Proper 15 - C The Chapel of Our Saviour Colorado Springs, Colorado August 19, 2007 Proper 15 – C Jeremiah 23:23-39 Hebrews 12:1-14 Luke 12:49-56 James Dobson still tells us to focus on the family, and people continue to talk a lot about family values. But what are family values? Commitment to education and hard work and ambition? Commitment to home and school as drug-free zones and to mom and dad and the kids walking hand-in-hand in the park? Commitment to the idealized, tranquil American family of four of the 1940s? When Jesus focuses on the family this morning, however, 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.” What are we to make of this? No picture of the tranquil 1940s family here. I think our Gospel reading this morning is simply Jesus the realist talking, Jesus speaking truth about real life. But is it good news or bad news? At the time Luke wrote his Gospel, thirty or forty years after the Resurrection, Jesus was the subject every Jewish grandmother forbade as a topic of conversation around the dinner table, because Jesus divided Jewish families. Jews believed it was blasphemous to bend the knee to Caesar as a god, and most of them also believed it was just as blasphemous to bend the knee to a man who had been killed on a cross. Because of their experience of the risen Christ, however, the first apostles, Jews to a man, believed Jesus was the Messiah God had sent in fulfillment of Scripture. Later, the apostle Paul also came to believe the same, and he joined the others in preaching Jesus as Lord to their fellow Jews. But many resisted. They did not see it the same way. So they were divided. Even within families they were divided. “What is important in life and what is not? What is good and what is evil? What is truth? Who is God? Who is this man Jesus? These are questions that divide us. They divided us in the first century, and they divide us in the twenty-first. Sons often do not see things the way fathers do, nor daughters-in-law the way mothers-in-law do. How many Roman Catholic mothers and fathers in South Boston seventy-five years ago, or even last week, 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 Jersey, were thrilled when their sons or daughters dropped out of school in the 1950s and 60s 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. 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 waves, but to many of their sons and daughters not to do something was to deny Jesus, who walks with us in our troubles. How many parents and grandparents in Colorado or Arizona in the 1960s were thrilled when their sons chose jail or Canada rather than serve in Vietnam in a war they believed to be unjust and immoral? The ways we look at life: What is important in life and what is not? What is true and what is false? What is good and what is evil? How is God calling me to live? Who is God? Is God? These are the questions that test every family, at least every family that is genuinely concerned about finding values that are worth living for, and maybe even dying for. People, especially across generations, have forever had trouble agreeing on the important things in life. Trouble agreeing on the meaning of patriotism, trouble agreeing on the meaning of sex and sexuality and on the significance of race and nationality and religion and church, trouble agreeing on the roles of men and women and on careers, trouble agreeing on the war in Iraq, trouble agreeing on the morality of stem cell research and 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, they are simply speaking with the voice of reality. Families have trouble agreeing on Jesus, because Jesus is that Word Jeremiah speaks about today – a hammer which breaks the rock into pieces, because some hear the Word of truth and receive him, while others reject him. When people are faced with a man who claims to be God’s Son, when people are faced with a religious group that claims that the one they worship is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, 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. Father Tom Woodward, a priest friend of mine who was the Episcopal Church chaplain at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, 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 somewhere else. 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, the children of each generation must struggle with God and with truth to find the values they themselves are to live with. But – and this is a very important “but” – but every child always begins his search with the faith his family and culture provide him to start with. There is no other way. I hear people say, ”I’m not going to influence my children about religion, because I want them to be free to make their own decisions about the importance of faith when they grow up. This is simply silly. No, it’s dangerously silly. It’s actually a denial that religion and faith are important. It’s like saying I don’t want to influence my children about good dental care, about whether they should learn to brush and floss, because I want them to be free to make that decision when they’re adults. We know, don’t we, that if they don’t learn and practice good dental care when they are young, they may not have any good teeth to care for when they are grown up, and indifference is just as deadly to religion and faith and truth as it is to physical health. We can and we should – we inevitably will, through either commitment or indifference – share our faith with our children. We can and we should, we inevitably will, offer them either the faith in God that we have or the absence of the faith we don’t have. So, of course, when our children are young, we model our family’s faith and traditions and give them 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 Sunday School and church with us. That’s what we do as a family on Sundays, because we believe God gave us Jesus and his Church as a way to learn about and practice what’s good and important in life. Yes, you must say your prayers. Don’t you want to thank God for all he has given you?” These and other directives are all necessary at the early stages of life. But we know, don’t we, that with each passing year such directives must be modified if they are to continue to be appropriate as our children grow. They must be modified to face the reality of the persons our sons and daughters are at any given age, if we are not, in fact, to abuse the persons they are becoming. As our children grow, we teach them the Ten Commandments and the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. But we must – parents must, the Church must – also teach them to face the difficult and critical questions of life which lie behind the Ten Commandments and the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and we must help them learn to respond to these questions as free persons. We teach our children, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews urges, to ”fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” We point the next generation to the Jesus we see. Not to do so would deny them the choice of Jesus later. But we cannot ensure that our children will see Jesus the same way we see him. 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, above all, Jesus knows the value, the family value, of freedom and the integrity of the person. Whenever we try to impose our generation’s answers or understanding of truth by force, emotional or otherwise, we have crossed the line from family values to family abuse. Not because our answers and traditions are not good and true, not because they are not better than other answers, 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 respond to 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. 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 our children to the truth we see. But we cannot ensure that they will see it the way we do. Is this good news? Or is it bad news? You are free; 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 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. But – here’s that very important “but” again – but our children need our help. They always begin with what we give them, and their search for Jesus will be futile if we do not provide them the story of Jesus to begin with. The New Testament says Jesus is the answer. We say Jesus is the answer. We tell our children – at least I hope we do – that the Bible is important because the biblical story is our story. We fix our children’s eyes on Jesus – at least I hope we do – because we believe Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Because we believe, in other words, that Jesus is that truth who is, in his life and death and resurrection, the most adequate way we have, as Lesslie Newbigin puts it, ”for grasping and coping with [the] reality [of life] with which all human beings are faced.” And 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 – if we ourselves give them a Jesus to see in the first place. So we lead our children to fix their eyes on Jesus, “the author and perfecter of our faith.” Not to do so would be to commit the sin of indifference to the God we have met and know in Jesus. But first, we must fix our eyes on Jesus as well, not just because the Bible says so but, even more importantly, because we believe it, because Jesus’ story – the story of love walking the earth, God’s story brought to completion in the world – is our story, because we believe Jesus brings us truth. But our children and everyone else must in the end see this truth 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. God makes us free because, for God, love is the most basic of family values, and without freedom love is not possible. And that’s why the poster I once saw in a dentist’s office had it right: “If you love someone,” it read, ”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 the life of love 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 acknowledges 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. Paul 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, a Presbyterian pastor, 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 the tears he sheds 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 adds, ”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 cares about. God made it. And it is very, very good. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Proper 15

