Luke 12:49-56
Some years ago, I was at a meeting for a national church committee on which I was serving, and during a break in our work I asked one of the other pastors what he was preaching on the next Sunday. That’s how pastors make small talk.
He told me he was preaching on Luke 12:49-56, and he was none too happy about it. He told me that he had been avoiding this passage for 30 years. Whenever it came around in the lectionary, he would look for something else to preach on, because this one made him too uncomfortable. But he had reached the point where his avoidance of it was making him even more uncomfortable, so he was going in. He would gird his loins and dive in.
It’s a good thing he finally did that, because this is one the church needs to hear, frequently. There are no people in the world more conflict-averse than church people. We firmly believe in the commandment Moses brought down from the mountain: Thou shalt be nice.
And so we really don’t understand why Jesus is being so mean here.
He says that he will bring division within households – father against son, mother against daughter, and so on. And that really hurts, because we know all about conflict amongst our loved ones. Mothers who won’t speak to their daughters because of some argument from years ago. No one quite remembers what it was about or why it was so important yet, nonetheless, the anger and hurt are as fresh as ever. Sons who cut off contact with their fathers for reasons that remain unspoken and, therefore, unable to be reconciled. Brothers who divide over business disputes and only speak to one another through their lawyers. We know about conflict amongst loved ones.
We know about conflict among church members. The ones who just stop coming and we wonder why, if it was something that we did or said, but are afraid to ask. We know about the pastors who get pushed out – maybe it was their own fault, maybe not. In any case, it left wounds on the body that are hard to heal. We know about conflict. But how it hurts to hear Jesus say that this conflict comes from him, and that he meant to inflict it.
It is a dangerous thing for him to say. Because as much as we hate it, it’s true: We always have conflict.
And often it is about the most unimportant things.
Many a congregation has been brought to the brink of civil war over the matter of carpeting. Or paint color. These are classic church conflicts – things that seem so small. It is always surprising when they turn out to be so big.
Horror stories abound. Someone once told me that if their church ever started clapping, they would leave. Someone else told me that their congregation split apart because they disagreed about the music. One church I knew split apart because the senior pastor and the assistant pastor couldn’t get along, everyone had to choose a side – or so they thought.
Sometimes you listen to these stories and think, “Really? This is the thing you are willing to break the body of Christ for?” You think Jesus died on the cross for this?
And the answer is almost always no. Because rarely can you point to one thing. The presenting problem, whatever it is, is not usually the real problem. The real problem is the stress fractures.
A stress fracture is a tiny hidden fracture. It’s when a bone gets a very small crack in it – so small you might not even know it’s there. Maybe your foot swells up a bit, maybe it’s painful to walk on, even painful to touch. But you can’t really see anything wrong with it, so you just keep going, ignoring it until you can’t.
So it is with the body of Christ. I knew a congregation where they liked to say, with a mix of humility and pride, that they never have conflict. They just don’t. But what that meant was that they always have conflict.
It’s true. Because if you don’t acknowledge the little conflicts, the stress fractures, they don’t go away. They only multiply. Before you know it, you have a hundred stress fractures zigzagging through the body.
And then something happens – big or small, it can be anything. Maybe it starts as a trivial thing. But to the surprise of everyone, it grows and grows. The conflict can’t be hidden, can’t be smoothed over, it demands change.
A pastor who does interim work was describing an interview he had with the elders of a congregation who were considering hiring him. Oddly enough, they weren’t asking him many questions; they were telling him everything they didn’t want.
They said, “Don’t tell us we need to change.” They said, “Don’t get into politics.” They said, “Don’t talk to us about healing. We’ve heard it all before.”
They had heard it all before. All of it, apparently, they had heard before and they didn’t like it. This was a church that was still hanging together. But it was as though they were a bowl that had been shattered in a hundred pieces and scotch-taped back together again. It was nominally intact, but it wasn’t going to be very useful.
They might do better to just hang it up. Turn out the lights, lock the door. Take down the sign and call it done, because in their pain they have decided not to be the body of Christ anymore in any meaningful way.
There does come a time, tragically, when conflict is just too hard to tolerate and there is nothing left to do but split. Divide. Fracture the body.
The story of a church that breaks apart might not be that different from the story of a marriage that ends, I think. If you sit them down and ask them, when did it start? How did it happen? It would be hard to say.
This stuff happens, we know. But it hurts to think of it as something that God intends. Where do we look to understand this immensely troublesome notion?
Perhaps we need to look at the cross. That is definitely what Jesus was looking at.
Listen to him. “What stress I am under until it is completed!” And we know that, as Luke would say, Jesus has turned his face toward Jerusalem, and everything that means for him: confrontation with the priests at the temple, clashes with religious and civil authorities, tensions among his followers, betrayal, denial, arrest, torture, rebuke by his own people, and finally death on a cross.
Conflict of the most intense and painful and powerful kind. And would we dare suggest that this is not necessary?
William Penn, good Quaker, founding father of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and champion of freedom, said this: “No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.” He wrote these words while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London because of his religious convictions, which were in conflict with the Church of England. I remember these words every single Holy Week; words that speak to the truth that there is no peace without conflict; no salvation without rejection; no glory without struggle.
Crisis is actually a part of God’s plan. The word comes from the word crux, a word we use to talk about the essence of something, the nub of truth therein. When we refer to the crux of the matter, we are saying here is the glimmer of truth in this particular problem.
But did you know that crux is also the Latin word for cross, from which we might understand that the cross is not just an unfortunate thing that happened – it is the essence of God’s plan of salvation.
Conflict cannot be swept under a rug and forgotten. Brokenness cannot be patched up with tape and ignored. True reconciliation with God requires a willingness to face the brokenness in ourselves and others, to confess and to forgive, to speak our truth and listen to another’s truth. None of these are easy. It is sorely tempting to opt for the easier path, but the easier path will not take us where we want to go.
To be the church of Jesus Christ demands that we follow his path and that means we will walk into conflict at times. That we will be confronted with changes that are not to our liking. That we will need to forgive, and probably, ask for forgiveness.
We probably won’t want to.
We will probably look for that easier way. We will fall back on the old knee-jerk reactions to problems: resist; get angry; find multiple things to get upset about and pick fights with one another; or walk away. But these reactions will not be helpful and they will never get us to reconciliation.
So what can we do? What should we do? I offer you three words:
1.Be realistic. Life is change and change brings conflict. In fact, the presence of conflict is the sign that change is happening. Simply understanding this is helpful.
2. Be hopeful. In some families, some communities, where things have been pretty stable for a good while, they are ripe for change. There are bound to be negative reactions to the change. However, change is necessary for life to exist, so take it as a good sign if people are unhappy. It could be a sign of life.
3. Be kind. Not necessarily nice, just kind. We know there will be disputes. We know there will be divisions. We know that when there are changes there will be the possibility of some people being wounded by it. But we can make a choice to respond with kindness and love to whatever comes our way.
We really do know how to read the signs, this is what Jesus is telling us. And with God’s help, we will.
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