Holy Arson

Luke 12:49-56; Isaiah 5:1-7; Hebrews 11:29-12:2


Good literature, drama, or cinema draws the reader or watcher into the action. We have all read a book which we couldn’t put down, or seen a play or movie that had us glued to our seat until the last climactic action took place. The very best actors, authors, dramatists, screen writers, cinematographers, and directors can make it happen for us. We may be able to see what the characters cannot see and know what is going to happen long before it actually happens. We can feel the tingle in our nerves, we can cut the tension with a knife.

Luke records that same kind of tension in today’s gospel reading. Jesus knows that he’s on a road that leads to conflict and to death. Now that he’s chosen his path, he just wants to get there. He can feel the pot simmering; he wants it to boil. It is agony for him to know that his message has not been accepted by the religious authorities. He wonders, when will they’ll come to get him, who will turn him in, how many days has he left to work. He doesn’t want a few warning sparks, he wants a blazing fire. In the midst of this tension, Jesus talks to his followers about conflict and about the price of the way they’ve chosen.

He starts by talking about peace.“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, I have come instead to bring division.” Now, peace was what Jesus most wanted to bring to the earth. At his birth, angels had announced, “Glory to God in heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors” (Luke 2:14). As Jesus taught and healed, his followers began to catch a vision of what that peace might be.

The prophets had spoken of a life that was full, of a peace that included enough for everyone and an end to exploitation. Jesus spoke the same message. Peace was more than a political absence of war. It was more than feeling good or being nice. Living by a vision of peace meant you had to choose where you would place your trust, how you would spend your money and time.

I imagine that somewhere along the way, it became apparent that the general public wasn’t buying the message. People weren’t eager to stop storing up their wealth in barns and start sharing it with those who have less. “After all,” they said, “we might need it someday. And, why should we trust someone else to share with us?” It’s the age-old human propensity to live out of fear of scarcity rather than gratitude for abundance. Whatever we have, we always want more, whether it’s paper money or paper clips.

Jesus’ hearers weren’t ready to trust the community over their own ambition. People might have been tired of the old ways, but they weren’t about to change the power structures even when they saw how destructive they were. In the end, Jesus would stand over Jerusalem and weep, “If only you knew on this of all days the things that lead to peace” (Luke 19:41). They had heard the message from the prophets and from Jesus himself, but they didn’t know how to live by peace, or how badly they needed it.

The people who did try to live by his vision found that their lives weren’t very peaceful. Many of them had experienced healing, and many had changed their priorities. Maybe they expected their private lives to improve, even if the outside world was being torn apart. But conflict in their families increased when they started on this new way. The older generation felt rejected when the younger folks turned away from their traditions. And we thought that was a problem new to our own times. The established people felt criticized and insulted by Jesus’ sermons. In other families, the younger ones felt abandoned when the elders went off with Jesus, or maybe they just resented their inheritance being squandered by people who always had seemed so responsible before.

Life with Jesus was anything but peaceful. Maybe the new disciples had accepted that they weren’t going to convince the whole Roman empire of Jesus’ way, but they probably thought their own families would understand what they were talking about. It must have been painful that the people closest to them didn’t share enthusiasm for this new preaching, this radically different view of God, of life, of responsibility.

When the tension was ready to explode, Jesus said some new things about peace. Jesus said he had not come to bring peace, rather he had come to start the process of peace — to show a new way. He said that his way involves making choices — choices about priorities and money and loyalties. Division always results from making those kinds of choices. Division was the only way to peace. When they decided to follow Jesus, they had to expect conflict. They didn’t have to be ashamed of it. They weren’t bad disciples because of it. Conflict happened. Peace would come, but only through walking a hard road and enduring hard conflicts on the way.

These words remind me of the wonderfully bucolic painting style of Thomas Kincade. His pictures are filled with heaps of flowering plants and everything is well-manicured. Nothing is out of place. The life Jesus lived and the lives his followers lived would never have fitted into a Thomas Kincade picture.

What do Jesus’ hard words say to us? They acknowledge that Jesus and his disciples had family conflict, as we all do. Having a perfect family life was not a required trait for disciples in the early church. You could be a good disciple or even a leader of disciples, even if it was all torn up at home.

Most of our conflicts at home are not about the lofty things Jesus was talking about. We don’t argue about basic life choices, like security and values and ultimate loyalties. Yet those values and choices underlie a lot of what we do argue about. Core values can make for wonderful common ground within which we can hassle out the less lofty points. The distance can also be terrifying when the values themselves don’t meet. Jesus’ disciples must have experienced the terrifying distances when they chose to follow him. They left their livelihoods, their tools of the trade, and their families, too.

What Jesus says is not just about families of kinship. The hard choices that we sometimes have to make are also part of those larger families of church and community. Too often we gloss over our differences and try to keep everything under control. That kind of peace is a lie. Or we go out of our way to accentuate the differences, always bringing them up and highlighting them so that they never get worked out in an acceptable way. We dig at old wounds and keep them festering. That is far from the peace of Christ and farther from the dividing that is the beginning point for the process of making of peace.

More than talking about families, blood-related or not, Jesus seems to be telling us again that the choices we make about what we believe and what we value and how we spend our time are important. They have consequences in our relationships at home, at work, in the community, in the clubs and organizations we join, in our cultural and political lives, and in the church. Jesus invites us to risk choosing what brings peace in the end, even though it may bring division in the present. Following his way, we may feel the heat and experience the tension which builds to an explosion.

What do we do in the mean time? We do what Jesus talks about over and over again. We take heart from those who walk the path with us and who have gone before us; we support one another in trying to live by values that will bring wholeness to this world. We trust that peace will come. We put the process of Christ’s peacemaking in his hands. We keep walking the paths of righteousness, justice, and compassion, even as the tension keeps on building. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Michelangelo had to chip stone off the marble block in order to create the Pieta. The woodcarver has to whittle bits of wood away to make a carving. The etcher uses acid to eat away a bit of metal to make plate which will print an etching.

The peace that Jesus seeks to bring is when you and she, and he and you, and you and I whittle, chip, eat away at the things that separate us from God and from each other. God started all this by sending Jesus as flesh and blood to be flesh and blood alongside us, to suffer as we suffer, to dream as we dream, to struggle as we struggle. God knew that it was an incendiary mix. Something was going to happen. And God chose to do it together with our ancestors, with us, and with the generations which will come after us. There is an African proverb that says it all: “If we want to go fast, go alone. If we want to go far, go together.” God wants to go far with us. And if it takes a fire to make it happen, then God will send the Holy Spirit to light the kindling.


Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.