The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
August 19, 2007

Proper 15 – C
Jeremiah 23:23-39
Hebrews 12:1-14
Luke 12:49-56

James Dobson still tells us to focus on the family, and people continue to talk a lot about family values. But what are family values? Commitment to education and hard work and ambition? Commitment to home and school as drug-free zones and to mom and dad and the kids walking hand-in-hand in the park? Commitment to the idealized, tranquil American family of four of the 1940s?

When Jesus focuses on the family this morning, however, 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.” What are we to make of this? No picture of the tranquil 1940s family here.

I think our Gospel reading this morning is simply Jesus the realist talking, Jesus speaking truth about real life. But is it good news or bad news?

At the time Luke wrote his Gospel, thirty or forty years after the Resurrection, Jesus was the subject every Jewish grandmother forbade as a topic of conversation around the dinner table, because Jesus divided Jewish families. Jews believed it was blasphemous to bend the knee to Caesar as a god, and most of them also believed it was just as blasphemous to bend the knee to a man who had been killed on a cross. Because of their experience of the risen Christ, however, the first apostles, Jews to a man, believed Jesus was the Messiah God had sent in fulfillment of Scripture. Later, the apostle Paul also came to believe the same, and he joined the others in preaching Jesus as Lord to their fellow Jews. But many resisted. They did not see it the same way. So they were divided. Even within families they were divided.

“What is important in life and what is not? What is good and what is evil? What is truth? Who is God? Who is this man Jesus? These are questions that divide us. They divided us in the first century, and they divide us in the twenty-first. Sons often do not see things the way fathers do, nor daughters-in-law the way mothers-in-law do.

How many Roman Catholic mothers and fathers in South Boston seventy-five years ago, or even last week, 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 Jersey, were thrilled when their sons or daughters dropped out of school in the 1950s and 60s 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. 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 waves, but to many of their sons and daughters not to do something was to deny Jesus, who walks with us in our troubles.

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

The ways we look at life: What is important in life and what is not? What is true and what is false? What is good and what is evil? How is God calling me to live? Who is God? Is God? These are the questions that test every family, at least every family that is genuinely concerned about finding values that are worth living for, and maybe even dying for.

People, especially across generations, have forever had trouble agreeing on the important things in life. Trouble agreeing on the meaning of patriotism, trouble agreeing on the meaning of sex and sexuality and on the significance of race and nationality and religion and church, trouble agreeing on the roles of men and women and on careers, trouble agreeing on the war in Iraq, trouble agreeing on the morality of stem cell research and 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, they are simply speaking with the voice of reality. Families have trouble agreeing on Jesus, because Jesus is that Word Jeremiah speaks about today – a hammer which breaks the rock into pieces, because some hear the Word of truth and receive him, while others reject him.

When people are faced with a man who claims to be God’s Son, when people are faced with a religious group that claims that the one they worship is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, 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.

Father Tom Woodward, a priest friend of mine who was the Episcopal Church chaplain at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, 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 somewhere else. 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, the children of each generation must struggle with God and with truth to find the values they themselves are to live with. But – and this is a very important “but” – but every child always begins his search with the faith his family and culture provide him to start with. There is no other way.

I hear people say, ”I’m not going to influence my children about religion, because I want them to be free to make their own decisions about the importance of faith when they grow up. This is simply silly. No, it’s dangerously silly. It’s actually a denial that religion and faith are important. It’s like saying I don’t want to influence my children about good dental care, about whether they should learn to brush and floss, because I want them to be free to make that decision when they’re adults. We know, don’t we, that if they don’t learn and practice good dental care when they are young, they may not have any good teeth to care for when they are grown up, and indifference is just as deadly to religion and faith and truth as it is to physical health.

We can and we should – we inevitably will, through either commitment or indifference – share our faith with our children. We can and we should, we inevitably will, offer them either the faith in God that we have or the absence of the faith we don’t have.

So, of course, when our children are young, we model our family’s faith and traditions and give them 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 Sunday School and church with us. That’s what we do as a family on Sundays, because we believe God gave us Jesus and his Church as a way to learn about and practice what’s good and important in life. Yes, you must say your prayers. Don’t you want to thank God for all he has given you?”

These and other directives are all necessary at the early stages of life. But we know, don’t we, that with each passing year such directives must be modified if they are to continue to be appropriate as our children grow. They must be modified to face the reality of the persons our sons and daughters are at any given age, if we are not, in fact, to abuse the persons they are becoming.

As our children grow, we teach them the Ten Commandments and the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. But we must – parents must, the Church must – also teach them to face the difficult and critical questions of life which lie behind the Ten Commandments and the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and we must help them learn to respond to these questions as free persons.

We teach our children, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews urges, to ”fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” We point the next generation to the Jesus we see. Not to do so would deny them the choice of Jesus later. But we cannot ensure that our children will see Jesus the same way we see him.

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, above all, Jesus knows the value, the family value, of freedom and the integrity of the person.

Whenever we try to impose our generation’s answers or understanding of truth by force, emotional or otherwise, we have crossed the line from family values to family abuse.

Not because our answers and traditions are not good and true, not because they are not better than other answers, 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 respond to 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.

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 our children to the truth we see. But we cannot ensure that they will see it the way we do.

Is this good news? Or is it bad news? You are free; 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 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. But – here’s that very important “but” again – but our children need our help. They always begin with what we give them, and their search for Jesus will be futile if we do not provide them the story of Jesus to begin with.

The New Testament says Jesus is the answer. We say Jesus is the answer. We tell our children – at least I hope we do – that the Bible is important because the biblical story is our story. We fix our children’s eyes on Jesus – at least I hope we do – because we believe Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Because we believe, in other words, that Jesus is that truth who is, in his life and death and resurrection, the most adequate way we have, as Lesslie Newbigin puts it, ”for grasping and coping with [the] reality [of life] with which all human beings are faced.”

And 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 – if we ourselves give them a Jesus to see in the first place.
So we lead our children to fix their eyes on Jesus, “the author and perfecter of our faith.” Not to do so would be to commit the sin of indifference to the God we have met and know in Jesus. But first, we must fix our eyes on Jesus as well, not just because the Bible says so but, even more importantly, because we believe it, because Jesus’ story – the story of love walking the earth, God’s story brought to completion in the world – is our story, because we believe Jesus brings us truth.

But our children and everyone else must in the end see this truth 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.

God makes us free because, for God, love is the most basic of family values, and without freedom love is not possible. And that’s why the poster I once saw in a dentist’s office had it right: “If you love someone,” it read, ”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 the life of love 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 acknowledges 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. Paul 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, a Presbyterian pastor, 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 the tears he sheds 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 adds, ”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 cares about. God made it. And it is very, very good.

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