11th Sunday after Pentecost

James Dobson tells us to focus on the family. But when Jesus focuses on the family, he says, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace on earth. No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on, a family of five will be divided: three against two and two against three; father opposed to son and son to father, mother opposed to daughter and daughter to mother, mother-in-law opposed to daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law to mother-in-law."

People continue to talk about family values. But what are family values? Commitment to education and church? Commitment to hard work and ambition, to home and school as drug-free zones, to higher standards for reading and arithmetic, to biblical standards on sex, and to mom and dad and the kids doing things together?

And yet, here this morning in Luke's gospel, Jesus seems to be taking aim at the family: "I have not come to bring peace on earth, but division. From now on, a family of five will be divided: three against two, two against three; father opposed to son and son to father, mother to daughter and daughter to mother...."

What are we to make of this? Is this good news or bad news?

I think it's Jesus the realist talking. Or, perhaps it's St. Luke the realist.

The Gospels were written in a historical context of tremendous social and political upheaval, in a period of history, 30 to 70 years after the resurrection, when it was important, if you valued your skin, to remember who was in power, to know what was what and who was who.

Some Jews had become followers of Jesus, but others wanted nothing to do with him. Those who followed Jesus believed he was the Son of God; those who didn't follow him believed he was a blasphemer and a seditionist. And because the Romans, those in authority, the ones with the chariots and spears and power, saw Christians as insurrectionists and anarchists, as a danger to religion and peace and order, Jews who didn't follow Jesus wanted to put as much distance as possible between him and themselves.

So the Gospels were written at a time when, if you wanted to avoid trouble, or perhaps if you were seeking it, it was necessary to stand up and be counted. The questions in the public square at that time were these: Are you Caesar's friend, or not? Are you on the side of good, or of evil? Are you on the side of God, or of Satan? Are you one of the followers of this god Jesus, or not? Neither serious Jews who were followers of Jesus nor serious Jews who were not followers of Jesus would bend the knee to Caesar as a god, but those Jews who did not follow Jesus often enjoyed an exemption from being penalized for this unpatriotic act, while followers of Jesus did not. Judaism was a troublesome religion to the Romans, but it had been long established and was tolerated. Christianity, to the Romans, was just a sect.

Somewhere in my files, I have a letter written by a worried parent to a government official. In the letter, the worried father complains that his son, who had received the best education at the best schools, and who had been headed for a good job as a lawyer, had gotten involved with a strange religious sect. Members of this sect were now controlling his every move. They had taken all his money, and they told him whom he could date and whom he couldn't date.

The father is pleading with the government official to do something about this weird religious group. The letter wasn't complaining about the Moonies or the Branch Davidians or the Mormons. It was a letter from a third-century Roman parent who was concerned about a group called the Church.

What is truth? What is important in life, and what is not? What is good and what is evil? Who is God? Who is this man Jesus? Are you for Jesus, or for Caesar? These are questions that divide us. They always have. They divided us in the first and third centuries, and they divide us in the twenty-first. Sons often do not see things the way fathers do, nor daughters the way mothers do.

How many Catholic mothers and fathers in South Boston 75 years ago, or even yesterday, were thrilled when their daughters went away to college and fell in love with a young man from New York? And not only that! Not only was the young man not Catholic, he wasn't even Irish. His name was Cohen! How was this going to fly with Father Murphy and Grandmother Carroll?

How many parents and grandparents in Georgia or Mississippi or Texas, or even in Illinois or New York, were thrilled when their sons or daughters dropped out of school in the 1950s to march with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma or Montgomery or Birmingham? "Son, you don't know what you're doing! This race thing has been around as long as people have, and you can't change the world overnight." To many a mom and dad, it just made good sense to keep your head low and not make any waves, but to many of their sons and daughters not to do something was wrong.

How many parents and grandparents in Colorado or Utah or Arizona in the 1960s were thrilled when their sons chose jail or Canada rather than to serve in Vietnam in a war they believed to be unjust and immoral?

