The Fire Bringer
Text: Luke 12:49-56
Professor Stanley Hauerwas, a well known Christian Scholar, often opened his classes at the beginning of the year a story like this. When he was at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, he often began a course on marriage by reading a letter to the students. A complaint to authorities, it went something like this, “Our son had done well. He had gone to good schools, had gone through the military, had gotten out, had looked like he had a very promising career ahead. Unfortunately, he has joined some eastern religious sect. Now he does not want to have anything to do with us, because we are people of ‘the world.’ He is never going to marry because now he claims his true family is this funny group of people he associates with. We are heartsick. We don’t know what to do about this, please help us!” Then he would ask the class, “Who wrote this letter?”
So who do you think wrote this letter? The students replied that the letter was written by concerned parents, whose adult child has gone off and joined some nutty religious cult, Moonies, Hare Krishna, Branch Davidians… Not surprising in those replies were expected… but the real twist is that this letter was written in the 3rd Century, by a Roman senatorial family, whose son had recently converted to Christianity.
It was a real eye-opener for the students. The Romans saw Christianity as an assault on their traditional family values, undermining and threatening their way of life. An interesting contrast for us many centuries later, where Christian ministries bear names like Focus on the Family, and politicians need to espouse family values in order to get the Christian vote. The difference is now that Christianity over history and time became the establishment, rather than being out on the fringes of society. We have forgotten our rather revolutionary roots! We may find it surprising to our ear today, and if anything we try to downplay that… but every once in a while, Jesus reminds us not to be so comfortable.
This morning’s reading from the gospel of Luke:
“49I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53they 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.”
Suddenly all those family values go flying out the window with the image of the bickering family. To borrow a saying from comedians, it seems that Jesus comes to put the “fun” in dysFUNctional! Yet there is more going on here than a simple surface reading suggests… otherwise we’re simply tempted to ignore this passage and hope it goes away. We do this, I think, to our own disadvantage… because we miss some very subtle but very important lessons about our faith, and what God calls us to be.
Most of the time, I think, we want to come to church on Sunday mornings to find a word of comfort. It’s a quiet refuge from our hectic lives, that it’s a moment of calm amid the frenetic pace of early 21st Century society. What we have from Luke today is anything but calm, serene or comforting. It’s all the more jarring, because earlier in the gospel, in the Christmas story, Luke seems to imply that peace on earth was exactly what Jesus was supposed to bring. We hear this passage, and we can’t help but to feel a bit betrayed!
It’s an uncomfortable place for us to be. As a preacher, I have to admit that there’s a certain dread when we come across passages like this. We do tend to buy into the calm, soothing images of Jesus. Images like the good shepherd, still waters, placid fields, all those things that grant us a sense of comfort when we come into this space. But it’s at those very moments where we want that calm sense of refuge that suddenly someone runs into the sanctuary and yells FIRE!!! When we turn to look, upset that someone has disrupted our calm, serene service. Imagine our surprise when we realize that the one doing the yelling is Jesus!
But then again, God has been yelling fire for a long time.
Let’s go back a little bit. Think to the book of Exodus… Moses, hunkered down out in Midian. He had killed a man back in Egypt. Moses is a fugitive. He’s trying to blend in with the wallpaper, posing as a shepherd. He marries a local girl and tries to start a new life… and then suddenly a bush bursts into flame. Fire! There’s a voice. “I’m sending you back there to stand up to Pharaoh and the Empire. I’m sending you to speak for me to the King. Go! Speak!” The voice of God… and in the same way, Jesus says, “I’m consumed with that fire and I intend to ignite you!”
The people of Israel in the midst of their flight from Egypt begin to complain that they should never have left in the first place. “You know… at least with Pharaoh, we knew where our meals were coming from, and we had shelter… with God, we don’t know where we’re going!” So did God say, “Okay… you can go back, I’ll let you slip back into slavery”? Or did God say, “I’ll slow things down and let you take up residence in the wilderness.” No! God said, “I’ll give you a pillar of fire to leading into the unknown darkness, and I will pulling you into my future.”
Jesus says, “this Exodus fire is what I bring… I am going to take you places that you have never even seen!”
When Jesus says that he has come to bring fire on the earth, there are a few things that we miss. Luke seems to play with the two different ideas of fire, one as a consuming destructive force, but the other as energy for change. The most powerful eruption of this change is 2nd chapter of Acts, describing the coming of the Holy Spirit in tongues as of fire. Luke is foreshadowing Pentecost… subtle, but it is foreshadowing nonetheless. There is something new coming… Jesus says… the fire of the Holy Spirit, the energy for change that will transform the whole world into something new. Things will never be the same again.
The disconcerting description about divisions in the family also reveals something else. It is father vs. son; mother vs. daughter; mother-in-law vs. daughter-in-law… Notice what it says, but also what it doesn’t say. This passage does not say husband against wife, or brother vs. sister… This is parent vs. child… and maybe it’s all they come to symbolize. The conflict here is between generations! It’s the embodiment of that struggle between old and new, between the establishment and change… it’s brought to a crisis, and the tensions are running high. Yet, as history teaches us, crisis is often what instigates change... how we choose to respond to it has a tremendous impact on our future.
As we know from the letter from the concerned Roman parents, this is precisely what the presence of the early church brought. The establishment struggled with these forces for change, and yet something new came upon them. They did their best to ignore it, and yet the fire of this new faith spread beyond their control, and changed the world forever.
As the church today, we find ourselves in a place not unlike those Roman families lamenting their son’s newfound faith. It’s a fascinating reversal… The church has lost its place as the establishment, and yet there is still this smouldering fire that threatens to carry us in new ways, in places that we have never been before. We find ourselves in the midst of a crisis, wondering what our future holds in the midst of all this societal change around us. Yet I don’t think this is something we need or should fear. There are new opportunities that God is giving us to be the church in new ways. We may need to get a bit creative, to consider things that we never have before… but that’s an exciting prospect… Amen.
Professor Stanley Hauerwas, a well known Christian Scholar, often opened his classes at the beginning of the year a story like this. When he was at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, he often began a course on marriage by reading a letter to the students. A complaint to authorities, it went something like this, “Our son had done well. He had gone to good schools, had gone through the military, had gotten out, had looked like he had a very promising career ahead. Unfortunately, he has joined some eastern religious sect. Now he does not want to have anything to do with us, because we are people of ‘the world.’ He is never going to marry because now he claims his true family is this funny group of people he associates with. We are heartsick. We don’t know what to do about this, please help us!” Then he would ask the class, “Who wrote this letter?”
So who do you think wrote this letter? The students replied that the letter was written by concerned parents, whose adult child has gone off and joined some nutty religious cult, Moonies, Hare Krishna, Branch Davidians… Not surprising in those replies were expected… but the real twist is that this letter was written in the 3rd Century, by a Roman senatorial family, whose son had recently converted to Christianity.
It was a real eye-opener for the students. The Romans saw Christianity as an assault on their traditional family values, undermining and threatening their way of life. An interesting contrast for us many centuries later, where Christian ministries bear names like Focus on the Family, and politicians need to espouse family values in order to get the Christian vote. The difference is now that Christianity over history and time became the establishment, rather than being out on the fringes of society. We have forgotten our rather revolutionary roots! We may find it surprising to our ear today, and if anything we try to downplay that… but every once in a while, Jesus reminds us not to be so comfortable.
This morning’s reading from the gospel of Luke:
“49I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53they 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.”
Suddenly all those family values go flying out the window with the image of the bickering family. To borrow a saying from comedians, it seems that Jesus comes to put the “fun” in dysFUNctional! Yet there is more going on here than a simple surface reading suggests… otherwise we’re simply tempted to ignore this passage and hope it goes away. We do this, I think, to our own disadvantage… because we miss some very subtle but very important lessons about our faith, and what God calls us to be.
