When There Is No Peace

13 Pentecost, Cp15,August 18, 2013

Jeremiah 23:23-29  Psalm 82

Hebrews 12:1 – 14  Luke 12:49-56

Lectionary Link

  There are all sorts of bad occurrences in life and if we are fortunate we are able to have an abundance of good things happen to us that not only even the score with bad occurrences but also tip the scales in favor of lives where we can have liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

  As people with basic actuarial probability common sense, we can see in our world what seems to be an uneven distribution of good and bad occurrences in the lives of the people of this world.  In America, we think that we’ve been fortunate for the most part in that we come to a place in our national experience where we get more than our fair share of the good occurrences that can happen to people.  We either feel proud of our heritage or blessed by sheer good fortune.

  We know that our country may sometime seem like a divided family, in political and economic terms.  And as bothered as we get in our own country, we cannot help but feel the divisions on the streets in the Egypt, in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, in various African countries and other parts in our world.  And lest we feel too isolated from this world pain, we need to remember that perhaps as many as 750,000 Americans died in our greatest family dispute, the Civil War.  We dare not be too proud about the ways in which we have handled our own country’s internal disputes.

  It is a fact of history as long as we can remember that people have disagreed and people have ended up harming each other for the beliefs which they held to be the most important for their well-being.

  We have a doctrine of sin to give us a great causal explanation as to why people and even families come to internal strife.

  Churches, mosques, synagogues, families, countries and nations all have come to strife.  And we do not really know how to come to meaning regarding the strife when it happens.  Historians with 20/20 hindsight views believe that they can find reasons and causes as to why people have come to strife with each other.

  One of the meanings that people find within strife is a belief that we are under discipline as students of the God of life.  Painful things happen as lessons to make us better.  Life in part is an ordeal for growth.

  In the early Gospel communities, one could find people who believed that they experienced an incredible excellent event; they believed that this teacher and prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, had been cruelly killed.  But they also believed that they experienced the risen Christ as a reality which created a new community experience.

  Fire is a biblical symbol for purification.  The Risen Christ, as an oracle within the Gospel communities spoke insights through their leaders about the situation of the early Gospel communities.

  Families were divided by faith, religious practice, religious beliefs and doctrines.  The Jewish religion had parties that followed the teachings and practices of various prominent rabbis, scribes and religious figures who had inherited their teachings from earlier teachers.  Each rabbi took from a former rabbi the teachings and applied those teaching in a way that gained a following or maintained certain traditions.  Rabbi Jesus had a sort of established school and set of practices within Judaism.  What would the teaching of Rabbi Jesus become outside of Palestine?  And how would Judaism become altered by the followers of Jesus who were not Jews?  Certain innovations would make the followers of Jesus unacceptable to the existing strands of Judaism.  Dispensing with circumcision and dietary laws and Jewish feast days, were innovations that would cause family members to to become divided.

  The Gospel communities had to account for the pain of division within Judaism and from the  pain of the separation of the Gospel communities from the synagogues.

  This is the fire; this is the division not peace that the oracle of Christ gave to the early Gospel communities.

  Why is a family divided for religious reasons?  I thought religion was about peace.  I thought that Jesus was the Prince of Peace; I thought that angels said “Peace on earth” at his birth.

  Is this purifying fire a satisfactory metaphor of explanation for us as to why people are not at peace?

Sometimes we are naïve about the Gospel and Scriptures.  Since we believe they are inspired we wrongly believe that they actually cause things to be the way that things are; we should rather believe them inspired because they are written by persons who looked for profound meaning to the recurring issue of division within every community that has ever existed.

  Let us come to the insight today regarding division and the purifying fire of life experience.  In freedom each of us has arisen in our situation as unique persons on unique educational paths.  And we seem to share some education paths more closely with some and less closely with others.  Unique education experiences mean that there can be such uneven educational paths in human experience that we truly seem to be unable to understand each other and we can come to painful disagreements and divisions.

  Faith means that we come to accept the uneven patterns of educational developments in the lives of people, even to the point of knowing that pain, disagreement and division are inevitable.  What we have hoped for in our country is to preserve the right of people to be on different religious and educational paths.  I think we have learned this better in our country than was known by the early Gospel communities; we have learned it  better than when religious communities have united the sword and interpretations of  holy books to force uniformity and persecute and burn heretics.

  Let us appreciate today, the struggle of faith and honor the uneven development in how people come to know reality of God and the practice of the insight that God is love.  Let us honor the freedom of people being different in their faith experiences as well as different in all manner of human experience.  Let us honor difference with laws that protect the freedom of everyone while at the same protecting the vulnerable and those without the means to protect themselves.  We hope that the fire of division in our world is a purifying of people learning to be educated away from ignorance and selfishness which causes the suffering in our world.

  In faith we pray again today that suffering will have redemptive outcomes for people to become better able to practice love and justice.  I believe that the Risen Christ as an oracle for us today would inspire us to the further practice of love and justice.  Amen.