Sermon for Sunday, August 17, 2025

August 17, 2025
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Luke 12:49-56


Whoa—is this Jesus or John the Baptist? What happened to the Jesus who said, “Have no fear little flock?” The Jesus who told us that he didn’t come to be an arbitrator for the person who asked Jesus to tell his brother to share the inheritance with him? That Jesus said he wasn’t sent to be the judge in such matters. Today’s Jesus, just 35 verses later, in the same chapter, sure sounds like he’s judging us all. What happened to the Jesus who promises us peace and restored community?

This part of Luke marks a change in the narrative, where Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem. He knows what lies ahead. He knows that he’s been getting attention, and not always the good kind of attention. He knows that he’s upset the ones in charge: in charge of the Temple, in charge of the Jews, and in charge of the territory—which means that Rome is paying attention. This reading makes it clear that the family, the foundational building block of culture, will also be divided and disturbed. Society cannot go on in a business as usual trajectory.

Many of us read this text as Jesus foretelling the future, but too many of us fail to realize that he’s talking about the short-term future, not the two thousand years forward future. To be fair, nearly every generation has cried out about times like these. In some ways, he’s doing more describing than predicting. Go back to that text, where Jesus talks about how he’s brought division, not just in the larger society, but in the individual family unit. He’s not necessarily saying that family division is part of his mission statement. He’s just describing what has happened and will happen in his wake.

It's a text that may seem especially descriptive of our current time, which has seen divisions that may feel apocalyptic to many of us. The last 15 years have brought enormous swings, such that regardless of your political beliefs, at some point you’ve looked at the people in charge and felt like you didn’t know your own country. It has been thoroughly disruptive from anything like the business as usual model that has served many of us well for so long. Democrat, Republican, some point in between, we’ve all had plenty of reasons to feel dismayed. Not the least of which is the somewhere in between thinkers that seem to have been silenced by the others. No matter where we are on the political spectrum, we’ve all seen ideas that we thought were solid discarded with nary a thought for consequences.

If Jesus stood up here preaching, he’d probably remind us that we’re focused on the wrong thing, that we’re investing too much in the wrong vehicle, hoping for salvation. He might use that language of fire, but he’d likely use it in a different way than worldly leaders do. Worldly leaders want us to be afraid of a world on fire that may plunge us into nuclear winter, afraid so that we’ll let worldly leaders do whatever they want to do, which is so often not good for the weak and the needy, for the widow and the orphan, to use the language of our Psalm.

Jesus, on the other hand, reminds us of the power of fire beyond destruction. We live in a time of raging wildfires, so it can be hard to remember the other uses of fire. There’s the fire that refiners use, to transform brittle metal into forged steel. There’s fire that cleanses or clears the underbrush, making way for what is to come next. Jesus reminds us that there is a power that can refine through fire, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, families, the status quo, and yes, humanity, in times like these and every other generation who has cried out.

Jesus reminds us that he’s not preaching something new. His message is eternal, just like the weather systems. And like the weather systems, we can read the signs, if we are brave enough. When I see a storm like Erin strengthen from a tropical storm on Friday to a category 5 hurricane on Saturday morning, I pay attention. Unfortunately, we’re not always paying attention to the messages that God has been sending.

Jesus is not the first to tell us that God wants something different for creation. Look back to our first reading, to Jeremiah, a prophet we think was active around 630 BC. Jeremiah too, tells us that the word of God is like fire, like a hammer that breaks a rock into pieces. The writer of Hebrews reminds us of a past heritage, a heritage of faithful believers who have shaped the intervening generations.

We might read verse 33 of Hebrews and despair. We may not see ourselves in this list of people: “who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, 34 quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.”

It’s good to remember that the faithful generations of the past were not always successful. We may feel more affinity with the ones described in verses 36-38, who “suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented 38 of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and holes in the ground.”

Well, thankfully, most of us haven’t suffered quite that way, not literally. But when we think about the vision of the Kingdom of God that Jesus teaches, and we compare it to what we see around us, in times like these, we may feel that we’re wandering in deserts or hiding in holes in the ground. We may feel that the end is nigh, but not in a good way. Sometimes even when we know the devastation a cat 5 can cause, we cannot get out of its way.

Jesus reminds us that the end is always near. The master may return at any moment, and we are to be prepared. We tend to think of the end in apocalyptic terms: mushroom clouds or poisoned water or melting glaciers. But Jesus comes with a different vision: he promises the end of oppression, the end of inequality, the forging of justice. He holds out a promise of a world where everyone has enough and no one has to endure a boot on the neck.

For those of us with eyes to see, we can notice the beginnings of God's plan for the world, in times like these, even while worldly powers think they're in charge. We can say be prepared to say yes to God's invitation to be part of that new creation that God is still creating. The long list of Old Testament believers had not seen the fullness of God since Jesus had not come, and for the alert, in every age since, we have been living in times like these. We, too, have not yet seen the fullness of God, even though we have glimpsed it in Jesus.

As we listen to Jesus talk about fire, think about how that imagery changes if instead of the kind of fire that a nuclear bomb delivers, we think about the fire that comes on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit fire that transforms a scared band of disciples into a group of apostles with fiery speech and a fierce energy. Listen to verse 49 again, thinking not of fire raining down from the sky, but the Holy Spirit igniting hearts and minds: “49 “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!”

When I think about Jesus casting Holy Spirit fire upon the earth, my reaction changes: “Yes, come Lord Jesus! Yes, bring that fire, Jesus. We are so ready for that change.” I sense that you are with me in this yearning, ready to be refined. Let us pray the reformer’s prayer, that we are the ones called for such a time as this. Let us run the race that God calls us to run, until we, too, join the cloud of witnesses, part of the transformation of the world that is far from finished. Let us look expectantly to the day when a time like this is one where the kingdom has come on earth as it is in Heaven.