I would like all of you to close your eyes for a few seconds and picture most of the images of Jesus you have seen all your life. How many of them show a calm, peaceful Jesus? Perhaps smiling, or looking peacefully out at you. Maybe it's the popular image of Jesus the Good Shepherd, calmly carrying that lost sheep over his shoulders.
Now here Jesus speak: "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!...Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!"
Shocking isn't it? The fact is that American Christianity has tended to do it's best to tame and calm our image of Jesus for the past 100 years. With Christianity in ascendance so much that we could add the word "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance without a fight, there was no need to look at the less friendly words of Jesus. We thought we had no one left to convince so we simply showed Jesus as our buddy, our friend. He is our co-pilot, the footsteps beside you, the Man holding you while you were at bat for the first time in Little League.
The problem is, when you put forth this image of Jesus, you end up forgetting a basic fact of His life – He came into the world and it rejected him consistently until it put Him to death.
Yes, Jesus was a loving Man who showed endless mercy and love to those around Him, but he never minced words. He knew he was preaching to a world that would reject Him during his life on Earth because he was preaching what God wanted, not what man wanted. As a reading through our history in Holy Scripture will show, we consistently chose ourselves over God. When God sends His prophets to preach repentance and a return to the Ways of the Lord... well, we usually kill them.
Into this world Jesus was born, to call the world back to the Lord and redeem fallen mankind. This was certainly not a peaceful mission. Jesus came on a mission that resulted in an entire reordering of the cosmos, forever altering the connection between mankind and God.
This was a big change, and we Episcopalians know, people tend be slightly resistant of change.
In today's shocking Gospel passage Jesus is addressing his followers. It seems that some of those following Jesus thought this might actually be an easy mission, where things would just fall into place. People would encounter Jesus and simply follow him. But Jesus could see into the heart of mankind and knew that his offer of a new, redeemed world that followed God and not the will of man, would not be accepted by many.
Jesus' predictions of households being split in two came to bear during his earthly ministry and even more intensely in the immediate years after his Resurrection and Ascension. The religion of Israel was torn in two by those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah and those who did not.
Now through the next two millennia Christianity grew to become the predominant faith of the world, yet it never forgot its radical nature. Jesus word's of division made sense to His followers, because to follow Jesus was always seen as radical act, a choice to accept God's grace and follow Him over and against our own sinful wills and desire. As St. Augustine put it, there have always been two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. Even with Christianity growing each and every century of these millennia, that choice was always there. Christians were always confronted with brothers and sisters and who chose the City of Man, and their own will and desires over that of God.
Yet something strange happened here a 100 years ago. We got a bit conceited and thought the battle was over. We thought there was simply no one left in the Western World who hadn't chosen the City of God over the City of Man. So we got lazy. Having declared victory, we forgot that our own sinful will would always be a temptation. But because we didn't think we needed to hear it, we stopped remembering the challenging words of Christ, we only remembered Him smiling and encouraging us, because we couldn't possibly be doing anything that would make Him challenge us!
So here we are today, and it's abundantly clear that we have residency in the City of God, but we live in the City of Man.
The teachings Jesus, His Holy Apostles and his Holy Church have given to us still challenge us in the Church and in the World today. I could go through and list each and every issue that Bible and the Church have laid out where the difference between our desire and God's desire is, but I don't think that would be all that helpful, because it really boils down to that one question: Do you choose yourself or do you choose God?
During my years as an atheist I was firmly in the camp of those who chose themselves. As someone who refused to believe in anything bigger than mankind, I used my own thoughts, my own intellect as the final guide and arbiter on all things. I refused to believe in any universal standard of good or bad, right or wrong. This lead me to a very narcissistic life when I made myself a god capable of judgment. It led to unfair judgments on others and a morality based around what was easy for me and my friends.
C.S. Lewis tells us in his book Mere Christianity that he was the saddest man in all of England the first night he got down on his knees and prayed, and that sounds strange to many. For me, however, it makes perfect sense. That day I had my light bulb moment, when I knew that that letter I was reading by St. Paul contained the capital T Truth, I knew everything had changed, and I was not happy. For in that moment, what wasn't running through my mind was God Loves Me!, but instead: this means I was wrong! Being the fallen man that I am, my pride was bruised. This revelation meant there was a right and wrong, there was good and bad, and it was not me who made the determination, it was He who made me and all of creation who was judge of all this.
It took me a year to get over myself and realize that this was a gift from God not a curse. Quite frankly it made my life quite easier. I can tell you from my brief attempt at trying to be an omnipotent god who knew right and wrong, it's not an easy job! But once I got past this, it made my life so much happier, it made all the pieces of my life fall into place.
After this revelation I spent another year simply buzzing with the knowledge that even though I had been wrong all these years, God forgave me, and He loved me. I spent a year simply basking in that glow of His love. After that year I was ready to open eyes and see what it meant to not just look internally at my relationship with Him, but to look outward and to see what it meant to be a Christian in the world.
When I began to look at the world around me as a Christian, I was not all that surprised to see the gigantic differences between those who chose genuinely followed God in His City and those who chose themselves and the City of Man in the secular world. I wasn't surprised about this because Jesus told us there would be a clear difference. What I was shocked by was the great inroads the City of Man had made into those who claimed residency in the City of God.
While no one would ever be silly enough to claim that they chose their own will over God because God told them to, it actually happens enough. It's a symptom , and perhaps the cause, of that laziness in American Christianity for the past 100 years. Because we were convinced that we, the people of God, had won, we got comfortable and stopped asking a fundamental question that Christians should always ask themselves: are we doing this for ourselves or for God? A new way of asking about what is right and what is wrong emerged. It follows this pattern: I have a need to do something, and because I am a Christian, and I have a need, it must be of God, because God made me and made my needs. And because everything within me is of God, all Scripture, all Tradition and all other people's reason must be interpreted though my needs. While one can appeal to the Book of Genesis and the children of God language in the New Testament to try and ground it in theology, to me, it sounds an awful lot like my thought process as an atheist ...it's all about me!
The reality is, to be a Christian has always meant that we must examine our internal needs, desires and urges and look at them knowing we are fallen. God gave us Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition, as the means, which through Godly reason, we can evaluate our desires. We ask ourselves, what does Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition say about my feelings, and how do I use these feelings and desires in light of Scripture and Tradition for the greater glory of God?
This is the challenge that Jesus puts before us in the Gospel today, and He tells us it is not easy. Will we choose God? Will we choose ourselves?
Will we chose ourselves and call it God? When you choose God, it is not always going to be the popular choice. It will offend those of the secular world and sometimes even those in our greater Christian family.
The good news is that you will never be alone in this. God know this question, of discerning Thy Will Be Done, is our biggest challenge as Christians and has given us tools to work though this. He has given us Scripture, Tradition and Godly Reason to work through that, and perhaps his sweetest gift of all, a loving church family right here, that lives to choose God, and helps us do the same.
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