Title: Is Jesus Divisive?
Text: Luke 12:49-56
Thesis: Deciding to follow Christ is discerning decision, but depending on our circumstances, it may also be a difficult and divisive decision.
Introduction
Ancient Greek Philosopher Democritus was cited for having said, “Creatures flock together with their kind…” in 460 B.C. Today the popular idiom is simply, “Birds of a feather flock together and they do… as do we. When people gather in groups there is almost always an element of homogeneity involved. They have similar lifestyles, hobbies, interests, persuasions, race or ethnicity, socio-economic status, etc.
Perhaps the most obvious examples of like-mindedness in our country would be the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Here in Denver the spectator bleachers at Dove Valley during Bronco preseason preparations is where the most die-hard fans gather in anticipation of winning the Super Bowl this year. Red Rocks is the place concert-goers pack out when their favorite band comes to town. And unfortunately, it may be said of churches as well.
A month ago or so Egyptians for the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi packed the streets. Today Egyptians for the reinstatement of Mohammed Morsi have risen up in violent protest. The Muslim Brotherhood has turned its anger against Coptic Christians because the leader of the largest Coptic Church in Egypt expressed his support for the military coup that ousted the countries first Islamist president. Before that he had openly supported Morsi’s opponent in the presidential elections. (Probably an example of why religious leaders need to stick with what they know and do best.) However given the ongoing anti-Christian sentiment in Egypt was already smoldering before this latest spark that renewed tensions.
This latest spate of anti-Christian violence is just that, the latest. The Coptic Christians are a significant but non-the-less minority in Egypt… they make up about 10% of the population. However you cut it… religion and politics in Egypt are volatile subjects.
In a 2008 Addeco survey, 1,807 U.S. workers were asked to identify issues they felt were off-limits for discussion at work. Here are the top five responses: Religion topped the list at 29% and Politics was fourth at 14%. (Jae Yang and Veronica Salazar, "What Is the Most Taboo Topic to Discuss at Work?" USA Today (6-17-08); submitted by Van Morris, Mount Washington, Kentucky)
Religion and politics are divisive. I’ve found that I may find some people personally likable but unlikable politically or religiously. So we have another popular idiom we cite to keep things civil: “Never discuss religion or politics in polite company [because it is divisive].”
A decision to become a follower of Christ seems at first to be more determinative than divisive.
I. I. A decision to follow Christ accepts Christ as one’s Savior while a decision to not follow Christ rejects Christ as one’s Savior.
“I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning! I have a terrible baptism of suffering ahead of me, and I am under a heavy burden until it is accomplished.” Luke 12:49-50
When we unpack what it means to receive the grace of God in Christ and become a follower of Christ, we understand that such a decision is a change of direction. Becoming a follower of Christ is a turning from one’s sin and self, to serve Christ. But why should that be a problem to anyone? No one is being forced to follow Christ. However, a decision to become a follower of Christ is a watershed moment.
When Bonnie and I first moved here, Bonnie’s parents came to visit us. We took a day-trip and drove Trail Ridge Road up to the Continental Divide. One of my favorite memories of that day is watching Mom Payne charging off up a little embankment to the Continental Divide sign, wading through deep snow, falling down, getting up and declaring, “I did not come all this way to not get a picture!”
The Continental Divide is what we call a watershed… a watershed is a drainage divide. There are watersheds everywhere and as such they form a divide that determines which way water will flow. The Continental Divide extends north and south through the United States, Canada and Alaska. Here in Colorado, as a watershed, water flows west from the Continental Divide toward the Pacific Ocean or east toward the Atlantic Ocean. In Alaska water either flows west toward the Pacific or east toward the Arctic Ocean.
When a person becomes a follower of Christ his or her life flows toward Christ and follows the course, so to speak, that Christ sets. When a person opts to not follow Christ, his or her life flows in the opposite direction.
The bible says that when one’s life flows with Christ it leads to everlasting life with God and when one’s life flows in the opposite direction it leads to eternal separation from God.
