The Great Sweeping Away

The Great Sweeping Away

Luke 12:49-56
August 19, 2007

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a
baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 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, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-
law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately
say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing,
you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how
to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret
the present time?

When Douglas and I were going through the Upper Peninsula, with our close friends,
Jim and Bruce, we pretty much missed all the fires that have plagued that area of the
country, except when we were coming back, and we passed by a couple of fire crews
that were finishing up some work, while they were waving us gawkers by as quickly as
they could. Some of the trees were burnt, though I have to admit that I’ve seen worst,
and the damage seemed sporadic, unlike the total devastation I’ve seen in other
places, such as in Montana and Wyoming, during the summer of 2000—that was an
amazing and humbling site, especially with the thick smoke that seemed to haunt those
two states as I was driving through them. There was nothing like that in the UP, though
I suspect we skirted some of the worst parts of the fire. There is something about
forest fires that just intrigues and saddens me, to be honest, and maybe it is all that
Smokey the Bear propaganda I got as a kid, but there is something so totalizing, so
devastating about a forest fire—how it kills the trees and probably much all of the wild
life. And to know that we humans are the ones who so often light the match,
accidentally or purposefully—it’s just sad to me.

But people keep telling me that despite the tragedy of some of these unnecessary fires,
they have always existed, and that some good can come from them, a cleansing of the
land, a renewal of the earth, a razing that can actually strengthen the woods and the
land beneath the trees. The land can become stronger because of that harrowing
experience of fire and ash, the great sweeping away of so much of nature in order to
allow for the land to grow something new. And yet, I also know that principle to be true
from my own life, and that is that God can take all the devastation that simply comes
with life, and do something new, something different, sometimes even something better
out of all the devastation left behind—if the floods can recede during Noah’s day, if
Israel can be made new, even after waves of waves of the world’s empires sweeping
over her, if Christ can rise up after being put down in the grave, then surely we too can
rise, surely there can be something new out of ashes for us well. But before we get to
the resurrection, before we rise from the ashes, we have to actually acknowledge the
possibility of fire, and that the fire can be devastating, and that it can tear us apart, and
tear our families apart, and our friendships apart. Christ in our passage today, speaks
of fire and division, of what is bound to happen to those who follow him, and he actually
contradicts the angel’s blessing of peace to all at the birth of Jesus, a birth told in this
very Gospel! “No,” Luke has Jesus saying, “I have come to set the world on fire, and to
divide up families—my very presence will set people ablaze, and it will become a crisis,
and that presence will turn brothers against sisters, fathers against sons, mothers
against daughters.”

Folks, I don’t know how you are taking this passage, but it doesn’t seem like good news
to me! But let’s get some context here—if your remember that before I left on vacation
last week, we had been going through Luke 12, and Jesus’ constant challenge to his
earliest listeners to let go of stuff, of things, and to trust the Giver rather than what has
been given to us, to trust the creator of barns instead of the barn itself, so to speak. In
that chapter he follows that up with another familiar passage with another famous set of
words, about not worrying about anything because the lilies of the field do not worry
and yet they are still clothed, still taken care of. I didn’t preach on that particular
passage but now, in this passage before us today, you see a tone change in Jesus and
something shifts, and his words betray impatience with his listeners and maybe with us
as well. I think that change is because he thinks his listeners don’t get it, they don’t
think following him or his teachings should cost them anything, that it won’t create
change or a crisis in their lives, and I think the frustration he feels bubbles over in that
moment, where he reminds them that his way will not only lead to peace within, but
sometimes also war without, a war outside of ourselves. I don’t mean literal war, but
emotional wars between loved ones, ones that aren’t happy about choices made
because we have chosen to follow the way of this one from Nazareth.

Now, I have to say that not a lot of us have had to suffer for our faith, not like the early
listeners of this text in the first and second centuries in the Roman Empire. Most of us
don’t lose family and friends because we are Christians, though some of us have lost
those friends because of the kind of Christians we are. Still, for those early listeners,
when Jesus talks the world being set ablaze, they know of the devastation can be
wrought in their first century homes, homes built of wood and thatched roofs and straw-
based walls. Fire was a frightening, community-threatening scourge on the cities of the
ancient world. But look at what he says next—the baptism by fire is not literal fire, but
the devastating fire of real life, the fire that will take him to the cross, the fire that has
already begun to burden him, even this early in his ministry. To do the things Christ
asks of us, to let go of all that stuff he keeps telling us not to trust, all of those bank
accounts and retirement plans, those barns stuff full of stuff we think will make us safe
in this world—to give it away may cost us something, he says, and, as I said a few
weeks ago, we may not get what we want but will always get what we need. Hard stuff,
not very popular stuff, and you can imagine that if doesn’t go down all that well here, in
this place, it probably wasn’t all that well received in the first century either. Jesus
words created a crisis, and very his life created a crisis back then, as is it does for us,
even now, even two thousand years after the fact.

