Small-Church Sermon, Big Impact: When Love Disturbs Peace
The Rev. Christopher Roque is our small-church sermon-writer for this edition of our newsletter. Fr. Chris is vicar of Calvary Episcopal Church in Menard and St. James’ Episcopal Church at Fort McKavett, Texas. A retired 30-year law enforcement veteran, he continues to serve as a reserve deputy sheriff and hostage negotiator, and in his spare time is an avid historian and railroad enthusiast.
Fr. Chris shares this sermon on the lectionary texts for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost (Propers 7A) for other churches in the diocese to use. If you don’t have regular clergy to preach on June 21 or you are the regular preacher at your church and could use a little break, please consider reading Fr. Chris’s sermon out loud to the congregation, with proper attribution, of course.
The scriptural texts for the day can be found here.
When Love Disturbs Peace
The Rev. Christopher Roque 4th Sunday after Pentecost
How many of you remember the scene in the movie Tombstone where Val Kilmer says to Thomas Haden Church, “You there, music lover,” after their heated and tense dialogue surrounding Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in E minor? Being married to a composer and musician and barely able to play the New Braunfels High School fight song on my trombone, that’s the category I’d fit into: “music lover.”
Music can be one of the most expressive forms of communication. In that scene, it expresses the dichotomy of sophistication against the raw dust and worn leather of the Old West. In Bishop N.T. Wright’s book Luke for Everyone, he writes about how Ludwig van Beethoven would use music to express, and even manipulate, emotions. Beethoven could be a bit of a trickster at times. He would lure listeners into a serene or melodic mood, only to blast them out of their seats by pounding away with a thundering crescendo resulting in a loud double-f, or fortissimo.
Through the season of Easter, we have heard Jesus preparing the disciples for his ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Now, in the season of Pentecost, Jesus has been about the work of exhorting and equipping his followers for active ministry. Then this reading from Matthew hits about like an airhorn after silently praying a rosary.
Verses 32 and 33 begin the crescendo, the building energy, when Jesus says, “Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.” Then, in verse 34, Jesus delivers the loud, thundering fortissimo: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
These verses, and the following verses regarding division within families, are some of what preachers and theologians call “the hard sayings of the Bible.” This isn’t the tranquil Jesus peacefully praying in the garden, immortalized in stained glass. This is Jesus telling us the truth about what happens when the Kingdom of God and Gospel love collide head-on with the dark, selfish part of humanity.
The sword in verse 34 isn’t a weapon to be used against fellow humans or those who disagree with us. The sword is an image of division. Jesus warns us that painful division can occur when we follow his example, especially if we challenge old patterns, family expectations, community pressures, or anything else that inserts itself into the sacred place set aside only for God.
This is one of those passages we may wish Jesus had phrased differently. We would rather hear about a lost sheep being found or a forgiven sinner on the cross. But here Jesus speaks with sharp honesty. He tells his disciples that following him will not always make life smoother. Sometimes it will expose false loyalties, unsettle assumptions, and force choices we would rather avoid.
Jesus is not against peace. Jesus is against a fake peace that preserves human injustice and selfishness. Jesus is against systems that harm, diminish, and exploit humanity.
Sometimes, as the Church, we get stuck in the rut of “just keeping the peace” or “going along to get along.” Family systems counselors warn and remind us that calm is not the same as peace. What we call peace is often only the absence of open conflict, and silence can parade as unity. This can be reflected inside our own homes as well as in national and global conflicts.
This is where the work of the Church is especially poignant. The Church’s witness is clearest where the Gospel demands standing with the poor, the forgotten, the stranger, the excluded, the abused, the captive, the grieving, and the neighbor whose dignity is being denied. When we stand up against the systems that perpetuate harm, we encounter division.
Let me give you a bit of a history lesson to show you what I mean:
Remember in the biblical history of the book of Exodus when Moses led the Hebrew people out of the bondage of slavery to the promised land? I’m sure this was a painful decision for Moses, who had been raised as a member of Pharaoh’s royal household in Egypt, to leave one family for the other.
We have seen how following the Gospel divided families in our own country during the Civil War. Today is June 21st. Two days ago, was June 19th, frequently remembered as Juneteenth. On June 19th, 1865, General Gordon Granger, commanding federal troops, read General Orders No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, stating, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
That freedom came through the suffering, courage, and sacrifice of enslaved people, abolitionists, United States Colored Troops, and an estimated 360,000 Union soldiers who died in a war that finally forced the nation to confront the evil of slavery.
German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the sacrifice of following Jesus Christ in his book The Cost of Discipleship. He said, “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Whereas costly grace, he wrote, “is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it cost a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
Bonhoeffer lived during the Nazi regime’s rise to power in Germany and denounced Adolf Hitler’s dehumanizing policies. Bonhoeffer lived into his calling to the point of his own death in renouncing the evil powers of this world that corrupted and destroyed the creatures of God.
The work to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ manifested again in the streets of the cities of the Deep South in the 1960s during the struggle for human rights and civil rights. In all these cases, liberation did not come as cheap harmony or fake peace. It came through truth, courage, suffering, and the refusal to let injustice call itself peace.
When Jesus says he brings not peace but a sword, he is not placing a weapon in the hands of his disciples or today’s Church. He is warning them that the Gospel itself will cut through every loyalty that claims more from us than God. Family, nation, tradition, comfort, reputation, and even church harmony are all good things, but they can become false gods when they ask us to betray the way of Christ.
When weapon talk arises, there is danger here of becoming blinded by our own righteousness. A question looms over us: “Am I striving for justice and peace among all people? Am I respecting the dignity of every human being?” I revert to my legalistic law enforcement language and ask myself, “Am I seeing both victim and suspect with God’s eyes and through God’s heart?”
Perhaps someone more eloquent than I said it better. The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote, “The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor… Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.”
Our worship, our doctrine, our traditions, our buildings, our public policies, and our beloved ways of doing things are meant to form us into people who love God and love our neighbors. When religion and public policy become walls against God’s love, then we have closed ourselves and others off from that love.
Jesus is not telling us to become quarrelsome people. He is not blessing cruelty, family bitterness, or religious arrogance. He is not giving the Church permission to swing the sword of judgment at the world.
Rather, Jesus is telling us that when the love of God is taken seriously, it will disturb every relationship that thrives on someone else staying bound, silent, forgotten, or afraid. The Gospel does not create that division. The division is already there. The Gospel simply tells the truth about the things that divide us from each other and from the love of God.
The way of Christ does not leave people enslaved or wounded. The peace of Christ is the peace that sets God’s children free, even when freedom first sounds like division. Gospel peace is not mere calm. It is the holy completion we glimpse whenever we seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.
