Burning Down the House

Submitted by Sara Miles on August 29, 2007 - 4:58am.

Reflections on Luke 12:49-56; a sermon preached at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church on Sunday August 19, 2007. 

If you were in church last Sunday you heard Jesus’ simple formula for overcoming fear: just give away everything you have to the poor. And you thought that was hard? Let’s try today’s challenge. Jesus says, I’ve come to bring fire to the earth and destroy your family. Do you think I’ve come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.
  What’s burning up here isn’t just money, as it was in the Gospel last week. It isn’t just religion, as it was two weeks ago when poor Peter tried to make a shrine to the ancestors to protect him from the blazing fire of the transfiguration. What Jesus is burning up in this reading is the past, and the future of the world as we see it in human terms. He’s replacing it with the fire of the perpetual present: the fire of Christ, the fire of baptism through death. The fire of new creation. 
He is burning down the house. Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem, heading into his death, and talking about burning down the whole damn house....and oh, how I wish it were burning already. 
Back in the early 1970s this country was on fire: the cities were burning, the streets were full of marchers and National Guardsmen, the country was convulsed by assassins, drugs and riots. Everything was turning over: Women left their husbands, young men defied the law and the elders, inmates took control of prisons, poor people refused to obey the cops, parents and children were at each other’s throats. I was young and fiercely anti-authoritarian and had no sense. The whole new thing, the Black Panther/Weatherman/radical lesbian/apocalyptic/ hippie/Third World revolutionary ethos, just thrilled me. My favorite chant at the demonstrations—not today’s polite civil disobedience events, but the scary ones that wound up with teargas and running with your heart in the mouth from the craziness—was: “2, 4, 6, 8; smash the family, church, and state.” 
I had absolutely no idea this was Jesus’ chant. Such a fundamentally Christian thing to say.
Smash the family––smash the relations of power between men and women, young and old.
Smash the church—break the relations of power between an official priesthood and the people of God, between manipulators of magic and its helpless objects.
Smash the state—break the relations of power that owe their existence to official violence; destroy the armies of the empire, break the iron bars of the prison house. 
Can’t you just hear our friend, Jesus, chanting this? Or, to quote another saying I grew up with: “burn baby, burn.” And how I wish the fire were already kindled. 
The idea of toppling the church or state seems so remote, now, it doesn’t always seem threatening. So let’s talk about what is scary, what we do take personally: family...that other locus of power Jesus wants to destroy.
In our cold postmodern capitalist world, family sometimes seems like the only place we’re safe. It’s home. It’s love. It’s a minivan full of blond children. But Jesus is not talking about a cozy, affective private household: he’s talking about a system of power. 
In Jesus’ time, family ruled as much as the temple did....or the soldiers of the imperial army. Your very name, your identity, was determined by whose son or daughter you were. Your role in life was completely circumscribed by your position in the family. Your freedom as an individual was negligible in the family, and in the network of families that made up tribes and nations. The father ruled the mother, the mother-in-law ruled the daughter--in-law, the elder brother ruled the younger brother. 
And central to the construction of family, of course, was who was outside it. Families existed—in fact, just as they do now—to define outsiders. Widows and orphans, illegitimate children—these people had no power, no authority, no place. They were not full humans, because they did not belong to a family. 
Jesus is gonna burn that sucker down. 
And, to the extent that we still think families are about private life, about controlling boundaries, about maintaining an inside and an outside, they are over. When we think they’re about knowing who isn’t family, who isn’t our brother or sister, they’re over. God wants to smash even our enlightened, modern families, and replace them with something new.
Because family, to Jesus, is not just the family you’re born into. Not the family of history, but the whole human family Jesus is born into, the family he remakes in his own image. Family contains everyone who is a child of God. It is love without conditions. And that smashed-up family, the new creation, is what Jesus gives us to live in, once he’s burned down the house of exclusive, man-made families. 
It doesn’t matter anymore that you’re related by blood...by circumcision...by name, by property, by geographic boundaries. It doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Greek, slave or free, male or female. We are all children of God: born naked, with no vestiges of family position or privilege that we can carry into the Kingdom.
We are liberated from human rules about who belongs, and who has power, and who deserves to be part of a family. You could have a virulent skin disease, or be without a savings account, or be crazy. You could be a girl. You could be an orphan or an illegitimate child. And yet you are part of Jesus’ family, the one he makes over and over again as he burns up the ones we create to keep others out.
He turns his back on exclusive blood ties and replaces them with the bonds of affection. He destroys the boundaries established by the patriarchs. He comes not to bring peace, but freedom.
 Because Jesus finally did find the thing Luke says he was so impatient for, his baptism of fire. He carried it, stumbling, up the hill, and hung there as the sky darkened. And then, before he stopped breathing, he turned to the shattered people around him and made them into a new family: Woman, he said, behold your son. Son, behold your mother. 
God is good at making families. You may have noticed this. Two men and a baby; five illegal immigrants, a widow and an orphan: God doesn’t care who the state calls a family. Unlikely couples, mixed marriages, the barren and unclean: God doesn’t care what the priests say, she can make children for Abraham out of the very stones. God is going to make your soul into a bride, and give you Jesus as your boyfriend, your brother, your mother, your baby child; Jesus who offers you his blood and his body as your own. And who leaves nobody out.
So burn down the house. Smash the family, church, and state. And come instead into the household of God. Let’s go up to the Table: we’re all going to have supper together.
Amen.

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