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Texts:
Matthew 10:34-42
W 6th Sunday after Pentecost Sharpening the Sword In the name
of him who is the Word of God made flesh, dear friends in Christ: This morning’s reading from the Gospel of St.
Matthew, in which Jesus says he’s not come to bring peace to earth but a sword,
and that he’s come to turn family homes into civil war battlefields, is surely
among the most difficult sayings of our Lord.
And it’s not because what Jesus says here is hard to understand. We understand only too well what he’s saying
and we find that it’s hard for us to take. And because of that, it’s a teaching of Jesus
that usually gets overlooked or pushed to the back of the mind and effectively
forgotten. That’s a
problem, because then it joins any number of other teachings of Jesus in that
dark attic of what’s sort of the theological blacklist: things Jesus said that are deliberately
excluded from our consciousness because they are offensive and we don’t want to
have to deal with them. And by this
process of filtering out what we don’t like, we create in our minds a sanitized
caricature of Jesus that is quite different than the one presented to us in the
Scriptures. He becomes the soft,
effeminate, Jesus of Hollywood films (most of them anyway, I’ll exclude Passion of the Christ) who is presented
as a neutered, namby-pamby, nicey-nice, do-gooder who is persecuted by the evil
establishment because he is just so-o-o misunderstood. Or he becomes the Jesus we see in popular
art, playing with children in the garden, helping little Johnny hold his
baseball bat and laughing with delight at little Suzie’s kitten – which in and
of themselves are not bad images, but
they certainly aren’t scriptural, and they are even less complete. And then,
having created this soft and cuddly Jesus of imagination, what happens when we
come across a passage like we have today is that we think, “Wow, what an awful
thing for Jesus to say! How completely
out of character.” Small wonder, isn’t
it? The character we’ve created bears
little resemblance to the real thing.
But even those for whom these words of Jesus come as no shock are likely
to join in praying, “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, and stay—as long as you
don’t stir up any of that conflict you mentioned in our family. No, Jesus, ‘Dona nobis pacem’: Give us peace.” It is
sometimes said that being a Christian, a follower of Christ, is all about
relationships, about restoring them and making them better. After all, he came to bring peace on the
earth, didn’t he? Isn’t that what the
angels sang at his birth? Well, yes – and
no. The Christian faith is not so
much about relationships as it is about just one
relationship: the one you have with God
through the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s the
restored relationship you have with God through faith in the holy life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus by which your sins have been forgiven. That gives you peace with God. And if you are at peace with God, a natural
consequence is that you should enjoy peaceful and loving relationships with
everyone else who is similarly at peace with God through faith in Jesus. It doesn’t always work that way, and we’ll
discuss why in a bit; but let’s start here:
if you are at peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ, then you
will most certainly be placed in conflict with the world. This
morning’s text is part of a continuing discourse we’ve been following for the
past several Sundays. Two weeks back we
heard how Jesus assigned his disciples the mission of going out to spread the
good news of the Gospel to the places he would soon visit. Then last week, we heard how he told them
that while they were out there doing his work, they would face many challenges
and threats. They were stepping into
enemy territory, Satan’s territory, and they could expect to suffer attacks on
their reputations, their physical well-being, and even their lives. But regardless of how tough the going got,
Jesus told them not to be afraid. As
long as they were his disciples doing his mission, nothing that happened could
be of lasting harm to them. To put it in
terms consistent with today’s text, as long as their relationship with God was
right, they had nothing whatsoever to fear. That brings us up to today’s
lesson in which Jesus says that the conflicts a Christian faces won’t just be
“out there” while you’re doing the work of spreading the Gospel, but they will
come to roost right in your own home.
They will be personal, and at times, painful. “A man’s enemies will be the members of his
own household.” And then it becomes a
question of priority. Which relationship
do you value more? The one with your
father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, or the one you have with Jesus? Jesus said he has come to bring a
sword on the earth, and the sword of which he speaks is the Word of God. It’s the Word of God that speaks truth and
shines light into dark places. It’s the
Word of God that confronts people with their sins. It’s the Word of God that tells of God’s love
in Christ Jesus who forgives all sin for his sake. This Word is life, peace, and salvation for
those who receive it, and it is the object of scorn, ridicule, and abuse by
those who don’t. It’s a blade that
divides: the Word of God is a sword
stabbed into this world that divides truth from error, sin from righteousness,
and life from death. And as a Christian,
you carry this sword. Christ has given
it to you with the instructions to use it to win others for the kingdom of God
– to rescue them from the condemned world.
Will you, as his disciple, use it for him? Case study number one: I recently watched an interview with a man
who had been raised in the Jewish faith but who had converted to Christianity
in adulthood. He, his wife, and their
children are very active in their church, and the man had even written a book
about his conversion and what it meant to him – that’s what the interview was
mostly about. Anyway, the interviewer
then asked him about family relations on his side and what they did at
gatherings for the holidays and such.
