I had a lengthy Facebook chat this week with a friend who lives in Texas. She is right smack in the middle of a crisis of faith and needed someone to talk to. She said she got a nudge to contact me, so she did. She and her partner have been having a rough time of it. Her partner lost an assistant principal job because she refused to lie about the nature of her relationship with my friend. Her partner has another job, but lives in fear of losing that one, as well. My friend, also a teacher, is unable to find a job in that area. Their daughter was recently in a very serious car accident and their son just received a diagnosis of autism. Now, they are certainly not alone in job issues, car accidents, diagnoses of autism. What makes all of this particularly hard is not being able to find a church home, not having a family of faith, a cloud of witnesses, to help them stay strong and persevere in their faith in spite of the hardships in their lives. Most of the churches in their area wouldn’t be particularly welcoming of a family like theirs. The church my friend grew up in taught her to hate and fear people like her. The welcoming churches they’ve visited seem to have some serious internal divisions. Add to those divisions the fear that someone might find out they’re going to “the gay church” and the only job in the household could be lost and you have a problem. Isolation hurts.
I wished I had some clear words of comfort for my friend. I wished I had wisdom. All I could offer was a willing ear, some book titles and the advice to start a gratitude journal. She thanked me for the chat & said it helped just to feel heard. Just to feel heard. Shouldn’t everyone get to feel heard on a regular basis? But this is life among the divided. Sure, some of us have stronger support systems than my friend does right now. I know, though, how isolated I have felt at times and I expect there isn’t one person here who hasn’t felt alone at one time or another.
I’ll be honest with you. When I first read the texts for this week (and even well into the week), I thought, “What? Did Brian decide he didn’t want to do these and urge his parents to choose this weekend for their anniversary celebration?” The texts this week are hard ones, ones we don’t really want to hear. You can’t imagine how tempted I was just to celebrate the Assumption of Mary, this week’s alternate texts, and avoid all of this talk of God making the vineyard that bore wild grapes a waste, these stories of the faithful being tortured and cut in half, this idea that Jesus came to bring fire and division to the earth rather than peace. I was so averse to dealing with these difficult texts, in fact, that I knew I must wrestle with them. That’s one of my operating theories. If I am finding myself avoiding something, perhaps it’s exactly what I need to do. So, I dove into the texts.
I started asking questions. Why would Jesus come to divide us when what God desires is a world where all may be one, where love is the most important commandment & people treat it as such? That makes no sense. Then I started to think about it the way I think about the crucifixion. God didn’t require that Jesus be crucified. It was the inevitable response of our flawed nature to his radical message of love. We got so scared by that message that we had to kill the messenger. And we’re still scared. The idea of love runs so counter to our brokenness that we are unable to approach it with any kind of openness. We are much more comfortable arguing for division than taking the risk of radically opening up to others. I have a dear friend who feels completely isolated from her family. The other day, she mused to me that her separation from her family is largely due to her feeling like she had to put up a protective wall. People in our country are in hot debate over differences, not realizing that the debate and arguing and emphasis on our differences is blocking the opportunity for the kind of love and peace God wants us to have. We argue over immigration, over same-sex marriage, over the construction of mosques. Why do we argue? Because we’re afraid. We’re afraid of difference. We’re afraid of scarcity. We’re afraid of change. It is so now, it was so when Jesus walked the earth.
At the point when he told his disciples that he came to bring division, he was about halfway through his ministry. He’d had a chance to observe how people were reacting to his message. Yes, there was great joy on the part of some of the people, joy in his healing, in his message of love, in his presence. But others were frightened of the upheaval he brought. For with Jesus’ radical message of love comes the necessity to talk about distressing things, things we’d rather just avoid, things like oppression and justice, social change and personal change. I’m sure all of you know of churches that seem calm and peaceful but have unaddressed conflict roiling under the surface. Everyone seems to get along because they are polite to one another and smile nicely on Sundays as they greet one another. Really, though, there is nothing underneath, no bonds of love and support.
The notion that everything is better, easier, if we just don’t talk about problems is threaded all through human society. The Pax Romana, that famous period of peace at the height of the power of the Roman Empire, did not bring peace in any true sense. The so-called peace was maintained with an iron glove and there was no justice in that peace. It’s just that no one dared to rise against the oppression. Without justice, widespread justice, peace is a lie. The churches that didn’t want to deal with the issue of slavery because they didn’t want to split, because they wanted to maintain peace within the denomination, were not gaining peace. They were only gaining avoidance. Better to get the problems out in the fresh air and handle them, better to go through the pain and struggle and gain resolution than to keep everything tucked away and hope it doesn’t pop up.
