I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

One of the few sure things in my life is that each year the Confirmation Class will deliver up a softball for me to swing at in my sermon on this Sunday, that is to say they will give me the creation story or David and Goliath or one of the cute parables about Samaritans and Prodigals and I will be able to toss together a sermon that will make everybody feel good, because this is a day when we have a lot to feel good about.

Well, it didn’t happen this year.

Not this Confirmation Class, no cute stories for them, they wanted to know what it means to be God’s people when things aren’t going well, when people hate you, when you are feeling alone and you are not feeling good – in other words, in the middle of real life how shall we live?

I went to plate looking for my traditional softball at the letter, over the heart of the plate and I got a Roger Clemens fastball, high and tight.

And so we turn our attention today toward one of the hardest New Testament passages for us to comprehend:

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

That’s Jesus talking.

You know, Prince of Peace, love your enemy, turn the other cheek: I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

More than a few Christians have heard those words and said “what the heck is going on here?”

This is the Good News?

Severed and ruptured relationships within our families?

This is why Jesus came?

You sure I can’t just talk about Noah and the Ark and all those animals?

And on top of that they told be to be brief.

I don’t suppose you have changed your mind on that either?

Well, OK.

Let me start by saying this clearly and unequivocally, let me climb out on the limb and tell you that you can quote me on this anywhere, anytime: Jesus was right.

Jesus was right.

My hunch has always been that he didn’t like saying this anymore than we like hearing it, but so often the things that we need to say and hear aren’t the things that we like to say and hear.

And when it comes to family relationships he knew all about severs and ruptures.

There was a point where his brothers and mother thought that he was having a nervous breakdown and they came to get him and he said “Who are my brothers? Who is my mother? They who do the will of God.” And he wouldn’t even stop to talk to them. And how many times do we need to go to the cross before we understand that Mary was there without her other sons and daughters, left to watch her son’s agonies alone.

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

That was never his plan, God never desires our pain but it can often be the result.

Sometimes it is because we emphasize different pieces of God’s love and we are excited by our piece, and perhaps so insecure, that we need to have everyone else be on the same page as we are.

Some of you have heard me talk about the blind men and the elephant for your whole lives, the ways in which each of the blind men touched a different part of the elephant and so had a different experience and used different vocabulary to describe the elephant. And you know the point, we can’t speak with certainty about another’s experience of God, we can only tell what ours is like. But imagine if those blind men had decided to argue over their experience, imagine if they needed to be right and have everyone agree with them, imagine, well you don’t have to. Listen to much of the contemporary religious debate and you will hear echoes of blind men all telling their own truth and failing to listen to each other, blind men separated and set against one another in the compelling battle to be “right” and have the other person “wrong”.

Good and committed Christians will have disagreements over significant issues, but as long as they don’t need to divide their world into winners and losers, they can live with their disagreements, understanding that someday their blindness will be no more and they will stand together and see together, the glory of God, even more diversified than the elephant.

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

However the recognition that we will have honest differences of experience is only a start on the question of how to live when things are conflicted, when families are divided.

There is also this reality that Jesus knew and many have experienced. When you and I decide to follow Christ he makes demands upon us: “Lose your prejudices” he says as he sits with Gentiles, Samaritans, prostitutes and tax collectors; “invest your time” he says as he stops to play with children; “surrender your selfishness” he says as he calls us to lose our lives for his sake. When we do that it will impact upon others, it can distance us from old friends and family members whose values and goals and principles are not the same as ours any longer.

Remember the Young Ruler to whom Christ gave the challenge: “sell what you have and follow me” and he went away, filled with sadness, for he was very rich?

Christ himself lost friends and family along the way, so will his followers.

Yet we are called to be faithful, not successful or popular.

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

So our faith can separate us from other good, committed Christians by virtue of our different perspectives, and our faith can separate us loved ones by virtue of our call to follow Christ, but we are free, in those cases, to stand together in unity without uniformity, or we are free to go our own way, but what do we do when we are surrounded by those who actually hate us?

Which brings us to Esther.

If you aren’t familiar with the story, go read it, it is a good telling of an incident far from the normal setting of the Bible, in the Persian city of Susa, 500 years or so before the birth of Christ.

The people of God are being threatened with extinction – again. If you are looking for a recurring theme in our relationship with God, you could probably write a pretty good doctoral thesis on how God’s people are always finding themselves on the brink of annihilation. I’ve spent 28 years listening to highly paid experts tell me that Churches like Clover Hill can’t survive, just like the Jews of Susa.

And yet listen to how calm Mordecai is, even though he saw Esther as the only plausible answer to their plight, he was not willing to reduce his hope to just her. He was adamant in challenging her to save her people, yet he was comfortable – even philosophical – about her possible lack of courage, he confronts her but doesn’t bully her, he speaks clearly to her and doesn’t try to manipulate her, he doesn’t have a Plan B, but he knows that God does.

“If you keep silence at a time like this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows perhaps you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

As unflattering as this may be to you, God doesn’t need you.

Or me.

Or any of us.

Oh, God will use us and the more we allow God to use us the better the our lives will be, but if we refuse to be used, if we insist that we want to be just like the people who have rejected God, the damage will be to us, not to God.

“Who knows perhaps you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

You have come to the kingdom, today.

You will in this formal setting, make your promises, you will serve us the outer visible signs of the inward, invisible realities of God’s love and spiritual nourishment.

And as you do that, people will be watching, not to see if you trip, but they will be watching.

Your parents and the rest of us oldsters, we live in a world that is pulling us one way, toward materialistic goals that will never be enough to satisfy, but the satisfaction of the sight of you today reminds us that while it may not be easy to live out our faith, in the end that is the only thing that will satisfy.

The kids who were here earlier, they live in a world that you’re leaving behind, a world where others make all the tough choices for you, a world where faithfulness and security are worries for other people, while you are reminding them that they are going to be leaving that cocoon and so they watch you do it and they are learning from you.

It’s a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.

If you don’t do it, God will made sure that some one does, but you will suffer, you will lose the blessings that God has for you. Perhaps this is the reason, on this day, that you have come to the kingdom, to inspire all of the rest of us to keep plugging along. And just so I don’t leave you with a hopeless feeling, that sword that Christ brings? That family divided, that he knew so well? If you flip ahead a few books in the New Testament, to Luke’s account of the Acts of the Apostle’s, you will find this description of who was there with the disciples after the resurrection of Christ in that Upper Room: “Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers”. So that which was divided is united, that which was severed is restored, that which was dead is alive when we work our way together toward Christ.

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.