"A Different Kind of Peace"
Luke 12:49-59
“I
came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” “Do you think I have come to bring peace to
the earth? No I tell you, but rather division!
We
live in a broken, divided world. With
all the divisiveness in our society these days, it seems like the last thing we
need is more division!
These
sound like harsh and difficult words from Jesus. Where’s the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” we
like so much?
“You
know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky,” Jesus said to the
crowds, “but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
How are we to interpret what Jesus
is saying? Can it help us to interpret our
present time?
I
think it’s helpful to reflect on Jesus’ own sense of identity and mission, to
help us understand what he is trying to say in these difficult words. Early in the lesson, we hear Jesus saying,
“I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until
it is completed!” It was in his baptism
that Jesus came to a clear consciousness of who he was. As he came out of the waters of the Jordan,
he heard God saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”
Jesus’
sense of himself was rooted and grounded in God’s love for him. Filled with this deep sense of being enfolded
in God’s love, Jesus was driven by the Spirit out into the wilderness, where he
was tempted by Satan. In that wilderness
time of forty days and forty nights, Jesus had to struggle with how he would
live out his identity--whether he would open his life to God’s larger purposes,
and how he would respond to the mission into which God was calling him.
Luke tells us that Jesus, filled
with the power of the Holy Spirit, returns to Galilee and goes to his hometown
of Nazareth. He goes into the synagogue.
In the synagogue, he was given the
scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolls
the scroll and finds the place where it is written, “The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has 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.”[1]
Then Jesus rolls up the scroll, and
sits down. The eyes of everybody in the
synagogue were on him. Then he begins to
say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”[2]
In Jewish thought, the year of the
Lord’s favor is the year of Jubilee, and the year of Jubilee is the time in
which all relationships are re-ordered, all patterns of indebtedness are set
aside, and the whole fabric of society is restructured according to God’s
desire…God’s plan that all may be free…that all may live in relationships of
love and peace. So Jesus makes a public
declaration of what his mission is.[3]
I’m grateful to the Most Rev. Frank
Griswold, former head of the Episcopal Church, for pointing me to the
connection to the Jewish term, “tikkun olam,” which means “repair of the
world.” This may be a familiar idea to
any of you who are aware of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s writings and the Tikkun
community.
I believe Jesus’ mission is very
much about repairing the world, re-ordering disordered relationships, and overcoming
the disparities that create injustice.
I think that in the strong words we just heard in today’s Gospel lesson,
we hear Jesus’ sense of urgency about his call to do God’s will. We hear an urgency to bring about God’s work
of reconciliation and binding up and making whole.
I believe this is truly gospel—good
news, because it is a message of compassion and healing. But it is also a challenging message, because
it calls people to change. It calls us
to re-order our lives, and it calls us to a new awareness.
Jesus saw many of the religious
practices of his day as a means of protecting or distracting against the deeper
demands of God, as a way of insulating one’s self against the calls of God’s
greater righteousness and God’s call to reorder all things in justice and
peace.
Churches and other religious
organizations can be very self-serving, rather than other-serving. We can get caught up in the little details or
the structures of our religious traditions or in the comfort of being in our
“church family”, and we can miss the deeper
invitation that is the heart of all authentic religion—that is to allow
ourselves to be broken open by God’s gracious love so that our own identity and
the call to be joined together with Christ in mission makes us, with Christ,
repairers of the world.
Jesus says, “I came to bring fire to
the earth. How I wish it were already kindled.” Do you sense his urgency…his passion? On that first Easter, when Cleopas and
another disciple finally recognized the stranger with whom they’d walked to
Emmaus, they exclaimed, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to
us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?”[4]
John Calvin, one of our spiritual
ancestors in the Reformed faith, experienced a change in the passions of his heart
and said, “My heart I give the Lord eagerly and sincerely.” Calvin’s seal was a hand stretched out from a burning heart.
The flames at the foot of the cross
of our Presbyterian Church (USA) symbol remind us of the beginning of the
Christian church, when the Holy Spirit baptized the apostles with fire at
Pentecost, charging them to be messengers of the good news of God’s love.
“Do you think I came to bring peace
to the earth?” Jesus said. No.
The way Eugene
Peterson translates it in The Message, Jesus said, “I’ve come to change
everything, to turn everything right-side up.
How I long for it to be finished!
Do you think I came to smooth things and make everything nice? Not so.
I’ve come to disrupt and confront.”
When Jesus said he didn’t come to
bring peace to the earth, I think the kind of peace he was talking about here
is the kind of easy, superficial peace that papers over things, sweeps things
under the rug, while leaving the disorder beneath the surface. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I come to
bring peace, but my peace is not of this world.”[5]
The peace Jesus brings requires a
deep re-ordering of our own interior life and a re-ordering of our
relationships with one another. It is a
costly and demanding peace that requires a transformation of our attitudes and
imagination. When we allow this costly
and demanding peace to transform our lives, we sometimes experience division—division
within ourselves, as we struggle with our desire to open ourselves to God’s
transforming work and reconciliation and our fears that the cost may be too
great. We’re afraid that following Jesus
may demand too much of us. And so we
compromise, we try to “be realistic.” We
try to explain away the challenge of the Gospel.