In John 3 Jesus continued, “God sent his Son into the world, not to judge the world, but to save the world. There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son.” John 3:17-18
So on one side is the watershed that leads to salvation and on the other side is the watershed that leads to judgment. This is where our text begins today: “A decision to follow Christ accepts Christ as one’s Savior while a decision to not follow Christ rejects Christ as one’s Savior.” And it all hinges your understanding of why Jesus came.
Jesus said, “I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning! I have a terrible baptism of suffering ahead of me, and I am under a heavy burden until it is accomplished.” Luke 12:49-50
So what is all this fire and suffering about? Jesus came to be judged in our stead… in lieu of our suffering, Jesus suffered!
• Isaiah puts it: “All of us, like sheep, have gone astray. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. But the Lord has laid on him the sins of us all.” Isaiah 53:6
• In Romans: “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus.” Romans 5:8 and 8:1
• In I Peter: “Christ suffered for our sins once for all time. He never sinned but he died for our sins to bring us safely home to God.” I Peter 3:18
When Jesus said, “I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning! I have a terrible baptism of suffering ahead of me, and I am under a heavy burden until it is accomplished,” he was speaking of judgment and specifically of his own role in taking the judgment that is rightfully ours upon himself.
When Jesus spoke of a terrible, impending baptism of suffering ahead for himself he was speaking of how he would soon be immersed in suffering on the Cross… and he is wishing it was over.
Author Henri Nouwen tells the story of a family he knew in Paraguay. The father, a doctor, spoke out against the military regime there and its human rights abuses. Local police took their revenge on him by arresting his teenage son and torturing him to death. Enraged townsfolk wanted to turn the boy's funeral into a huge protest march, but the doctor chose another means of protest. At the funeral, the father displayed his son's body as he had found it in the jail—naked, scarred from electric shocks and cigarette burns and beatings. All the villagers filed past the corpse, which lay not in a coffin but on the blood-soaked mattress from the prison. It was the strongest protest imaginable, for it put injustice on grotesque display.
That’s what Christ’s cross does. The cross that held Jesus' body, exposed all the sin, violence and injustice of this world for what it is. At once, the cross revealed what kind of world we have and what kind of God we have: a world of gross unfairness but also a God of sacrificial love.
(Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God (Zondervan, 1997), pp. 185-186)
So the suffering Christ is on full display for all of us and all the world to see. So we could say that Jesus is divisive in the sense that receiving or rejecting the salvation offered through his suffering our judgment is a watershed decision that determines one’s life and eternal destiny.
This is a very relevant consideration. Am I flowing with Christ or away from Christ? Am I receiving Christ or am I rejecting Christ. It is relevant because that decision defines how you will live and where you will spend eternity.
A second way Jesus may be perceived as divisive is to further explore the ramifications of either receiving or rejecting Christ beyond one’s own spiritual destiny.
II. A decision to follow Christ may be divisive in the sense that some will follow Christ and others will not.
“Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to divide people against each other! From now on families will be split apart, three in favor of me and two against…” Luke 12:51-53
There is an old film called “Harvey.” It features James Stewart, who is a polite, charming and often inebriated man with an imaginary friend who is a 6’3” rabbit named Harvey. The man’s sister is very concerned and tries to have her brother committed. As the film progressed the sister and the psychiatrist met Harvey and eventually there was a division between those who had met “Harvey” (the rabbit) and those who had not. In the end they decided not to treat Stewart because he was a better person with the rabbit in his life than without it.
That may be how some people see us… a bit weird but better people with Christ in our lives and as long as we don’t get too radical it is best to just let us be. But in truth Harvey was a divisive rabbit. People either believed in Harvey or they did not.
In our text Jesus describes the split, “three will be in favor of me, and two against – or two in favor of me and three against.” Luke goes on to quote what Jesus said in Matthew 10:34-36: “Father will be divided against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother; and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
Jesus is or can be a polarizer. It is as if humanity were iron filings laid out on a sheet of paper and Jesus is the magnet. Every single iron filing lines up with the North Pole or with the South Pole. Every person is either attracted to or repelled by the person of Jesus Christ, because he’s a magnet. (Kent Edwards, from his sermon “The Great Polarizer.”)
The fact that not everyone opts to follow Christ does not mean we thumb our noses at those who reject him and part ways from them. While it is true – becoming a follower of Christ may result in tensions and even divisions in our relationships, we are not the ones who part ways. Always let the unbeliever be the one who parts ways.
In II Corinthians 7:12ff there is a principle laid out in Paul’s teaching about believers and unbelievers living together in a marriage. The bible says, “If a Christian man has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to continue living with him, he must not leave her. And if a Christian woman has an unbelieving husband and he is willing to continue living with her, she must not leave him. A Christian wife brings holiness to her marriage and a Christian husband brings holiness to his marriage. Don’t you wives realize that your husband may be saved because of you and don’t you husbands know that your wives may be saved because of you? However, implicit in the teaching is the possibility that the unbeliever may opt to leave the relationship and if so, so be it. That is their decision.
Jesus Christ is divisive only to the extent that some may choose to reject him and those who are his.
The final pieces of this text really do serve to implore us to make a decision to line up behind Jesus.
III. A decision to follow Christ is a matter of wise discernment.
“When you see the clouds beginning to form in the west, you say, ‘Here comes a shower.’ And you are right. You fools, you know how to interpret the weather signs but you do not know how to interpret the present times.” Luke 12:54-56
We have a saying here in Colorado, “If you don’t like the weather just wait 5 minutes, and it’ll change.”
Colorado does have a unique landscape with the high plains to the east, the Front Range, the Rocky Mountains and then the Western Slope. Anyone who has ever driven through the Eisenhower Tunnel has approached the tunnel from the east in a blinding snowstorm only to emerge from the tunnel on west into a bright, sun shiny day.
We have something of an understanding of how the weather works. Prevailing air currents reach Colorado from the west and most of the precipitation carried in the clouds falls on the Western Slope and in the mountains. When polar air moves into Colorado from the north and collides with warm moist air coming up from the Gulf in the south we get a blizzard here on the Front Range and out on the High Plains.
We are big on watching the signs in the weather here in Colorado to see what is going to happen next. (I mostly rely on my arthritic thumb to alert me to impending weather changes.)
Similarly, Jesus spoke to his audience in our text of how they too knew how to discern the weather. If the wind came from the west it likely carried moist air from the Mediterranean and it was going to rain. If the wind blew in from the south they knew it was going to be very hot and very dry… the NLT says it was going to be a scorcher. So Jesus told them how foolish is to be able to discern the weather but unable to discern the times.
Jesus was saying, “So here I am. You’ve heard me teach, you have witnessed the miracles I have performed, and you have heard the talk of me being the Son of God… the Messiah and you still don’t get it!” The point being: If we analyze the weather and order our lives by it, we should analyze the times and order our lives accordingly.
It is not as if the world is becoming a better place with each passing day. It is not as if the hope of world peace is within our grasp. It is more like the emotion expressed in Blood Diamond which unmasks the ongoing practice of mining diamonds in war zones and smuggling them out to be sold on the open market in order to finance an insurgency or terrorists. It is a brutal and bloody business.
The setting could be anywhere in Africa but it was in Sierra Leone where the ongoing civil war and the brutality of the insurgency had decimated the country that journalist Danny Archer said, “Sometimes I wonder if God will ever forgive us for what we’ve done to each other… and then I look around and I realize, God left this place a long time ago.” (Quote from Blood Diamond)
The last thing Jesus said to John when he received what we know as the Book of Revelation… the last thing Jesus said after having unfolded chapter after chapter of how it will go down in the end times is, “Yes, I am coming soon!” And the Apostle John’s response was, “Amen… even so, come Lord Jesus!”
Despite seeing what we do, if we could see what God sees or if we lived in certain places in the world today… places of utter hopelessness and despair we would likely pray, “Even so, come Lord Jesus!”
