Sermon preached by the Reverend Nicholas Lang, Rector

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

12^th Sunday after Pentecost, August 19, 2007

May God be discovered in wonder on our way, Christ hold us on the path to truth, and the Spirit bring us wisdom. Amen.

In case you missed it the first time, let me repeat what we just heard: “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!”

Yes, that’s Jesus talking. We could dismiss it by chalking it up to his having a really bad day – after all he does tell us he is under great stress. Who wouldn’t be if facing the kind of end to his ministry on earth, the betrayal, suffering and death that loomed around the corner in Jerusalem? That’s just too simple a comeback and Jesus was never one to let someone off the hook easily – especially in the midst of a confrontation.

Yet I think it’s fair to say that we’ve come here today because we think of this as a place of comfort and assurance. We live in such a fast pace world where it is sometimes almost impossible to center ourselves or get grounded. I expect we’re looking for a message to be preached here that helps us do that, as well as one that calms our fears. Most of the time we get lucky and Jesus comes through for us on that score, providing the preacher with just the right stuff. Then there is the random Sunday like today. And I wonder how this Gospel gets received in other churches throughout the city when “fire” has been in the news and on our minds since the Norwalk High School Marching Bears’ storage facility, much of its expensive equipment, and many irreplaceable trophies went up in smoke this week. Is that the kind of fire Jesus is wishing for? I think not.

The saving grace is, I believe, that while Jesus always meant exactly what he said, he used parables – little stories – and metaphor – images or figures of speech – to make his point.

Lest we forget, the church was born through combustion – through the blazing trail of hot flames generated by the Holy Spirit and landing on the people gathered in that upper room. The day of Pentecost was the day when the disciples of Jesus were ignited with a passion for spreading the gospel, healing the sick, fighting the dragons of oppression and malice.

The early church was full of excitement and drama and risk-taking and anticipation. The Acts of the Apostles, a condensed history of those first years, bears testimony to that. Could it be that Jesus knew how complacent, laid back, and even down right apathetic the church could become? Is that reason he wishes that the “fire” gets kindled again and again and again?

It is so easy for any church to sit back and admire its accomplishments – and for us they are many – but, when we do that, we must be very careful not to think that we have “arrived,” that we done our share, that it’s time to put the fire out, or pass the torch to some other congregation that wants a little incineration.

I don’t think Jesus is scaring us in this passage but I do think he is warning us. When the church becomes too comfortable in its own security and successes, and things cool down, things cool off, it is not the church Jesus incited us to be. We are most the church when we can feel the heat of the passion and are nearly scorched by the flames of diligence. We are most the church when the embers of our zeal for spreading the gospel to those who have yet to hear it are stirred up, never to be extinguished by indifference.

And it is precisely when we are in that state of combustion that we are fired up enough to work for peace – peace which often lies on the other side of a struggle or a protest or even a sit-down strike, peace which, yes, just might come with a price tag of offending those we love. It is precisely when we take our selves that seriously as the church that we become empowered to stand up and speak up for what is right and against what is wrong and will fight to protect those who are most vulnerable and whom society marginalizes in any number of ways.

That brings us to the talk about family and division. Now remember that in the audience du jour were any number of people who would decide to follow Jesus and become “People of the Way” (as they were described before the term “Christian” was coined in Antioch.) They would, in fact, face persecution, many would be killed, and even the families of those who chose Christianity would be victimized by the authorities. So, in an effort to survive, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and children did disown those in their clan who chose to follow Christ.

Now, while this still happens to some extent, while parents or other relatives may reject the decision of a member of the family to worship in another faith tradition – or none at all, I don’t believe that this part of the text is so much about that sad phenomenon as it is about how Jesus is redefining what family is in the kingdom of God. For him, it was not about genes and DNA, but rather in whose image you are created.

In the words of Mother Barbara Brown Taylor, “It was not a matter of who has the same last name or lives at the same address but who serves the same God, which means that his family became huge beyond counting, with lepers and tax collectors and Roman centurions in it, scruffy looking men who smelled of fish and ladies in robes made of gold brocade and hordes of squealing children.”

That is the family to which we all belong and we are, everyone of us, sisters and brothers in Christ, daughters and sons of God, struggling to learn what is right and what is wrong, what is worth living for, what is worth fighting for, what is worth dying for – and what is not.

This Gospel passage is what Barbara Brown Taylor calls a lesson in “family values” which “while they may send a chill down our spine, there is good news here for those with the nerve to hear it. The gospel is not a flashlight but a fire. It can warm and it can burn. The gospel is not a table knife but a sword. It can set free and divide. The gospel is not pabulum. It is powerful stuff, powerful enough to challenge the most sacred human ties, but as frightening as it is, it is not finally to be feared.”

And when that gospel is able to fire us up, when we’re fueled enough to work passionately for justice and peace, disrupt the complacency of the world, and grow that marvelously diverse and quirky family of the church, it is, indeed, a glorious thing to behold.

So the big questions for us today are can we stand the heat when Jesus sends us more fire? Can we see the signs in our midst pointing us in the direction he is taking us and calling us to be his church right now in this present time? Are we as God’s people listening to what the Spirit is saying to us? Unlike some questions, there is a right and wrong answer.