August 17, 2025 · Rev. Gracie Paterson · Jeremiah 23:23-29; Luke 12:49-56
Jesus says he came to bring fire and division, hard words in a world already divided and burning. Rev. Gracie Paterson places them in the line of prophets like Jeremiah, who refused to be a king's yes-man, and finds the good news in a fire that clarifies and purifies: God's standards of truth and justice are a torch in the darkness.
Transcript
Will you pray with me? O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable unto you, for you are our rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Difficult texts today. Difficult to understand why, in a world where we seem to have done a pretty good job as far as division goes, why Jesus would want to bring division as well. Do we not live in a world where mothers are already turned against their daughters, fathers against sons, mother in laws, against father in laws? And what other combinations were there? We've already done a good job. So why is Jesus bringing division? It's a difficult text when in a world where we see more and more signs every day of an impending climate disaster, we have to grasp that our Savior wants to set the earth ablaze. Haven't we already done that? These are difficult texts, difficult to understand why in a world on fire, we'd want to continue setting it ablaze.
But I think if we're going to find the good news in these difficult texts today, a few things contextually need to be explored. The first thing that we have to do is be able to locate Jesus within a long Prophetic tradition of the Israelite and Jewish people. I think a lot of Jesus's most famous teachings come in the form of parables, which are rich in imagery, but not necessarily direct language. Jesus uses an indirect path to expound upon some deeper teaching that he could say directly, but chooses to go around. But this language is a little bit unusual for Jesus in its directness and its aggression. Jesus speaks about himself as the bringer of division and fire, and all of these fire and brimstone like things. It's almost unlike him, but not so much.
If we do this work of placing Jesus within a longer prophetic tradition. A tradition to which the likes of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and other major and minor prophets belonged. See Jeremiah. He was a fire and brimstone teacher as well, because in the prophetic tradition, there was this ongoing power tension between the prophets and, well, the prophets. In chapter twenty three, here in Jeremiah, we actually have an oracle against the royal prophets. I don't know if you knew that being a prophet was a profession that you could have back in the day, and kings who worked in cahoots with the temple cult of the Israelite religion hired these prophets as advisors. However, when a prophet comes under the royal consciousness, under the royal agenda. The messages that these prophets began to declare, these dreams that they declared that they have were not really so radical, not really so surprising. If anything, they were tools for this royal consciousness to come through. And so these royal prophets, you might compare them to your college educated internship on the Hill. Prophets. What they were saying started to sound just a lot like what the king wanted to hear, what the temple priests wanted to hear. It became more repetition than radical, not so much disruptive as complicit. They became the yes men of the king.
Jeremiah was not that kind of a prophet. Jeremiah was a child when he first received the word of the Lord, and he took issue immediately with what he saw was an abuse of the Word of God, an abuse of the name of God being used to justify being used to hold up the earthly power of a king, rather than glorifying the heavenly power of God. So he brought his firepower upon them.
Jesus brought this same power with those he was speaking with in Galilee. A young rabbi, definitely outside of the realm of the synagogues of the day and the and the religious leadership of the time. Jesus was the outsider. He wasn't somebody ordained to do this work. He was just someone, a carpenter's son. But the truth he delivered was refreshing. And it was fiery.
Another point of context that helps with digging out the good news in these difficult texts is understanding the prophetic power of fire. Within these traditions see, in the priestly tradition of the Israelites, fire was a symbol and a tool of purity. You think of burnt offerings, things offered to God, things that needed to be sanctified, clarified, condensed into something pure for God. That's what fire was good for. And when fire shows up in the prophetic tradition, that's a sign that, you know, this is something coming directly from God. I think of fire in the prophetic tradition the burning bush, the pillar of fire with the Israelites in the wilderness, the fire that fell onto the altar in front of the prophets of Baal, brought on by the prophet Elijah. All of these fires clarified the noise that was happening around them with the burning bush, the fire that came through the bush clarified Moses's doubts about himself as a leader of a people in the wilderness, the pillar of fire that represented God's presence with the people clarified the worries that they would be alone, wandering in the wilderness until they died. The fire that Elijah brought down clarified whose God was really God in comparison to the prophets of Baal.
And so if we take this prophetic tradition and we take this fire power, this clarifying, purifying, assuring kind of fire, we see some good news starting to emerge from Jesus wanting to bring fire on the earth. Because we think about today in our own context. We've got a lot of yes men in very high offices in our land. We've got a lot of deceptive language. We've got a lot of placating language, language that Blurs the reality of the injustices that are truly happening. We use words like criminals to describe people who have lived here working hard for their families for years, who maybe just aren't from here originally. We use words everything up to the word genocide to describe the slow starvation of the people of Gaza. We hear that things in the country are going great, big, beautiful, better than ever. But they're all coming from the yes men. They're clouding the clarity that's in the standards of truth and justice that God has for us.
So that's the good news in fire. Amidst all the noise and all the overwhelm of the bad news in our world. Fire comes through with a refreshing honesty, with a refreshing truth. Even amidst all the mystery of God. Of what God is of. Of who we are in relationship to God. One thing that God offers us is true, is clear, is certain is the standards for truth and justice.
We're not walking without a light in this world. We have a torch. It will guide us. It'll go up against the edges of the noise and of the darkness. We'll say, no, this. This is the truth.
Last week, Amy and I asked you to pray for our friend Ester, who was detained by ICE after showing up in good faith to her immigration hearing. And within the past week, she's now been deported back to the Philippines, leaving behind three children. No, father. You can read about this. This is public information, that the family has consented to put out.
But. Forgive me if I am feeling a little fiery myself this morning. There's a power and a generosity in clarifying the things that are wrong in this world. and seeking out what is right with a fiery passion, I believe that. And today I want to offer just a bit of that.
So when we leave this place, we'll ask God. God direct us to the real prophets. Not the royal prophets, not the yes men. Help us seek out truth from those who will say it faithfully. A good bet is a child, maybe an elder. But somebody without an agenda. Except for a passion for this truth. God. May those people come to us. May those people guide us like a torch in the darkness. Thanks be to God that some things are clear. Thanks be to God that we can follow that. Amen.