The Fiery, Dividing Tongues of God's Love

Children’s Homily:  Life is a team sport.

Fr. Tom Seitz, Jr.   8/14/22

When I was your age, I competed on my hometown swim team. Our final and largest swim meet included five or six at an Olympic-sized pool in a nearby city. So many swimmers came hoping to win a medal or a ribbon that they had to hold preliminary races to find out who the six fastest swimmers were in each event for the final, decisive race. Doing that took all morning.

The final races started after lunch, beginning with the youngest swimmers - eight and under and ten and under - and moving on to the middle and high school swimmers, so I didn’t have to wait very long to compete. The first time I won a gold, silver, or bronze medal, I was, of course, very eager to receive my award right away, but my older teammates told me that’s not how it worked.

What the meet organizers did was to award the medals and ribbons after every race had been run, which meant I had to wait until the evening, after sunset, after they had turned on the lights in and around the pool so the final races could be run. Then and only then did they award individual medals and ribbons as well as announce the winning team. My job, between the time I won my medals and ribbons and the time when I received my awards, was to sit with my other younger teammates on the grassy hillside and be ready to jump up and cheer on my older teammates when the starting gun sounded.

We just heard from the Bible that this is the way God runs the race of life as well. All these people in our stained-glass windows are early winners in the game of life, long before we were born. We call them saints because they have been faithful members of Jesus’ team. They have won the crown of life that will never get lost or stolen or tarnished or worn out by the passage of time.

But God hasn’t awarded them their crowns yet. Like me on the grassy hillside at the swim meet, they have surrounded us like an invisible cloud, cheering you and me on until everyone has finished their races. Then and only then will God give each and every one on his team their crown, the glory that comes when we remain faithful to God even when our race is especially difficult, tempting us to give up, to stop swimming in the pool of his love.

When that happens. When you think you’re all alone and no one cares what happens to you, remember that millions of your fellow teammates are rooting for you, even if you can’t see them or hear them. They want you to finish every event in your life that tests your faith in God. And the only way you can fail is if you refuse to try, or refuse to get in the water, or to quit, or to ignore the instruction, the example and encouragement of your teammates, and especially Jesus, who is the captain of the team and the perfector of every person’s faith. Jesus entered the toughest event of all, the one that only he could enter, so that we could join his team and be a winning human being too, learning how to live like him with faith, and hope, and love.

You still have many life events ahead of you. The older members of your team who are here this morning, as well as those in the windows who finished their races long ago: we all remember what it was like to be eight and under or ten and under. We all had many of the same events as you: taking tests, dealing with bullies, being tempted to steal or cheat or lie, to disobey your parents or your teachers, or to take unnecessary risks with your health and life. We’ve had to learn how to finish a race even if we don’t win a medal, and how to be happy for your teammate who swam a little faster than you, knowing that the one point you earned as a sixth-place finisher might be the difference between a winning or losing team effort. 

In the end, being on Jesus’ winning team is more important than any individual awards we may earn in the race of life, because we can never earn enough medals to win the crown of life, which is a gift that only God can give. We’re rooting for you, because we know you can and will be a winner if you stick with Jesus and with us, and we’re looking forward to the day, at the end of time, when we’ll all receive from Jesus the crown of life that lasts forever. AMEN.

 “The Fiery, Dividing Tongues of God’s Love”     (The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 14, 2022)

Fr. Tom Seitz, Jr. 

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

Some of you are familiar with my homiletical strategy in responding to the lessons that are assigned to us each Sunday; namely, that the most productive place to begin is with those verses of Holy Scripture that we either disagree with or do not fully understand. It is where the Bible confronts and challenges our natural human presuppositions or where it exposes our ignorance and the limits of our understanding that we often stand to benefit the most, to hear God speaking to us most clearly.

Such problematic verses in the Bible, passages we believe to be the word of God, may be hard for us to swallow, but, as Jeremiah reminds us in our first lesson, they also often contain the most spiritual nutrition. The word of God is wheat; it feeds the divine fire in our soul. Our merely human imaginings are, on the other hand, too often like straw, empty calories at best, even if we’ve artificially sweetened them.

God called Jeremiah to be a prophet at a decisive moment in the history of Israel. He gave him a word that he was loathe to announce to his fellow citizens; namely, that God’s patience had finally run out and that his people would now face the destructive consequences of their repeated breaking and scorning of their covenant with God. He knew that was not what the people wanted to hear. He knew his prophetic word would be very divisive. Some would see him as a traitor to his own country. Others would, perhaps reluctantly, recognize the truth of what he was saying.

