Jesus: Divider or Uniter?
The Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
August 19, 2007

Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Psalm 80
Luke 12:49-56

At Christmas time, we open the Gospel of Luke and read in chapter two of the multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying “Peace on earth and goodwill to all.” But here we are today on this 12th Sunday after Pentecost and the Lectionary gives us this text where Jesus really shakes things up by renouncing peace and upholding division. You’d think that Jesus would seek unity among his believers, not try to turn them against each other. So we might ask, in the parlance of our politics over the last several years, is Jesus a uniter or a divider?

In this passage he sure seems more like a divider. He says some families will be torn apart as some respond to the gospel and others don’t. But this text is not about his intent to tear apart families. Certainly, his other teachings would fly in the face of that. He is not saying, really, that he does not bring peace, but he is saying perhaps that the peace he brings is a deep peace and to get to that deep peace, decision, engagement, conflict and sometimes division is necessary. He is saying that to follow him is to leave behind some things and to take up other things. He is saying, perhaps, that some things should divide us, that peace is more than the absence of conflict.

Jesus reminds us that there are some things worth dividing over. We see this in religious history. We are Protestants. The root of Protestant is “protest,” as the reformers divided from the Roman Catholic tradition. The Puritans were separatists who likewise divided themselves from the Church of England and declared that the local church was the church complete.

We see this in secular history. Our nation was born in division as we declared independence from Britain. Our nation itself divided for a while over slavery, north from south. Slavery also divided many denominations, the Methodists and the Baptists, to name a few. It did not so divide Congregationalists because there weren’t too many Congregationalists south of the Mason Dixon. In fact, many Congregational Churches, including this one, were involved in the anti-slavery movement, as we were one of the churches breaking federal law by helping to harbor escaped slaves as a church on the Underground Railroad.

In our world today, yet other issues threaten division of our society and religious traditions. Race remains a significant issue in America as well as in Milwaukee and Wauwatosa, a hangover in our nation from the days of slavery. Perhaps the next issue we think of is the issue of the place of gay and lesbian people in society and in the church. Most recently there’s been talk of a split among the Episcopalians and in our newspaper last weekend was the ELCA Lutheran’s national assembly meeting in Chicago as they struggled with policy on clergy who are in committed same-sex relationships.

And there are all the other hot-button cultural issues: race, abortion, war, and various issues of the common good of God’s people. We in our congregation and across our association of congregations have seen this play out and have been grateful, perhaps, that we are not in that struggle. These are the issues that confront us in our wider community, issues which are out there, not in our own community. And yet these issues are also in here—in our community and in this sanctuary. These are not merely political issues, but they are the real things that some of us struggle with. We have people whose families are interracial and deal with living in a white majority community. We have people who are gay and lesbian, and we have people with gay members in their families. We have people who are struggling with all the cultural issues we read about in the paper.

I think we have a false sense of peace because we don’t talk about these things. When I say “we” I don’t mean just our congregation, I mean our whole association of congregations. The deeper I go into Christian understanding, the more I am aware that the Christian faith has something to say to society as well as to individuals. We have tended in the direction of silence in part because of our distinct history.

As most of us know, we are the among the churches that did not go into the merger that created the United Church of Christ back in the 1950s because the emerging UCC was more Presbyterian in governance than congregational. There also was a concern at the time about the stances taken by the Social Action Committee of the former General Council of Congregational Christian Churches. So our culture here among the National Association (NA) churches has been strongly that we should not take stands, as this abrogates freedom of conscience of individuals as well the authority of local churches to set their own policy.

And this is a good thing. These days too many traditions have become too politicized and it’s gotten in the way of the Gospel. But the way this has worked out among our churches is not only that we don’t take stands, but that we don’t even talk about these issues. (For example, I’m told by the current editor of The Congregationalist, our national magazine, that the throughout the 1960s and 1970s the magazine never addressed any aspect of the Vietnam War, which was the major issue of that day.) In failing to engage these issues from a faith perspective, we have helped to turn our Christian faith into a merely private affair between individuals and God. Certainly, the Christian faith is in part about one’s individual relationship with God, but moreover our faith is about community. God cares about the societies we build.

I am not suggesting that we take stands. I know you don’t want to hear politics from the pulpit each Sunday and I don’t want to give you mere politics. But we do need to help each other on how to think theologically about what’s going on in the world. And especially we need help on how we treat fellow church members who live with these issues. Silence is not always toleration.

I say this out of my love for you and for our tradition, grown over these last almost four years that I’ve been with you. I don’t think there are easy and clear answers to these difficult issues. There are good Christians on all sides of these arguments. Different Christians understand the Biblical witness differently and it’s not always clear on what exactly is a Christian stance on these things. If we go to the Bible asking what it says about war and peace, about abortion, about race, about issues of sexuality, we find we have to read the Bible in its entirety, in the richness of its warp and weave, from the standpoint of the church’s traditional insistence that theology be understood from the quadrilateral of Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience. You can’t just extract a text or two and claim that the Bible speaks on that issue for all time. Remember, abolitionists had great difficulty convincing the American public of the 19th century that slavery was wrong in part because Paul clearly said in the Bible that slaves should obey their masters.

