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.

So I wonder: was Jesus cursing us to be divided? Was that his intent? Or was he just telling us how he knew we were going to act?

What is truth? Jesus said, “I am the truth.” And that, my brothers and sisters, is why we’re here today. We’re here because Jesus is the truth, Jesus is the way, Jesus is the light. Jesus came to bring truth, and he did that by bringing himself. Jesus is the truth of God’s love for us. Talk about a household divided, God the Father loved us so much that he sent his only Son to be killed for our sake! That is the truth we need to cling to, and that is the truth we need to consider in every situation we encounter.

Two weeks ago our gospel lesson told us of someone in the crowd saying to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” Jesus replied and said, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” Today’s gospel lesson is still part of that same conversation! It’s so easy for us to lose sight of the big picture, to lose sight of why it was that Jesus came and for whom it was that Jesus died, and focus rather on petty, relatively insignificant matters of opinion instead. It’s so easy for us to listen to the words of Jesus, pick out the ones we like, the ones we think justify us, and then use them as a cudgel against anyone who offends our own ideas. Take the would-be heir of two weeks ago. He was in the crowd, listening to Jesus proclaim the kingdom of God, a kingdom that provides truth and justice and grace and peace and mercy for all, and he interpreted that to mean his brother was cheating him out of an inheritance. So he said to the One who came to give his life as a ransom for our sins, “Jesus, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” Jesus, I’m being cheated; fix it so I get what’s mine.

Maybe he really was being cheated out of the family inheritance. Maybe he wasn’t. In either case, he just didn’t get what the kingdom of God is really about. If he had, then he would’ve known that family inheritances are unimportant, that only the love of God in Christ Jesus matters. Family inheritances can rot or be squandered; the kingdom of God is eternal and everlasting. Family inheritances can corrupt; the kingdom of God is incorruptible. But this would-be heir only heard what he wanted to hear, and he tried to use it against his brother to justify himself. Brother against brother. A house divided.

Families do that a lot, don’t they? So many of us think we have the scoop on who’s going to heaven and who’s not, and we don’t hesitate to condemn those who don’t make our list. Or maybe we don’t take it quite that far, but we do point out the many sins of a family member who’s doing something we just don’t like, and we think we’d be failing in our duty if we didn’t tell them that God doesn’t like it either.

And that’s only one example of a house divided. John Wesley, the father of Methodism, wrote about a dream he once had. In his dream he was escorted to the gates of hell, and he shouted to those inside, “Are there any Presbyterians in there?” “Yes,” some of them shouted back. “How about Baptists?” “Yes,” came the answer. “Episcopalians? Catholics? Lutherans?” “Yes,” came the reply each time. “How about Methodists? Are there any Methodists in there?” “Yes, we’re here too,” came the answer. Very much distraught, Wesley was then led to the gates of heaven, where he again shouted to those inside, “Are there any Presbyterians in there?” They shouted back, “No, there are only Christians in here!”

Those who follow Christ are called Christians, and among those Christians are different traditions, beliefs, understandings, and interpretations. Christianity can be enriched by our broad experiences, yet we often let those differences divide us, even as we confess to be one holy catholic and apostolic church. It’s not what Jesus intended for us, but it’s what he knew we would do with his message. So he called us hypocrites.

The word ‘hypocrite’ is one that can trip us up. Usually it’s meant to refer to someone whose actions are contrary to their professed beliefs or values. While that’s a trap many of us often fall into, it’s not the whole story. ‘Hypocrite’ comes from the Greek ‘hypo-’ which means under, and ‘krinesthai,’ which means to explain. We under-explain ourselves. We under-criticize ourselves, while we over-criticize everyone else. The crowds in today’s text could see the clouds rising in the west or the south wind blowing, and they could critically examine the signs for what they meant: rain or scorching heat. But they could see the signs in their own lives—greed, unrest, poverty, injustice, corruption, houses divided—and they would under-examine them and say, “We don’t know what this means. We don’t know what we’re doing wrong. We don’t know what you want from us.”

Jesus came to bring us the truth of God’s love, and he did that by bringing us himself, and bringing us to himself. He came to proclaim the kingdom of God, and he wants for us to live and to love as though that kingdom were already here. But the truth is that it’s not yet here—if it were, then there would’ve been no need for Christ to die on the cross. So even when we live with peace and justice and grace and mercy towards others, there’s no guarantee that others are going to live with peace and justice and grace and mercy towards us. But we’re not here to be hyper-critical of others, any more than we’re here to be hypo-critical of ourselves. The ungodly (or what we perceive to be ungodly) behavior of others is no justification for our twisting the message of Christ to justify ourselves. Jesus came to bring the good news of the kingdom of God to you, and to you, and to you, and to you, and to everyone else inside this room and outside these walls. He brought it to us even though he knew full well what we were going to do with it. But he didn’t curse us to live in a house divided; he just warned us that it could very easily happen. His message of peace can easily cause division because it’s peace according to God’s terms, not ours. But it is a message of peace, and of love, and of hope. It’s a very simple message, but a very beautiful one. It’s a message of truth. Do you know what it is?

Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so! Amen.