#had a shock just now but then i realized it wasn’t a fellow entitled youth saying it

[alexa-crowe]

when u have to check who’s saying the hot take to see what perspective it’s coming from

[woodworkingpastor]

Bringing fire to the earth Luke 12:49-53 March 1, 2020

Call to Worship

Ashes have been smeared and sins have been confessed…

we follow our faithful Lord.

These times, they are troubling.  This journey, it is hard…

we follow our faithful Lord.

It is God who sustains, not the temptations of this world…

we follow our faithful Lord.

In the Lord is our trust, our protection from harm…

we follow our faithful Lord.

Come, let us worship the One whom we serve…

we follow our faithful Lord.

Hymn, My Jesus, I love thee, # 522

On December 18, 1998, Lynette and I got in our car in Harrisonburg, VA and drove to Roanoke.  I remember the date because it happened to be the day before our 6th wedding anniversary.  But this was no anniversary getaway; we were heading to the Virlina District Office to meet David Shumate.  We arrived on Plantation Road, got into David’s car, had supper at the Franklin Restaurant, and then headed on to meet the search committee at the New Hope Church in Patrick County.

Along the way, David told me something important about serving a congregation in a rural community (something that is true in any congregation, rural or urban): you need to be aware of how family relationships impact decision making in the church.  “Sooner or later,” he said, “Cousin Billy will do something that’s really stupid and hurtful, and everyone will know it’s really stupid and hurtful. But you need to remember that he’s still someone’s Cousin Billy, and people from the church have to put up with him at Christmas dinner.  They probably won’t take your side if you take him on.”

I share this story not to in any way demean the New Hope or any congregation, but to say that somewhere in our lives we all have a Cousin Billy, and it makes Scripture texts like the one for today REALLY challenging.  We Brethren think of our faith not in terms of the division and discord, but in terms of unity and togetherness and peace. But our commitment to the New Testament forces us to wrestle with a text where Jesus says something we don’t want to hear—following Jesus might bring division to even the most important of our relationships.

Wired to defend our tribe

The fact of the matter is, we are genetically wired to defend our people.  Ezra Klein has recently written a book entitled Why We’re Polarized. He’s trying to make sense of why it seems everyone in America is treating one another so badly these days, and his research has led him to some very interesting discoveries.

He found an old study by Henri Tajfel who wanted to figure out what it would actually take to make people stop working for the common good and start defending their own group.  So he and his fellow researchers rounded up a group of 64 fourteen and fifteen year old boys from the same school and brought them to their lab. They showed each of the boys a picture that had a lot of dots on it, and they told the boys to guess how many dots were in the picture.

After they had gotten all the boys answers, they told the boys they were dividing them into two groups: a group that guessed a lower number of dots, and a group that guessed a larger number of dots.  In reality, they simply divided the boys into two completely random groups that had nothing to do with the dots; but the boys thought they were in groups of people they had something in common with.

Then one of the boys in each group was given some supplies that all of the boys in the groups would need and told to distribute them. What did those boys do? They gave the boys in their group more than they did the boys in the other group.  The researchers were actually shocked at this result; they had designed this particular test assuming it was below the threshold that would trigger group behavior. The boys were not divided over significant issues.  They weren’t two tribes competing for control of the local watering hole so that their livestock has enough to drink; they weren’t facing an election where we are deeply divided on significant issues.  This was just a bunch of kids who were told they guessed low or high on how many dots were on picture they were shown.  The researchers fully expected the boys to eventually begin favoring their own group; but they had no idea they would start seeing themselves as “us” and “them” over such a meaningless point.

           It turns out that the depth of our civilized nature isn’t very deep at all.  But it is this kind of behavior that is supposed to be transformed by our relationship with Jesus. We know we’re wired to think and act in ways that protect our own interests.  But the New Testament says,

But it can be a struggle.  