I am concerned about issues of race in our culture because race remains a stubborn thing locally in our wider community. Here I’d note that our mayor, Teresa Estness, continues to receive hate mail over the incident now quite a while ago when she hugged Milwaukee Alderman Michael McGee. Not just critical but respectful mail, but hate mail, some of it anonymous and including, she says, some death threats. This should give us pause.

Though I personally support the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church, including ordination, I know that some of you disagree with me here, perhaps strongly. This is okay. We can disagree and remain in covenant. We need not think alike to love alike. We need more dialogue, more prayer, we need much more light before our community or our society can see our way clearly on these matters.

Really, uniformity of thought about these issues is not the goal. I am worried about engagement of our culture and a deeper engagement with each other. I worry not just about our congregation, but all our congregations in our National Association. All of us need to better engage the real issues of real life and do so with the confidence that our real and living God will guide us to a better and deeper and richer place. To a place of true peace, to an experience of that peace on Earth we yearn for so deeply.

Jesus says he came to divide. I don’t think these things need to divide us. Jesus sometimes teaches in hyperbole. In fact, we Congregationalists are well placed to engage these issues given our governance, since our national body can’t dictate the stances of a local church. Each congregation is empowered to discern what is God’s will for that church for the living of these days.

The world presses in on us. It pushes us, not to division, but to decision of how to be followers of Jesus Christ in a pluralistic world. It pushes us to engage real life and the real people who struggle in an often difficult world.

God is not an ethereal spirit disconnected from real life. Our God is an incarnational God who gets involved in the muck and mire of real life. Today’s text from Hebrews recites the heroes of our faith, suggesting that the most difficult circumstances can be overcome when confronted by people of faith acting in the name of God. All these compose a mighty cloud of witnesses, so we are not alone.

Our God works in and through the created world, in and through the disagreements and conflicts and violence of the created order, moving us ever closer to a fuller knowledge of God which will continue to break forth.

In closing I want to tell you two brief stories. The first is that a little over a week ago two friends and myself met up in Chicago to see a play and we got there early and so we were nosing around downtown. We are all ministers and one of our trio is from Chicago and so he showed us around some of the downtown churches. (Notice when ministers gather for recreation, what do we do? We go to churches.) We went to First Methodist Church, the oldest church in Chicago, known as the “Chicago Temple.” Its sanctuary is opened during the day as a place for prayer. As we walked into the sanctuary, I was touched by the handful of people who were there sitting or knelling in prayer. I took a brochure. Here’s how they described themselves:

(The church)…is home to a dynamic and truly diverse congregation made up of people of all ages, from the city and suburbs, single, married, with and without children, old, young, and of many races and varied native languages. We welcome all people to the life of this congregation and believe that we are all in need of God’s love and grace and that God, through Jesus Christ, intends the church to be a community that incarnates love, grace and justice for all people. Holding true to that belief, we welcome and encourage all persons, including persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities, in every aspect of our Christian life together. Our mission is to spread the Good News, bear witness to God’s love through our actions, bear the fruit of our faith in our actions, and humbly enter into dialog with other people about the meaning of following Christ today.

Of course our church is not an urban church, and this is the mission of a downtown, urban congregation. But notice how they’ve apparently worked through the divisions that trouble the wider culture and offer unity—a place of prayer and respite for everyone. That’s their mission. Our church, like each and every other church in the NA, also has a mission given to us by God and the goal of any church is to find that deep mission, its deep gift, and how it might meet some deep need of the world. That’s when the magic happens.

That was a week ago Thursday. This week, as you probably noticed, sewer repair has continued around the Village and has created detours here and there. This last week, as repair closed down even more of Wauwatosa Avenue, traffic going south was detoured down Church Street. So this week we had a steady stream of cars right in front of our church, often backed up trying to turn left onto the Parkway.

It felt odd as I would walk out of the building, to see all this traffic in front of our church. And it was a greater diversity of cars and of people than we usually see. With the nice weather, people had their windows down and I could hear everything from classical music to rap. It seems that a road detour suddenly brought a rich diversity of people to Church Street. It wasn’t exactly downtown Chicago, but it was a rich cross-section of our community, brought to our doorstep.

Part of me wishes that the detour down Church Street would be permanent. But I took this as a sign that, even when traffic isn’t rerouted, the world presses in on us and God beckons us, inviting us to become more of the church in the world, to engage the world.

God beckons us to have the faith that we can dialogue about where God is calling us to help build up the common good of God’s people, that our love for each other will hold us up in the places where we disagree, as we need not think alike to love alike. That by following Christ, Christ will bring us through that which divides us and divides society, into a deeper, richer, more sustaining unity—a unity and a peace that only God can give, not the world. We go forward in the knowledge that our good God will bring us more light and more truth that we will need to minister to the world, in the living of these days.

So may it be.