• A House Divided, A World Divided  Luke 12:49-56     (see below)
  Rev. Karen Goltz                                    
   

• HEROES, Hebrews 11:1-12:2, by Rev. Dr. David Rogne       
   

• Peace-But Not At Any Price! Luke 12:49-56, by Rev. Frank Schaefer    
   

• Vineyard of the Lord, Isaiah 5:1-7, Rev. Roy Fowler 
   

• Attaching the Fullness of Our Faith, Hebrews 11:29-12:2, by Rev. Thomas Hall
     

• God doesn’t ask for more than we can do, Hebrews 11.29 - 12.2, by Thomas Arth   
   

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A House Divided, A World Divided
based on Luke 12:49-56
Rev. Karen Goltz

Sing with me. Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong, they are weak but he is strong. Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so!

[Forcefully] I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on households will be divided! Families will split into warring factions, fighting amongst themselves! And you think you can interpret signs because you can predict the weather, but you can’t even see what’s right in front of you! You’re all a bunch of hypocrites! [Pause]

Shall we sing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ again?

It’s hard to reconcile today’s gospel lesson to the song many of us learned in Sunday school. Where’s the love? We can see the strength, but where is the love? How does this mesh up with the guy that, when he was born, angels sang ‘peace on earth’ in the sky?

During my internship year, I was part of a Lenten Round Robin with several other area pastors. Our theme was “fruits of the Spirit,” and each of us selected a ‘fruit’ that we would preach on each Wednesday night during Lent at one of the other pastor’s churches. The ‘fruit’ I’d selected was peace. That turned out to be a challenging choice, because the first Wednesday of Lent, the first Wednesday I was preaching my sermon on peace, was the night in 2003 that we declared war and launched missiles into Iraq.

How can you preach peace at the beginning of a war without making a political statement? Especially when you’re a known Bostonian serving internship in southwestern South Dakota, your congregations are VERY conservative, and the war has a great deal of support from both politicians and the general public?

That situation made me reflect a lot on what is meant by ‘peace.’ And what I realized is that peace is not merely the absence of war. Peace is a state of being in which no war is necessary, because everyone is living with justice and truth.

Let me pull a Pilate here and ask, what is truth? My dictionary defines it as, “conformity to fact or actuality; fidelity to an original or standard; reality.” Nice, good, academic answer.

But so what? What does it actually look like when everyone is living with justice and truth, so that no war is necessary? What would that have looked like in Iraq in 2003? The President of the United States would tell you one thing. The Iraqi government would tell you another. The Sunnis had a suggestion, as did the Shi’ites, and the Kurds, and the Iranians, and the Saudis. What would justice and truth look like in Afghanistan or Syria or Egypt today? There’s just as great a diversity of opinion there as there was about Iraq.

But who’s right? Whose vision actually does conform to fact and reality? All I know is that the world increasingly looks a lot like a household divided. Three against two and two against three. Very representative of the household in today’s text. [continue]