I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what constraint 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? (Luke 12:49-56)

A Conflict That Led to Peace

In August 1987, I started work as Director of Counseling at Berry College under supervision of Vice-President for Student Affairs, Tom Carver. Both wise old man and eternal college sophomore, stern judge and circus clown, savvy political player and childlike moralist, scholar and jock, bombastic enthusiast and gentle minister, Tom kept everyone at Berry on their toes, especially those of us who worked closely with him. He packed enough energy to back up the Georgia Power Plant. If you stayed close to him for too long, you would either get burned to death or die laughing.

A new Ph.D., I had no management experience and little inclination for that part of my job. From before that time to the present, I am much more interested in the healing art of therapy than massaging a budget or clarifying policy to a staff member who does not want to get it. So with this hilarious hurricane of a boss, I knew I was in over my head. Moreover, Tom was the consummate extrovert and I, the consummate introvert. Extroverts sometimes have difficulty trusting introverts because they get nervous about what we’re thinking behind our quiet smiles, especially if we look nervous. As I was.

Introverts like me usually do not like conflict, while Tom did not mind conflict at all. So it all came to a head about a year and a half in. We had a showdown at the OK Corral. He drew, I drew, we wounded each other and called it a draw. He needed to know if I would shoot or run. I needed to know too. For the next 15 years until his retirement, we were as loyal to each other as David and Jonathan. 

A Lesson in Disruptive Love

But he surprised me during one performance evaluation a few more years in. “Marshall, I’m not so sure about you. You worry me,” he earnestly said, to my astonishment. “Nobody complains about you. But if you were really doing your job, somebody would get ticked off every now and then.” He proceeded to give me good marks on everything except being too quiet and not getting out and about among people enough. Moreover, he gave me food for thought about disruptive love.

Did I mention that I do not like conflict? I would much rather preach on Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” 

But no. Father John asked me to preach today when the lectionary offers Luke 12:49-56. There Jesus seems to contradict those words in Matthew and the many other ways he says, “Love one another,” and, “Peace be with you,” and, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Instead, he says, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!… Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (vv. 49, 51). 

Another test? Back to the OK Corral?

Well, I thank Tom Carver, recently deceased, for leaving me with a valuable lesson. The only way to avoid conflict altogether in life is not to live it, or more specifically, not to care, not to love. One must not care and withdraw into Netflix and books, into imaginary lives. Granted, it helps to keep one’s nose clean, to avoid looking for trouble. But love either finds trouble or trouble finds love. If you have lived a conflict-free life, you probably have not loved. You likely keep a whole lot of privileges to yourself.

A Paradox

Do not get me wrong: Jesus and his Jewish tradition commanded love of God and neighbor above all else, and nothing we do yields greater rewards than love. Yet, love incites hate; or more precisely, hate kicks back against love. In the early church, this played out most notably as many families scorned and rejected members who joined this odd new group pejoratively called, “Christians.” Hence, Jesus emplyed imagery of family division, “father against son….daughter against mother,” and so forth. 

Yet, if you take Jesus seriously by loving those who persecute you, you do not withdraw. You meet it with disruptive love. The rule plays out in our context as well.

So paradoxically, peace requires passage through conflict. The paradox can comfort you if you let it. For the more conscientious among us, conflict often prompts guilt. We examine ourselves in search for the blind spot or unconscious, selfish motive that caused the rift. Yet whatever conflict may have wounded you, whether you were right or wrong, it does not mean you failed to love. Disapproval, rejection, or outright aggression of others does not necessarily mean you are flawed. If you love, more often than not it means you are on the right track.

If you can claim that comfort, you claim it with the early church for whom Luke wrote his masterpiece. They certainly got in a lot of good trouble for loving. Moreover, Luke, more emphatically than the other three gospel writers, reports Jesus exemplifying and prescribing the kind of disruptive love that gets us in trouble. 

At the outset of his ministry, the hometown folks almost stone him after he cites scripture to show that God’s love extends even to their enemies (4:16-30). In the first of his two most well-known parables that Luke reports, Jesus holds up a foreigner from a despised race – the Samaritan – as the exemplary neighbor. In the second, the Prodigal Son, he depicts the love of the Father as gratuitous toward the scoundrel and heedless of just deserts for the conscientious older brother, who understandably protests with righteous indignation. Jesus promotes a disruptive love that crosses social boundaries and defies common-sensical fair play. That makes decent folks angry.

Yet when we follow his lead, we please God because that is how God loves. Conflict follows, not because we want a fight, but because sinful humanity wants to keep such disruptive love in its place, to domesticate God. Following Christ in loving entails letting go of that control, risking that security, and placing hope in God’s reign that we serve but cannot control. So Jesus’s disturbing words about bringing division include Tom Carver’s wisdom about the rough natural consequences of caring.

Kairos

But Jesus’s hyperbolic words about bringing division offer more than insight into the social psychology of love and conflict. They tell us about the active work of God that we too easily overlook, especially if we try to avoid conflict at all costs. 

To dig deeper into Jesus’ point, consider the nature of time. Normally, we think of time as a kind of flat, empty plane with which we fill our experiences in equal units, like seconds, hours, months, or millennia. We mark the timeline with ticks and tocks, numbered days, even signs of seasonal changes like that first September morning chill or the budding of dogwoods. It is flat and seemingly endless like our view of the ocean beyond the breakers. The Greeks called that kind of time chronos, from which we get the word, “chronological.” 

But do not forget the breakers, the swelling waves with their crash, roar, and hiss right there in the foreground. Ancients like Luke thought time gathered up in critical moments signified by the Greek term, kairos. In those moments, God steps in, and all the moments before and after are never the same again. A child is born. A career skids out of control. She says, “I do.” The doctor recommends getting affairs in order. A voice calls your name. A stranger breaks bread, and you see it is your Lord whom you saw bleed to death just hours ago.

In such moments, God steps in with disruptive love, and they can be the most terrible, seemingly godless times or the most wonderful, heavenly times. Or both. No philosophy, theology, or science explains it, but kairos time can be both at once, terrible and wonderful, full of death and love. Father vies against son, son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother, division, polarization, sheer helplessness to make peace like all people of conscience feel daily in our troubled times. In the end, it comes down to a planet full of short-sighted mortals looking for something less than God to worship. Meanwhile the one, true God grabs the clay of creation, turns it upside down, reshapes it, and tearfully calls beloved Adam, you and me, to come home.

Coming Home

Come home on earth as in heaven, now as in eternity. The division of which Jesus prophesied is not divine violence. Indeed, Jesus showed how God’s nonviolence conquers the world. Division and violence are sin’s final throes before it loses its grasp on us. Then we find ourselves held by God alone. Division and violence come at twilight before dawn. 

This gathering  at St. Peter’s is a parable of the hope to come. It is the hope toward which all good trouble points, of people united in worship if in nothing else. For if there is division today, it precedes communion, family, and beloved community with no boundaries tomorrow. As we love today as Jesus bid us love, crossing boundaries and not keeping score, conflict will come like a cross, but joy will come with the morning.

Related Posts

Three Dimensions of Peace and Peacemaking

Peacemaker in the Family: A Salute and a Challenge

Life in Kairos Time

Jesus’s Inaugural Address: Sermon on Luke 4:16-21 (22-30)

Dr. King’s Medicine: Love Your Enemies

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you (Matthew 5:9-12).