Sermon: 10TH Sunday after Pentecost 2025

Texts: Luke 12:49-56, Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Jeremiah 23:23-29

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, reflecting on how even after the harrowing experiences of the Second World War, in itself an experience of disillusionment about humanity’s civilizational progress, that even after that humanity was still preparing itself for more destruction and ruin in the form of nuclear weapons, he wrote the following : “When we consider humanity and how it passed through these war years, did it not prove with astounding toughness, that all this did not affect it fundamentally? We have experienced the most frightful things, but man is not broken by the lords who are not the Lord.” Those horrible memories, instead of inspiring a more united humanity, a more repentant disposition, even a repudiation of violence and bloodshed, provoked it’s opposite still. An attitude that even today we are suffering from, of old divisions and rivalries, of conflicts over ideology and who gets to have power. Division often brings conflict. Barth wrote that statement because he was also highlighting how as Christians we confess that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the exceptional reality to which humanity is faced with. In a world with many powers competing for domination over others,

Christ reveals the ultimate power from God Our Creator which rests over all of humanity. And those many powers rather ignore this authority in favor of their own little fiefdom. Confessing Christ means then a kind of difference and therefore sometimes a cause of division in a world like this. Confessing Christ as Lord will provoke in humanity an ultimate confrontation or division between God’s Way and Our ways. We are always being confronted with allegiances to worldly powers instead of God, and yet none of these earthly powers have the capacity to compel us to truly change from within the heart, to see beyond domination into beloved community, and to transform our lives to their ultimate purpose of love for it’s own sake, since God is Love. Often they lead us to the same old ditch of sin and death. They often rely and manipulate our worst instincts rather than our best; they appeal to our finite self-interest, instead of God’s eternally rewarding compassion. But God, the power beyond all power, revealed in the life of Christ, is the difference that confronts humanity with the ways of God. Borrowing a phrase from the film A hidden life from Terrence Mallick: “Christ’s Life is a demand”.

It is not strange then that Christ spoke as He spoke in today’s Gospel reading. Christ is the gentle shepherd, but He also is the prophet that speaks God’s judgement and justice. And so, when Christ says: “”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!”. Jesus is declaring that He has come with a purpose. Here we can see the shadow of the Cross being raised in this pronouncement, as Christ has come with a mission that will turn the world upside down. God’s Word manifested in Christ is like a fire, not in the sense of wanton destruction, but of purification and judgement. Jesus’ ministry is in the spirit of what the prophet Jeremiah said in today’s first reading: “Am I a God near by, says the LORD, and not a God far off?… Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” Imagine what it means for God to be near and witnessing our ways! Christ is God in the Flesh, God being near to us and showing us the way in the face of our waywardness. And when He speaks, it is a word of power, and these words can be piercing. They can burn. They can melt the hardness of our hearts. They can reveal to us our lack of love and mercy. They can purify and make us see the truth. And with the truth, we are thus compelled to draw a line on the side of truth. Thus, in the light of Christ’s truth, we can witness the truth of our moral failings, to act in a spirit of repentance, befitting the grace we have

received in Christ. We can witness the truth of Christ’s teaching of love and mercy, to stand always in light of His heart’s desire for the weak and the oppressed. We can witness the truth of grace, that God forgives and loves us, and thus we need not participate in a constant depreciation of any human person including ourselves.

Beloved, as Christians, we stand for something. We believe, we confess, Christ Jesus as Lord of our life. And that can be cause for division, even if we don’t desire it. That is a hard truth. To follow Christ means to stand where He stands. And even if we love all people, a gift that I believe God invites us to desire in our walk with Him, our same allegiance to Christ compels us to not stand with everybody in the same place. As Jeremiah declares: “what does wheat have in common with straw?” In the same way, let us not make the neighbor stumble by contorting the Christian life to something that it is not. To confuse our Christian identity with allegiances to earthly powers that abuse other human beings, or with those that peddle lies about others, or with those that believe in might makes right, or those that are self-seeking in detriment to the poor. Christ’s life, with it’s abounding grace, also demands of us to stand with Him in the midst of the world’s clamoring conflicts. And we should expect, that the world will not agree with Christ and His radical ways. I

remember an anecdote from a Southern Baptist Pastor, this was a few years ago, when He preached on Jesus’ sermon on the mount, and was later confronted by a congregant. This congregant rejected the message of Jesus’ most famous sermon to the pastor’s face saying that such a message was “weak” and “does not work”, considering that if Jesus was a “liberal” as he understood it, then he didn’t agree. One thing that Jesus does not do, is provoke lukewarm responses. He brings fire, and He will elicit a response from us and where we place our trust.

Beloved, I recognize that talking of division in an already extremely divided society is tricky. And these divisions are lived so closely, in our families and friendships, in the eroded trustworthiness of political and social institutions. Yet, as Christians who are working in the name of Christ for a more united and loving humanity, a redeemed image that reflects our Lord, we cannot pretend that we accept things we are not called to believe in. We can build bridges across divisions, we can be promoters of peace and dialogue, if we stand in our truth that Christ call us to a path of justice and mercy, that anything that does not reflect that love and mercy outpoured to us, cannot coexist neatly with the identity of being Christian. Indeed, the word of God is purifying fire, refining hearts for the greater purpose of a love that is ablaze with the Holy Spirit.

We are not called to be tepid in our love. To love rightly, we must call out what divides, and not live under false and fragile unity. True unity is lived in truth, forgiveness, humility and repentance. To know when we are wrong and to name what is right in the eyes of God. To admit that we as human beings are fallible, that our reasoning might be faulty, and not possess the full picture. Christ being the Lord above the lords of this world, provides us the full picture of God, which seeks to bring us all together with the cords of true universal love. Through Him, we can wade through the conflicts with a different spirit, not with domination, but with the eternal view of God which sees the potential of changing our ways, of enemies becoming friends on the terms of justice and goodness.

Let us then take heed of Jesus’ warning: “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a contemporary way of stating this warning: “We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers…When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men”. Indeed, some nations of the world have amassed great material power, and yet have not taken in the signs of God in our time, the signs that have been blazing since Jesus

walked on this earth on 1st century Palestine; Christ’s inauguration of the Kingdom of God in our midst, slowly growing in the hearts of human beings through the love and grace of God. Christ was ablaze and yearning for the completion of this redemption, and He went the extra mile through conflict, division, rejection, onwards on the path of love. The world crucified Him for it. And God raised Him up again so that we might now, death and destruction do not have the final word. Jesus always reveals the alternative way of God, even through difficult division and conflict. May we be empowered to do the same in our own time, to look to God, so that we may not be misguided in our times, so that the unity we are working for is founded on the solid foundation of God’s love, and thus answer with the humble clarity that comes with Christ’s demand. Let us pray: