comes as they ask him to identity the greatest commandment in the Jewish law. Matthew tells us that this question was meant to test Jesus, but even so it’s still a surprisingly good question. No matter what you think about the law, it ought to be a good thing to consider which commandment is the greatest among them all. As much as the Pharisees may have been trying to quiz or entrap Jesus here, they also picked a question that is pretty open to differences in interpretation and an issue that actually matters for the life and practice of faith.

So when they asked him to identify the greatest commandment, Jesus responded quickly and thoughtfully, giving not just the greatest commandment but the second-greatest, too. First, he said, “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence,” with all your heart, soul, and mind. Jesus chose what might be to some an obvious response—this commandment, understood to have been offered by Moses as part of his own summation of the law toward the end of his life, stands very prominently at the center of Jewish life and liturgy. The Pharisees could find no objection to this at all.

While they had just asked Jesus for the greatest commandment, Jesus continued and offered a second commandment that “is like it:” “Love others as well as you love yourself.” This was perhaps a more unexpected choice, but it was still very much in keeping with Jewish law and Jesus’ practice. This specific law to love neighbor is buried in a longer list of the more obscure commandments in Leviticus, a book known today more for its restrictions on idolatry, eating and cooking techniques, sexual practice, and cotton-polyester blends, among other things. However, most of the commandments near this particular one focus on treating others and especially the poor and outsiders with respect, honor, kindness, and justice. When Jesus lifted up the command to love neighbor as self alongside the command to love God, he made it clear that attention to God’s commandments means attention to God’s people, too.

Jesus then concluded his discussion of the greatest commandment by insisting that these two commandments are more than just the greatest—they are the pegs on which everything else hangs. Without these two commandments, the other ones mean nothing. Without the perspective that these commandments offer, everything else is just legal mumbo-jumbo. Without the center of love for God and love for neighbor that we find here, everything else falls to pieces on the floor.

So the Pharisees of Jesus’ time were likely a bit astonished at his moves here, but what really matters in all this is not Jesus’ ability to interpret the law but rather his wisdom to sort out what is really important in all of it. For Jesus, the specific details of the law clearly mattered far less than the broad scope of it. The principles of love for God and love for neighbor that lay behind the law mattered far more than any particular provision. And the emphasis on love as right relationship with God and neighbor took much greater priority for Jesus than any policy regarding Sabbath observance, any restrictions on eating or cooking techniques, or any prohibition on wearing blended fabrics.

So even from my somewhat biased place, I think we need a few good Pharisees these days. We need people who can help us understand what God’s commandments lead us to believe and to do. We need people who can open the texts that define us in new ways and help us understand how they can be more than law books to be followed carefully. And we need Pharisees who can remind us that all the law that we follow hangs on these two pegs—these two laws—of loving God and loving neighbor.

In another account of this exchange in Luke’s gospel, Jesus goes on to offer a definition of neighbor by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan. It was an insightful moment, because Jesus’ questioner was challenging him to define “neighbor” as narrowly as possible. In the same way, I think we could bear some similar attention to the definition of “love” here, for we too are tempted to define love so narrowly or find ways to limit our love for one reason or another. What does it mean for us to love God and love neighbor nowadays? How do we deal with the challenges of this word in our world where it is so easily defined as a human feeling between two people, with all sorts of limitations and possibilities that might emerge from that? How do we experience and show our love for a God who can seem so distant and disconnected from us and our world? And is it even possible to love our neighbors in this world where we are so easily paralyzed by fear of them—by fear that they might have a deadly virus, by fear that they look or act or love differently from us, by fear that they might harm us as we help them, even by fear that we might be opened to new and different ways of life as we encounter them along the way?

The temptation for Pharisees like me is to put even matters of love for God and neighbor into a law-based way of thinking, to give specific guidelines for what this love might look like and what it should not look like, to set up laws and rules that define love for God and love for neighbor in specific, quantifiable ways, to codify our fear because we are afraid to love. But the Pharisees of every time and place must instead welcome the ambiguity and uncertainty of love—love that can’t be checked off a list, love that can’t be defined by simple laws or limited by human understandings, love that defies human limitations, breaks any restrictions on it, extends beyond our own understanding, and shatters our fears of the other, all because it is divine love, shaped and formed and directed by God and shared with every neighbor we can imagine.

