World on Fire

Proper 15C:  Luke 12:49-56

Ludwig von Beethoven is one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music. Even in his own day, his talent was celebrated and his work was patronized by the highest echelons of Austrian society. Sometimes, though, he liked to play a trick on his audience when he played in refined salon concerts. When he sensed that they weren’t really interested in serious music, he would perform a piece on the piano, one of his own slow movements perhaps, which would be so gentle and beautiful that everyone would be lulled into thinking the world was a soft, cozy place, where they could think beautiful thoughts and relax into semi-slumber. Then, just as the final notes were dying away, Beethoven would crash across the keyboard, and laugh at the shock he gave to the assembled company.

A bit harsh and impolite, perhaps. But the shock of that crash of notes interrupting the peaceful melody is a good image of what Jesus says in today’s gospel lesson from Luke. I mean, we’re used to thinking of Jesus as having an infinite capacity for empathy, as someone who is the epitome of "nice.” But Jesus’ words in today’s gospel shatter this image with a crash like Beethoven’s arm on the keyboard.

"I have come to set fire to the earth, fire! Oh, I can’t wait to see it all up in flames! Do you think I've come to bring peace? No! Peace is boring! Strife, division! I've come to split up families, divide homes, turn father against son, mother against daughter. Fire! Fire!” Luke has, believe it or not, softened Jesus’ words, for in Matthew’s version Jesus sounds downright violent: "I came not to bring peace, but a sword." A sword!

This fire-wielding, sword-flashing Jesus is light years from the sugary, serene pastel portraits

of a gentle Savior that typically adorn church hallways. What happened to the “Prince of Peace,” the Jesus “so meek and mild,” the one who would not so much as snuff out a candle? We like the Jesus who soothes, who comforts, who is all-accepting, never judgmental, and improves our lives painlessly and effortlessly. But here Jesus is telling us he’s come not to assuage but to unsettle us, to disrupt our lives, to turn them upside down, for the only way there can be new life is for the old life to be burned away.

This may come as a shock to many of us, but the fact is, Jesus’ confrontational attitude can be seen throughout the Gospels. Jesus was forever picking theological fights with the Pharisees, sticking his finger in the eyes of the Sadducees, partying with the wrong sorts of people, and generally ticking off those in power. He attracted plenty of friends and followers, to be sure, but he made plenty of enemies, too. These enemies finally had enough and got him arrested on charges of disturbing the peace and inciting rebellion. It wasn’t because Jesus healed the sick and encouraged us to forgive our enemies that got him killed. It was because he was fomenting social unrest. And there’s nothing the powers-that-be are afraid of more than social unrest, a challenge to the status quo.

And Jesus wasn’t alone when it came to causing trouble. After he died, his followers picked right up where he left off. One of them, a deacon named Stephen, got mouthy with the Jewish leaders, accusing them of murdering Jesus and got himself killed, becoming the first martyr. Peter too was arrested for preaching the gospel. He was let out on the condition that he stop talking about Jesus, but he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. So he was arrested again and was later martyred for his preaching.

And then there’s Paul. It seemed that wherever Paul went there was some conflict or another. It began with his conversion. The apostles argued with each other over whether they could trust him, on account of his having persecuted of Christians. (He was there when they killed Stephen, egging them on.) The disciples ultimately did accept him, but that wasn’t the end of the controversy, not by a long shot.

Paul’s first evangelistic mission, to Syria, ended abruptly, with a hasty retreat, for reasons he doesn’t explain. Most likely because things got too heated for him there. Or maybe he came in a little too hot, a little too strong, on his first assignment. On another mission, to Ephesus, he was nearly lynched because his preaching threatened the local idol-making business, as you just heard. And in Philippi, when he cast out a demon from a slave-girl, her owners, who profited by the demon’s fortune-telling ability, had him arrested and thrown in jail. Over the course of his ministry, Paul was flogged, tortured, arrested, stoned, shipwrecked and finally martyred, all because he wouldn’t stop stirring up trouble by sharing the Good News.

Even within the church, among Jesus’ followers, the Gospel had a tendency to incite divisions. After Jesus was resurrected, Peter and Paul got into it when Peter backtracked on whether to baptize Gentiles. Paul and his co-worker Barnabas apparently had a falling out over whether to allow their associate John Mark to join them after he had deserted them in Pamphylia. And when Paul tried to settle some conflicts among the Christians at Corinth, they turned on him, attacking him and his credentials. Paul repeatedly had to defend himself and his authority, especially against other Christians who insisted one had to become Jewish before becoming Christian. In his letters, the epistles, we can see Paul having to deal with one conflict after another in the church.

The point of all this is that Christians are no strangers to conflict. The church has been causing conflicts and been rent by internal conflicts since the beginning. This may offer some comfort to those Christians who are concerned about conflict in churches today. Conflict is normal for followers of Christ. It’s part of the life of the church. Look at any church, most any church, if they’re not in the middle of a conflict, they’re just getting out of one or are about to get into one. We like to think of the church as immune to the egoism, willfulness, and strong opinions that give rise to conflict. But we know from experience that that is not the case. The church, we have to remember, is not a place for perfect people; it is the place for perfecting people. And none of us are there yet.