But there are others that know what this means, that welcome Jesus’ words, about crisis
making, and division making. Teresa Berger shares the story of Lisa Fithian [who]
seems to understand Jesus’ call to embody crisis. Fithian is a grassroots activist in the
global peace-oriented movement for social justice. She has been arrested 30 times for
intentionally creating crises, i.e., situations that force the powers that are --
transnational corporations, the media, security forces, consumers -- to cease doing
business as usual, examine the inequities that they may be perpetuating, and change
policies. In an interview last year, Fithian explained: "When people ask me, ‘What do
you do?,’ I say I create crisis, because crisis is that edge where change is possible."
[and Teresa goes on to write] I wonder: Is this not what Jesus meant when he spoke of
bringing fire to the earth? Did he not seek to bring crisis as "that edge where change is
possible"? Was he not saying, as Lisa Fithian says, I have come to bring crisis because
business as usual means injustice and death? (Christian Century, August 10, 2004)

But I would say this, not just the injustice and death we so often find the systems of this
world that care little for those who have little, or are actually little themselves, children,
the most vulnerable ones amongst us. The crisis point happens with us as well, in our
lives, in those moments, when fire does rage into our lives, and devastate the
landscape of what we have always known. It seems the end of things, it seems as if
the ground will not recover, as if the earth of our lives has been blackened by God’s
doing or God’s indifference, or just the cruel hand of the universe—but it does not
matter who is to blame because all we know is that the ground of our lives, the trees
that provided us shelter, they are no more, blackened by the rage of the disaster that
has come into our lives. Still, in that moment, something can happen at the edge of the
cliff, in the midst of the worst crisis of our lives—something that God can do in those
moments where division and devastation seem to be the only thing possible. Change,
real change, in our lives, can happen when we lose the things we held onto, the things
we stuffed in our barns thinking they would make us safe, the people we mistook for
ourselves, whom we couldn’t imagine living without, whose loss would be the end of us.
If we will not empty our own barns, so to speak, if we will not trust the Giver rather than
the gift, then sometimes, just sometimes, but not all the time, God may empty the barns
for us. But Christ’s words here aren’t meant to threaten us, to scare us, but to remind
us that his way is as radical as the words he’s been saying to us and that we’ve been
sitting with the last few weeks.

But that change, the change we find at the edge of the cliff, that cliff we don’t think we
can avoid…well, I do think the world becomes renewed, that there really is something to
what they tell me about the good that can happen out of a forest fire, the cleansing of
the land for new growth, the remains of those burnt trees being the fertilizer for a new
forest, richer and deeper than the one burned to the ground. A couple of years ago, I
really went through an incredibly difficult time, where I made some wrong-headed
decisions, and found myself in a conflict that really wasn’t my own, a church conflict,
which is always the worst kind of conflict, it seems. I remember feeling as if I had lost
my will to pastor anymore and worst of all, I wondered if I was really all that good of a
pastor to be honest. A lot of days had me wondering when the forest of my life would
ever recover, so to speak. The division, the heartbreak, the feeling of helplessness as
the world you love seems to implode around you…well, you know what I am talking
about…there is no one in this room who hasn’t been through those kinds of moments in
your life.

And yet the crisis didn’t last forever, the devastation wasn’t complete, the world and life
and love, and hope came back, with time, of course. Even Christ had to wait three
days before he came out of that grave—lives and forests and resurrections, they take
their own doggone time to happen, don’t they? Christ may allow our world to be set
ablaze, but all fires eventually go out, and then comes the dove above Noah’s ark, and
then comes the homecoming of Israel’s people, and then comes the rolled away stone
of that tomb of that One whose words we attend to even now, even so many years after
his life, death, and more life. I can’t tell you to welcome the burning down moments, the
forest fires of your life, because I don’t welcome mine, and I’m not sure they’re meant to
be welcomed—I suspect they are meant to withstood, to be endured, to be survived.
But the good news is that fire is not the end of the story, and that the remains produced
by that fire can be the start of a new beginning for us, a new place, a new soil to grow
more deeply into, a ground enriched with the ashes of our former lives, our old naivety,
our heavy stuff, the ashes of those barns now burned completely to the ground. The
beginning of change usually comes to us in a crisis, a moment we think we cannot
endure…and then we find we can, that even this is doable. And when the old trees of
our lives are burned to the ground, when silence falls over the smoldering ashes of our
lives, it is then, my friends, that God can do a new thing in our lives. Amen.