Most of the time, I think, we want to come to church on Sunday mornings to find a word of comfort. It’s a quiet refuge from our hectic lives, that it’s a moment of calm amid the frenetic pace of early 21st Century society. What we have from Luke today is anything but calm, serene or comforting. It’s all the more jarring, because earlier in the gospel, in the Christmas story, Luke seems to imply that peace on earth was exactly what Jesus was supposed to bring. We hear this passage, and we can’t help but to feel a bit betrayed!
It’s an uncomfortable place for us to be. As a preacher, I have to admit that there’s a certain dread when we come across passages like this. We do tend to buy into the calm, soothing images of Jesus. Images like the good shepherd, still waters, placid fields, all those things that grant us a sense of comfort when we come into this space. But it’s at those very moments where we want that calm sense of refuge that suddenly someone runs into the sanctuary and yells FIRE!!! When we turn to look, upset that someone has disrupted our calm, serene service. Imagine our surprise when we realize that the one doing the yelling is Jesus!
But then again, God has been yelling fire for a long time.
Let’s go back a little bit. Think to the book of Exodus… Moses, hunkered down out in Midian. He had killed a man back in Egypt. Moses is a fugitive. He’s trying to blend in with the wallpaper, posing as a shepherd. He marries a local girl and tries to start a new life… and then suddenly a bush bursts into flame. Fire! There’s a voice. “I’m sending you back there to stand up to Pharaoh and the Empire. I’m sending you to speak for me to the King. Go! Speak!” The voice of God… and in the same way, Jesus says, “I’m consumed with that fire and I intend to ignite you!”
The people of Israel in the midst of their flight from Egypt begin to complain that they should never have left in the first place. “You know… at least with Pharaoh, we knew where our meals were coming from, and we had shelter… with God, we don’t know where we’re going!” So did God say, “Okay… you can go back, I’ll let you slip back into slavery”? Or did God say, “I’ll slow things down and let you take up residence in the wilderness.” No! God said, “I’ll give you a pillar of fire to leading into the unknown darkness, and I will pulling you into my future.”
Jesus says, “this Exodus fire is what I bring… I am going to take you places that you have never even seen!”
When Jesus says that he has come to bring fire on the earth, there are a few things that we miss. Luke seems to play with the two different ideas of fire, one as a consuming destructive force, but the other as energy for change. The most powerful eruption of this change is 2nd chapter of Acts, describing the coming of the Holy Spirit in tongues as of fire. Luke is foreshadowing Pentecost… subtle, but it is foreshadowing nonetheless. There is something new coming… Jesus says… the fire of the Holy Spirit, the energy for change that will transform the whole world into something new. Things will never be the same again.
The disconcerting description about divisions in the family also reveals something else. It is father vs. son; mother vs. daughter; mother-in-law vs. daughter-in-law… Notice what it says, but also what it doesn’t say. This passage does not say husband against wife, or brother vs. sister… This is parent vs. child… and maybe it’s all they come to symbolize. The conflict here is between generations! It’s the embodiment of that struggle between old and new, between the establishment and change… it’s brought to a crisis, and the tensions are running high. Yet, as history teaches us, crisis is often what instigates change... how we choose to respond to it has a tremendous impact on our future.
As we know from the letter from the concerned Roman parents, this is precisely what the presence of the early church brought. The establishment struggled with these forces for change, and yet something new came upon them. They did their best to ignore it, and yet the fire of this new faith spread beyond their control, and changed the world forever.
As the church today, we find ourselves in a place not unlike those Roman families lamenting their son’s newfound faith. It’s a fascinating reversal… The church has lost its place as the establishment, and yet there is still this smouldering fire that threatens to carry us in new ways, in places that we have never been before. We find ourselves in the midst of a crisis, wondering what our future holds in the midst of all this societal change around us. Yet I don’t think this is something we need or should fear. There are new opportunities that God is giving us to be the church in new ways. We may need to get a bit creative, to consider things that we never have before… but that’s an exciting prospect… Amen.
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