(Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Luke 12:49-56)

August 15, 2010

                  This passage from Luke is so strange.  It is so contrary to the way we understand Christianity that it is hard to believe it was spoken by the one after whom Christianity is named.  “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?”  Well, yes, Jesus, actually, we do think that.   Maybe we think that because you yourself taught us to think it: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”  “Peace I leave with you.  My peace I give to you.”  “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth, peace among those whom God favors!”  “And he said to the woman, ‘Your faith has saved you.  Go in peace.”  “Daughter, your faith has made you well.  Go in peace.”  The disciples were saying “The Lord has indeed risen, and he has appeared to Simon….while they were talking about this Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”

            So, yes, Jesus, you’ll have to forgive us for thinking that you came to bring peace to the earth.

            But, of course, Jesus is not just being a jerk here.  And he is not contradicting himself.  It seems he is pushing us to be consciously aware of something we already know.  There is peace, and then there is “peace.”  There is the situation of joyful human flourishing, based in love and a truthful view of our lives in this world.  There is the peace which Jesus gives to us, when he says, “Peace be with you.”

            Then there is “peace” – there is what the world wants us to believe is peace.  There is peace as in the absence of conflict, at least the absence of conflict close enough to us that we have to worry about it.  There is peace as in material comfort, at least material comfort among all of those with whom we have contact every day.  There is peace as in the way we currently live, which is at least peace until we finally empty the vast stores of energy that now fuel our way of life, and the planet on which we live sputters and conchs out, leaving us stranded on the only planet we have.

            Yes, there is “peace.”  It is the peace the prophet Jeremiah spoke of:

 For from the least to the greatest of them,
   everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
   everyone deals falsely. 
14 They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
   saying, ‘Peace, peace’,
   when there is no peace.

Do you think that I have come to bring this type of “peace” to the earth?   No, I tell you, but rather division!  Or, as other similar passages say it, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

            Jesus is not interested in what we frequently call “peace.”  So often, what we call peace is peace for us.  Peace for those of us who are protected by the most powerful military in human history, and protected by the largest economy in human history, and protected by the reservoir of millions of years of energy stored up in the ground that we are releasing faster than the planet can handle, and protected by the light color of our skin, and protected by living on the right side of the river, literally for most, figuratively for all, protected also by the expectation that we will not engage in the hard work of telling the truth to each other about our lives, or better, that we will not work hard together to figure out the truth about our lives.  So often, what we call peace is just the protection of a bubble, a dome, and as long as we are on the inside of the protective dome, we are happy to say “peace, peace.”

            But such peace, peace inside a protective dome, is not peace.  The makers of such peace are not peacemakers and they, we, are not blessed by it.  It is not the peace that Jesus gives us.

            One of my favorite movies is a little known film called “A World Apart.”  They use fictional names in the movie, but it is in reality Shawn Slovo’s account of her upbringing in South Africa during Apartheid.  The title, A World Apart, well captures the meaning of this image of a protective dome that I just used.  While growing up Shawn Slovo lived in a world apart.  She was a part of a white family, which meant that she was part of a privileged family, comfortable, carefree, a family whose comfort and safety, a family whose peace, was built on the foundation of centuries of oppression of the African population.  Like nearly all other white families in South Africa, their peaceful lives only existed as long as they were able to keep their world apart from the world of the oppressed, poor, and suffering people of Africa.  The movie is about Shawn Slovo’s journey out of childhood, and out of the world apart, out of the protective dome, in which she was raised.

            Her journey was different than most in South Africa, because her family was different than most white families in South Africa.   As the movie begins, Shawn’s father had recently been forced to go into exile because he was discovered to have been working with black leaders to organize non-violent resistance to white rule.  Shawn’s mother, named Ruth, worked for a clandestine newspaper that covered the black resistance movement, and when Shawn’s father was forced into exile, Ruth redoubled her efforts to support those who were working for justice for all.

            But Ruth shielded the 13 year old Shawn from this work.  Shawn lived in a world of pool parties and afternoons dancing around the yard with friends, and in which her biggest concern was getting her favorite chair at the family dinner table.  But Shawn also talked with the blacks who worked in their home as cooks and maids and groundskeepers.  She had learned to respect them and to listen to their stories, the stories of their lives, and the stories of their lives revealed the different world in which they lived – the world of racist oppression, poverty and suffering.

            As Shawn heard those stories, she also started to pay attention to the resistance work her mother and father had been doing – mostly because her mother had been taken into detention by the police.  While beginning to understand why her parents were doing this work, Shawn also felt bitter about the fact that both her parents had been taken away from her.  She missed them, and she didn’t understand.

At one point, after she had not seen her father for months, and after her mother had been gone for weeks and tortured in prison, Shawn breaks down, crying tears of sadness and the innocent feeling-sorry-for-yourself of childhood.  Heartsick by the tears of her daughter, her mother, temporarily out of jail, tries to explain how important her work against Apartheid is.  And Shawn says, “Why can’t you just ignore it, leave it alone, like all the other parents.”  Her mother has no answer.  What answer could she give?  To answer the question would be to let Shawn remain in “a world apart,” a truth-less world, a justice-less world.  Ruth knows that Shawn is on the journey out of the protective dome, and that it is a painful journey toward the truth of an ugly world.  But based on the example of her mother and father, Shawn knows that she can live in her world apart no longer, for it is world in which everyone says “peace, peace,” when there is no peace.  Shawn sees that true peace only exists when we live with the truth of the world as it is, for all, not just for those within our protective dome.

Do you think I come to bring peace to the world?  No, Jesus says, not peace, but division.  He comes to cause division between us and everything that keeps us in the false protective domes in which we live.  He comes to bring the sword of truth to every falsehood we tell ourselves about the world in which we live, the community in which we live, the family in which we live, even the falsehoods we tell ourselves about ourselves.

That division, that sword, can hurt.  But it can only hurt that part of us which is hanging on to the very things that are killing us – like our unwillingness to recognize the “protective domes” which separate us from others and which allow terrible injustice to continue while complacently  live in our “world apart.”

We need Jesus to bring his sword of truth to us, to create division in our midst, for that sword is one of his great gifts to us.  It is a gift we may not be very happy to receive at first, but when we experience the liberation from the falsehoods we tell ourselves, about our lives and the world, we will be most grateful indeed.

You know, many of you have heard me say before that preachers really only have two sermons: you have the discipleship sermon, and the forgiveness sermon.  You have the sermon in which the call to discipleship issued to us in scripture is presented in full, but loving, force.  That is this sermon, thus far.  But I think, given the unusual clarity and force of Jesus’ message in this passage from Luke, that today I need to give the second sermon as well.  God is love, and the God of love is the God of forgiveness.

The only way we can possible have the courage to admit the truth about our lives and the world in which we live, the only way we can be freed from the false protective domes in which we live, is to be assured that God forgives us.  As we humbly recognize the need for the sword of truth, we also celebrate that the sword of truth is also the sword of the cross – God’s ultimate sign of forgiveness.  The God who wields the sword of truth, is the God who was willing to die to set us free.  God is love, and thanks be to God that that love sometimes takes the shape of a sword, a sword of truth, which separates us from everything that separates us from God. 

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.