This time of year, with the season of Pentecost dragging on and the Common Lectionary we follow winding its way through Scripture without any real focus, gives us the opportunity to scratch our collective heads through some of the more... Problematic... Teachings of Jesus, the Apostles and the Prophets. What we hear today from the mouth of the Lord is just such a teaching: "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!... Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!" This strikes us as an image almost contradictory to the Jesus of popular conception, the gentle and loving country rabbi who healed the sick and befriended the sinner. What a juxtaposition the one who came to bring fire is from Isaiah's prophecy of the Prince of Peace. How difficult to hear, and how difficult to preach on as well!

Most often, passages like the one from Luke's Gospel are trotted out to defend a particular, rather dismal, view of Christianity. Nonbelievers and believers alike point to the fire and sword Jesus says He came to bring, and cite it as proof that we are not the sacrificial peacemakers that Jesus frequently teaches us to be. Many critics of Christianity will say "See! See! This is why Christians have always been so violent and intolerant of others! Their God even teaches them to kill their own family members!" Many Christians will satisfy these criticisms, resting upon passages like these as a shield from teachings like "You have heard it said 'you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,' but I say love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you..." [Matt. 5] And "never pay back evil for evil to anyone... Never take your own revenge, beloved..." [Rom. 12] The argument is that God gives us permission to kill, since that is what He really sent Jesus here to do!

Understanding these hard teachings of Jesus is involved. The first and easiest interpretation is routinely the worst, since our natural inclination as human beings is to seek self-justification. Scripture is at its most convenient when it supports opinions and actions we set out on before we ever cracked open its pages. Want to prove that Christianity is a violent and bloodthirsty religion of hate? Here you go. Want to prove that God will be the chaplain of our troops wherever we choose to send them and for whatever reason? This will do quite nicely, thankyouverymuch. That this is a gross misinterpretation is besides the point.

What is it that could make Jesus so angry that He speaks of kindling a fire on earth and bringing division to families? What is the nature of this anger, and what brings division to a world already filled with such self-evident strife? Thankfully, we have passages like today's reading from the Prophet Isaiah to focus and clarify our understanding. Jesus, we believe, is the Messiah foretold of in the Hebrew Scriptures, and throughout His earthly ministry He demonstrated by His emphasis on faithfulness, forgiveness, justice and challenge to religious hierarchy, that He is a product of the Prophetic tradition. When inaugurating His ministry in the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus quoted from the writings of Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." [Luke 4]

Now keep in mind what Jesus quoted here... The poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed... This is supremely important in understanding these passages and even Jesus' ministry as a whole. Oh you guessed it: the ol' social justice engine is gettin' revved up again!

In the passage from Isaiah that we read today, God's people are represented symbolically by a vineyard. God planted this vineyard and tended it so that it should produce its intended fruits, but constantly She finds it producing the wrong fruits. Where it should be producing something sweet and healthy, it produces only what is bitter and poisonous. So in anger, the vineyard's owner chooses to tend the field no longer: He tears down the hedge and lets nature take its course. The vines are devoured and trampled, overgrown and dried up.

The grapes the vineyard were meant to produce, you see, were justice and righteousness. The wild grapes it did produce were bloodshed and the cry of the oppressed. So, intent as we were on bloodshed and oppression, God simply allowed us to pursue our heart's desire. We are not punished for our sin, after all, but by our sin... We reap what we sow, and where injustice and violence are planted, injustice and violence will sprout and multiply like voracious weeds. This is simply the natural consequence: God doesn't have to take the axe or the bonfire to anyone, because we're quite capable of doing that to each other on our own, if that is our pleasure. And since the vineyard was planted to produce a better fruit, the displeasure of the One who planted it is only natural.

After a century of trying our best to eliminate fires from the forests that spread throughout our continent, we have learned that fire is a necessary process. By fire, the forest is replenished and renewed: nutrients locked up in decaying matter are returned to the soil, and the weeds and debris that choke out new growth are burned away. Without rain, a vineyard will become dry. Without being tended, it will become vulnerable to a fire that would consume the briars and thorns and wild grapes. And when the inferno has passed through, the soil will once again be fertile and ready to be planted anew.

The seeds of this new vineyard are already being planted. An old saying is that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church", and we can see this in action in our reading from the letter to the Hebrews. By this, we can understand what Jesus meant when He talked of division: not the sword that we take to those who's religions opinions differ from ours, but the sword that others take to us for the new way of life we seek to live in justice and righteousness. When the household is divided against itself, with son against father and mother against daughter and in-laws taking it to each other, it is the struggle between grapes and wild grapes for which will be dominant in the vineyard.

How the battle is waged differs between those involved. "[M]eans and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means," advises Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., "and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends." One side brings the sword as their weapon, the other brings sacrifice. Torture, mocking and flogging, chains and imprisonment, stoning, sawing in two, killing by the sword, living destitute in the skins of the lowest animals, persecution and torment, wandering in caves and deserts... These are horrors the Prophets and faithful have suffered which we can only imagine, and shudder at the imagining. Yet the writer of Hebrews tells us that this was because the world was not worthy of them!

It is said that if our being a Christian is easy, it indicates one of two things. The first is that the world has become a lot more Christian. The second is that Christians have become a lot more worldly. The scale to which we have to endure persecution is in direct proportion to the threat we represent to the status quo. I'm not speaking of any frivolous claims that we're being repressed because we're not allowed to preach hate towards this group or that. What a pointless distraction that is: enduring no real suffering for an issue we've voluntarily chosen to be offended by that ultimately has nothing to do with anything. If this is all we represent, then the powers and principalities must be pleased that we have been so well domesticated.

Take a look around at the world outside our doors. Has the world become more Christian, or have we become more worldly? We spend so much time trying to figure out the weather and the stock markets, but we miss the big picture. The really big picture. We miss the great trends and movements of our society, the fundamental assumptions underlying our culture. We miss being aware of the values taught to us by the incessant drone of our media and politics. What does Western civilization, right now, in this day and age, say about what it means to be human? To be good? To be fulfilled? To find our true value, and what our true values are? What does it say about our purpose? Our goal? Our perfection? And what does Christianity have to say about what our society says?

I'll let you answer those questions for yourselves, and leave you instead with the Word of assurance and grace. Though we are each vines in this vineyard of God's, we are part of the one tree of Christ. Through Baptism we are one with Him and with all those who have come before us, are here now, and who are yet to come. The Lord has tended to us and nurtured us to produce the sweet grapes of justice and righteousness. We do not have to fear. God is love, and loves us not for anything we did, but for love's own sake. Nor will God take His love from us, since we were made for love and by love. As we have been grafted into the tree of Christ, all we must endure is the division caused by humanity as the tree Christ was hung upon, in whatever manner we are called to endure it. Whether it is because we are a tiny church that inconveniently doesn't fit into the big money plans of the establishment, scorned as the "uptight" Christian guy at work or the loathsome activist on the street, questioned because of the expense of our hospitality, challenged because of the stance we take, insulted for our idealism, or even called into real physical danger in whatever mission field God sends us to work in, it is all a part of that cleansing fire which renews and enriches the soil in which a new and better world can be planted. God is working to perfect us, asking of us only perseverance, the patience to allow Him to do His work.

This is the fire and the division that Christ came to bring. Not judgment and violence, for the world judges itself by its own violence. Rather, it is the fire and division caused by the justice and righteousness that challenges the status quo. It is the struggle of the Messiah, of which and of Whom we are a part, towards a vineyard where the oppressed are free, the blind can see, the captives are released, the poor are shown the Good News and the year of the Lord's favor is proclaimed for eternity.

Amen.