Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Photo by Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash

Grace and peace to you all from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

It feels a little strange giving you that greeting this morning after reading Jesus’s own words from the Gospel of Luke! How in the world did we get to these harsh words in Luke’s Gospel?

Remember, this is the same gospel that begins with Jesus’s birth and a host of heavenly angels singing: “Glory to God in the highest heaven and peace to God’s people on earth!”

Now today, Jesus is boldly proclaiming that he, “came to bring fire to the earth” and he protests to the people saying, “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

These are the strongest words we hear from Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. And I think they are among the strongest words from Jesus in all four of the Gospels if not the strongest words.

To some here this morning, this text may be really challenging to hear. You may have experienced these words flung at you from a pulpit as harsh words that sinners need to hear. Something like, “Jesus is coming with fire and sword and we wonder today, are you going to be cut away and burned in the fire or are you going to be among the saved?”

That’s bad theology and that’s bad preaching. I’ll just be blunt. It’s made this text and ones like it - evoke strong – mostly negative – feelings from many.

Now, I’ve said this before, when texts evoke a strong feeling – they are telling us something! God is indicating we need to dig deeper. To gently meditate on the text and try to listen to God to hear for what God is telling us now -- is telling you now.  

So, to counter bad preaching and to show you how you can counter bad preaching too, I want to do what’s called “exegesis” with you this morning. Exegesis is a fancy church word that means “researching and examining a text with a critical eye.” My husband Ned calls it “extra-Jesus” and I think that’s fitting too – because we’re taking some extra time to seek for Jesus’s good news.

Exegesis is being “critical” about a bible text, but does not necessarily mean “criticizing” like a “movie critic.” It means asking several questions as you unfold the text sentence by sentence – word by word.

So, today, I encourage you to join me and take out your bulletin and follow along as we do a close reading of this text.

Now, the first thing I notice in the first couple of sentences is tone. Jesus sounds anxious, frustrated, and maybe a little angry. The ways we decipher the tone in English is largely through word order and punctuation. In verse 49, we read, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” We hear the sense of anxiety in the exclamation point and the turn-of-phrase “how I wish it were…”  The punctuation and word order in our English actually doesn’t give us enough emotion which I noticed in the original Greek which reads, “Fire! I came to throw over the earth! And I want it already kindled!” There is no “wishing” for it to be kindled in the Greek – just a deep desire for it to be kindled. It’s urgent. It’s anxious.

Similarly, as we move onto verse 50, the first word in Greek is “Baptized” reading something like this: “Baptism is coming for me, the baptism of all baptisms! And I can barely constrain myself until that is accomplished!”

Next is the bit about division. In the Greek, the text says, “Do you think I am bringing peace? No! My coming brings division!” And Jesus concludes with verses 54-56 which are about the arriving Kingdom of God – which Jesus eludes to by calling “the present time” in other words, Jesus is the beginning of God’s unfolding Kingdom on earth – we are living in the unfolding!  The crowd is apparently unable to fully see this and not really ready to receive the full implications of God’s arriving Kingdom through Jesus Christ.

So, this text structure becomes more poetic – a poem of ephasis:

Fire!

Baptism!

Peace?

Division!

Kingdom come!

Fire and baptism are both known to be purifying forces in Jesus’s world. Fire’s purifying quality is often alluded to with metaphors like “burning away the chaff” which is the unusable part of a plant, and burning off impurities from precious metals. Similarly, baptism is a preparation rite, a cleansing to be readied for something spiritual. In Jesus time, women and men needed to undergo a period of cleansing washing after wounds were healed.

The writer of Luke’s Gospel is having Jesus symbolically exclaim with great emotion and poetic beauty that Jesus is the Messiah who is anxious to accomplish these purification rites for all of God’s creation! Jesus is on a journey to the cross to be the final sacrifice, to walk through the fire of purification and to free us all from our sins and ultimately from even death itself.

Luke is using Jesus’s emotion and this poetic structure of the text to show us that the work of the Messiah is to purify creation, to go through the fire, and to bring a new baptism - a resurrection life for all people. Jesus is opening the way to the very Kingdom of God!

The arc of Luke’s whole Gospel shows how Jesus’s life and ministry does this by many reversals of the expected. Jesus served the poor, fed the hungry, reached out to the outcast and then died a death on the cross to save the whole of creation. Jesus wasn’t a king or a military leader, or a powerful rich man, or sitting atop the social order of his time in order to powerfully usher in God’s Kingdom. Remember, from the very beginning of Luke’s Gospel Mary sings her Magnificat saying, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly, God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty…” Jesus’s mission and ministry showed God’s intention for the poor to be full of plenty and for peace to reign by destroying the divisions sowed by power, violence and wealth with the greatest reversal of expectations of all time: Jesus went through the fire of the cross.

So, now we get why verse 51 is about sowing division. Notice that Luke doesn’t say Jesus has come to sow division in an active way. The text rather means: “my coming sows division.”

Jesus’s ministry and mission of divine peace is not welcome news for everyone. The idea of the rich being sent away empty isn’t exactly appealing to the rich. Hence, the acknowledgement in verses 51-53 that Jesus’s peace agenda will trigger conflict, and disunity among all parts of society right down to the nuclear family unit.

Jesus’s mission of divine peace, compassion, mercy and justice shatters the status quo of a stratified society – it reverses the expected way of being. That’s why it’s hard for the crowds to see it in their midst – humans are conditioned to protect the status quo.

So, to follow Jesus’s way is to be in conflict with the status quo. It’s risky business – it can cause conflict within ourselves and among our friends, neighbors and family.

Jesus is agitated today and anxious for the arrival of God’s Kingdom. A kingdom that causes conflict for us because we realize what God’s Kingdom means – it’s a place where the poor are lifted up, where wealth means nothing, where kings are thrown off their thrones, where the powerful are left powerless, where violence has no currency. A place where peace, mercy, justice, joy, compassion and love are supreme. A Kingdom that has been initiated by Christ’s giving of his whole self, including his body and blood, on the cross which has done the work of the winnowing fire and prepared the way of everlasting life for us all marked by Jesus’s resurrection.

Jesus’s message of fire and conflict, when examined closely through a practice of exegesis – is actually sharing a message of hope that God’s Kingdom is on the way and that Jesus has gone through the purifying fire for us, and we are now promised to be the newly baptized children of God, members of God’s Kingdom which we pray will come such that God’s will may be done.   

Amen.

Rev. Ryan | August 17, 2025