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have a large collection of books I’ve not bought and have not read, but whose titles make me want to buy them. Sometimes the title alone is worth the price of the book. One of them is by Mark Galli, an editor for the evangelical journal Christianity Today. I stole it for my sermon title today. His title, Jesus Mean and Wild, is intended as a play on the popular hymn by Charles Wesley, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” In his book, Galli wonders out loud how anyone could read the gospels and come up with the words “meek and mild” to describe Jesus. As an infant, perhaps, but certainly not as an adult. Our passage today from the Gospel of Luke certainly doesn’t have anything meek or mild about it. As a colleague puts it, this passage is not one you are likely to find in a greeting card or hanging on the refrigerator door. The Lutheran hymn-writer John Ylvisaker has a hymn that includes the line, “Jesus was sent to upset and annoy.” Frankly, that comes a bit closer to what we find in the Gospel of Luke. This is a troubling text, to say the least.

      I confess that, perhaps like many of you, I am somewhat conflict averse. I would just as soon settle things amicably, even if it means compromise, than force a breach in relationship. I suppose it is part of the demeanor I have learned to cultivate as a pastor to see the best in others, to not assume I am always right, to find a way to settle differences without leaving bruised feelings. I know that’s not always possible. Sometimes it’s not even desirable. One of the hardest things for me in our community organizing over the years has been to learn to sit toe to toe with city officials and hold my ground in a room filled with tension, when every bone in my body wants to find a friendly way out.

      So when Jesus asks his disciples, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” I want to shout, “Yes.” Isn’t that what the angels sang? Peace on earth and good will among all people? Aren’t you the one called “the Prince of Peace”? Aren’t you the one who taught us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek? Yes, we do indeed believe that you came to bring peace to the earth.

      So it comes as something of a jolt– as it must have to his disciples– when Jesus answers his own rhetorical question, “No. Not peace, I tell you, but rather division.”

      By the time Luke was writing this, of course, the division Jesus warned about had already come to pass. It’s just as true in our own time. Following Jesus brings division as often as it brings unity. The author Tom Mullen writes in his book, Laughing Out Loud and Other Religious Experiences, of his membership in the Society of Friends. “I learned upon joining the Quakers,” he writes, “that they attack large social and moral problems with conscientious determination. They work for peace– and if you really want to cause conflict, work for peace.”

T his past Wednesday I drove out to Herndon, a few miles the other side of Dulles Airport, to participate in a Bible study for mostly Spanish-speaking day laborers in the Herndon area led by Edwin Andrate, the Hispanic New Church Development pastor in our presbytery. Edwin, along with members of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon, meet the men at the Herndon Day Laborer’s site, and offer transportation back to the church, where they serve a meal and then have a short Bible study. Edwin and the members of Trinity Herndon (especially their Associate Pastor, Becca Gillespie, who served as a Presbyterian Youth Volunteer in Guatemala for two years), have created a real sense of community among these men, from varied backgrounds, different countries, and diverse religious experiences. The Day Laborer’s Site, called Project Hope and Harmony, is sponsored by a group of churches and affiliated with Reston Interfaith, a county-wide group of churches and synagogues. They didn’t set out to be controversial. They simply wanted to find a way to provide hospitality to the strangers in their midst, as the Gospel constantly urges us to do, and were unwilling to put limits on that hospitality. Yet almost from the beginning, controversy has raged– raged like a fire.

      So perhaps it fits that Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” It’s not clear exactly what Jesus meant by bringing fire to the earth– fire as judgement, fire as purification, fire as a sign of God’s presence? Or perhaps he means fire in the sense of “passion.” When I was in Delaware and our church building burned down, the congregation I served tried to capture that sense of passion with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek motto “A Congregation on Fire!” I’m not sure the members of Trinity Herndon knew what they were getting themselves in for when they first dreamed up the idea of a Bible study for Day Laborers, mostly immigrants, many of them here without all the proper papers, but they have found a passion for the strangers in their midst that is indeed setting their church on fire.

F inding that passion, Jesus suggests, has a lot to do with paying attention. Reading the signs of the times. A couple of Sundays ago in The Washington Post, John Pryor, who directs the trauma center at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, wrote about serving as an army surgeon in Iraq. He comments that working the ER in West Philadelphia was good training for his stint serving in a war zone. There are more young people killed by gun-fire in our inner cities every day than eventhe worst day of carnage in Iraq. He writes,

      The wounds and nationalities of the patients are different, but the feelings of helplessness, despair and loss are the same. In Iraq, soldiers die for freedom, for honor, for their country and for their buddies. Here in Philadelphia, they die without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one....There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa.

      Unlike the Iraq conflict, this war is not on the front pages of The Post or on CNN... You [don’t hear] about this tragedy because it happens to inner-city poor people. Imagine, for a moment, if this occurred in a suburban shopping mall or if a Marine unit in Iraq had been involved. There would be shock, outrage, 24-hour news coverage, Senate hearings and a new color of ribbon to wear. That double standard, that triage of compassion and empathy, is why the war on the streets continues unabated.

      So why are there no peace marches on the Mall for those who die in our inner cities? And, quick, which presidential candidate has the best plan to rebuild our urban centers? And how can we spend billions to prosecute a war when there never seems to be enough to reduce crime and poverty in our city neighborhoods? Or, as Jesus asks, how do you know to interpret the appearance of the earth and sky, but you do not know how to interpret the present time? It’s enough to make you want to bring fire to the earth. It’s enough to make you want to learn how not to be conflict averse. So in our work with the Washington Interfaith Network, we are learning how to be appropriately confrontational and controversial, or as John Ylvisaker put it in his hymn about Jesus, how to be appropriately upsetting and annoying.

      Our next hymn is based on the famous prayer attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi. It’s hard to imagine someone thought of as more gentle and less controversial than Saint Francis, often depicted with little birds sitting on his shoulder. Yet at the time he was a controversial figure. The son of a nobleman, he was disowned by his family, vilified by the church at a time when the church was singularly devoted to the amassing of wealth and power, all because of his commitment to the radical notion of actually living by the values of the gospel. So let us sing Francis’ words with gusto. But don’t imagine that if we lived by them, we too would not bring fire to the earth.                                                ✞

© 2007 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel