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Proper 15 Year CI confess that when I looked at this reading several weeks ago I groaned with dismay. What a cozy affirming passage for this day on which we kickoff our Christian Education Programs for the whole family. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three: they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, and…”
I think you get the point. This seems a monstrous text. Why do we read this text in church? Don’t we have enough divisions in our families and lives already? Why do we need to affirm a text that is so troubling?” I guess Jesus doesn’t fit into that neat category of family values guy that some so desperately want him to uphold.
From another angle it is interesting to ponder the shaping of the New Testament canon of scriptures and to question how this passage made it into the bible. We moderns might be tempted to toss it aside as foreign to our experience, but it has survived for one reason. The early Christians found in Jesus’ words something true, something helpful, something that was instructive for the experiences they were enduring. Division even within their own family structures because of their devotion to Christ was real. The missionaries in Luke’s community are coming back and saying, “Listen, there’s a family over there in the next town that has broken up because of our gospel. The kids are all turned on but the parents don’t like them going to our meetings and changing the way they live, and we’re not sure what to do.”
There is an interesting principle in biblical scholarship and criticism that the more strange or difficult or even seemingly incongruous a passage is, the more likely it is to be authentic. Which is to say that it was easy for odd or random or confusing things to be edited out or omitted along the way, but if a passage or saying that seems strange or difficult managed to be included in the lengthy and rigorous editing process that our scriptures undoubtedly went through then there must be something of tenacious value in it, troubling though it may be.
I started to listen to my life and the lives of others around me for clues to help me understand the importance of this passage. Recently a parishioner described their experience in an extremely fundamentalist sect of Christianity. The group took passages like this one to heart encouraging their members to cut themselves off from family members who were not “true believers.” Certainly simplistic readings of this passage could be and have been used in incredibly damaging ways. It seems so easy to take these words of Jesus and to fashion with them a way of life that is so hell-bent on isolation and conflict that it is blind to any hint of grace or community hidden in this passage.
I remembered a college professor who came to me distraught about his son who had chosen to become a chaplain with a campus ministry group that reached out to university students. But he wanted his son to go to graduate school, become more educated, be “more successful” and to take a respectable job teaching or entering a profession. The idea that his son would invest himself in helping college students explore and sort through issue of faith at such a formative time in their lives seemed a tragic waste to him and it was threatening to create a rift between them. His son on the other hand was joyful, alive with passion and fully engaged in helping young people discover a life-giving faith. Perhaps this passage is not so far outside the experience of some in our midst.
While studying theology, I took a course entitled The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith Issues in the Writings of Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. It gave me my first strong dose of Southern fiction, fiction from a region where religious issues are always at the core of life and culture. I mention all of this because I want to let you in on a little Percy trivia that I think will help us to make some sense out of today’s readings.
Tucked into our own musical tradition is a hymn that was written not by Walker Percy, but by his uncle William Alexander Percy (1885-1942). William Percy, an author in his own right, wrote a book called Lanterns Along the Levee, a kind of history of the Mississippi Delta region. But he also wrote a beautiful hymn found in the1982 hymnal #661. It is a meditation on the struggle of faith, the danger of devotion, and the costly nature of grace. The hymn is a favorite of many people because of its powerful and paradoxical final verse:
The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for just one thing – the marvelous peace of God.
As I pondered the Gospel lesson for today, the words of this hymn drifted into my mind as well, a musical commentary on this hard-hitting teaching of Jesus.
Jesus is not willing to candy-coat the spiritual life for his followers. He knows the inevitable conflict between His vision of the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. Being a Christian is to embrace struggle in this world because in living for the kingdom of God we will encounter opposition. To be a kingdom person is to live in a way that challenges the way things are. It is as Fr. Brian has said recently, to be counter-cultural and that can be costly in many ways. There are those for whom the kingdom of God is too much of a risk, too challenging to the status quo and their beloved version of how things ought to be. To work for justice and peace in this world because one has tasted the Kingdom of God in Jesus’ life and ministry is to find oneself upsetting the social order and that can be dangerous and difficult. At times parenting in such a way that your children’s moral and spiritual development is truly honored, in this consumer-mad world brings the resentment and condemnation of others around you with surprising force. The simple truth is that if you choose to live differently because of Jesus, you can become a target of others’ discomfort just like Jesus did. It is what the Martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer called The Cost of Discipleship because following Jesus does not come cheaply, grace is not without struggle and discipline. It requires all of us, our whole life lived in obedience to the call of God.
This is what the writer of Hebrews today is talking about when he encourages the faithful to run the race with endurance.
Therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin the clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame.
The writer of Hebrews is telling us something that we cannot see with our eyes but that we can only know by faith. And if you’ve ever been to a major sporting event you may have an easier time understanding this part of the scriptures. Did you know that a Saturday afternoon spent wearing black and red and screaming for the Lobos could be helpful to your understanding of the holy scriptures? The writer of Hebrews is informing us of a holy vision. We have a cheering section in heaven and at this very moment and at every moment this vast company of the faithful in heaven are busy rooting for us, cheering us on to follow in the way of Jesus. They are watching us from the gallery and shouting out words of encouragement hoping that we will be faithful to the ways of God no matter what the cost, by looking to the example of Jesus who is the one who has showed us the way of faith.
We need this encouragement because following Jesus, being faithful to the Kingdom of God is not easy. In fact it creates crisis in our lives. By crisis I do not mean an emergency but rather a moment of decision or an occasion of truth. For the Christian, Jesus, that enigmatic rabbi, makes a difference. Jesus’ life and teaching establishes the standard by which the world is judged. One must struggle to come to grips with the person of Jesus Christ and his message. One must struggle with this one who brings fire, who grabs our attention in the burning bush and attempts to lead us by a new light. The writer of Hebrews instructs us to “look to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” Jesus demands that we become attentive to our relationship with God and toward one another in a way that can do nothing but transform us.
For it is only in the ongoing struggle, in running the race with endurance that we can ever hope to know the Peace of God which passes all understanding. A peace that exposes the false peace we are tempted to settle for in this world. A peace that leads us out of our own deceptions and into the marvelous peace of God’s truth in our lives.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church