Jesus, a prophet like Jeremiah at an even more decisive moment in the history of Israel and of the entire world, tells us that he has come, not to bring peace, but division. The fire that he would kindle through his baptism on the cross would change everything, even the strongest of human bonds, the bonds of family.

The evidence of the disruptive force of Jesus’ prophetic role and fiery baptism is there in gospels, even if we tend to ignore it or overlook it. Take, for example, Jesus’ reply to his mother’s request that he salvage a wedding reception that had run out of wine. His reply to his mother was literally, “What is there between you and me?” That is to say, “Even though you are my mother, what claim do you have on me?” words that had to sting Mary to the quick.

Indeed, the angel who announced to Mary that she would bear the Son of God warned her that a sword would pierce her heart as well as the fact that her son would divide and disrupt the world around her as the initial and necessary means of turning the world right side up through the fire of this baptism.

Or take the scene later on in the gospels when Jesus’ family comes to try to take control of him and return him to his father’s carpenter shop in Nazareth only to be rebuffed by Jesus when he points to those who have gathered around him and declares that those who have come to believe that he is not crazy but is none other than God’s chosen Messiah are his mothers and brothers and sisters, even if it should cost them their own family ties.

And isn’t it profoundly reassuring to also note that after Jesus is baptized on the cross and kindles a fire of divine love that cannot and will not be extinguished, but will spread to every corner of the world, that we find Mary among those in the upper room when the fire of the Holy Spirit was kindled among the first disciples, along with James, the Lord’s brother, who became the apostle over the church in Jerusalem and guided the church in its first crisis to resolve the future relationship between Jewish and gentile Christians, uniting people of every language nation and tongue into the one Body of the Church. Jesus’ earlier division within his own earthly family can now be appreciated as a divine and ultimately constructive and transformative process that can be achieved in no other way.

The Bible doesn’t give us many details about how disruptive it must have been for Peter and Andrew to leave home and walk away from their fishing business, though his mother’s subsequent sickness which Jesus heals by visiting her home, taking her by the hand and raising her up may have been as much a sign of Jesus overcoming her emotional distress at losing her son’s support as a physical disease.

Jesus’s call to James and John also meant leaving their father Zebedee. Jesus was very clear. “He that loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” That will require a wrenching division in many families.

This is what Jesus is trying to explain to us by the fact that we know how to predict the weather. When you see familial bonds being broken by God, by the fire of his Holy Spirit kindled through his Son’s death and resurrection, then you know that God is determined to create bonds between people that are even stronger than those between fathers and sons, between mothers and daughters, and between in-laws. 

And so has he created those stronger bonds with you and me who have been baptized. His seemingly harsh and dismissive comment to his mother at the wedding feast did not dissuade Mary or destroy their relationship. Rather, it changed the basis on which they were related, as Mary immediately recognized, that she was dealing with the Messiah, and not just her son, and so she instructed the stewards at the banquet, “Do whatever he tells you to do.”

The fire of the Holy Spirit is the fire of God’s love demonstrated most fully on the cross with Jesus, who is the pioneer and perfector of our faith, who trusted that the severing of the very lifeline between himself and his Father on the cross would be the very spark that would ignite a fire that would bring many sons and daughters to glory with him, perfecting his joy with our inclusion in the family of God by a similar faith. This loving fire makes whatever it touches better, even if it doesn’t appear to be the case at first. That is our calling, to bear witness to the world of the total transformation that has taken place in our lives, touching even our most intimate and precious natural kinship ties, recreating our fathers and mothers, our sons and daughters, our in-laws as brothers and sisters in Christ.

God knows we are living through very divisive times, with divisions on every level of public life. Just as we can trust that God’s fiery love can transform our personal lives, so has that same love the power to transform our larger society and the nations and peoples of the world. Believing that God is working through and actively directing the divisions and disruptions that we see all around us is, to be sure, an act of faith no less than those who first read the letter to the Hebrews, who were tempted to abandon their faith in Christ and the divisive fire of his Spirit and to return to Judaism as a socially and politically safer and more peaceful alternative, but one that would undo the work that God had begun in them.

Let us take comfort in the fact that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses whose faith was tested and proven victorious. Their joy is not yet complete. They will not receive the crown of life until we have finished our own race and receive our own crown with them, as members of the one body in which there is an essential place for each and every one of us, where none of us can say, “I have no need of you,” a reconstituted family who trusts in the divisive and transforming fire of the Holy Spirit kindled by the baptism of Jesus on the cross. AMEN.