Auguest 19, 2007 - A lesson in long division

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
19 August 2007
Luke 12.49-56
A lesson in long division
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

We were kids. I was maybe nine or ten years old. My brother and I each had a pair of boxing gloves. Mom gave them to us. She saw we were at the age when we going to be getting on each other’s nerves, and she figured it was best that brothers pummel one another with a little cushioning between the knuckles and the chin. Maybe the gift of boxing gloves was also her way of telling us that fighting was part of being in a family, and we had her permission to hit and even hurt, as long as there was no major injury. I’m sure we did put those gloves on a few times, but I don’t ever remember the fights we must have tried to have. I do remember the lesson from my mother, if that’s what she was giving us. I remember that sometimes there has to be a fight, even with people we love.

It’s one thing, even if an unusual thing, for your mother to tell you you’re going to fight. It is somehow another thing when Jesus—the Prince of Peace—teaches us that we’ll be fighting within our own families over the truth he is teaching us. Whenever I read that anymore, it doesn’t surprise me. Old hat. Then I think about it, and the idea of spiritual antagonisms does take me back. Elsewhere, Jesus takes the idea even further and says that we will actually have to “hate” our family members, if we want to be his disciple. [Lk 14.25] That’s really shocking.

I suppose you’ve heard this passage before, and somewhere along the line you might have listened to a sermon about it. I’ll bet, though, that the sermons most of us have heard suggest that Jesus is just exaggerating to make a point about how hard religious disagreements can be. Most of the time I myself don’t believe that I will ever have to divide myself against my own brother or father or mother over an issue about my faith in God. What I don’t really state out loud, even to myself, is my assumption that God would never divide me against my family over a matter of faith. I may be right, but only if Jesus is wrong.

Jesus says that we will live in conflictual division with each other, and were he to have finished the thought, he would have told us that everyone is in for a long division. Ever since Jesus relinquished to his disciples the mission to teach faith to the world, people have been divided about what to believe and how to live. Jesus’ lesson in long division to his disciples reminds me of the lessons in long division I got in school. Long division is frustrating when it’s too hard and tedious even when you master it. And you have to learn it.

How shall we learn to be divided, today? How are we to be faithful to our belief about God and Christ to the point that we’ll put on our gloves and fight over it? And yet when does our division on the other hand become faithless and damaging to the church, the world and ourselves? Or are there some things about the faith that make damaging the church or the world our ourselves necessary?

My dad used to ask me about what I was learning in seminary. I talked about the things that invigorated me. Those things tended to be ideas that challenged beliefs about God and reality I had never questioned. When I heard new ideas and the explanations for why they came closer to the truth, the new discoveries excited me. I wanted to know more, because I wanted to understand better. Or sometimes I wanted to know more, because I wanted to sharpen my arguments for traditional ideas that would otherwise be displaced. Mostly, though, when I found a new school of thought that I learned to trust, I started to embrace the new ideas of that school. We must need new ideas, I figure, because the old ideas haven’t accomplished what their conceivers wanted.

When I explained the new ideas to Dad, it was hard for him to share my excitement with me. For the most part, the old ideas had served him well. He grew up a Baptist and became a Presbyterian only when he was in seminary himself and had to choose a denomination. He liked Presbyterian culture. The old Baptist in him, though, liked the gospel traditional and straightforward. At the end of these conversations I had with him, he’d say, “Christian faith shouldn’t be that complicated.” I’d say that simple didn’t mean true. He’d say, “Simple people like my father”—my grandfather was a plumber—“should be able to understand faith with out all these complicated ideas of yours.” (My father had college and seminary degrees, but he never could repair a faucet. I wish I asked him why it was his father who was simple.)

The reason these conversations with Dad always ended this way is that I didn’t have an answer for him that didn’t make me seem to insult my grandfather. My Dad admired him, probably more than anyone else in the world, and far be it for me to suggest that understanding Christian faith could be beyond the mind of the most admirable person in the world. So I didn’t fight, son against father, as Jesus taught. I walked away.

But what if I had stood and fought? Would I have hurt him and strained our relationship? Or would he have played out the filial loyalty gambit about my grandfather until he antagonized me? Or would we have drilled down into our beliefs deeply enough to see a common foundation of faith? And from that common foundation, might we have built a way for each of us to say what we believed without excluding one another? We’ll never know for certain—Dad and I never really put the gloves on. But eventually we all find out what will happen if we get into a fight with someone we care about, because sometimes life makes you fight, even when you don’t want to.

I have been typical of the moderate-to-liberal Christian. Certain traditional conservative beliefs have become less important to me than they still are to others. Once I’d studied the evidence for the theory of evolution, it was not hard for me to conclude that Darwin was on the right track, even if he could not prove everything about his theory. Especially, when someone pointed out to me that the first two chapters of Genesis present two distinct narratives of creation, I was able to see the Genesis testimony as something that taught me eternal truths so compelling that they transcended the significance of temporal facts, scientific or otherwise. As a moderate person, I was content to read at Christmastime the lovely testimony of Matthew and Luke that Jesus’ mother was a virgin, such that even when someone pointed out that the other two gospels—plus all the rest of the New Testament—showed know interest at all in Mary’s virginity—did not even seem to be aware of it—I realized it wasn’t worth fighting over how she actually got pregnant.

