Jeremiah 25:23-29; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-46
I figured that we needed the children’s message, and its simple proclamation of grace, before we could even begin to open our hearts and our minds to today’s texts. Because boy, are they difficult. Our text from Jeremiah warns us against false prophets without telling us how we’re supposed to tell the true prophets and the false ones apart. Kind of like being warned about fake news without any help as to how to tell if it is or isn’t. Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews warns us that you shouldn’t assume that people with uneventful lives are the most faithful Christians. Sometimes the most faithful people experience the most suffering, so you can’t tell by the events in someone’s life whether they are true Christians or not. And then there’s our Gospel reading, and Jesus’ words that he was bringing division to families and to the most basic social bonds. “I do not come to bring peace but division.” These are really hard Scripture readings, and so we need to start from a position of grace and God’s unconditional love and nearness in order to hear what God is saying to us today.
So, let’s get right to the question I asked the children, Have you ever disagreed with someone about God? And I don’t mean the kind of polite, oh that’s interesting, disagreement. I mean have you ever had a deep, fundamental, high-stakes disagreement with someone about God? Where each side believes they are absolutely right and the other is absolutely wrong? Maybe it was with someone in church. Maybe it was with a family member. You might not have had an actual argument with this person, maybe it was something you sensed and never brought up because you didn’t want to actually get into a fight. On the other hand, maybe what you believed was so important to you that you did speak up, and now there is a division between the two of you. If you’ve experienced that, you’ll know how painful it is. It’s awful––no one ever wants to go through that. And you’ll recognize the truth of what Jesus is saying, even if it seems contradictory––Jesus does not always bring peace to families. Just because a family is Christian doesn’t mean they are peaceful, doubly so for church families. Because our faith means so much to us, we can’t alway just let things go. We take a stand because we believe we’re right, and we live with the consequences.
But this is not new. We are constantly arguing about who is actually right about God and who is wrong, and we divide because of it. The Gospel of Luke was written in retrospect, during a time when the early Christians were experiencing divisions in their own families, between those Jews who believed it was right to follow Jesus and their family members who didn’t. The Gospel reading isn’t so much predicting the future as simply describing what was going on at the time. Jesus did indeed cause divisions.
And it didn’t end there. Lutherans were born in division and the Protestant Reformation, asserting that we were right about grace and faith, taking a stand. We’ve also experienced division during the Holocaust, when some pastors gathered to preach against Hitler, and formed the Confessing Church, and were shunned by other pastors in Germany. We experienced division in the 70s over the issue of ordaining women as pastors. We’ve experienced division more recently over the issue of marrying LGBTQ couples in the church, and allowing them to be pastors. And just in these last two weeks, Lutherans in the States have experienced two fundamental disagreements. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod declared at their national convention that God created the world in six “natural,” 24-hour days, causing distress for those Missouri Synod Lutherans who don’t interpret Genesis that way. And the ELCA, our American equivalent, declared their entire denomination a “sanctuary church body” for refugees and immigrants at their national convention. This declaration was so ground-shaking that it has made the news on CNN, MSN, and has even provoked “Fox and Friends” to air a panel of experts, Christian and otherwise, to say that this move is unchristian and against the Bible and God’s Word, and flat out wrong. I think it’s the first time Lutherans have ever made national news. But, more to the point, even in the ELCA, there are Lutherans who are deeply distressed that the church has taken this stand, seeing it as a wrongful blurring of the separation of church and state. Within single congregations, there are divisions.
So who is right? Are the Lutherans in the Missouri Synod right? Are the Lutherans in the ELCA right? How do you know? When we are involved in these divisive disagreements, where our faith and our relationships are on the line, how do we know who is right and who is wrong?
Well, here we come to the hard reality that our readings are trying to tell us. The hard part is that we don’t know whether or not we are right. We can’t know. We can’t actually know the mind of God. I don’t know that I’m right about women being pastors. 1 Corinthians 14:34 says explicitly, “it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” Clearly I’m not about to stop preaching from this pulpit, but at the same time, I don’t know that I’m right. I could be wrong. When I die and stand before God, God may point to that passage and say, “I really meant that one.”
I don’t know that I’m right when I say that God created individuals with all ranges of sexual orientations and gender identities and blesses them with the Holy Spirit to live in the world the way they were made. I could be wrong about that. I know that my grandfather and I were deeply divided on that issue. He’s with God now, so I guess he knows the answer before I do. My point is, though, that we don’t know. We don’t know that what we believe about God––including the most fundamental beliefs that shape our daily lives, like that God is love, or that God is forgiving, or that God wants justice––are right. We believe they’re right. We find evidence in Scripture that we’re right. But Scripture says a lot of things, some of them contradictory, and so we don’t know.
Even our internal conviction of our beliefs isn’t enough to prove that we’re right. Sometimes what seemed like the right, God-filled decision at the time turns out to have been a terrible idea. Residential schools, for example, were established by Christians who really thought they were doing what God wanted them to do. Christian conversion therapy camps are another example. Both of those things turned out to be terrible ideas, leading to misery and torture and even suicides. But we didn’t know that at the time. We, Christians, thought we were doing what God wanted. We were convinced we were right. But I don’t think we were.
So then what do we do? How do we continue to stand in our faith, and act in our faith, while acknowledging that we might be wrong? Because I know that our faith means so much to us that we can’t sit back and do nothing. We have to act on what we believe to be right––how do we live in this paradox? Well, as Martin Luther famously wrote, “Sin boldly, but let your trust in Christ be stronger.” Luther didn’t mean be arrogant or proud in your sin. He meant acknowledge, accept, that we are sinners, through and through. We will make mistakes. We will get many things wrong, including our beliefs about God. That is a given. At the same time, though, let Christ’s relationship with you be stronger than what you believe. Our faith, our beliefs do not save us. Christ’s relationship with us saves us. You can be completely wrong about every single thing, but that does not stop Christ from claiming you and those who disagree with you as his own. Being wrong does not stop God from being near to you.
This means living in humbleness. In humility, even. It never hurts to begin conversations with, “I’m probably wrong about this...” before we continue to say what we think about God or what we think God wants. It never hurts to say, “You could be right...” Imagine if every church disagreement started with, “I’m probably wrong and you could be right, but here’s what I think...” Just imagine if disagreements about kneeling at the Communion rail versus standing, or an artificial tree versus a natural one, or traditional hymns versus contemporary ones, or what kind of pastor God wants for Advent––imagine if these disagreements were all framed with “I’m probably wrong and you could be right, but here’s what I think...” We don’t need to step back from proclaiming what we believe, or from acting on those beliefs. We can still have convictions. It’s just something that we do humbly. With fear and trembling. With trepidation. With a trust in Christ’s relationship with us and with those who disagree with us, rather than in the rightness of our––or their––beliefs.
Now, I might be wrong about all this. I’m pretty sure I’m right, but I’m not 100% sure. There’s a 1% chance that I’m wrong. In the end, though, we don’t rely on our beliefs about God to save us, as it were. Instead, we rely solely on God, who comes to us in Jesus Christ. It is God who saves us, not we ourselves, and as Jeremiah tells us, God is near. As the children heard, God is near to you, God is near to those with whom you disagree, God is near to every single person in families divided by beliefs about Jesus. This is the power of God over our lives, a power and presence stronger even than ourselves, and that is why we say, Thanks be to God. Amen.
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