August 17, 2025 – The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost

Once again this week, we’re working with some rather challenging biblical texts, perhaps longing for some of Jesus’ gentler teachings on these August days. But no, this sounds as if we’re in the lead-up to Advent, when typically our scripture readings do come with a very real urgency. One of the things about the lectionary is that it keeps the preacher from simply hunting down texts that he or she would like to be preaching, instead pressing us into the biblical story as a whole. That’s actually a gift, if not always of the most comfortable sort.

Let me speak, then, to our Gospel reading for today, which arises from a crisis time in the life of that people. The territory of Judea and its capital city Jerusalem are a vassal state under the iron rule of the Roman Empire.  Jesus had begun his public ministry up in the region of Galilee, well north of Judea, but now his face has been turned toward Jerusalem and the long winding path to that city is underway. He can see what it will mean for him to enter that city with his gospel message calling for a return to God; he knows “how to interpret the present time,” to borrow a line from his teaching, and he knows this road will not be an easy one.

And so as this section begins, Jesus addresses his followers:

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, 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! 

He’s come to bring fire and division? Is that true? What of the gentleness with which he has greeted children, lepers, status-less people, the outcasts? What of his compassion for the hungry crowds, the lost sheep, the blind and the lame?

Yet as the theologian Matt Skinner comments, “The fire Jesus wants to kindle is a fire of change, the fire of God’s active presence in the world,” adding “No wonder he is so eager to strike the match.” In so many ways that fire of change will be, to cite Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church, “a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Opposition will be mounted both by the temple leaders and by Rome itself, and even when someone does catch his vision and chooses to follow his way—as tens of thousands would in the opening years of the church’s life—that was no guarantee against opposition. Families will be divided, Jesus warns, because while you may hear to power of this call, members of your own household will not accept your decision to follow my way. “[T]hey 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.’

That’s not figurative language, you see, for it is precisely what happened when someone caught the vision and made the decision to follow the Jesus Way. The original readers and hearers of this Gospel lived in a time of persecution and oppression, and they would have instantly recognized that there was a price to be paid for following Jesus. He was a man of peace, but he and those who followed him lived in a time of the so-called Pax Romana or the Roman peace, which was imposed and held by force. If I have chosen to follow Jesus but my brother or my parent had opted for keeping the peace with the powers that be—the Roman imperial powers, no less—then there would be division, in spite of my hope in Christ. That was simply the way of that ancient world.

So now we can hear why Jesus sounded so urgent and uncompromising in these texts. But you do know that this isn’t simply about what happened way back then, which we wrestle with, understand, and then set aside with some relief that it was all about “way back then.” The claim that is being placed on those who hear this message is to actually follow, and while our day is clearly very different from the days of Jesus, our world and our context is not without challenges. Right? Read the newspaper—and I know that a good number of you still do get an actual print copy, especially of the weekend paper—or listen to the news. Is there pain, conflict, upheaval, uncertainty, worry and anxiety in our own time? Yes, without a doubt.

And in response those of us who dare to call ourselves Christians and seek to follow Jesus are then challenged to press forward, as best we can, in honesty, daring, compassion, and truthfulness. To dare to speak as truthfully as one can, and then to listen as openly as possible to the perspective of the other. And to do that always in the light of the gospel because the light of the gospel will always draw us forward in faith and in action. As the poet Mary Oliver writes in the conclusion of her poem “What I Have Learned so Far,”

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a

story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.

Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of

light is the crossroads of —indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

And because Christ wants none of us to “be gone,” we must now and again and ever be ignited.

Now, those are strong words indeed to speak on a Sunday morning on which we are baptizing a wee little baby, but given how Jesus always made room for the little ones—held them and loved them and insisted that they have a place in the circle—maybe this baptism is exactly what we most need to be doing together on this morning. We are saying that Jesus is calling us forward into the Gospel of light—to be ignited by the gospel of light—and that as he does this we must make special room for the last and the least and the lost and the little… and this morning Melovia Luna is our little one to be welcomed, embraced, marked with the sign of the cross, and named beloved in our midst.