So I think we need some good Pharisees—people who understand these two pegs of love of God and love of neighbor, people who can open us to the broader gifts of love as we direct our attention, affection, and devotion to the divine, people who can show us a broader understanding of what it means to be a neighbor to everyone we encounter, people who can remind us that all that we say and do must reflect our love of God and our love of neighbor.

So may God guide us to understand all the more these greatest commandments, how we are called to love God and love neighbor, so that we might live in that kind of real and deep love each and every day. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Incredible Love

July 27, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Romans 8:26-39
preached on July 27, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

During my seminary years, a week or so after my grandfather died, I received a brief handwritten note from the president of the seminary, Laura Mendenhall. I received three of those notes during my time as a student there, but that first one comes to mind every time I hear this morning’s text from Romans. She lifted up a slight adaptation of these beautiful words, “In life and in death we belong to God,” that is familiar to many Presbyterians from the opening question of the Heidelberg Catechism and the Brief Statement of Faith in our Book of Confessions. Those words that had grown in meaning and importance for me even before those difficult days had been a tremendous comfort to me through my grandfather’s illness and death. Laura thoughtfully reminded me in her note, though, that our tendency in such times is to focus on how our loved ones belong to God in death, so she encouraged me to remember that he had belonged to God in his life, too.

So today, amidst these familiar words that bring us so much comfort and hope for a life beyond our known days on earth, I think Laura’s encouragement to me to remember that we belong to God in life matters so much more than ever. The news tells us about so much death these days: continued civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, repeated rocket launches into Israel, a commercial airliner shot down in the midst of internal conflict in Ukraine, two other aviation accidents in Africa, capital punishment administered with unexpected and unnecessary suffering in our own nation, new conflict emerging in Iraq and Afghanistan despite our best efforts to bring peace, and so much more.

But when we remember Paul’s words to the Romans only in these times of death, I think we end up giving them less power over us. They may bring us comfort in such moments, but the gift of God’s love in Jesus Christ is not only to change things for us for eternity—God’s love in Jesus Christ changes things for the whole world now, and the real power of this love comes when we allow it to change us and our world.

This transformative power of God’s incredible love is not something we embrace only when things are good—in fact, I think that it is when things are most complex and confused that this love matters the most. Paul knew that for himself. His life had been filled with joy and sorrow, trials and tribulations, and so he wanted his listeners to have the same kind of trust in God’s love that had sustained him through all those things.

So in Romans 8, he asks a series of rhetorical questions that make it clear that the gift of God’s love takes hold in us when things don’t go as we expect.

If God is for us, who is against us?
Who will bring any charge against God’s elect?
Who is to condemn?
Who will separate us from the love of Christ?

The answer to all these questions is simple. Nothing. No one. Not anything. And so amidst all the confusion and uncertainty of our world, amidst the death too often that seems to pervade our lives and our experience, amidst all the war and strife that seem to reign, amidst all the evil that creeps into things, amidst the exhaustion and confusion that so easily become the norm for us in these days, we have everything we need in the gift of God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Secure in this gift of God’s love, comforted by God’s presence amidst anything that may come our way, it is then our call to embody this love throughout our world. If we have truly been changed by this incredible love, then we will want to change our world with it, too. When we look around, there are sure plenty of places that could use a good dose of God’s love these days. What would it look like if God’s love for all people and our common creation in the image of God stood at the center of our reaction to the conflict in Israel and the Gaza Strip? What would it look like if God’s love for the victim and the perpetrator was the first thing that we considered when we thought about how and whether to administer capital punishment? What would it look like if God’s love for all the children of our world was first on our minds when we are confronted with the influx of child refugees from Central America in our nation? What would it look like if God’s love for our enemies came to mind when we found ourselves at odds with another person? And what would it look like if God’s love for the world stood at the center of our budgets for our households, for our church, for our city, and for our nation?

I suspect that if we took a close look at these and other things, we would find that sometimes we allow our actions to create barriers between us and our experience of God’s love. But the good news is that while we may put things between us and our understanding of this love, not even these actions in our lives and in our world can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ. Nothing, Paul says, can separate us from God’s love,

neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation—

nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

With this incredible love in our midst, pervading our lives and our world even when we try to push it away, it is our call and our responsibility to offer this love to others without reservation or fear. We may get love wrong and share it too broadly, but I for one cannot believe that a God who loves us so much would ever penalize us for sharing too much love with our world. We may find new and better ways to embody God’s love in Jesus Christ over time, but even the smallest steps toward doing that are a gift to our broken and fearful world. And sometimes we may even get hurt for loving too much, but in those moments God’s love shines through all the more, for when we love others as God loves us, we see God’s love for us in new and different ways.

