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Beyond Mom and Apple Pie
Luke 12: 49 – 56 |
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Summary
Beyond Mom and Apple Pie It would be easier, wouldn’t it, if we could just put Jesus on the shelf next to Mom and apple pie and all the other uncontroversial, happy-place things that nobody will disagree with? Like baseball. Disney movies. Handmade quilts. Daisies. Wouldn’t you like to line Jesus up next to all those good things? We would see him sitting on that pleasing row of things that we love and we’d say, “You look good there, Jesus!” “Thanks for everything.” If only Jesus would just stay there. Maybe you’ve seen those commercials for the Yellow Pages. In that cupboard or drawer where you’d expect to find that big yellow paperback book of telephone numbers, there sits a man. He waits patiently, standing by for your questions: Is there a bakery near the corner of Elm and First? Where’s the nearest auto supply store with parts for my Mitsubishi? What time does that big church on the corner have their worship services? In each case, this man promptly and politely gives the answer that we’d expect to find in the Yellow Pages. And he doesn’t even mind when the cabinet door closes on him. You just know he’ll be there the next time, ready to answer to your every need. We try to make Jesus like that sometimes. We want to come and talk to him when we feel the need to reconnect. He’s our go-to guy when we are in trouble or need reassurance or want a dose of “Sunday” in the middle of the week. If he really could be waiting there, in that cupboard, maybe Jesus would quote scripture for us or remind us how much God loves us. Fortified with that, we could turn back to our own pursuits with energy, trusting that he’d be right there for us the next time. Here for a purpose But then again, Jesus never was much of a shelf-sitter. Rarely do we find Jesus in the gospels just sitting around waiting for something to happen, wondering when someone might come and ask him a question. More often, he’s the one directing the action as he and his disciples move from place to place, reaching out to people, some of whom couldn’t reach for him first. He’s a man on a mission, with the urgency of an important message and a sense that time is short. Jesus knows, and he has told his disciples — before what we read today — that he will suffer and die, and be raised in three days. The people who first heard that didn’t like it. They would have put Jesus on a bench somewhere out of the way, safe and hidden. They could have turned to him at critical moments, and they would have had his holiness and insight to draw on, just when they needed him. But Jesus knew he came for more than that. We know it, too. We know a Jesus who brings salvation, grace, reconciliation and forgiveness. We know a Jesus who changed people’s lives with the touch of his hand. We know a Jesus who could change a person’s entire worldview with a few words, a parable, or maybe a question. We worship this Jesus who did all those things, and then left it all behind to go to the cross and fulfill his mission to the world, so that we might have life, and have it abundantly. The rest of the story And for all the times we recite and remember and celebrate all these things that Jesus was and is, we rarely dwell for long on “the rest of the story,” to use Paul Harvey’s well-known phrase. The coin of salvation and healing and truth comes with a flip side, and the flip side is harder. The flip side is change. The flip side is people deciding that what they once believed was incomplete. The flip side is people leaving the certainty of settled, predictable lives to follow this revolutionary Jesus. As these people’s families stand in the doorway, watching them go, waving, left behind, Jesus doesn’t seem much like a “prince of peace.” And Jesus calls that. He predicts exactly that. He says (in essence), “Households are going to be divided. You’ll see: It will be two against three and three against two.” And he enumerates some of the possibilities: a father will be against his son, and a son against his father. A mother will be against her daughter, and vice versa. The same with mothers-in-law against daughters-in-law. Have you seen a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law divided? It’s not pretty. So Jesus comes right out and says, “This conflict is going to happen.” And then he says the part that we so easily forget: He (Jesus) will be the cause of all this discord! This Jesus that we wanted to place in that neat row of uncomplicated, easily accepted “good things” for our lives — he is going to be at the very heart of this division. Why? Because following Jesus is complicated. “I came to bring fire on the earth,” Jesus said. In the gospel of Thomas (which didn’t make it into our Bible), Jesus is reported to have said, “Whoever is near me is near fire.” Being near Jesus is being near fire, because Jesus offers a whole new perspective on the way things are. We still don’t fully understand some of these teachings:
People hear words like these, and they see what happens when Jesus comes in contact with them, and they go away different! When everything you thought you knew and valued and trusted gets turned on its head, it’s like a fire has swept through you. But the fire doesn’t singe everyone the same. Some people hear once and they’re changed. Others are right there, listening and eager, and yet something happens and they walk away. Even within a single family, not everyone is equally receptive. (We don’t need Jesus to tell us that. Within families today, some are eagerly faithful and others — not so much.) It’s no wonder Jesus warned people that he would bring division. What about that shelf? But if all that’s true, then what about that shelf where we wanted to put Jesus? If Jesus is so dangerous, so unsettling, then how could we have even tried to put him on that calm, uncontroversial shelf? It’s easy for us to lose track of the Jesus who was like a fire to those around him. We don’t want to be unsettled and uprooted any more than that mother-in-law and daughter-in-law of Jesus’ day. So it’s no surprise when we embrace the kind, gentle Jesus that you see in those paintings that hang in so many church buildings. We don’t have many paintings of the Jesus who’s like a fire. But maybe we need to create some. Maybe we need something more like a video — or a hologram — or an avatar — of the living, breathing Jesus who came to bring fire on the earth, who longed for it to finally be kindled. Better yet, aren’t we supposed to be that avatar — doing what Jesus would do and carrying on the work of Jesus in the world? Imagine that: Our hands and feet and hearts and eyes and minds, no longer our own, but all yielded to Christ who lives through us! And what would that life look like? We would be alert to the world around us; we’d have that ability to interpret the appearance of things that Jesus described in today’s reading. Only we wouldn’t so much be interpreting whether it’s going to rain and when the economy is going to turn around for us, like we have in the past. Instead, as avatars of Jesus, we would be interpreting the signs of need and openness that are all around us. What’s happening in the lives of people — down the street and across the world, and do they have their daily bread, and what temptations and evil do they face that we might have a hand in averting? Imagine how reading those signs would propel us up off the couch and out into the world! Picture us, as avatars of Jesus, going boldly into places of emptiness and need. Think how keenly we would feel other people’s pain, and how urgently we would share Jesus’ Good News, and how deeply we would savor the privilege of serving him in this way. Once that fire is kindled, it burns and burns, deep within. And yes, some of our relationships will get singed. That shelf where we used to keep our happy-place things — it’s gonna get lonely. Yet Jesus calls us to know, as he did, that that is part of the baptism with which we must be baptized; we will bear that distress until it’s completed. We join Jesus in the fire — anyway. |
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