Luke 12:49-53

Yikes! What’s going on with Jesus in this passage? Where’s the stained-glass window Jesus, the pretty, peaceful guy holding the lamb? A preacher might be tempted to choose one of the other lectionary texts for August 14. I checked them; they aren’t much more comforting.

Jesus says, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” With all that’s going on in our world, and particularly our sorely polarized nation, the last thing we need is a gospel text that encourages more division. But hang in there. Jesus did not have an evil twin or suddenly get a personality transplant. This is the same Jesus who reminded us just a couple of chapters back that the two greatest commandments are to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Which is exactly Jesus’ point here. Relentlessly loving God and neighbor is risky. Think about it. In his words and actions, Jesus shows us that when he says love your neighbor, he means not just the neighbor who’s easy to love, but the neighbor who’s very hard to love. The one you’d rather not sit next to on the bus. The one you don’t want for a colleague. The one you avoid at the family reunion. The one you hope won’t go to the polls next Election Day. The one who sees the world entirely differently from you. Love that neighbor, which includes intending for him, and even working toward, his well-being, even if it seems he’s doing all he can to work against your well-being.

That kind of love is risky. It doesn’t make people popular, at least not with everybody. We all can rattle off a long list of peacemakers and justice-lovers who loved their neighbors the way Jesus did and were killed or jailed for their efforts: Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Bobby Kennedy, Oscar Romero, Anwar al Sadat, Nelson Mandela, Harvey Milk, Yitzhak Rabin, Rachel Corrie, environmentalist Tim DeChristopher; and others whose names we’ll never know who resisted the Holocaust, fought for civil rights and thought women ought to have the vote.

Jesus wasn’t saying that he wants people to turn against each other. He’s saying that if people follow him, really follow him, they can count on offending someone, even someone close, even someone they love.

When I was growing up, my mother’s family, the Canadians from Scotland, went to church, but my father’s family, the Californians, did not. My father spent his first 12 years in Columbia, California, in the Sierra foothills. His mother had been raised a Methodist and thought church was fine, for other people anyway. My grandfather’s family was unchurched long before it was the cultural norm. There was a Presbyterian church in Columbia; it’s still there and it’s called the Church of the Forty-niners, which, by the way, has nothing to do with football. When my father was six- or seven-years-old, he heard the church bells ringing every Sunday morning. He asked his mother what it was, and when she explained, he said he wanted to go there. She told him go ahead, and he did, all on his own. It’s mind-boggling to me now – a little kid taking himself to church. And he kept going. My grandfather, a man of few words, told my dad it was a waste of time.

My dad’s family moved to Stockton, so my father started going to Stockton’s First Presbyterian Church, across town from their house. He had to take the streetcar and walk a ways to get there. His father told him, again, what a foolish waste of time that was. My dad had the impression that my grandfather thought going to church was somehow weak.

Jesus isn’t talking about going to church in this passage. He’s concerned with the persecution, if you will, not of people who choose one faith over another but of people who strive to love God and neighbor. In my father’s story, it turned out that the fact that he went to church wasn’t as divisive as the ethics he developed as he grew in faith. I never saw my father behave holier-than-thou, but some members of his family treated him with a kind of, “Who do you think you are?” attitude because he was committed to kindness, fairness, and generosity; to racial equality, economic justice, and honesty. It’s complicated – families always are. But it is a strange phenomenon: Sometimes when people see someone committed to doing what’s right, they feel critiqued, even if that’s not the point at all.

What concerns Jesus is this: When anyone has the nerve to look at the way things are and say, “This isn’t right,” it divides people. “This isn’t right” challenges the status quo. Those who benefit from the status quo will fight tooth and nail to oppose anyone who tries to change things. Jesus sums up his frustration by noting that people can look at the clouds and predict the weather, but they can’t see the way things are here and now. They can’t look at what’s going on around them and “interpret the present.” Why? Because they are satisfied with the way things are right now and don’t want to change.

Jesus is inviting people to open their eyes to what’s really going on. Throughout his ministry, Jesus tells hard truths. He points to the way culture creates insiders and outsiders based on what works best for those with power and privilege. He decries the way this leaves some people marginalized or even oppressed. He shows what happens when people are possessed by their possessions or trapped by the trappings of success. He reveals how fear shuts down the human heart, so that we build barricades between us.

I promise you, if you do these things, it will create divisions. David Sellery writes, “[W]e are to build the kingdom by loving God and neighbor. We are not to coerce the kingdom into existence. We are not to con the kingdom into being by sugar coating God’s word. With humble and honest witness, through the grace of God, we are called to help love [God’s] kingdom into being. And let the chips fall where they may.”