So as we go forth this day, with these wonderful words of love ringing in our heads and echoing in our hearts, may we embody this love with everyone we meet so that all the world may know God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Two Incredible Gifts

May 25, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on John 14:15-23
preached on May 25, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Anytime I hear our reading this morning from the gospel of John, this song immediately comes into my head. While I have sung many of the great works of choral music, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually sung this particular one—but I do know that its simplicity and beauty inspire me to think differently about these words and the two incredible gifts that they describe.

Jesus’ words to his disciples from this reading in the fourteenth chapter of John point us to two incredible gifts that Jesus left with us. First, they remind us of the gift of his commandments. Now Jesus never gave his disciples an explicit list of his commandments in the gospel of John. Unlike what our bulletin cover suggests this morning, Jesus did not come down from a mountain like Moses, carrying two stone tablets inscribed with ten explicit instructions from God. Instead, Jesus gave his disciples a single new commandment just a few moments before these words:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

So when he tells his disciples that if they love him they should keep his commandments, he is telling them to show the kind of love that he showed them. Jesus gifts them with love so that they might gift others with love too.

But what does this love look like? How are the disciples—and by extension us—to live out the gift of this love in their lives and their world? It’s easy to make this love some sort of abstraction, as a generic feeling of goodwill focused on humanity in general, with no application in present and real circumstances. Instead, as Nancy Ramsay reflects,

this love is the lived reality revealed in the life, relationships and actions of a simple Nazarene who looks and talks like them and lives simply among them. He feeds the hungry, touches lepers, heals the sick, and speaks and acts toward women with care and regard. Love is seen in his life as service and compassion. It is also seen in his fierce protests against those who abuse this vision of the value of each person and the importance of an ethic of mutual regard and care. Instead of power as domination, Jesus invites those who meet him to imagine power that has as its goal the well-being of all persons regardless of social status. (Nancy J. Ramsay, “Pastoral Perspective on John 14:15-21,” Feasting on the Word: Year A , Volume 2, p. 492.)

This love of Jesus, then, demands a new and different way of life that sets aside power for presence, that steps outside of our comfort zones to meet others in their places of need, and that upholds the fullness of life that God grants to each and every one of us.

As difficult as it may be at times to live out, Jesus’ gift of the commandment to love is good news. But the second gift of Jesus in these words is probably even better, for he does not leave us to live out this gift on our ability alone, as he knows that that will just make things worse. Instead, he brings us a second gift, “another Advocate, to be with [us] forever.” Now ultimately this is a little preview of the story that will come before us in two weeks, where that Advocate named the Holy Spirit shows up on the day of Pentecost and surprises the disciples with all sorts of unexpected gifts, but even the promise of this gift here is important. This gift makes it clear that the disciples—and us too—do not face the challenges of living out this commandment to love on our own. Not only are we surrounded by others who are also challenged to love one another, we are supported by this continuing presence of God with us. This Spirit of truth may not be immediately visible—the world cannot see this Advocate, after all—but we will know that the Spirit is with us, and we will not be orphaned, wondering if anyone will journey with us or left alone to figure out the way on our own.

So Jesus also names this Spirit as “Advocate.” Now this is actually only a partial translation of the original Greek word here, “Paraclete.” That one word seems to come from a legal background, and so it implies other meanings too, like intercessor, helper, comforter, and counselor. This Paraclete will continue the work that Jesus began, embody his presence with the disciples after he is gone, continue to teach them when he can no longer do so, and bear witness to God in Christ each and every day.

So the gift of the Holy Spirit, described first by Jesus here as the Paraclete and later witnessed coming in power on the day of Pentecost, guides, directs, and supports us as we live out the gift of love we know in Christ in our world. This Spirit is so intimately involved in everything about us that we can easily miss out on all the Spirit is doing! Our Brief Statement of Faith describes the work of this Spirit very well in modern terms:

We trust in God the Holy Spirit,
everywhere the giver and renewer of life.
The Spirit justifies us by grace through faith,
sets us free to accept ourselves and to love God and neighbor,
and binds us together with all believers
in the one body of Christ, the Church.
The same Spirit
who inspired the prophets and apostles
rules our faith and life in Christ through Scripture,
engages us through the Word proclaimed,
claims us in the waters of baptism,
feeds us with the bread of life and the cup of salvation,
and calls women and men to all ministries of the Church.
In a broken and fearful world
the Spirit gives us courage
to pray without ceasing,
to witness among all peoples to Christ as Lord and Savior,
to unmask idolatries in Church and culture,
to hear the voices of peoples long silenced,
and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.
In gratitude to God, empowered by the Spirit,
we strive to serve Christ in our daily tasks
and to live holy and joyful lives,
even as we watch for God’s new heaven and new earth,
praying, ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’

Ultimately, these words assure us that the gift of the Spirit as Paraclete will bring us comfort and hope, not because we need to feel good but to challenge us to walk in a new and different way, to live in the kind of love that Jesus himself offered, and to bear that kind of love to one another and all the world.

These are two incredible gifts in Jesus’ commandments and in the Holy Spirit. They are given with grace and mercy beyond measure, without restriction or limitation. They come in unusual and surprising ways to bring us life and for us to share with others. And they come to transform us and our world because of God’s abiding and continuing presence among us. So may we be ready to receive these two incredible gifts, to follow Jesus’ commandments to live in love with one another and to welcome the Holy Spirit each and every day, so that we might share them with anyone and everyone until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Challenge and Hope

February 23, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23 and Matthew 5:38-48
preached on February 23, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Christ is made the sure foundation, Christ the head and cornerstone.

Those are such wonderful and important words from our last hymn, such important statements of our faith that help us describe God’s presence in our lives, such seemingly simple approaches to belief that will help us fit into what God is doing in our lives and in our world. These great words dating from the medieval church echo the wonderful words of the apostle Paul from our first reading this morning that help us to identify the source and foundation of all that we live and all that we believe—yet that too often leave us thinking that the pathway to following Christ is easy.

The bigger reality is that our two readings this morning from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth and from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as recorded in the gospel according to Matthew both tell us that it will be hard to follow Jesus in our world. First, Paul insists that the way of life in Jesus Christ doesn’t fit into the ways of the world. We are holy temples, he says, built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, and God will defend that temple against any worldly enemy. But even more, he declares that the wisdom of this world is not wisdom in God’s eyes:

Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

Paul suggests that we must set aside even our best attempts at our own wisdom and instead trust that God will guide us. In this, then, we will gain so much more, for “all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”

But if that challenge weren’t enough to make our faith difficult, today the Lectionary also guides us to one of the most difficult portions of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. As one commentator describes it, “The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus at his ornery best: offering ‘advice’ that makes no sense divorced from the nature of the one giving it.” (Jason Byassee, “Theological Perspective on Matthew 5:38-48,” Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 1, p. 382.)

Here Jesus instructs the large crowd who had gathered to hear him teach that they must change their ways. He first suggests that we must set aside our hopes for vengeance and instead seek transformation and reconciliation. His instruction here is not easy to hear:

If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.

This is dramatically different from our human instinct. We seek self-protection at every turn rather than risking our safety to bring the possibility of transforming those who attack us. We hoard what we have rather than offer from our abundance to respond to the needs of others. And we do only what is absolutely required rather than literally going the extra mile for anyone.

If all that weren’t enough to scare us away from following Jesus, we need only continue to Jesus’ second instruction:

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Some days it is hard enough for me to love my friends, let alone even begin to think of loving my enemies! But here Jesus insists that even the deepest-seated enmity must be addressed not through ever-more-hardened hearts but through love and grace for everyone. Then he sums it all up with the most challenging words of all:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

For our great foundation, our head and cornerstone, to insist on this way of life is quite a challenge. Setting aside the wisdom of the world, approaching enmity with hope for transformation, praying for our enemies, even being perfect—all these things go against the grain for us, and our initial response is all too likely to try to give up on it all. Commentator Jason Byassee clarifies the challenge—and the solution:

We are called here to love as God loves. This cannot be done out of our own resources. So this is no admonition to try harder—if it were, it would indeed be recipe for despair. It is a plan of action rooted in the promise to be made ‘children of your Father in heaven’ (v. 45). The Sermon [on the Mount] here and elsewhere is a portrait of the very heart of God, one who loves the unlovable, comes among us in Christ, suffers our worst, and rises to forgive us. Turn the cheek, give the cloak, go another mile, lend, love the enemy—because that is how God loves. If you want to follow this God, fleshed in Jesus, you will be adopted into a life in which you find yourself loving this way before you know what you are doing. (Jason Byassee, “Theological Perspective on Matthew 5:38-48,” Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 1, p. 382.)