How many fathers and mothers, in all kinds of places, have planned for years to leave the insurance business or the law practice to their sons or daughters, only to have their children grow up wanting to have nothing to do with it? "Sorry, dad, I just don't have any interest in your kind of life."

Family values. The ways we look at life. What is good and what is evil? What is important and what is not? What is true and what is false? What are the limits of our allegiance to Caesar? Who is God? Is God?

People, especially across generations, have forever had trouble agreeing on the important things in life. Trouble agreeing on the importance of patriotism, trouble agreeing on the meaning of sex and sexuality and on the significance of race and nationality and of religion and church, trouble agreeing on the roles of men and women and on careers, trouble agreeing on the morality of nuclear weapons and of war and peace, trouble agreeing on the wisdom of stem cell research and the morality of cloning. And you, of course, can add some others things to the list, perhaps from your own families.

When Jesus says that he does not come to bring peace, but division, when Luke says that Jesus would divide the family, two against three and three against two, he is simply speaking the voice of reality. Jesus is that Word Jeremiah speaks about, a hammer which breaks the rock into pieces.

When people are faced with a man who claims to be God, when people are faced with a religious group that claims that the one they worship is the Way, the Truth, and the Life -- and the only way, and the only truth -- then, if there is such a thing as freedom, there is also going to be disagreement and conflict. Even in the family. Perhaps especially in the family. Life is just like that. Freedom is like that. It forces us to choose.

In his book, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1993), John Dominic Crossan sees Jesus' words about the family as a example of the revolutionary way Jesus rearranges power among us. Jesus is not attacking family serenity, Crossan says. Jesus is attacking power.

"The family," says Crossan, "is society in miniature, the place where we first and most deeply learn how to love and be loved, how to hate and be hated, how to help and be helped, how to abuse and be abused. [The family] is not just a center of domestic tranquility. Since [the family] involves power, it also invites the abuse of power, and it is at that precise point," says Crossan, "that Jesus attacks it." Because Jesus knows, above all, the value, the family value, of freedom and the integrity of the person.

Father Tom Woodward, a priest friend of mine who was the Episcopal Church chaplain at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and also the Rector of a small parish and residence for Episcopalian students, told me that one day the father of one of the students stormed into his office and said, "My son is losing his faith and his values here. I'm going to take him out of this place and send him some place else, or else take him home. Anywhere but the University of Wisconsin!" And Father Woodward said to the father, "No, Mr. Smith, your son is not losing his faith and his values here. He's losing your faith and your values, and finding his own."

As difficult as it sometimes is, as painful as it sometimes is, each generation must find its own truth, its own values, its own God. Or perhaps it's better to say that each generation must find truth and values and God in its own way. We can and we should, we inevitably will, hold our values out for our children. We can and we should, we inevitably will, model for them the traditions of our families and our nation. We can and we should, we inevitably will, offer them the truths of our religion and church and the understanding of God that we have. But whenever we try to impose our answers or our traditions or our understanding by force, emotional or otherwise, we have crossed the line from family values to family abuse.

Not because our answers and traditions may not be good or true, not because they may not be better than other answers or other values, but because of the way God made us. God made each of us free. Each of us is a person. And what it means to be a person is to be free to face the big questions of life and, ultimately, to have to answer them for ourselves. What it means to be a person is to be free to face reality and, for ourselves, to find the God of truth there.

When our children are young, we can teach them the Ten Commandments. And we should. We can even coerce them to recite them. But as they grow older, we cannot force them to obey them.

When they are young, we can require that our children learn and recite the Creed. And we should. But as they grow older, we cannot force them to believe it.

When they are young, we can teach our children the Lord's Prayer. But as they grow older, we cannot force them to pray it.

Of course, when our children are young, we model our family's values and impose answers to life's important questions more directly than when they are older: "Yes, you must brush you teeth every night. Watch me, I'll show you how. No, you may not stay out after dark. Yes, on Sundays you will go to church with us. That's what we do as a family on Sundays. No, you may not have a motorcycle. We think it's dangerous. Yes, you must say your prayers. You believe in God, don't you? Don't you want to thank God for all he has given you?"