The man explained that the topic of his Christian faith was never
discussed. His parents and everyone else
knew that he and his family were now Christian, but they all pretended to
ignore it. And while he was with them,
he did too. For the sake of peace in the
family, the most important relationship in the man’s life was never
mentioned. But it begs the question, if
to safeguard the illusion of peace in the family the man pretends his
relationship with Christ doesn’t exist, is it really the his most important
relationship? And if he truly loves his
extended family and values his relationships with them, how could he not want
to share the true and lasting peace he has found in Christ with them? Case Study number two: Last week, talk show host Larry King
interviewed Joel Osteen on his program.
Maybe some of you saw that interview.
But in case you haven’t heard of Mr. Osteen, he’s the popular pastor and
preacher of the fastest growing church in the country. Last I heard it had somewhere in the
neighborhood of 50,000 members. He’s
written a best selling book called “You’re Best Life Now” which these
days you will see prominently displayed everywhere if you walk into a Christian
bookstore. Joel Osteen promotes the
gospel of positive thinking in much the same tradition of Norman Vincent Peale
and Robert Schuller, if you’re familiar with them. It’s all about how the Lord is a God of
grace, love, and peace, and how he wants to bless you in this life with
abundant riches and health and happy relationships, which can all be yours
largely by changing your negative attitudes and focusing on the positive
promises of God. After Joel explained
all this to the camera, never losing his perpetually saccharine smile, Larry
King tried to pin him down on a few specifics of his doctrine. Mind you, Mr. Osteen bills himself as a
conservative, bible-believing evangelical.
“What about abortion?” Larry asked.
“What about homosexuality? What
do you teach about those things?” Joel
Osteen replied, “Oh, we don’t need to go there.
I don’t want to judge anyone.
That’s not my place. I try to
find the good in everyone and every situation.”
One has to wonder what good God would find in someone choosing to murder
their own baby. Case Study number three: I’ve attended several District conventions and
convocations over the past several years, and also one Synod convention. We have these for a number of reasons, but
the main one is always to focus on our church’s doctrine and practice, and to
make sure that what we believe and what we do as a church body corresponds to
the Word of God. Sadly, I’ve seen the
following scenario unfold at every one I’ve attended so far. As soon as a genuine theological discussion
begins in the assembly over some matter in dispute, rather than allow us to get
to the real issue of conflict and resolve it with an honest examination of
God’s Word, invariably someone rushes to the microphone and says, “Brothers, we
have to stop this! We’re arguing! This is an offense to the Lord. We are supposed to be at peace with each other.” And every time the assembly votes to end the
discussion, because, after all, the majority thinks it better to pretend that
we agree rather than to actually do the hard work of coming to genuine
agreement in God’s truth. Okay: three different cases, but all share a common
theme. They all deal with Christians who
deliberately suppress the Word of God in order to preserve some sort of worldly
peace or relationship. The Sword of the
Spirit is kept hidden in its sheath, or it has its sharp edge ground down so
dull that it couldn’t cut through butter, or it’s otherwise misused, misquoted,
and neglected with the false belief that somehow Jesus is better served by its
silence. But what Jesus are we
talking about then? Why, it’s the Jesus
who came to bring peace, not a sword to the earth – the same Jesus the Bible
knows nothing about, but who is very popular in the world’s imagination. So let me say this as clearly as I can: a Christ who does not reach out with
compassion to the lost, a Christ who does not confront sin and falsehood where
he finds it, a Christ who does not strive for truth even when it causes
conflict and unsettles the peace of families – or church families – is not the
Christ of Holy Scripture. So the real question we need to
grapple with this morning is this: Of
which Christ are you a disciple? The
unscriptural wimp who avoids conflict to preserve the false peace that the
world gives, or the fearless Lord who hands his disciples the Sword of his Word
to use it in his name to bring people into the peace of God which passes all
understanding? Now, hopefully we would all say
the latter – even while admitting that we haven’t been his very good disciples
in the past. And for the many times we
have failed him we need to approach him with sorrow in our hearts for our lack
of faith and zeal in his cause and receive his forgiveness. But at the same time, we need to honestly
resolve to amend our lives and serve him more faithfully in the future. So, let me take this a step further: in what condition is your Sword? Is it rusty, dull, in need of
sharpening? And how well can you handle
the Word of truth? When was the last
time you had it out of the sheath to practice with it – or even to use it to,
say, defend what you believe, or to apply it to the obvious sin in someone’s
life, or to share the Gospel with them? Our Lord Jesus has entrusted the
Sword of his Word to each of us to use it for him in the building up of his
kingdom. May we take this sacred
responsibility to heart, and devote ourselves to keeping its blade sharp and
ready so that we may use it whenever duty calls. In Jesus name. Amen. Soli Deo
Gloria! |