Now, the fact that conflict is nothing new for Christians may give us some consolation when conflicts arise. But it doesn’t explain why Jesus would actively seek conflict, as he seems to do in this passage. Why on earth would he do that? Why cause trouble unnecessarily? What purpose does it serve to get people riled up, to cause hard feelings, and stoke resentments? Why would Jesus see division as a good thing?

It seems so at odds with what we expect of Jesus, and at odds with how we see our own mission. Shouldn’t we be gathering rather than scattering, multiplying rather than dividing, being “inclusive” rather than “exclusive,” making alliances rather than drawing lines in the sand? And yet, Jesus in this passage is saying that conflict isn’t necessarily contrary to God’s will. Indeed, conflict may be a way that God’s will gets carried out.

That only makes sense when we understand that Jesus didn’t come to make us happy, comfortable, and conflict-free, or to make a happy, comfortable and conflict-free society. He didn’t come to prop up the old ways, to bless the status quo. He came to stir things up, to set things on fire, to kindle a flame that would become a conflagration and consume the entire world!

That language can seem dramatic, I know, even scary. But it gets at the power, the energy, and yes, the danger that Jesus presents to the world as it is. You see, Jesus came to confront the powers-that-be, the patterns of thinking and behaving, that oppress and imprison men and women. He taught that a new day was dawning, a new era was upon us, a new kingdom, the Kingdom of God, was being established, in and through him. This new kingdom, this new reality, is in conflict with the way things have been. Its very existence forces people to choose, to decide where they stand in relation to the Kingdom, in relation to Jesus. It’s not that Jesus desires conflict for conflict’s sake. He welcomes conflict because it is the natural result of his mission, the consequence of his new teachings being taken seriously.

For the first Christians, the conflict was just that stark and dramatic, prompting literal division in households and in communities. Following Jesus meant abandoning careers, meant leaving behind lucrative positions of power, meant being on the outs with family, as following the way of Jesus challenged the existing order.

For most of us, however, being Christian has presented no particular conflict. The prospect of God’s Kingdom has been so long accepted, and we’ve so long sought to integrate it into the customs, laws, and outlook of the West, that we have forgotten it’s distinctiveness. I mean, for most of our lives, we lived in a Christian country, everyone we knew was Christian. To be born into America was effectively to be baptized a Christian. However, with Christianity’s retreat and the growing secularization, being Christian has become stranger, harder to justify, and more costly to practice.

Or maybe it’s not that following Jesus has become harder. Maybe it’s that the compromises we’ve made as Christians have become harder to conceal.

I mean, as educated, sophisticated people, we don’t like to think that being Christian is so simple, that the decision to follow Jesus is an either/or proposition. There’s some validity to that. As dramatic as the differences are made out to be between following Jesus and sticking with the way things are, the boundary between them isn’t always neat and clear. The line between the world’s way of doing things and the kingdom way of doing things zig-zags through our lives, and each of us sooner or later becomes adept at going from one side to the other. We’ll let Jesus have this part of our lives but not that part. We’ll let the kingdom influence our decision-making at home but not so much at work. We’ll let Jesus have our Sunday mornings but not our Saturday nights. This may make life easier. It reduces conflict. It helps everyone to get along better with everyone else. Surely Jesus would want that kind of peace and serenity for our lives, wouldn’t he?

That is precisely the attitude, the assumptions that Jesus means to confront and counter in today’s Gospel. Yes, life is often complicated. Yes, decisions are rarely black and white. But too often those allowances are used to hide our inconsistencies and our ethical compromises. We cannot get away from having to choose: Are we committed to the kingdom, to Jesus’ way of life, or do we remain enthralled to the way life has always been?

We have to choose, not because God is mean, but because God wants to make us whole, to be integrated as a person. We can’t follow him half-heartedly, limping along, one foot in, one foot out, with divided loyalties. Jesus wants to burn away everything that gets in the way of loving him. Jesus, the “anointed arsonist,” has come to set fire to the earth, to melt our cold hearts and ignite our passion, so that we will be enflamed to do his will.

And to be sure, this will likely cause some relationship to get heated. I know a young woman who grew up in a caring, loving home. She was sent to university to be trained in business, to join her father and her older brother in a very successful family investment firm. But she did not graduate and return to the family business. Instead, she left college her junior year and now works in a program with Native American children in Arizona. “It’s what Jesus wants me to do,” she explained to astonished family and friends.

How did her family respond to her decision? Her parents hardly speak to her anymore. They took her decision to follow Jesus to Arizona as a repudiation of them and their values. I suspect, if that young woman heard today’s Gospel, she’d say, “Yes! That’s it. That’s just what happens when you follow Jesus. It’s fire, division, mother against daughter. That’s the way it is. Jesus causes trouble.”

Now, that may not seem like “good news” to many of us. It can seem like a crashing piano in our otherwise comfortable and harmonious lives. But sometimes that disruption is what we need to wake us up and bring to our attention the radical nature of the grace-filled life that we share as part of the church. “I have come to set fire to the earth.” That’s Jesus’ warning, and his promise, that we might catch fire too. Thanks be to God!