Jesus Meek and Mild...Not!

Joseph P. Mathews, OSL
19 August 2007
Pentecost 12+, C

Luke 12.49-56
“Jesus Meek and Mild. Not.”

God of Flame, ignite us, set us on fire, rekindle us, and enflame us in passionate love for you. Draw us out of the confines of our safe and predictable faith and out to the high seas of adventuresome discipleship. May we burn brightly for your love. Amen.

Today’s text is not an easy one to preach. As I looked at the lectionary readings for today I had choices: Isaiah’s first song; a Psalm; a continuation of the discourse on Faith from the letter to the Hebrews; and finally, Jesus meek and mild. Not. “I came to bring fire to the earth!...Do you think I have come to bring peace on the earth? Ha! Division, I say! Dividing houses: fathers from sons and mothers from daughters!” No, this is not Jesus meek and mild, as much of our artwork portrays. Bishop Will Willimon, currently of the North Alabama Annual Conference has this to say about the text, “I confess I always feel a dread when we come to this particular Sunday of the year, this text from Luke, and this Jesus who runs counter to so much that we’ve tried to make him.” This, beloved, is a hard text to preach. But so is most of the Gospel when spoken to be applied to our lives. And it was to this text that I felt lead to speak on.

This week’s lesson is a continuation of pericopes – selections of scripture used to build a sermon around – of Christ’s warnings and exhortations. Two weeks ago Christ told the disciples not to worry because life is more than food and clothing. “Look to the ravens and the lilies,” he tells them, “they neither sow nor reap nor toil, but are fed to fullness and clothed splendidly.” Last week was “fear not little flock.” God wants us to live in the kindom here and now. This week, however, the tone changes. “Fear not little flock,” becomes “be terrified instead!”

By talking about fire, Jesus evokes a long history of imagery from our sacred text: Ecclesiastes lists it as a gift along with water, iron, honey, wine, and other things as gifts from God. But fire can be – and is meant to be – frightening, too. After Old Testament battles, how many cities were burned completely to show their total defeat? Fire is used for purification in Old Covenant religious rites. (What are some other fire references that we have from which to draw?) God lead the wandering Israelites by a pillar of fire at night. I AM appeared to Moses as a burning bush. Fire is a sign for the presence of God as well as being a gift representative of destruction and purification. When Jesus speaks of bringing fire to the earth, we have this imagery.

After the proclamation that fire is coming to the earth – fire of destruction, fire of purification, and/or fire of the presence of the Almighty – Jesus alludes to his coming death: “I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” Christ has come to take away the sin of the world. But Jesus has talked elsewhere in the Gospel about his mission on earth: to show we mortals how to live into the Kindom of God here and now. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Can you imagine being Jesus? Not yet to the point of praying “your will not mine” in terms of his death, but knowing that it’s coming? Can you imagine trying to change the world – to shake the foundations of the systems that are in place from the ground up - when you have boneheaded disciples with you who just don’t get it, even after you’ve explained it to them, and told them that they don’t get it? What kind of stress is that?

After telling the disciples – and us – of his stress, Christ throws a card that makes many people uncomfortable, particularly in light of his title Prince of Peace. “I’m not here to settle your arguments! I’m not here to make everything happy times! I’m here to bring about strife and division among you! Your houses will be split between those who follow me and those who do not!” This rejection of bringing peace is not a justification for war. In the first century of the Common Era, Israel was under Roman occupancy. Many expectant Jews planned for Messiah to throw off the Roman oppressors and bring about peace. But, as we know, he didn’t. He brought about a peace that passes human understand, and he tried to share it with us.

Christ tells us here that his message is not one of maintaining the status quo. He taught, acted, and lived as though heaven were already on earth. He expected his followers to do the same. Throughout the Gospel Jesus challenges the powers that be – government bodies, religious leaders, and human nature. He healed on the Sabbath and called the leaders hypocrites. He worked and lived for a Kindom that no one could actually see, even though they were living in one of the greatest empires in Western history. He said last week to “sell all that you have.” What? Sell all that I have? Depend on others who may at the same time be depending on me? That runs counter to our ingrained desires of self-preservation.