Christena Cleveland, a theologian our youth met at NYC in 2018, pushes this one step further.  What happens when one of “us” begins to identify with one of “them”?  She calls this the “black sheep effect” and people’s responses here are harsh. We know that “they” feel a certain way. But our anger toward you is double: not only do you believe the incorrectly, you have betrayed your tribe.  We are wired to defend our group. When someone makes the decision to leave “our” group to do something else, that betrayal will trigger a strong reaction from the group.  

But this is what Jesus does—he asks us to leave behind one way of living and take up another way of living.

Bringing fire to the earth

With that, we’re ready to deal with Luke 12:49-53 and Jesus’ promises to “bring fire to the earth” and division to households.  When it comes to the New Testament, our “love language” is unity and acts of service that bring people together.  When we consider the New Testament message in total, it is clear that Jesus has come to reform humanity into one new people that cuts across all the old existing divisions.  Galatians 3:28 illustrates this well:

There is some thought that these words were used when people were baptized. Every time someone emerged from their baptism, the first thing they would see would be a congregation full of people they could identify as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female.  But the first words they would hear would be “all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

That oneness represents a threat to our old tribes and families. When we begin following Jesus, our ways of relating to one another change, and that may very well bring us into conflict with those closest to us.

It can be very hard for us to hear that, especially when it’s family. Because Luke chose to include this story in his Gospel, one wonders if there weren’t already family divisions in the time of Jesus, as more and more people began following what was for them a new religious teaching.  We know this was an issue for the church in Corinth; they sent Paul a question about what to do when only one spouse in a married couple was a Christian. Some in the church in Corinth thought this might be grounds for divorce.  Paul said it wasn’t; that it might be a way for the unbelieving spouse to come to know Jesus.  But being unequally yoked in this way does raise significant questions for a couple seeking marriage; I always talk about this in pre-marital counseling because the issues are so significant.  Our faith in Christ impacts how we use our time and money, how we will raise our children, how we will interact with the people who offend us, and even our very lives.  You can perhaps imagine the difficult conversation between a husband and wife in Corinth (or anywhere) who don’t have a lot of money, but the spouse who is a Christian wants to give money to someone else in the church, when the other spouse could care less.  Or a husband and wife in our day where one spouse isn’t a believer, but the other is called to the ministry, or feels compelled to go on a mission trip to some other country.  

So perhaps we can begin to see how it is that following Jesus might bring division before it brings unity.  This text is difficult for us to hear because we see how it closely to home its message hits. We’d rather avoid the subject altogether.  

Finding life in the desert

This might easily be one of our less-favorite New Testament passages, but it really is an excellent text for Lent because it forces us to deal with the cost of following Jesus. There is no way to soften these words, so let’s lean in to the challenge and try to live with them for a while.  

Jesus says that “five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.  I want you to think about those on the other side of the divide.  In this day and age, it won’t be hard.  We’re all bound to have someone we’re very close to who isn’t very interested in our faith in Jesus, or a friend we’re talking to a lot less since the last election.  Think about that person between now and Easter.  What is your role in the relationship?  What can you do about be the division that simply exists because you’ve determined to follow Jesus?  I have two thoughts for us this Lent:  

First, we can grieve the brokenness and pray for the day unity in Christ will be realized.  Just grieve. We’re generally much better at pointing out what someone else ought to have done or not done or deny that there’s an issue at all.  But most of the time we really can’t do all that much about what other people do or how they act toward us. Taking a step toward Jesus does mean taking a step away from other people. We can, however, grieve the brokenness, recognizing that we have this in common with Jesus, and if there is anyone who understands, it is him. As unpleasant as it is to think about, this might be a sign of our faithfulness to Jesus.  Jesus accepted the cost of his call all the way through his resurrection on Easter, and so can we.

Pray for strength to not weaponize your faith.  Righteous indignation is always easier than love.  But when followers of Jesus face brokenness, we respond with forgiveness. It takes courage and humility to not respond to division with power and force.  But shouting the loudest is not a fruit of the Spirit.  Sometimes all we can do is be humble and trust that following Jesus is the right thing to do, even when it comes with a high cost.