A Fourth Church Sermon by Deborah Kapp

August 19, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Splinters

Deborah Kapp, Guest Preacher
Professor, McCormick Theological Seminary

Psalm 80:1–2, 8–19
Hebrews 11:29–12:3
Luke 12:49–53

“Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division!”

Luke 12:51 (NRSV)

Jesus calls us; o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea,
Day by day his sweet voice soundeth, saying, “Christian, follow me.”

Long ago apostles heard it by the Galilean lake,
Turned from home and work and fam’ly, leaving all for his dear sake.

Jesus calls us from the worship of the vain world’s golden store,
From each idol that would keep us, saying, “Christian, love me more.”

In our joys and in our sorrows, days of toil and hours of ease,
Still he calls, in cares and pleasures, “Christian, love me more than these.”

Jesus calls us: by thy mercies, Savior, may we hear thy call;
Give your hearts to thine obedience, serve and love thee best of all.

Cecil Frances Alexander
“Jesus Calls Us; O’er the Tumult”

A few weeks ago I laid ceramic tile on the floor of our powder room. Let me quickly say that my particular skill set is not well adapted to such a task, but for good or ill I tackled it anyway, and in the process I discovered a new tool: a rubber grout float. This is now my most favorite tool ever; I’m familiar with about ten tools, total, and this is, by far, the best. What’s a rubber grout float? It is the tool one uses to fill in the spaces between the tiles, and using it is like icing a cake without the crumbs. You dump a little of the gooey grout stuff on the floor, and, with the rubber grout float, you smooth the grout over the surface, filling up all the cracks between the tiles beneath. I loved using this tool, which lives up to its name. I floated it over the surface of the floor and all the cracks filled up.

I remember thinking that it would be nice if there were something in life akin to a rubber grout float—something that could gently skim over the cracks and fissures of my life and fill up all the spaces as they were meant to be filled. I have to confess that sometimes I like to think about Jesus in this way—as someone who tenderly moves across my life and fills it up and heals it and makes it complete. This Jesus is a great guy. He’s sweet and gentle, loving and kind. I’m sure you know him; he’s the Jesus with whom we probably all enjoy spending time.

But as you have already noted, that fairest Lord Jesus is completely absent from our text this morning. Instead of being a rubber grout float, this Jesus is a jackhammer, a crowbar, somebody who breaks apart our moorings and disrupts our lives. Here, in this text, Jesus is not a savior who brings peace. Quite the contrary. Here Jesus promises division instead of peace, family values of discord rather than harmony. What in the world are we to make of such a troubling, ominous text?

I invite you to join me for the next few minutes in thinking about what this text might say to us about the relationship between faith and family—one of the more controversial topics in our culture today. Think of all the hot-button issues it encompasses: Gay marriage. Parental consent for teenage abortion. Abortion itself. Birth control and family planning. Condom distribution. Premarital sex. All these are issues of faith and family—at least as they are framed and discussed in the public arena. Other realities that may impact us more directly also come under the faith and family umbrella: Divorce. Domestic violence. The joys and challenges of making blended families work, or, for that matter, the joys and challenges of making families of origin work.

What does God want for us, for you and for me, as we try to live together in our families, or as we search for the intimacy and nurture that some sort of family system might offer us? This is a big question, for which there is no simple or glib answer. I raise it not in the anticipation of being able to offer resolution, but rather to suggest what a tough and contemporary topic it is that Jesus raises in today’s text. Part of what makes it so tough is that it is elusive of a quick fix and troubling.

Issues of family life and how to live in a family were troubling in Jesus’ day, too, partly because the traditional family unit was being weakened. Now let’s step back for a minute and remember that when we talk about family in the first century, we are talking about a social and economic reality quite different from what we know today. The family, the household, was the basic social and economic unit in ancient Mediterranean life. The household into which you were born defined your lineage, your work and economic status, your relationships, your religion, your everything. There was no going to college and making a new life for yourself. There was no moving to another city and starting over. You were your family. Everything grew out of the family or household unit.

But the overall family picture was in flux in Jesus’ day, and the change was partly driven by the economy. There was a growing gap between rich and poor. The households in the economic middle often found themselves moving a little lower on the economic ladder. Sound familiar? In addition, archaeological evidence suggests that the older family model of the larger extended family was eroding, and the larger family unit was scattering into what you and I might think of as a nuclear family model—more and smaller single family households. People in Jesus’ day were concerned about the economy, and they worried about changes in family life, just like we do now (Halvor Moxnes, Putting Jesus in His Place: A Radical Vision of Household and Kingdom, pp. 39–43). That’s an important thing to know about this text: it is set in a context in which people worried about the health and welfare of contemporary families.

It was also set in a context in which family problems were real. We can surmise from some stories in the New Testament that family strife and pain were not unheard of in the first century. The parable of the prodigal son, for example, tells the story of two brothers, both of whom hurt their father deeply—one a rebel who practiced almost every offensive behavior he could imagine, and the other a sanctimonious prat whose self-righteousness was a constant judgment of his father. I think we can assume that this parable, like most of Jesus’ teachings, is drawn from examples of everyday life in Palestine. People in families hurt and offend each other. That was as true then as it is now.