Following Christ causes division, particularly if we seek to live as a kindom people, where all are treated justly with fairness, and where God’s grace that we the baptized enjoy be enjoyed by everyone else – especially those we think deserve punishment for their actions. The Rev. Taylor Burton-Edwards observes that those most invested in earthly kingdoms will be most disturbed by talk of the Heavenly Kindom’s presence. I’m not saying to storm the jails and break them down, although this was considered an act of sanctity in the sixth century church. But we do have specific instruction to visit the jailed and show God’s love to them. I don’t suggest we have an anarchist revolution, but do suggest we strive to make a just society within our various forms of government.

If following Christ causes division, what are we doing that’s divisive? What are we doing that we think is divisive but is only maintaining the status quo? Who are we, as Christians, making angry? Who are we as a people called United Methodist stirring up? Who are you, as a body of believers and as individuals making question what they think and do? How are we living into those beautiful vows of our water baptisms – renouncing the spiritual forces of wickedness, rejecting the evil powers of darkness, repenting of our sin, and resisting evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves, putting our whole trust in Christ’s grace and being Christ’s representative to the world – so that we are being baptized with fire?

Our Social Principles can be a good jumping off point. What does this church of which you’re a member believe? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Why? What are you being done to change it? In our democratic system of government they can be changed. But what conclusions have the roughly a thousand members at the general conferences since our church was birthed reached and why? Do those things for which the United Methodist Church already stands for bring division and fire?

Furthermore, how are we not letting ourselves bring about divisions with fire? In her book Teaching that Transforms: Worship as the Heart of Christian Education, author Debra Dean Murphy is critical of worship styles that “dumb down” the faith and take Christ’s dramatic claims - “DIVISION! FIRE!” – and box them into a consumer culture’s limits: 

"…the market driven character of much of our worship; the dumbing down of he church’s historic liturgy; the thoughtless capitulation by Christians to consumer capitalism; the extolling of managerial models of ecclesial leadership; the view of the church as a promoter of ‘family values; and defender of (abstract) principles of love, justice, and freedom; the facile identification of Christianity and nationalism; the failure to train the imaginations of the young; the devolving of rigorous Christian discourse into pious sentimentality; and the growing trend across Christian traditions toward a vacuous, generic, benign pop spirituality."[1]

How do we suppress fires in our worship? What songs do we not sing? What passages of scripture do we avoid? What prayers and litanies go unsaid? Which affirmations of faith that are available to us do we not say? How do we shroud the fire of compassion, the flame of mercy, and the Light of the World in our personal lives, thoughts, words, and actions?

After telling the crowd of people listening that following him is not easy and brings division Jesus talks about something they can really understand: the weather. The geographic location of this narrative lends itself to Jesus’s speech: to the south was a desert. As such, when the south wind blew, the heat was coming in. The people of Jesus’s day knew this and understood what was coming. But they, not unlike the disciples, didn’t really get what he was talking about: the Kindom of God. Today it might sound something like this: “You hypocrites! You understand the weather! You have satellites and know when tropical depressions are forming off of Africa. You can monitor storm systems and air pressures and fronts of air, but don’t you see what’s going on here?” As the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American’s General Synod has just disbanded, our General Conference will convene next year, and The Episcopal Church’s General Convention will gather again in 2009, what new things are coming? Will the delegates – who will have The Weather Channel in their hotel rooms – listen to God’s new things? Or will they, like the disciples so many times, listen to only what they know and think is safe? May your fervent prayer be that they catch on fire with enthusiasm, even if as John Wesley suggests, that causes people to come from miles around to watch them burn.

I close with a song from The Faith We Sing that gives us instructions and hope. It tells us what to do now as we wait for what is to come. It reminds us of what we’ve been told to do and what we’ve been told will happen. This is David Haas’s “We Are Called”
Come! live in the light! Shine with the joy and the love of the Lord! We are called to be light for the [kindom], to live in the freedom of the city of God! Come! Open your heart! Show your mercy to all those in fear! We are called to be hope for the hopeless, so all hatred and blindness will be no more! Sing! Sing a new song! Sing of that great day when all will be one! God will reign and we'll walk with each other as sisters and brothers united in love!
And the refrain goes like this: We are called to act with justice. We are called to love tenderly. We are called to serve one another, to walk humbly with God.

In the name of the Holy and Triune God, Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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1. Brazos, 2004. p. 23