As some of you know, I spent a good bit of my college coursework studying and thinking about the Civil Rights Movement, and I’m still learning about this incredible time in our nation’s history. I am increasingly convinced that this movement was one of the great embodiments of these challenging texts. The Civil Rights Movement set aside the wisdom of the world that encouraged patience and careful obedience to the rules and replaced it with a worldview that said that civil disobedience would call appropriate attention to the unjust system of racial segregation that bordered on apartheid. The philosophy of nonviolence that prevailed through so much of the Civil Rights Movement was built on these very words of Jesus that sought to transform violence against African Americans into real and direct action against injustice. Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, women and men built up the spiritual capacity to turn the other cheek, to offer more than what was unjustly requested of them, to go beyond the basic expectations, to love those who were declared enemies, even to pray for those who persecuted them. All this love for the other was grounded not in digging into one’s own personal resources but in the foundation of God in Jesus Christ.

These ideas echoed throughout the movement. Whenever organizers were planning and executing direct action campaigns, participants gathered in regular mass meetings that resembled revivals as much anything, encouraging the community to stand firm amidst the challenges of the world and instead turn the other cheek, pray for the enemy, and give of everything that they had.

During the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, as he stood on the porch of his parsonage that had been bombed just hours before, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested that these ideas of Jesus ought to be made real.

Let’s not become panicky. If you have weapons, take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. Remember the words of Jesus: ‘He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.’ Remember that is what God said. We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.’ This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love. (quoted in Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today, p. 37-38)

And even years later, an African-American activist who had faced the worst of white treatment and persecution made her understanding of Jesus’ message clear:

Of course, there is no way I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face. (Lou Emma Allen, quoted in Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, p. 309.)

These challenging and hopeful words of Paul and of Jesus, then, have been and continue to be a real challenge to us. Every day, we are called to set aside the wisdom of the world and insist that there is a deeper and better way in Christ Jesus. Every day, we are called to turn the other cheek and offer even more than what is asked of us. Every day, we are called not to work against our enemies but to seek God’s transformation of them and us and our whole world as we work to embody God’s amazing grace and love. It seems almost impossible to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Yet while it may be impossible for us, “nothing is impossible with God”—and God is working in us and through us and in spite of us to bring about this perfection in our lives and in our world.

So may we join in this difficult but certain work of transformation and new creation each and every day, strengthened by the love of God that makes it possible for us to be something more than we have been, empowered by the grace of God that shows us the depth of mercy gifted us in Jesus Christ, and guided by the light of God that shines on us and shows us the way to join in this work in our lives and our world. Thanks be to God for this incredible challenge and hope! Amen.

Bait and Switch?

August 18, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 12:49-56
preached on August 18, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When you think of Jesus, what kind of person comes to mind? Do you picture him as a kind and gentle man, always offering a nice word to everyone he encounters, caring for children, and never raising his voice or showing a temper? Or do you imagine him like a fiery preacher, ranting and raving against all the bad things in the world, and always making people mad about something or other? Maybe I just saw too many pictures of a gentle and kind Jesus in Sunday School as a child, but I sure have something like that first image stuck in my head, and I suspect I am not alone. The song “Jesus Loves Me” that marks so many of our images of God suggests a kind and gentle man, not a fiery preacher. The gifted teacher and healer we hear about in the gospels surely only offered positive words that never condemned anyone, right? The quiet and gentle baby that we remember every Christmas was born to be the “Prince of Peace,” not one who stirs the pot constantly!

We could go a lifetime with these simple and peaceful images of Jesus, and many of us do—but then Luke confronts us with the Jesus from our reading this morning. The Jesus who speaks here sure seems like a very different person than the one we sang about a month or so ago when Cristian so wonderfully led us in singing “Jesus Loves Me.” This Jesus doesn’t offer a gentle or kind word—he speaks of fire and division! It feels a bit like a classic bait and switch move, as if Jesus has lured us in with the promise of simple love and grace and then tells us that that is all out of stock—with only fire, brimstone, and family conflict available instead!

His words here are intense and direct. He starts out with a simple promise tied to a lament:

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

Now it is certainly reasonable for Jesus to suggest a fire to purify the problematic areas around us, but I for one am not really interested in him bringing great destruction to the entire earth. Either way, his words here are not easy to hear.

