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The Rev. Matthew Dayton-Welch
St. David’s Episcopal Church, Radnor
August 14, 2016
LUKE 12: 49-56
“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with
which to be baptized, and what stress 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?
What does it mean to be made in the image of
God?
The opening chapter of Genesis tells us that God
said, “Let us make humankind in our image,
according to our likeness,” and the narrator
continues, “So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them.”1
In the image of God he created us. But we look
so different, you and I, and we have dissimilar
attributes. I smile a lot, I’m bald, and I’ve got a belly.
If I was made in the image of God, then Buddha is a
much more fitting image than the svelte, long-haired
Jesus I always grew up seeing in children’s books.
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Genesis 1: 26-27 (NRSV)
To be made in the image of God is not to look
like God. We are male and female, we are white and
brown and black and blonde and gray and bald and
furry. We are in shape, and we are out of shape. Our
ages span a century. We come from every corner of
the world, we speak a thousand languages, we are
short, we are tall, and some of us can win gold
medals.
These are not the attributes that bind us. We are
made in God’s image, all of us, and so there are God
attributes that transcend all of our more common
descriptors. These are who God is.
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Let’s try this: What does God do?2 God creates.
Okay, there is one. Any parent out there must surely
marvel at the miracle that is procreation, and any
artist must step back and ponder how the blank
canvas became so full. God forgives. That one is
harder, but we rarely ever regret it once we’ve done it.
God hopes. God would not have sent Jesus to live
and dwell among us—God would not have sent
prophets and martyrs and saints and grandparents—if
God did not hope for the future, and who we could
be.
God loves. That’s the most important attribute
God has. God loves, relentlessly. And so to be made
in God’s image is to love—no matter where you’re
from or what you look like—it is to hope, is to
forgive, is to create beauty, be it a symphony or a
smile on cashier’s face.
So what.
I mean, it’s an obvious point, in a way. Families
can fail us, but God never does.
But if that’s the message Jesus intended to send,
he could have just said that. “Remember, friends,
God loves you more.” But what would that have
done? It’s a nice motif to fall back on when family
members create headaches—“God loves me more
than my resentful sister does”—but it doesn’t
empower any sense of hope for the families that we
have now, on earth. And besides, that’s frankly not
what Jesus says.
These attributes transcend our diversity. They are
the God attributes that bind us, that make us one
family in God. Membership in this family comes
from our baptism, and it supersedes all other
affiliations and commitments. The love of a parent
mirrors God’s love; it does not compete with it. A
parent’s love is the reflection of the love that the
Father has for the Son, an aspiring remake of the love
Mary showed the infant Christ.
Jesus is near venomous. “I came to bring fire to
the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! Do
you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division!” He is laying into
the disciples and to the crowds. This gospel lesson is
part of a sermon in Luke’s Gospel, a continuation of
last week’s reading when Jesus warns his followers to
be ready. Jesus’s sermon has its comforting
moments, like when he tells the disciples not to worry
about their lives. “Consider the ravens; consider the
lilies,” he encourages.4 But this text today is not
encouraging to them. His message is becoming more
ominous, more foreboding.
When Jesus, then, tells his disciples as he does in
today’s Gospel that his message will divide families,
he’s arguing that the entrenched family structures of
Biblical Palestine are no match for the divine order.
This is why he so often breaks those family structures.
“Jesus replied, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my
brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here
are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does
the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and
sister and mother.’”3
And the crowds step back. They’ve enjoyed all the
inspiring bits, but this is now starting to cut to the
bone, and it’s intimidating, and threatening. They
have come to hear good news and instead Jesus is
threatening to split families like firewood. Peter
inquires, “Lord, are you telling this for us or for
everyone?”5 Peter, never appreciating a good
metaphor and now astounded at his Lord’s teachings,
would just assume Jesus return to the lilies. At least
they kept the crowds happy.
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Attrib. to the Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson, General Theological
Seminary, 2015.
3 Mark 3: 33-35 (NRSV)
4 Luke 12: 24-27 (NRSV)
Luke 12: 41 (NRSV)
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But Jesus knows the story of salvation is a
tumultuous one, brimming with joy and suffering,
swirled together, like coffee and milk, or water and
wine. They are indivisible. If Jesus’s message only
speaks to one half of the human experience, then he
is a divine clown, come to cheer up but not to save.
Jesus’s message therefore is clear: do not sugarcoat
my ministry. Do not water me down. Do not
relegate me to proverbs and fortunes, tweets and
Hallmark cards.
