August 18, 2019 | Maurice Lee

Readings: Jeremiah 23:23–29; Psalm 82; Hebrews 11:29–12:2; Luke 12:49–56

That old plea, “Can’t we all just get along?,” seems as relevant and as sensible as ever in these polarized days of ours. It’s a good question. If the news is anything to go by, we as a society seem to have made not getting along into a way of life. Maybe there isn’t any golden age of tolerance and harmony in our past to return to. But it’s pretty clear that, overall, we’re not in that golden age now. So to hear Jesus in our Gospel reading from Luke 12 — Jesus, remember, moving toward Jerusalem to give himself for the redemption of the world; Jesus, whose arrival was celebrated by angels with the hope of “peace on earth” [Luke 2:14]; Jesus, who assured his missionaries of a “plentiful” harvest [Luke 10:2] and who through his ministry drew ever “increasing” crowds [Luke 11:29] as he opened the kingdom of God to the people — saying: “I came to bring, not peace, but division,” to hear that as something like a deliberate strategy, an intentional policy, from one who, we would think, is in the business of good news, might be, well, a little discouraging.

And, of course, to hear Jesus run the fault line, the fracture, of division, the division he says he’ll cause, right down through families — “a household will be divided, … father against son, son against father, mother against daughter, daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” — through families, which we might at least dream could still be a kind of refuge from the craziness of the culture, just makes it worse. It probably doesn’t help to know that Jesus was doing a kind of riff on the book of Micah, where (seven hundred years earlier) the prophet was complaining about epidemic social violence and injustice: “Put no trust in a friend, have no confidence in a loved one; for the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother…; your enemies are members of your own household” [7:5–6]. It’s fine to see that connection; but, unlike Micah, Jesus was saying that this dissension even where you’d expect relationships to be closest would be basically his doing. As I said, maybe a little discouraging.

My favorite sentence from an otherwise forgettable book, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, is: “However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.” [1] Here’s another thing that’s certain: there are lots of ways to be divisive and polarizing. Not all of them have the breaking of unity, the destruction of fellowship, as their one central purpose. Not all of them have to end in hatred and contempt for those on the other side. Think of an election. Our denomination, the North American Lutheran Church, just elected a new bishop. There were fourteen nominees. We couldn’t have them all as our bishop. A choice, essentially a division, of one person, and not the others, had to be made. Or think of a court decision. Someone is declared guilty or not guilty, liable or not liable. A judgment — a division, a polarization, between what actually happened, who actually was responsible, and other, maybe attractive but still false, accounts — is rendered. Often you do have people who are deeply invested in one or the other side and who are offended, not just by the verdict, but by the fact that there are others who think and believe differently. But the point of judgment isn’t to set people against one another, as if life were some kind of perpetual war; it isn’t to make them adversaries, even though that does happen way too much. The point of judgment, ideally, is just to tell the truth about what really occurred, to say what really took place, at least as close to it as limited, fallible, biased human beings can get.

And if that’s how human judgment goes, where does that put things when it comes to God? The word of God, the word of Israel’s God, the LORD, according to our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah 23 — God, remember, whose word created reality in the first place; God, who fills heaven and earth even though he’s part of neither; God, who tells the truth rather than retailing the lies manufactured by false prophets — is like fire, like a hammer breaking rocks. That’s the effect. That’s what comes of a word that not only points to the truth but is the truth. You may recall the famous summary in Hebrews, pretty much the New Testament equivalent of our Jeremiah reading:

The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account [4:12–13].

“Piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow.” We might say: dividing is what’s done by any speaking of the truth. Dividing is what happens with any deciding that things are thus-and-such rather than some other way, any dissecting of the world at the joints, any reflecting of what’s actually there. But that makes people uncomfortable. It raises inconvenient questions. It threatens the illusions we’ve built significant parts of our lives on. It maybe isn’t or shouldn’t be all that surprising that the word of God would be divisive in that sense too, riling up people with different interests to protect, sounding like different kinds of nonsense to people with different plausibility structures.

And so it’s more tempting than ever in our day to basically give up on the notion of truth. We might feel like we’re drowning in fake news and cynical political spin. We might feel the force of that postmodern question: “Who are you to tell me what’s true and what’s false? What gives you the right?” Or we might not really care or want to care any more. It’s too exhausting to figure out. There’s too much yelling. We’re tempted to go with Pilate, saying, “What is truth?,” and then walking away. The only problem is that closing my eyes doesn’t make the train speeding toward me disappear. My being tired doesn’t make the reality irrelevant.

What if, above and beyond our human confusion, there remains one who always tells the truth, without changing it into its opposite or distorting it beyond recognition or treating it like some kind of optional accessory? What if the truth were to be told ultimately by the life — life and death and resurrection — of one person, one Israelite? What if the truth is that this world was designed, was destined, to know and to love and to obey God, Israel’s God, that that’s what life is for, that that’s the point of it all? That would be judgment, wouldn’t it? That would divide. Because if that is the truth, then to think or act otherwise, to aim to construct meaning and fulfillment for ourselves on our own, to perform our stories as if they were solely our creative composition, to reject what we need most deeply, forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God, to turn away from those places where God has chosen in mercy to be found, that’s to be dysfunctional — even though surface appearances might deceive — in the most literal possible sense. But the word of God also divides, because, even though no one wants to be wrong when it comes to living in this world, we still want to shut our ears to God and try to get life right on our own terms, by our own self-definition. And that not only amounts to running on empty, barking at nonexistent squirrels up nonexistent trees, but also alienates us from other people, including family and friends and neighbors.

“I came to bring fire to the earth!” Jesus said. “I came to bring division!” And we could ask: Does it end there? Is that the last word? Are we stuck in our separation? Can’t we all get along? Is there any hope, any possibility, of unity? Could there be such a thing as fellowship beyond those little echo chambers where people who think pretty much exactly alike find each other on Facebook, or in churches, and hex the heretics outside? The weird thing is that real unity, deep agreement, can only come from outside, outside our individual prejudices, beyond our desperate desire to be needed or to be the one who calls the shots. Otherwise, “unity” would just be each of us trying to conform everyone else to ourselves, trying to make every other person into a carbon copy of me.

The same word of God that divides, also unites. The same word of God that burns like fire and breaks the hard places like a hammer, also turns us toward — as our Epistle reading from Hebrews 12 has it — “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” toward the one who “endured the cross” and is “seated at the right hand of God.” The same Word of God, alive and active, who warned that families would split over the truth, also calls families to worship together and to live holy lives in witness to God’s kingdom — a “cloud of witnesses.” The same Word of God in whom there is no shadow of changing does the unprecedented and makes us part of himself, judged and forgiven and reconciled, so that we may follow him. Amen.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (W. W. Norton, 1986), ch. 1.