Then he turns to the things that are ahead for him. As Luke tells the story, we’re right in the middle of an intense time for Jesus. He has been doing his basic ministry of teaching and healing for quite some time, and after an encounter with Moses and Elijah on the mount of Transfiguration, he has set his face toward Jerusalem, knowing that great challenges await him on the journey. So after he promises to bring fire to the earth, Jesus declares that he has “a baptism with which to be baptized,” and that he faces incredible stress until it is completed. He clearly knows that that road ahead for him leads to the cross, and because of that he has little patience for anyone who doesn’t share his commitment to the new things that God is doing in the world.

After this, he clarifies his intentions once and for all:

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two and against three; 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.

This is the ultimate bait and switch of this text, I think— the one who has repeatedly been declared the “Prince of Peace,” the one who has said that he comes to inaugurate a new and different way of life in the midst of the deep uncertainty of his time, the one whose mother sang of his mercy and strength even before his birth, for this one to suddenly declare that he comes not to bring peace but rather division is a dramatic reversal!

It seems that we have been deceived into thinking that Jesus is up to one thing when in fact he is doing something entirely different. We have been deceived that Jesus will make all our relationships stronger and better right away. We have been deceived into thinking that Jesus wants us to put our families first and ask questions about it all later. We have been deceived that following Jesus will lead us simply and easily into eternal life.

You see, when you get down to it, the content of Jesus’ message is so radical that it can’t help but bring a divisive response from some people. If we take just the words of his mother’s song, the Magnificat, that help to open Luke’s gospel, there are a whole bunch of potentially angry people: the proud who have been scattered in the thoughts of their hearts, the powerful who have been brought down from their thrones because the lowly have been lifted up, and the rich who have been sent away empty as the hungry have been filled with good things.

All this is only the beginning of what Jesus is up to. As commentator Richard Carlson puts it,

The divinely wrought peace that Jesus inaugurates and bestows involves the establishment of proper relationships of mercy, compassion, and justice between God and humanity. Not everyone, however, wants or welcomes this divine peace plan. Hence the initiation of Jesus’ peace agenda also triggers contentious disunity and fissures among all facets of society, right down to the societal core of the household. (“Exegetical Perspective on Luke 12:49-56,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, p. 361, 363)

So will we be deceived? Will we be deceived into thinking that that we can only focus on Jesus’ message of love without talking about the things that that message condemns? Will we be deceived into thinking that the “Prince of Peace” who comes to bring people together will not stand up to those who continue to beat the drums of war? Will we be deceived into putting temporal relationships with family and friends above the call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? It is easy to fall into these traps and set aside the more challenging parts of the gospel message, but when we listen to Jesus and take these words seriously, something can and will change for us and our world.

When we listen to him closely here, we will recognize that a full embodiment of Jesus’ way of life will make some people angry, maybe even some people we deeply love. But we will also remember that this is to be expected, and we can’t let others’ responses to our actions turn us back from following him. I find strength for doing exactly this in the example of the thousands upon thousands of women and men who practice nonviolent resistance, where quiet and gentle people simply seeking to exercise their rights to assemble, protest injustice, and live with the full dignity of their humanity insist with words and actions that they will not be moved, that they will not be silent until all people are recognized as children of God, that no one of us can be truly free until all of us are free. In the protests of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the Moral Mondays celebrated each week this summer in North Carolina, and so many other such things, these women and men do not set out to bring conflict but show that the divine intentions of justice, peace, and mercy stand in direct conflict with so many of the practices of our world and so deserve our condemnation. In drawing attention to the injustices of our world, these people who live out the message of Jesus in this way remind us that those who claim a place of power and privilege for only a few do not speak for all.

And so Jesus’ strong words here can give us the courage to speak up with so many others around us about the places that need the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit, about the people who face a challenging road of uncertainty as they follow the path that Jesus set out for us, about the injustice that remains so pervasive in our city, state, nation, and world, and about the depth of peace that still evades us even when we seek and pursue it each and every day. Jesus calls us, even us, to be a part of God’s new thing in our world, to speak up against everything that gets in its way, and to step into the world proclaiming this way of justice, peace, mercy, and love every day.

So may we trust even the Jesus who seems to bait and switch us and not be deceived along the way, for the path is not easy, but he walked it before us and walks it with us as we join in his work of making all things new until that day when he comes again. Lord, come quickly! Amen.