Not peace, but fire

Readings:

Romans 6.19–23

I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations.  For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.

When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.

So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed?  The end of those things is death.

But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification.  The end is eternal life.

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Luke 12.49–53

‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

I have a baptism with which to be baptised, and what stress I am under until it is completed!

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division!

From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three;

they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’

Sermon

There are moments in life when Jesus says things that make you wince.  “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division!”  It’s not exactly the line you’d expect on a Christmas card, is it?  “Merry Christmas from all of us — may your family be divided against itself, one against the other!”  You can almost imagine the shepherds blinking and saying, “Er, come again, Lord?”

And yet, there it is.  Jesus did not come to pat us all on the head and tell us we’re lovely just as we are.  He came to light a fire.  “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.”  He came, in other words, to purify — to burn away pretence, hypocrisy, and cruelty — even when that process makes things rather uncomfortable for the rest of us.

Now, here we are again, in one of those uncomfortable seasons.  The world seems to have become addicted to shouting.  From the far right, we hear the word “woke” spat out like it’s an obscenity.  From the far left, we sometimes hear contempt for anyone who struggles to keep up with the vocabulary of inclusion.  And in the Church, alas, we’ve reached that familiar moment when bishops, in their wisdom, have decided that the best way to move forward… is not to move at all.

It feels, at times, like the liberal, progressive project — that brave attempt to make Christianity about love rather than control — is being buried under an avalanche of angry blogs and carefully worded episcopal statements.  The GAFCON press releases thunder against “heresy” as though the Spanish Inquisition had just been given a new set of robes and a Twitter account.  It’s all very dramatic.

But none of this should really surprise us.  History moves like a pendulum.  Every few decades, society takes a deep breath of freedom — then someone coughs and says, “Too much of that!”  The Reformation was followed by puritan crackdowns.  The Enlightenment was followed by empire.  Civil rights were followed by culture wars.  And so it goes on.  There’s always a backlash when compassion starts to look like it might actually change something.

That’s what Paul is getting at in his letter to the Romans.  “You were slaves to sin,” he says, “but now you’ve been set free — slaves instead to righteousness.”  In other words, freedom isn’t the absence of control; it’s choosing whose control we live under.  The freedom Christ offers isn’t a licence to be smug or cruel or careless.  It’s freedom for something — freedom to love, to serve, to seek justice, to bear with one another’s differences.

But that kind of freedom is threatening to anyone who profits from division.  The moment you start insisting that every person, regardless of gender, orientation, colour or creed, bears the image of God, someone will call you naïve.  The moment you suggest that refugees might actually be neighbours rather than problems, someone will call you woke.  And if you dare to say that God’s love might even include people the church has historically excluded — well, then you’ve gone too far, apparently.

It’s tempting, at such times, to pull the duvet over one’s head and wait for the storm to pass.  But Jesus never offered that option.  He called his disciples to stand in the heat of the fire — to let it purify us, even as we hope it purifies the world.  Bonhoeffer once said that “the church is only the church when it exists for others.”  He paid for that conviction with his life, hanged by those who preferred nationalism to grace.  And yet his faith in the costly freedom of the Gospel remains one of the bright lights of the twentieth century.

So what do we do now, when the air is thick with division?  I think the answer might be simpler than we imagine.  We keep being kind.  We keep showing up.  We keep blessing those who curse us on social media.  We keep offering cups of tea to those who think differently.  We keep telling the truth, gently but firmly, about a God whose love cannot be contained by any faction or frozen by any synod.

And maybe we even keep our sense of humour.  Because nothing deflates the self-righteous quite like laughter.  Jesus himself must have had a mischievous smile when he spoke of fire and division — not because he relished conflict, but because he knew that love, once set alight, can’t be controlled.  It burns through every wall we build, every label we cling to, every hierarchy we invent.

So perhaps the liberal project isn’t dying after all.  Perhaps it’s simply passing through its refining fire.  Perhaps what’s being burned away is our need to win, to persuade, to be right.  And what will remain, when the smoke clears, will be the stubborn, unkillable heart of the Gospel — the wild, tender, inconvenient love of God.

And when that love has done its work — when all our divisions have been named and faced and forgiven — then, and only then, will the world finally know peace.  Not the peace of avoidance or apathy, but the peace that comes when the fire has done its work.

Until then, we keep tending the flame.  With kindness.  With courage.  And yes — with a wink and a grin. Amen.