Jeremiah 20:7-13
Matthew 10:24-39
           
I don’t know how you reacted when you heard the Scripture readings this morning.  Maybe your mind wandered and you really didn’t hear them.  Maybe as you began to hear them, your mind wandered because you didn’t want to hear them.  I can tell you this: when I read them as I began preparing this sermon, I did not like what I was reading.  I wanted to read something else.  I wanted some other text to use as a starting place for a sermon.  I concluded my desire to find another text was an indication I probably needed to wrestle with these.

Did you hear what was read?  From Jeremiah, “Lord, I am ridiculed and scorned all the time because I proclaim your message. . .  I hear everybody whispering, ‘Terror is everywhere! So let’s report him to the authorities!’ Even my close friends wait for my downfall.  ‘Perhaps he can be tricked,’ they say: ‘then we can catch him and get revenge.’” (Jeremiah 20:8,10)  And from Matthew, “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the world.  No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  I came to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law; your worst enemies will be the members of your own family.” (Matthew 10:34-36)
           
Aren’t these troubling statements?  What could Jesus possibly mean that he did not come to bring peace to the world?  Do we not refer to him as the Prince of Peace?  What is going on here?  What does this mean?  How can this have any meaning or relevance in our lives?
           
A Sunday school class was discussing the Commandment against murder, "Thou shalt not kill." There was widespread agreement that no one in the class could imagine taking another human life.
           
"Unless, of course, my family was threatened, then I would kill someone to defend them," said one young man. Again, widespread agreement in the group.
           
Isn’t it interesting that our family, for all its positive value, would have the power to render us into killers. Such is the power of our loves. What we love determines how we act and what we do. And we have few loves that are deeper than the love we have for our families.
           
With this in mind is what makes the reading from Matthew so stark, so difficult. Jesus called his disciples. He sent them out and empowered them to do his work. Then, Jesus gave a rather solemn warning to those whom he has called. He tells them that he is the sword that brings division. The person who tries to preserve and secure his life will lose it. And he even says that his followers will have a cross. That's rather striking because up to this point in Matthew's Gospel there has been no mention of a cross. We have no indication at this point that Jesus will be crucified. Jesus says that we will be crucified for following him!
           
Sometimes Jesus brings peace. Sometimes he brings a sword. Sometimes Jesus unites, and sometimes he divides and disrupts.  How can this be?  Why is this?  Why is it that wherever Jesus went in his ministry, trouble seemed to follow?  Why is it that today when people take seriously Jesus’ instruction about working for justice, opposing prejudice, accepting and welcoming anybody and everybody, that trouble seems to erupt?    We Christians keep thinking that somehow we have found a way to follow Jesus without getting hurt. Being a Christian is roughly synonymous with being sensitive, compassionate, and caring citizens. Jesus is the one who keeps families together, who confirms our highest and best values and institutions. Then comes Jesus in today's Gospel and even the most complacent and contented among us realizes that here we are confronted with a very different way of looking at things.
           
William Willimon was chaplain at Duke University for twenty years.  During that time he said he rarely received a call from a worried parent with the request, "Help! My child who is a sophomore is sexually promiscuous" or "Help! My child is addicted to alcohol."
           
“No,” Willimon said, “the calls that I received were ‘Help! I sent my child to the university to be a success and she has become a religious fanatic.’ ‘Religious fanatic’ defined as she is going with the Catholics to teach reading in Haiti. These parents knew well: Jesus is still capable of disrupting families and family plans and hopes for their children.
           
More than one person has gone to seminary to study and prepare to be a minister and to testify: “God called me to leave my job and come here to seminary to study to become a pastor. And then my husband left me. Or my wife has been unhappy ever since.”
           