Jesus confronts us with the
uncomfortable question: “Why do you not
know how to interpret the present time?”
In other words, why will you not look at the world around you through
the lense of faith?
“Why do you not judge for yourselves
what is right?” Jesus asks. The English is more ambiguous in meaning than
the original Greek, which would more accurately be translated, “Judge for yourself what is just.”
The social and economic context for
this saying is the rampant debt that was destroying families and communities
throughout Palestine in Jesus’ time. If
disputes about debts reached the Roman legal system, the debtor would receive
one of two verdicts. Either the debtor
would be forced into indentured service to work off the debt, or the debtor
would be thrown into prison until family members managed to scrape together the
money needed to pay off the debt—often by selling off their land. It was a system that allowed the rich to get
richer, and that spelled the ruin of the poor.
That’s why, when the Zealots entered Jerusalem at the start of the war
of 66 C.E., the first thing they did was to burn the debt records!
In Jesus’ time, the only way to
avoid playing such blatant injustice, would be to settle cases before they went to court. Whatever the actual patterns of debt and
credit, justice required that the system be brought to an end. Those who have heard Jesus proclaim that
God’s reign is at hand[6] see the need to end the debts and credits
of “business as usual.”
Now, this was not a new idea. When the Old Testament talks about land
ownership, it does so in the context of the year of Jubilee, which was supposed
to be held every 50th year, when all debts are forgiven, and all
land reverts back to its original owner or his descendants.
In addition, every seventh year,
land owners were supposed to provide a Sabbath for the land, to let it rest, to
lie fallow. The Bible envisions a
relationship of good stewardship, and of faithful responsibility between people
and the earth.
I believe our faith calls us to a
new awareness, a new way of seeing things, a new openness to struggling with
questions of faithful living, as individuals and as a society.
How do we interpret the present
time? How do we balance the rights of
individuals with the needs of the community, and the earth itself? How do we confront the idolatries of private
property and mindless consumption? Is a
company’s CEO really worth 200 times what its lowest-paid employee is
worth? Is a professional athlete really
worth 100 times more than a public school teacher? What does our faith have to say about the
growing gap between the rich and the poor?
How do we interpret the present
time? What does our faith have to say
about a world that seems to become increasingly violent? What does our faith say about fear, and about
what happens when we allow fear to rule us?
What does our Christian faith say about war?
How do we interpret the present
time? What does our faith say about
earth-damaging habits and desires that lead us to use more of the earth’s
resources than the earth can sustain?
What does our faith say about buying products that are produced on the
backs of children and slaves?
These aren’t just political or
economic or environmental questions.
They are faith questions. [7]
Jesus was right, wasn’t he? If we raise questions like these, we are
likely to create division—within families, within the household of faith. And that can make us very uncomfortable.
Sometimes when Jesus speaks, he
doesn’t leave us with peace—at least not an easy, superficial peace. Jesus calls us interpret the signs of our
present time in the light of our faith.
The present time we live in is confused and disordered and broken. Sometimes
what we see in the world around us can feel overwhelming, and we feel powerless
to do anything that would make a difference.
But, in the words of Margaret Mead,
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world. Indeed, it is the only thing
that ever has.”
In the late 18th century in Great Britain, as awareness
of the cruelty of sugar plantations in the West Indies grew, more and more
British people boycotted sugar from the Indies, declaring that they would not
sweeten their tea with sugar tainted by slave blood. The boycott had an effect and helped the
abolition movement to build momentum. The movement was led by people of faith. The Abolitionist movement that followed in
the United States was led by Quakers, Evangelical Christians, and others.
Presbyterians and other Christians have
effectively boycotted companies for humanitarian and justice reasons over the
years. Whether it’s committing as an
individual to buy only fair trade chocolate or coffee or deciding as a church
to divest from corporations that participate in great injustice, the little things we do can help
to bring about change for good and can help to heal the world.
When we follow Jesus, he challenges
us to interpret the present time in light of our faith. He calls us into new life—not a nice,
lukewarm life, but a life of passion and urgency to repair the world.
When we allow ourselves to be
transformed by God’s love, so that our identity and calling and mission are shaped
by that love, the Spirit will give 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.[8]
All this is costly and demanding,
but we are not alone, because Christ, who is our real peace, has promised to be
with us every step of the way.
Thanks be to God!
Amen!
[1] Isaiah
61.
[2] Luke 4.
[3] I am
very grateful to the Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, former Presiding Bishop and
Primate of the Episcopal Church USA, for his insights on this text, in “Sermon
for Proper 15” at http://day1.org/609-sermon_for_proper_15.
[4] Luke
24:32
[5] John
14:27
[6] Luke
4:18
[7] I am
grateful to the Rev. Julie Adkins for several of the insights and questions
here, in “Interpreting the Signs of the Times,” published at
www.goodpreacher.com
[8] Brief
Statement of Faith, Presbyterian Church (USA), 1990.