Jesus’s message therefore is clear: do not
sugarcoat my ministry.
I am more than that. You are more than that.
The love that we share—that most holy of
attributes—is a love that permeates the whole of the
human experience. It is a tenacious, bombastic,
irrational love. It is not quaint, it is not qualified. It is
not limited by politics or social norms or family
systems. It oozes hope into the darkest corners of
our world, oozes like wine and wafer down the throat.
It is ambitious. It is revolutionary. It is unafraid.
“I came to bring fire to the earth,” Jesus said,
“and how I wish it were already kindled!”
This is the God-love that you and I inherit in our
baptism, that we share with one another, and with our
God, who came and lived as one of us, suffering at
our hands, and dying on the cross. If God’s love was
cheerful, then Jesus would have died an old man. But
God’s love is real, unadulterated, unwilling to bend,
just like the cross on which God’s love was
manifested.
Recently I attended a funeral, and a fitting but
uncommon passage from the book Ecclesiastes was
read. “For everything there is a season, and a time for
every matter under heaven.” You know the passage.
“A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant,
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Ecclesiastes 3 (NRSV)
and a time to pluck up what is planted . . .”6 I always
edited this passage in my own head, deeming which
of these phrases was palatable and which were not. A
time to heal, yes, but a time to kill? A time to love,
most definitely, but a time to hate? A time for war?
Hearing this fresh again at the funeral struck me
deeply. Why was this in the Bible? How can this jive
with the God of love that I grew up with, that I heard
in Sunday school as a child, and in which I take
comfort? The faith I inherited is one that loves
merrily, one that never cared to think much about sin
and evil, even though Jesus talks about those things a
fair amount. I instead relished in God’s cheery, blithe
love. A love that called me to be nice, led by a drum
major who once said, “Love your neighbor as
yourself.” That kind of love was more about being
pleasant than passionate, neighborly in the truest
sense. And good fences make good neighbors.
But blithe love often looks the other way when it
sees evil. It doesn’t want to make a fuss. It doesn’t
want to cause a scene. It likes the good fence. Blithe
love doesn’t inherently run towards evil. It prides
itself in keeping its distance from such indecent
matters. And that’s where blithe love fails.
Blithe love will never stand up for you. It will
never call out injustices in our common life, nor seek
out unexplored opportunities to respect the dignity of
every human being. It will never save you and me
from ourselves. Blithe love calls us to be happy and
frequently complacent. It does not cajole us to be the
children of God we are made to be.
And God’s love should cajole. It should make us
shudder, like cold water in the veins, just like it did to
those first listeners in today’s gospel. “I have a
baptism with which to be baptized,” Jesus said, “and
what stress I am under until it is completed!” It is a
love that willingly suffers abuse and death, only to
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establish resurrection, and call that baptism, and invite
everyone of us into it.
It is a love that makes us shudder, because it
challenges us to be more. It is a bold love that seeks
each of us out, that lifts each of us up, and that calls
us to do the same to one another. A brave love that
wades into the rubble of our common life and digs us
each out, resuscitating us with Holy Spirit forced into
our lungs, our chest pumped to a divine rhythm: “I
love you! I love you! I love you!”
If this is the attribute of God—not just love but a
dogged, indefatigable love—then it is the attribute
that we share as well. It is at the core of who we are,
because it is at the core of who God is.
If this is the attribute of God—not just
love but a dogged, indefatigable love—
then it is the attribute that we share as
well.
And it is at the core of who the church is and
who the church can be. A church founded on
dogged love is a church that knows its very viability
hinges on its willingness to speak up for and serve the
most marginalized, the most vulnerable, a church that
honors our baptismal vows to seek out Christ in all
persons and to honor that Christ. It is church that
reclaims from the modern world those issues rooted
in Scripture that affect our common life, a church that
argues respect for the dignity of every human being is
a holy task, not a partisan one.
It is a church that stands for you, and for me, now
and in the tribulations to come.
And that is the church God calls us to be, because
that is the God attribute we share.
What makes us a family is our sacred mandate to
stand for one another—even when we disagree with
one another—because we know our Lord stood with
us, stood for us, through death and into resurrection.
And at our very own last days, Christ will stand
alongside us at the foot of throne of God, and say,
“This is my child, whom you created and whom I
have loved from the beginning of time. This child
saw our image in all whom you have created. This
child was not afraid of the capacity of our love, but
emboldened by it.”
And God the Father will respond, “Welcome
home, sister. Welcome home, brother. You did
well.”