Risking Division for the Sake of Love

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scripture: Luke 12:49-56

There’s a lot I love about Jesus, but the thing I think I love most is how he always, every time, knows who he is and claims who he is.

When he was 12, he scared the heck out of his parents by disappearing while on a trip to Jerusalem. When they finally find him, they say, “Where were you? We were so worried!” And this twelve year-old replies, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I had to be in my Father’s house?”

When the devil tempts him with food after he had been fasting for 40 days and then with power over the whole earth, then when the devil demands that he prove who he is, Jesus gracefully denies the devil, saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Even in the face of Pilate, with his life on the line, he refuses to swerve from his mission.

He will tell you the truth, not with spite, not with resentment, but always with conviction: a conviction rooted in what anchors him in everything he does: love.

He steps into his ministry out of love. He performs miracles of feeding and healing out of love. He storms the temple and drives out those seeking to exploit the people who worship there out of love. He goes to the cross out of love.

And in today’s gospel, he speaks a hard truth out of love:

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

Wait, what? How is that loving? How can telling people that "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” be loving?

Well, I guess it depends on what love means to you, what peace means to you.

If love looks like changing who you are or making yourself quiet or small in order to please another person, or if you demand that others change who they are or make themselves quiet or small in order to please you, then I could see how division might not look very loving to you.

If peace looks like making sure everyone is comfortable all the time, making sure emotions never get too strong, making sure no boats are ever rocked, then I could see how bringing fire to the earth might not seem very peaceful.

But if love looks like bringing the fullness of who you are and how God created you to other people, and making space for the fullness of others and how God created them, we might see that bringing division is often a necessary step towards love. If peace looks like creating conditions in which everyone can be who they are and say what they need without fear of rejection or harm, we might see that bringing fire is often a necessary step towards peace.

The primary goal of love isn’t to please other people, though often love does please other people, I certainly hope. The primary goal of love is about integrity, whose definition is “the quality or condition of being whole.” That’s what Jesus teaches us in everything he does. Love is being in authentic relationship with others, which means all of who you are in relationship with all of who another person is. Yes, that requires compromise, as when the Canaanite woman asserts herself by saying, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table,” and she changes Jesus’ mind. It requires navigating our differences with love and grace and openness rather than aggression and well, the need to be right.

As the poet Yehuda Amichai writes,

From the place where we are right

Flowers will never grow

In the spring.

The willingness to be in tension, even conflict, can be an act of love, for others and for yourself. The Canaanite woman could have shrunk back when Jesus scolded her, calling her a dog and telling her that his healing is reserved for Jews only. Instead, she claims her humanity, she claims her need for her daughter to be healed, and stands up, confronting this man who has such power. She uses Jesus’ own words to flip the script, to demand wholeness for both herself and her daughter.

And she does something else. She helps Jesus to recognize that he was not acting out of integrity, denying his healing simply because this woman comes from a different people. And he steps back into integrity, saying, “Woman, you have great faith.” And he heals her daughter.

Without her, Jesus may have stuck to healing only his people, giving his life only for his people. Her courage, her willingness to risk conflict, to step into division, may have opened Jesus in ways that he may have otherwise stayed closed.

And Jesus does not cling to his need to be right. He lets himself be changed—changed in a way that helps him to live and minister with greater integrity, with greater love.

But not everyone is Jesus. Some of us would rather be right than loving. Some of us would rather maintain the status quo that keeps us comfortable, even at the expense of those who are silenced or oppressed to keep that status quo.

Y’all, that’s when we need to kindle a fire. Whether it’s an abusive spouse, an exploitative employer, or an administration bent on harming so many of our neighbors in order to maintain power and privilege, that’s when we need to bring division, that’s when we need to risk conflict.

A priest friend of mine told me this week that she is serving as a clergy observer at the ICE facility on Macadam in Southwest Portland. ICE is requiring people with certain immigration status to check in with them in person—something they used to be able to do over an app until this administration suspended it. Agents are stationed outside the building, ready to take away people who are doing everything they’re supposed to in order to be in this country legally.

My friend said it was a bit frightening. These big, bulky men in dark uniforms, carrying guns, their faces covered. She said observers have watched people come in and never come out.

And if it was frightening for her, I can’t imagine what it was like for the mother with her four children that she and other observers accompanied.

That mother had to make a difficult choice: not check in with ICE, stay safe, and risk her legal status, or go and risk being torn from her children and forcibly deported. I can’t imagine the kind of courage she had to muster to walk into that building, where ICE held her fate in its hands.

But she didn’t have to do it alone. The observers—who are there to bear witness to anything that happens AND to support the immigrants going in—they surrounded this family, speaking to them words of encouragement in Spanish, giving them snacks, and praying over them.

The observers wouldn’t have stepped in if ICE took action, but they were there to generate friction, to take sides which is to create division, to call everyone involved to their integrity, to love, if anything did happen.

—

Making space for everyone and how God created them, making space for yourself and how God created you, sometimes takes courage. It sometimes requires telling hard truths, to create friction, for the sake of love, to risk division. And yes, sometimes it breaks relationships that depended on someone hiding parts of who they are, making themselves small. But just as often it transforms relationships, opening them up in new ways that can create new healing and new life. Even Jesus let himself be transformed by the courage of one woman.

So yes, Jesus came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! A fire of truth, a fire of integrity, a fire of love.

Amen.