We are known by our loves, and loving Jesus brings disruption, conflict with our other loves.  To Jesus’ credit, he did not invite people to be his disciples without letting them know what they could expect, what the costs were.  Jesus is upfront in what he demands of his disciples and what reactions they can expect if they seriously seek to live as he asked them to live, to love as he asked them to love.  The question that is constantly being asked and which we must continually answer is, “Will we risk the possibility of disruption and love as Jesus loved? Will we learn from Jesus what it means to love God by loving the world and will we love like Jesus did, despite the cost?”  In other words, are we willing to go against what is popular, what is conventional wisdom?  Are we willing to be counter cultural?  Will we live against the culture in an attempt to change the culture for the better?
           
A minister was asked to preach at the school he had attended as a boy. It was one of those annual events that many schools have where the great pioneers are supposed to be remembered.  They are the ones who founded the school, developed it, and gave it its character.
           
So that was the content of the minister’s sermon. But he pointed out that something very odd was going on. Each one of the men and women being honored had been innovators. They had been the ones who had dared to do things differently, to go in a new direction despite the people who wanted to keep things as they were. But by reading out a list of their names in a solemn voice, and by holding them up as our founding figures, the people hearing the names were in danger of doing the opposite, saying that what they wanted was for everything to stay just the way it had always been. Do we honor the memory of innovators by slavishly following what they did, or by daring to be different in our turn?
           
I suspect that sermon caused a mild stir. But it was nothing like the stir which Jesus’ words cause. 'Sons against fathers, daughters against mothers' - what on earth could he mean? Rejecting parents and children - not peace on earth but a sword - can this be Jesus himself? What's going on? How can we get our minds around these strong sayings?
           
Of course, the New Testament also has a good deal to say about caring for one another within the family. And I know that some have misguidedly taken passages like these as a license to neglect their own dependants and spend all their time on 'God's work.' But these are stern and uncomfortable words that we can't ignore. They echo down through the years into the church of today.
           
Think of St. Francis leaving his wealthy home despite his father's fury, to go and live a simple life of imitating Jesus as much as he could - and setting an example that thousands still follow today.
           
Think of those who have faced terrible dangers for the sake of the gospel and have had to send their families to a place of safety elsewhere, while they have stayed to look after a church because there wasn't anyone else to do it.
           
Think of those who at great risk to their lives and the lives of their families, stood up against racism, bigotry, and hatred in this country in the 1960’s.  Some of them were rejected by their families.  Many of them were severely injured.  Some were killed.  It was said of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others that wherever they went, trouble was sure to follow.
           
Jesus doesn't say here that all who follow him will find themselves split off from their families; certainly not. Indeed, many of the apostles, in the days of the early church, took their spouses with them on their travels (1 Cor 9:5). But Jesus is once again talking about priorities, and is making remarkable and quite drastic claims. (Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone - Part One, Chapters 1-15, Westminster-John Knox Press, 2004, pp. 121-123.)
           
William Willimon, whom I mentioned earlier, is now a Bishop in the Methodist Church, serving the Alabama Conference.  He commented recently, “I love being in a church, in a place where there are still saints to watch us in our work, to watch us and, by remembrance of them, to prod us. In our new Methodist Building in Birmingham, we've planned a Hall of Heroes - two walls of pictures and testimonies of ordinary Methodists who right here in Birmingham in the 1960s did the right thing. Some paid dearly for their testimony. I've told my preachers that it's been so long since one of us has been forced to flee in the middle of the night because of a sermon, that we've forgotten how. I long for some congregation to call me demanding to be rid of its preacher, not because she has failed to be unfailingly nice and promiscuously available, which most Methodist clergy are to a fault, but because her biblical preaching has made them want to kill her. 
           
“I suspect that we tend to portray a Jesus who is so innocuous that everyone thinks that he looks like them. As a result we are surprised when we hear of someone like Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandella, or Desmund Tutu who take their calling so seriously as to live against the culture and risk their very lives to be faithful to embodying the love of God they have discovered demonstrated in the life of Jesus.
           
We keep forgetting how deeply offensive Jesus appeared to us in his disruptive presence among us. Stephen Shoemaker, in a sermon on the cross of Jesus, reminds us that we are among the crucifiers:
           
Paul Johnson, the historian, frames the question:
By the time of his trial and passion Jesus had succeeded in uniting an improbable, indeed unprecedented coalition against him: The Roman authorities, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, even Herod Antipas. And in destroying him, this unnatural combination appears to have acted with a great measure of popular support. What conclusions can we draw from this?
           
I draw this: the crowds were in on it. Democracy was in on it. The Jewish leaders were in on it. The conservatives and the liberals were in on it. The Bible scholars were in on it. The bureaucrats were in on it. The great Roman Imperium was in on it, killing a few more that day in the name of the Pax Romana, the famous Roman Peace. The best and the brightest were in on it. The most religious and spiritual were in on it. The narcotic of war was in on it; the spiritual frenzy of inquisition and blood sacrifice was in on it.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Yes, I was there. We all were there: voting, jeering, silent, enthralled, confused, tortured, hoping that maybe with this man's death things might be better now. We were all there. (H. Stephen Shoemaker, Being Christian in an Almost Chosen Nation Thinking About Faith and Politics, Abingdon Press, 2007).   
           
No matter how radical, disruptive, or innovative any of us become, we can never get out ahead of Jesus in his ability to disrupt.  Few have understood the strange nature of the "peace" that Jesus offers better than the Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder:
           
The cross of Christ was the price of his obedience to God amidst a rebellious world; it was suffering for having done right, for loving where others hated, for representing in the flesh the forgiveness and righteousness of God among people both less forgiving and less righteous. The cross of Christ was God's way of saying there is no evil that cannot be overcome by love, there is no distance God will not go to love, and there is no distance we are not invited to go to demonstrate God’s love.
           
For a follower of Christ taking up the cross is no different. A cross is something one takes up voluntarily in order to love another unconditionally.   It is the price for loving others as God has loved us. Such unflinching love for friend and foe alike will mean hostility and suffering for us, as it did for Jesus.
           
Jesus instructed his disciples, simply and clearly, not to resist evil with evil and to love one's enemy (Mt 5:39-45). He was not a foolish dreamer spinning out futile hopes for a better world, thinking that only if we keep smiling everything will turn out all right, with our opponents turned into friends and our sacrifices repaid. He knew full well the cost of such unlimited love.
           
"It is by this that we know what love is," says the apostle, "that Christ laid down his life for us. And we in turn are bound to lay down our lives for our brothers" (I Jn 3:16).
           
Christians whose loyalty to the Prince of Peace puts them out of step with today's nationalistic world, because they are willing to love their nation's friends but not to hate their nation's enemies, are not unrealistic dreamers who think that by their objections they will end all wars. On the contrary, it is the soldiers who think that they can put an end to wars by preparing for just one more.
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hristians are to love their enemies because God loves them and calls all people to love their enemies. That is the only reason, and that is enough.       
           
No one created in God's image and for whom Christ died can be for me an enemy, whose life I am willing to threaten or take, unless I am more devoted to something else - to a political theory, to a nation, to the defense of certain privileges, or to my own personal warfare - than I am to God's cause which is God’s loving invasion of this world through prophets, through Jesus, and through the church.
           
If this was God's pattern, if Jesus’ strategy for dealing with his enemies was to love them and give himself for them, it must be ours as well. (John Howard Yoder, "The Way of Peace," from He Came Preaching Peace, by John Howard Yoder, Herald Press, 1985, pp. 391-394.)
           
Indeed, when we respond positively to the invitation to be a disciple of Christ, to love the world as he loved, we are being counter cultural people.  And when we counter the culture we can be certain that the culture will come down on us.  If we continue to resist the culture with love, we will continue to experience the hostility and resistance of the culture.  And we may live long enough to see the beginning of the transformation of the culture as has been evident various times in history—during and after Jesus’ life, during the Reformation, and during the civil rights movement in this country—to call attention to three.  To be a follower of Jesus is to sign up to live a counter cultural life.  Are we willing to pay that price? Are we willing to pay that price?