And there is more to be moderate about. Since the world is not flat but round, does it any longer make sense to believe that there could have been enough water to flood all of life into oblivion, or to believe that Joshua really stopped the sun for a day, when it would have to have been the earth that stopped rotating, which, it one day dawned on me, would in turn have made everybody’s coffee cup slide off the dining table? You could argue about these things, but as a moderate person, who values togetherness along with diversity, I didn’t see why I would fight about them, even if Jesus teaches us that we will fight with people we love about our faith.

Two kinds of things happen with respect to these differences that, according to Jesus, make push come to shove. One is that, at least over the last generation or so, people have kept backing moderates into a corner. Many conservatives have loudly challenged the faith of people like me. They assert a literal interpretation of the Bible, and they choose parts of the Bible, like the creation in six days, the virgin birth, the great flood and even of Joshua’s stopping the sun in the sky as the literalist line in the sand. Whereas I’ve been happy to let them preach the truth their own way, they have shouted at people like me, daring us to disagree with them. When we calmly affirm a belief they disagree with, they say, “They you are, a faithless liberal!” So all of us calm moderates are now liberal, and on top of that, we’re in a pitched battle for God, truth, and, somewhat surprisingly to us, the American way, which we consider a separate matter altogether.

Why don’t I just let this kind of thing roll off my back? Well, normally, I do. But one day in a weekly meeting of 10 or so church members who gathered at 7:30 for coffee, faith-sharing and prayer, someone read a forwarded email telling about a group of scientists associated with NASA, who discovered a full day’s worth of time missing in their calculations for the movement of the earth and sun over the last few thousand years. They scratched their heads until a Christian scientist showed them in a King James Bible the two places that accounted for the missing day. When the group member read this, people reacted with audible amazement, but I was doubtful. Wouldn’t we have read about this somewhere besides emails the tabloids, if it were verifiably true?

It turns out, there really was a group of people associated with NASA, which was the Curtis Engine Company, whose conservative Christian president published the story in a 1974 book, How to Live Like a King’s Kid. His company actually sold generators to NASA, but it wasn’t a consultant. Also, no scientists were really involved, nor was NASA ever looking for a missing day. Most of the story has been proven to be made up, but I didn’t know that then. I just knew it all sounded fishy, which is why I finally made my comment about coffee cups sliding off the table, because the earth stopped spinning to make the sun look still. I was trying for inoffensive humor as a way to change the uncomfortable subject, but what I got was silence from everyone around the table and stern looks from some. Then within the next few months, most of the people around the table quit our church over theological differences. It was bad enough that the minister wasn’t. to them, a true believer, but it was intolerable that so many other people refused to reject his beliefs.

So you may try to be moderate, but unless you are willing to surrender your integrity and flee from your own Christian faith, you find that you are in a pitch battle for the life of the church. When conservatives revile me, now, for stating my beliefs over against theirs and for thereby “attacking” their right to their beliefs, I realize sadly that they’ve had to resort to slimy rhetorical tricks in order to hold up their side of the argument. So one thing is that you’re sometimes in a fight because others take your beliefs as an assault.

The other kind of thing that happens to make push come to shove is that life puts up a fight of its own. My dad, who wanted to keep his faith simple and his biblical teaching literal, had to reckon with his own sexuality. For most of his life, Dad tried the simple way of literalism and condemned himself for his same-sex orientation. I’m living proof that he did his doggonedest to be a heterosexual for the sake of his faith, but one day he had to have a fight within himself. He had to decide. Was God just being mean to him by making him the way he was, or was it untrue to say the Bible condemned him the way God made him? Understanding the Bible became a little more complicated, which had always irked him about my point of view, but understanding God’s grace became a lot more clear. Dad lived the rest of his days with a somewhat complicated Bible and a blessedly simple God of grace.

Then one day I was in a presbytery meeting in Indiana and had to listen to someone support their view that homosexuals should be excluded from full service in ministry, because they are perverted and threats to our children, and the fighter came out in me. The man who was my model for faith, who had agonized more deeply about his obedience to God than anyone I’d ever known, who taught me so passionately about his love of Jesus that I committed my career to his ministry, who continued to love people who would not accept him as he was, and who prayed daily with a discipline we all in my family remember as the standard of spiritual discipline was not the person this speaker on the floor of presbytery was talking about. As it happened, I was next in line to speak, and I leveled a solemn and fierce response regarding the conduct of any Christian who would stoop to character assassination in order to persuade a body of earnest believers to vote their way.

Thus did my father’s inward fight become the outward fight between me and some of my spiritual brothers and sisters, people with whom I had served on committees and had broken bread in the name of the Lord—people I loved, which at once made the hurt more painful and the fight more inevitable. Today, though I am still dismayed that our church continues to be torn by controversy, I understand the importance of the fight. I am even energized by it, because I have learned that Jesus really means it when he says that following him faithfully is going to lead to divisions that can press us to antagonism, even when we don’t want them and try not to antagonize.

Jesus actually harshly confronts moderates like me. “You hypocrites!” he says to us, when we seem to be able to understand astronomy, “the appearance of earth and sky,” but can’t change our thinking, as he puts it, “to interpret the present time.” The present time is always changing, and that is why it always needs to be interpreted with insights we never saw before from scripture. Those new insights, of course, are going to cause fights, because, as Jesus knew better than anyone in history, new insights from scripture look very scary to people for whom the old insights have become their only protection from evil. People tried to prove Jesus wrong by killing him, but what Jesus has proven ever since is that, in the cause of faithfulness, even death leads to new life and victory. In a fight for his faith, Jesus surrendered his life, and he wants us to remember that we, too, may be called upon to do both. Amen.