Daily Lesson for October 23, 2020

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 12 verses 49 through 53:

49 “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53 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.”

I am reluctant to write about these words so close now to the election and with such division in our country.

But, nevertheless, it must be said that Jesus brought division within the countryside, and the cities, and the synagogues, and the families. And he brought a fire which terrified and threatened, purified and purged. And, indeed, a father was set against his son and son against his father. And some within even his own household were appalled and put out with him.

Indeed it is difficult to write and speak of the Jesus of fire and division, but only usually so for those who feel they have little to gain or lose in the great matters of contention. Jesus came not to bring peace, but division. Yet those who called "peace, peace" were the ones who had learned to settle for the peace of Rome, but not the peace of God.

I think of the white clergy who wrote their op-ed in Birmingham in 1963, telling Dr. King not to come to their city because it was "unwise and untimely" and would bring more violence. Dr. King wrote back from jail his magisterial "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" which showed that the violence was already there in Birmingham and in the rest of America, and all that Dr. King had come to do was unveil it.

The violence and division we see now in America seems greater now than many of us remember in our lifetimes. This is unsettling and at times, even terrifying.

But perhaps there is a saving grace in it all. For perhaps in its eruption, we see now what was always there. Perhaps now that we see the violence and its existential threat to us we will finally do something about it. Or, as King said in his Letter, we will be

Just after Atatiana Jefferson, a black woman, was unjustly killed by police while trying to defend her own home, I helped organize a city-wide meeting at the historic Baker Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Mayor and several other City and County leaders were present. I will never forget what Broadway's own Mattie Compton told those leaders that night as she warned of the need to address not only the injustice of Ms. Jefferson's death, but also the systemic injustice which was plaguing all of Fort Worth's and America's police departments and governments. "The house is on fire," she said, "and ya'll need to get the biggest hose you can find to put it out."

The house is one fire. And it is divided. And as Jesus said "a house divided against itself cannot stand." And the answer is not to pretend like these things are not so. The answer, as Dr. King said in his Letter, is rather "to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused . . . is forced to confront the issue."

That was the tension and division Jesus created. It was the crisis he created.

And the flames ? In T.S. Eliot's words, these are our "only hope . . . to be redeemed by fire from fire."

So may it be.

NOTE: We are reading the whole Bible through this year. Over the weekend we will read Luke chapters 14-17 and John 11.