There is always a temptation as preacher to steer clear of difficult passages. But maybe I’m a glutton for punishment as they say – because the 4^th Sunday after Pentecost presents us with challenging OT and Gospel readings.

In Matthew 10:24-39 Jesus seems to be suggesting that conflict between family members and by extension, conflict in wider society is to be expected. The passage concludes with this dire warning – I’ve not come to bring peace but a sword – for I’ve come to pit family members against one another and one’s foes will be one’s kith and kin.

Once over our shock at his words, we might begin to notice that the picture of familial and societal conflict Jesus presents is actually the one we are most familiar with. What’s shocking about it is for some reason we don’t expect Jesus to talk this way. After all –isn’t Jesus the prophet of turn the other cheek not the prophet of strike back? Isn’t Jesus’ message all about love and acceptance?

The reality is that we live in a conflict riven society set in an increasingly conflict riven world. Riffing a little on my own responses to this passage – it’s as if we cry out for peace and yet Jesus rebuffs us with don’t cry to me for peace, when you have no real appetite for what it takes to establish it.

The reign of God’s Kingdom ushers the promise of peace. But it’s not any kind of peace. It’s not peace without cost. It’s peace predicated upon the establishment of justice. To the extent to which there is no justice in the world then there will be no peace. For the reign of God’s Kingdom is at odds with the ways of the world. Jesus does not so much bring the sword as many of his more crusader minded followers believe. The sword of violence is already in play when God’s reign breaks into a world not yet committed to peace with justice.

Love is the abiding principle by which we as Christians should live. We prattle on about what a complex word love is and how can we even begin to know what it should look like. But it’s actually very simple. Justice is what Christian love looks like in action. Justice is Christian love’s expression of solidarity with the stranger, the vulnerable, and the outcast. It’s one thing to acknowledge we may not be up love’s demands, but it’s quite another to say we don’t know what love is.

This gospel from Matthew 10:24-39 is preceded by the reading from Genesis 21:8-21 which relates a curious incident of conflict in Abraham’s family life. It’s a story about a wife and a concubine. It’s a story about the heir and his bastard brother. It’s a story about power and the victims of power – about the jealousy of a wife for vengeance on the one who threatens her son and his future – and the failure of a husband to intervene in order to protect both his sons – bastard son as well as heir. Talk about family drama!

The shock value in this story is a reminder to us that we cannot impose a 21^st Western veneer of monogamous family life upon Abrahams domestic arrangements. This is a warning to popular American religion that likes to take early Biblical figures and modern role models. It requires a lot of airbrushing out to maintain this fiction.

In 2017 Linda+ preached on this text in a sermon titled Families are Complicated. In it she drew the following conclusion from the story about Abraham’s domestic arrangements:

God continues to work within the framework of the gift of free will and the resulting complications and chaos that accompany it. …. In doing that, we gain a window on our own lives and the lives of our neighbors. Hagar’s suffering is redeemed through us; it calls us to see and hear her lament in the abused, rejected and marginalized of our own time, and it further calls us to offer them God’s healing wherever we can, like a well of cool water in the harsh wilderness. By God’s grace and with God’s help, that’s not really complicated at all.

Linda’s+ final sentence expresses her desire for a hopeful conclusion to the otherwise disturbing story. Yet, I also hear a note of irony in her final sentence. The irony of not really complicated at all is the hint that it’s very, very complicated indeed! Well, without God’s grace, that is. But often we human beings are not much interested in God’s grace when it comes to sorting out interpersonal and wider societal conflicts. A note of irony lies in our continued deafness to the point of this ancient story – because it endlessly complicates our lives if we see and hear God’s lament in the abused, rejected and marginalized of in our own time.

Although the actors in this Genesis story are far from modern persons with modern sensibilities – and again, I warn against viewing them through our 21^st-century Western cultural lens – they nevertheless represent archetypal human choices. We see in Sarah our human desire to protect what is ours both now and in the future by sacrificing others whose existence threatens our control. In Abraham, we see despite the helpless hand wringing and genuine heartache – a response of I can’t get involved – a nothing to do with me response. In Hagar and Ishmael, we see the responses of the powerless who have no protection but that afforded by the love of God. It seems it’s only God who is listening and loving.

Kathryn M. Schifferdecker, Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St Paul, MIN, in her 2014 commentary on this text in Working Preacher notes:

God opens Hagar’s eyes to see a well of water nearby, just as Abraham in the next chapter will see the ram caught in the thicket. And in both cases the seeing leads to new life for [both] Abraham’s sons. …It is easy to overlook this story of Ishmael, set as it is between the story of Isaac’s miraculous birth and the story of his (near) sacrifice. Yet, it is worth pausing and considering what Ishmael’s story tells us about God’s care and providence. As the old hymn reminds us, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” We cannot limit God’s mercy. God hears the cry of the abandoned. God hears the cry of the outcast, and God saves.

We cry peace, peace, but there can be no peace until there is justice. The sons of Abraham are still at each other throats in multiple permutations of this family conflict that echoes still in our own time. Whether it’s Jew and Arab; Israeli and Palestinian; Christian and Jew; Christian, Jew and Muslim – however you define it -this is the timeless family struggle between the Sarahs and Hagars, between the Isaacs, and Ishmaels, and between the Jacobs, and Esaus. On and on – round and round it goes – to our undying shame.

Cleophus J LaRue, Princeton Seminary Professor of Homiletics sums it up thus: Some think the divisions are little more than a family squabble, while others see in them a struggle against the cosmic powers of this present darkness (Ephesians 6:12).  …. The Christ whom God has sent among us does not come to usher in an era of peace but rather an era of engagement and challenge where convictions will be tested and decisions made about the things that matter in this life even as creation, along with humanity, groans for redemption. The struggle is not an easy burden to bear.

Jesus’ sword means that simply following Jesus will bring its own rejections and conflicts as we work to right wrongs, fight complacency – ours as well as others, speak truth to power, turn away from judgement and embrace service, and be genuinely open to a transformative encounter with Christ in our worship and work. All these are possible with God’s grace. Note, not a hint of irony in this last sentence.