Jesus spoke of reading the signs that will signal the end times in Matthew 24: wars, threats of war, famines, earthquakes, persecution of Christians, i.e., think Coptic Christians in Egypt, false prophets… and at the very end the signs of the darkened sun and moon, stars falling from the sky and cosmic upheaval… then the last sign will be the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with the mighty blast of the trumpet, and they will gather his chosen ones from all over the earth – from the farthest ends of earth and heaven.” Matthew 24
Jesus was saying to his listeners then and to us today, “If you look around you might just see that maybe it’s time to get your house, i.e., your life, in order. There is a better way to live now and there is a better destiny ahead for those who become followers of Christ.
Jesus then proceeds to drive in the nail in verses 57-59. He concludes by saying:
IV. A decision to follow Christ cannot be postponed indefinitely.
“Why can’t you decide for yourselves what is right… and settle matters before you get to court?” Luke 12:57-59
Recently the Cleveland Kidnapper, Ariel Castro, negotiated a pleas bargain in order to avoid the death penalty. The evidence was overwhelming and given the nature of his crimes he decided he would prefer to spend life in prison without parole, plus 1,000 years rather than take his chances with a jury trial where he would likely be sentenced to death.
People accept plea deals and people settle lawsuits out of court not only because it saves time and money and a lot of public notoriety… they settle because if their case is an unfavorable case and the likelihood of losing very distinct possibility, it is wise to settle before it goes to trial and it is too late.
That’s is precisely what Jesus is speaking to in the last verses of our text: “When you are on your way to court with your accuser, try to settle the matter before you get there… before the judge hands you over to an officer, who will throw you into prison.” Luke 12:57-59
I know we are in a room filled with really good people… I’m good and you’re good. But despite our self-perceptions the bible says, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23 A few chapters later in Romans it says, “The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6:23
You would think that nice people like us might be tempted to think we can pull a Von Miller and skip our court date but that probably is not only unwise but not possible. We might think we can enter a plea of “Not Guilty” or even “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity” but that will not fly in God’s courtroom.
This really is a no-brainer. We are guilty and the only way we can avoid being convicted of our guilt is to throw ourselves on the mercy of God and accept the work of Christ in our stead. Then and only then can we stand before God and hear a positive verdict, “There is no condemnation for those who belong to Jesus Christ.” Romans 8:1
If we are wise we will settle a potentially unfavorable verdict against us before it goes to trial… and we ought to be wise enough to settle with God before it is too late.
Conclusion
During a training session for soldiers who were about to make their first parachute jump, the instructor explained how to open the reserve chute in the event that the primary chute failed to open.
One of the recruits hesitantly asked the instructor, “Sir, if my primary chute does not open, how long do I have to pull my reserve chute?”
The instructor looked directly into the young soldier’s eyes and said, “The rest of your life… the rest of your life.” (Humor in Uniform, Reader’s Digest, 1982)
Not every text asks us to think in terms of decisive decision making, but this one does.
Question: How long do you have to make your watershed decision that will determine how you live and where you spend eternity?
Answer: The rest of your life… but before it is too late!
Lord… You are God! You are God in the midst of controversy and you are the God of peace; You are God in the midst of controversy and you are the God of agreement; You are God in the midst of dissension and you are the God of agreement; You are God in the midst of disruption and You are the God of unification… You are God of everything and everyone.
Lord… You are God especially in the midst of the tensions and tugs and the pushes and the shoves of our lives. So we look to you this day asking that you bring to the tensions in our lives and the tensions in the lives of others around the world who follow Christ, a spirit of peace with grace sufficient for all that is hurtful and horrific.
We pray especially today for those in places like Egypt who truly know what it is to suffer for having chosen to follow Christ. May they experience in their suffering your presence, your peace and your power…
And I pray this morning for those among us who are feeling the tug tug to follow Christ… grant each the will choose you and experience the inner peace that comes to us through our Lord, Jesus Christ.
This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ who taught us to pray, “Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil… for yours in the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
