“A Gracious Arson”
Luke 12:49-56
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
8/14/16
Early in Luke
12, Jesus tells the crowds, “Do not fear those who kill the body.” A little
later he tells his disciples, “Do not worry about your life.” It all seems wishful
thinking, though. When read straight through, chapters 12 and 13 of Luke can leave
a person feeling terrified and anxious. Indeed, they convulse with Jesus’ own anguish.
“I came to
bring fire to the earth,” he says, and “division” rather than “peace.”
“I have a
baptism with which to be baptized,” he says, “and what stress I am under until
it is completed!”
In this collection of teachings and
interactions, we encounter Luke the artist. He’s not merely collating stories
of Jesus. He’s writing his readers into a literary diorama. He surrounds us
with images of the crushing immediacy of all that Jesus faces on his way to Jerusalem.
In this climactic
moment, Jesus declares himself God’s chosen arsonist, the one who comes to
light a fire in the creation and to experience his own baptism by fire. This
scene foreshadows and burns with all the agony of Gethsemane. It also reminds me
of Joseph facing the brothers who betrayed him, and Moses demanding that
Pharaoh release the Hebrews. It recalls David admitting the truth of his
treachery against Uriah, and Judas trying to return those thirty pieces of dirty
silver. It is confession and liberation, death and resurrection. Every time
Jesus faces the magnificence of his truth, it proves to be a bone-crushing
cross to bear.
I genuinely
trust that if Jesus is behind it, if he’s alive within it, whatever IT is offers new life to and for all
creation. I also genuinely trust that the promised newness will be achieved in
ways consistent with the gracious means by which Jesus fulfills his role of
Savior. He enters the creation and discerns what is holy and corrupt in all
things. Then he tenaciously commits himself to redeeming the creation by loving
and nurturing that reconciling, re-unifying holiness into ascendency the way
one gently blows on an ember and encourages it into a flame.
The fire Jesus
sets is a gracious arson. It enlightens and refines. Its heat represents the
very com-passion of God – the burning
with us of God. And through this mystic alchemy, our true selves are redeemed
and revealed.
When Jesus
pronounces division, I hear him crying
out in lament, not threat. He knows that when faced with their holy truth and
their earthy calling, the people he loves will struggle with discernment like
Jacob at the Jabbok, like Elijah in his cave, like Jesus at his temptation.
Discernment is a place of refining
and defining tension. It’s a fiery crucible where, through honest and often grueling
deliberation, we begin to learn the edifying arts of humility, gratitude, generosity,
and justice. Or we give up, and pit ourselves against one another and learn to
practice the divisive, love-concealing obsessions of legalism, judgmentalism,
and greed.
Discernment is
no picnic. On both the individual and communal levels, discovering and declaring
our true selves can prove liberating in both ecstatic and agonizing ways.
Last Sunday morning I talked with
the children about Rosa Parks. In refusing to walk to the back of the bus, Ms.
Parks said to herself, ‘I am a human being equally beautiful and valuable as
anyone else. I will quit acting as if I am not.’ And she sat in a front seat of
a city bus, in Montgomery, AL. In doing so, she helped to force our culture to
face the deep-seated and too-long-tolerated and denied reality of racism. She
helped to push us deeper into a long, arduous, and still incomplete season discernment.
Who are we? Are we a society in which “self-evidence” has truly declared that “all men [and women]
are created equal…[and] endowed with certain inalienable rights [such as] Life,
Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness?”
Are we paying attention to the
signs of the times? Are we aware that, indeed, our “experience [is showing]
that [hu]mankind are more disposed to suffer…than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms” that enslave, humiliate, and oppress?
Have we really been ignorant of the
“long train of abuses and usurpations” that has reduced an entire
population of God-imaged creatures to sub-human status? And is it not “their
right… and their duty to throw off such” tyranny and to live in the
light of God’s joy?
In discerning her own full
humanity, Rosa Parks declared her independence. And for all with eyes to see
and ears to hear, Ms. Parks invited our divided household into “a more perfect
union.”
We are an increasingly divided
society, though. Maybe, part of our
struggle to be at peace in community arises from our struggle to be at peace
individually, our struggle to accept and Love ourselves as we truly are at the
core of our being. Maybe, before we
can understand and heal the widening rifts among us, each of us needs to try to
understand and to forgive ourselves.
This is always true for me: When I
am most irritable, most impatient, most unpleasant to be around, most prone to
make decisions that tear down rather than build up, those are times that I feel
most divided within myself. At such times I am most likely to use words to
assault, belittle, and judge.
The divisions ripping at us right
now are, I think, timely signs that as followers of Jesus, we are being
challenged to set our faces toward Jerusalem. And here we face an unnerving truth:
In Jerusalem, life as we’ve known it comes undone. The journey to the good news
of Sunday passes through the heart-rending trauma of Friday and the drifting
weightlessness of Saturday.
And here we also face the redeeming
truth: Jesus leads the way through this passage. His gracious arson is our
light, and it has been kindled. His baptism is our redemption, and it is
complete. Even when we fail to live completely in the completion of his Love, he
has shown us what is primordially and ultimately true about ourselves and about
all creation. God has declared us “good.” And nothing anywhere or anytime, can divide “us from the love of God.”
There’s a communion hymn that
begins: “I come with joy to meet my Lord, forgiven, loved, and free, in awe and
wonder to recall His life laid down for me.” And in the third verse we sing: “As
Christ breaks bread and bids us share, each proud division ends. The love that
made us makes us one, and strangers now are friends.”1
Doesn’t humankind owe most of our
divisions to that most serious of the seven deadly sins – pride? And to fear of the stranger, the other?
Offering the best of who they are,
Jesus, and other whole-hearted folks like Rosa Parks, Shane Claiborne, Matthew
Vines, Mohandas Gandhi, Malala Yousafzai reveal the best within us, as well. When
it comes to discerning holiness from corruption, we’re not perfect. And while we’re
not without forgiveness, we are without excuse.
The Light of the World burns within
and among us. And the times demand that we embrace and share our gift.
1“I Come with Joy,” Brian Wren (1968, rev. 1977). The
Presbyterian Hymnal, Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville/London, 1990.
Hymn #507.
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