The same is true in marriages. You hear about couples who haven’t fought for years, only to have it come out that they also haven’t shared good times or dealt with the problems. The same is true in our personal lives. I believe that we are divided against ourselves a good lot of the time. We know what the right thing to do is, for ourselves, for those we love, for the world. And we know that we are scared to open that can of worms, whatever brand our particular can of worms might be. It’s easier just not to deal with it, to pretend our inner conflict doesn’t exist. So we compartmentalize, we live among the divided. Jesus came so that we wouldn’t have to be divided, came to bring a message of love and true peace. Our fear brings the division. Jesus’ defiance of traditional societal ways of bringing meaning and cohesion to life was bound to bring conflict and division. To so radically challenge something so core as family, to demand allegiance to his own message of radical inclusion and extravagant welcome above family and all other societal laws was certainly going to be divisive. It still is, simply because of who we are. Peace at all costs is not Jesus’ peace. Maintaining the oppressive, unjust status quo in order to maintain peace is not the peace of Christ. Neville Chamberlain spoke in 1938 about “Peace for Our Time,” after the Munich agreement that allowed Hitler to occupy the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. It may have seemed like an agreement for peace, but it certainly wasn’t peace for the Jewish people in the Sudetenland, who lost their rights, and it ultimately wasn’t peace for Britain, either. When we read the weather rightly, read what is really going on and are willing to confront it, even at the cost of disturbing the peace, that is the kind of true peace Jesus came to bring. Tom Mullen says, “My religious denomination is the Society of Friends…I learned upon joining the Quakers that they attack large social and moral problems with conscientious determination. They work for peace---and if you really want to cause conflict, work for peace.” He’s right. It brings up all those icky things we don’t want to confront. But peace can only be built if there is truth, justice, equality and respect.
Does this mean Jesus didn’t bring the fire, either? That the fire is of our making, as well? I don’t think it does. I think Jesus definitely came to bring fire to the earth. It’s just that we, with our terrified little minds that are always working to see how we might be hurt, interpret that fire differently than I believe Jesus meant it. When I first read that, I thought of destructive fire, the sort of fire that burned heretics and destroys acres of forest. But then I started thinking about fire. One of the strongest images of fire for me is connected intimately with my mom. Walking through cold & dark November woods, with increasingly weak flashlights barely making a dent in the blackness of night, enduring the rain that is inevitable the first time I bring someone new to my mom’s place comes to mind. We hike for about 20 minutes. If the new person is not used to being out in the woods, not only are they cold and wet, but they are afraid of wild beasts (or madmen) lurking in the woods. The hike is hard even when it’s dry, but it’s exhausting and dispiriting when it’s muddy. Just when we think we can’t take another minute, though, we rise up out of a dip and there are cozy lights shining in the woods ahead, the flames from the kerosene lanterns lighting the darkness ahead. They are a beacon to move toward, promising shelter, warmth from the woodstove, a delicious dinner and good company. This kind of fire, the kind of fire that shines into the darkness, the kind that sends waves of warmth out from the woodstove, the kind that makes a hot dinner possible, this kind of fire may just be the sort of fire Jesus wanted kindled.
Or, perhaps, Jesus was thinking more of the sort of fire in a blacksmith’s forge, fire that purifies us, knocking off clinkers and making us stronger while at the same time rendering us malleable and able to change without breaking. Maybe Jesus was thinking of his followers burning with a passion for justice. Maybe Jesus was thinking of bonfires, the sort that make Halloween in my hometown so festive. When I was growing up, I would always take breaks from trick or treating to warm up at the Gaunt Park bonfire, enjoying a hot dog, some cider, a stickful of toasted marshmallows with friends before heading back out on the candy trail. That fire was a place for the community to gather, a place that helped us to be community. No wonder Jesus wished the fire was already kindled. With all of our fears, all of our doubt, all of our worries, all of our divisions, we desperately need a cozy fire to warm us, to feed us, to purify us, to help us change without breaking, to ignite a passion for justice, to hold us together in community. Church, lived out rightly, can be that fire. Christ guards it and keeps it ablaze for us.
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