These and other directives are all appropriate at certain stages in life. But we know, don't we, that with each passing year such directives must be modified if they are to make sense to our children. They must be modified to face the reality of the persons our sons and daughters are, if we are not, in fact, to abuse the persons they are becoming.

As our children grow, we must not only teach our children the Ten Commandments and the Creed and the Lord's Prayer. We must -- parents must, the Church must -- also teach them to face the questions of life which the Ten Commandments and the Creed and the Lord's Prayer all reflect, and we must help them learn to respond to these questions as free persons.

We can, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews urges, "fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith." We can point the next generation to the Jesus we see. But we cannot require our children to see the same thing.

Some of you will remember the story about the priest who was new to a parish, and how he decided to do something to get to know the small children. So he visited a Sunday School class one day. He thought it would be a good idea to try to break the ice with a game or a riddle, so he asked the children, "Can any of you tell me what is small and furry and has a long bushy tail?" There was silence. So he tried again. "This really isn't very hard. I'll bet some of you know what is small and furry and has a long bushy tail?" Finally, after another long and awkward silence, one little boy raised his hand and said, "Well, Father, I'm not sure. I know the answer is Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me."

We can point the next generation to the truth we see. But we cannot require our children to see the same thing.

Is this good news? Or is it bad news? You make the call.

I believe it's good news. Not because it is easy or painless. Sometimes it is very painful indeed. But it's good news because it's the truth. It's reality. It is freedom, and freedom is what makes love, the greatest of family values, possible.

When we, as free persons, act with integrity according to the truth we see, we become, and are, the person God created us to be. And when our sons and daughters, as free persons, act with integrity according to the truth they see, they become, and are, the persons God created them to be. The search for truth, if undertaken with integrity, is truth.

The New Testament says Jesus is the answer. We say Jesus is the answer. But if Jesus is the answer, what is the question? If the answer is important, then the questions must be equally important, equally permitted, equally desired, and freely responded to. Otherwise, God is only playing cruel games with us.

If Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, then the honest scrutiny of the hearts and the minds of our children will find him. We may point in his direction. We believe we should point in his direction. We believe we should, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews urges, "fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith." But we must "fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith," and point our children to him as well, not just because the Bible says so and because it's true, but, even more importantly, because we believe it is true, because it is our faith.

And our children, and everyone else, must see Jesus for themselves, and see him freely. Indeed, they cannot truly see him in any other way. And that's good news. It's good news, because, without that freedom, God would just be playing games with us, horrible games, abusive games. Because one of the most basic family values is freedom. And because freedom is what makes love possible, which is what God values above all else.

So I think the poster I once saw in a dentist's office had it right: "If you love someone, let him go. If he returns to you, he is yours forever. If he doesn't, he never was."

Isn't that what God does for us? Isn't the Bible the story of how God lets us go, even in our sin, precisely because he loves us. Whether we return to him is up to us, up to each of us. That's just the way free life is, the way loving life is.

And, as God said when he surveyed the creation and all his creatures, "Behold, it is very good."

It is very good for the reason Pastor Maclean says in A River Runs Through It. Those of you who have read that wonderful book will remember that Pastor Maclean has two sons. The older is conventional and dutiful, and becomes a scholar. But the younger son, Paul, is defiant and rebellious. He will not be molded to family expectations. He will not live his father's conventional life. He does not see life the way his father sees it. As a young boy, he did not even see eating oatmeal the way his father saw it, and later he does not see going to school or going to church or believing in God and Jesus and all that the way his father sees them. And ultimately, Paul falls in with a wild crowd, and he begins to gamble and drink, and he is killed in a fight.

And at his son's funeral, through his pain and grief and tears over his defiant and rebellious son, whom he could not understand, Pastor Maclean says, "It is one of the ironies of life that it is those we are closest to that we are least able to help or to understand, for often they either resist the help we want to offer or do not need it. "And so," he says, "it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we are still free to love them. And we are free to love completely, without complete understanding."

That's a family value that is worth more than any other God knows about. God made it. And it is very, very good.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.