And sometimes those hurts or offenses are so profound that regular, normal human beings like you and me cannot get past them, and families splinter. People in the first century knew that grief as keenly as do many of us. There is a poignant story in John 9 about that very thing. Jesus comes into a village and encounters a man who has been blind from birth, and of course, Jesus heals him. When the other villagers see that the man can see, they ask him how he was healed, and he tells them about Jesus. When the village Pharisees get wind of this, they refuse to believe it. They keep saying that Jesus is a sinner and therefore it is impossible for him to have healed the man. But the man sticks to his guns; he tells them again that Jesus healed him. They go round and round about it, but the Pharisees cannot convince the healed man to recant. Sadly, no one in the village defends the man, not even his parents. So, reports John, “they drove him out” of the village. Because this man was healed and converted to faith in Jesus, he ended up having to sacrifice his whole world.

We dislike admitting it, but families often fail to be the places of support and nurture that we need them to be. Children can rebel. Parents can be unrelentingly rigid or refuse to support their children. People can be just plain mean. We hurt each other all the time, and sometimes it is the ones closest to us whom we hurt most deeply or who hurt us.

This is, as I said, a troubling text. Why would we want to follow a man who invites this sort of pain and suffering? Is this kind of familial separation and pain the sort of thing that God wants for us and our families? Is that what this text means?

Let me answer a clear and resounding “No!” to my last two questions. I do not believe that God chooses suffering for us. Suffering and pain are real, to be sure. A lot of suffering exists without God’s visible intervention to make it stop. But the persistent reality of human pain does not mean that God wills it, nor does it mean that God intends to inflict pain. No. No. No. This text isn’t about Jesus intending his followers to suffer.

This little section of Luke is one of a series of statements and teachings from Jesus that come under the general topic of faithful discipleship. That, I think, is the general gist of this text. Our scripture lesson this morning is about Jesus’ own faithful discipleship, and it suggests things about our faithful discipleship, too, what it means to follow God in Christ. According to Luke 12 and 13, what God wills for Christians is not suffering, but rather a relationship of faith and trust and an ordering of priorities that puts that faith relationship first in our lives. That is something very different from what a surface reading of these verses might suggest.

What do these comments about faithful discipleship imply about the relationship between faith and family? Does putting faith first mean that we inevitably have to fight with our families or abandon them? To be honest, that is what I have always been afraid that this and other similar passages mean. Maybe for some people a faith commitment does create familial discord or estrangement, but that’s not true for everybody. One of the strong contributions of the Protestant Reformation was its recognition that following Jesus is something that we can do wherever we find ourselves. Whether we are a janitor or a monk, a wealthy Wall Street financier or a homeless person, a homemaker or a grade school student, we can all follow Jesus in our own way and in our particular place. One of these might be our family. Martin Luther was so deeply convinced that the family was an arena in which one could and should practice faith that he deliberately left the religious life and got married and had kids. He understood that everyday life is exactly the place where God calls us to be faithful, and he made a commitment to live normal, everyday life in its fullness, so that his faith could find fullness. Sometimes nurturing a healthy and peaceful family is exactly what putting faith first might mean.

And that’s a good thing. We all know how important healthy families are for our social fabric. Children are much more likely to thrive when they live in healthy families, surrounded by productive and caring adults. Adults thrive, too, when we are free to construct conventional or unconventional family structures that nurture us and allow us to be the people God created us to be. I suspect that Jesus understood that; I do not think this text represents Jesus as essentially antifamily.

The text does suggest, however, that Jesus is against the deification of family. Faith and family do not have equal footing in Jesus’ understanding. Faith comes first, above all else; family is somewhere further down the list. Unfortunately, we do not always hear Jesus’ followers making that distinction.

I heard a preacher say once that by being born into a human family, Jesus sanctified family life. I had trouble with that statement the first time I heard it, and twenty-five years later I still have trouble with it, because it is too easy to misconstrue that statement and interpret it too narrowly. There are many religious voices today—and Christian voices are the loudest among them—who suggest that the most faithful way for human beings to live is within the traditional family model: working father, homemaker mother, and a couple kids. In the interests of promoting that sort of family life, many good things have happened, to be sure, but bad things have happened, too: wives who are being beaten by their husbands have been told to suck it up; children who don’t fit the mold have been emotionally scarred or worse; men have lived with unreasonable levels of stress. The traditional nuclear family, as we understand it in white, middle-class, North American culture, has been turned into a god by some religious people, and that deification is not only harmful for some people, it is blasphemous.

If Jesus did indeed sanctify family life by being born into a human family, then he sanctified it in more ways than one. He was born to Mary and adopted by Joseph, sanctifying both birth and adoptive families. He grew up with brothers and sisters and a mother with whom he did not always get along, sanctifying family stresses and strains. He lived a single lifestyle, sanctifying that option. And he built a new sort of family among his disciples and friends, sanctifying alternative family structures. But in none of these family settings did Jesus ever forget that his first and highest priority was his relationship with God and the work that God called him to do. Jesus always put that first, and this morning he invites each of us to put it first as well.

Moving faith to the very top of our list of priorities is not exactly easy. It’s not easy to rearrange life priorities, nor is it easy to follow Jesus with radical devotion, because, as this text reminds us, sometimes that leads us in directions that we would rather not go. I am certain that the healed man in John 9 would have preferred staying at home to being exiled from his community and estranged from his family. But exiled and estranged he was, torn from community and family because of his faith. The story, however, does not end there. At the very end of the story, we get a glimpse of the rubber grout float Jesus, when our Lord hears that the man has been driven out, and he goes and finds the man. Jesus does not, will not, allow the healed man or any of his followers to walk the path of faith alone. We join Jesus himself on the road of discipleship, in faith and fellowship, in risk and adventure, in peace and in conflict.

Amen.