Sunday Sermon: “More by Its Priorities than Its Popularity”
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Text: Luke 11:43, 12:49-53
Series: “The Church Your New Pastor Deserves”
If there’s any profession that in recent years has lost the respect of Americans more than preachers have, it would be politicians. I say that because of how when you ask most people what their problem is with politicians, they’ll tell you that they don’t like how they seem to be driven more by polls than by principles. They wait to see which way the wind is blowing before tipping their hand as to where they stand on a given issue. And it’s their waffling on pressing matters that galls us most.
Obviously, not all politicians fall into that category. There are some who are truly committed to doing the right thing even when the right thing is not the popular thing. But even those politicians will acknowledge that their profession in general has been given quite the black eye by others from among their number who lack scruples and ethics are driven more by public opinion than the public good.
Of course, most of us can surely appreciate the desire to have others think highly of us and how that desire sometimes alters our behavior. It matters not what place in life you hold, you want others to hold you in somewhat positive regard. That’s true of businesspeople and professors and health care professionals, and it’s even true of church people. In fact, few are the folk who are confident enough to go about their callings without ever worrying about the reviews others are giving them.
And there’s no sin in any of that, not even for church people; until we allow the pull of popularity to cause us to reorder our priorities so that we end up watering down our discipleship and pursuing things that are not what Jesus would have us to pursue.
Such was the warning Jesus was giving to his disciples in this passage before us this morning. I have to admit that this passage is one of those verses in the Bible that make me uncomfortable because of how it challenges my motives and demands that I take stock of my discipleship. And it likely does the same for you.
Look at it with me. Here, Jesus is setting the stage for the eventual outcome of his earthly ministry and what that outcome will mean for those who have chosen to follow him. There are three parts to this teaching. In the first part, Jesus chides the religious authorities for their obsession with both prestige and popularity. “You love the choice seats in the synagogue and to be greeted respectfully in the marketplace,” he tells them. And in the second part, Jesus turns his attention to the disciples, as he speaks to them of fire and baptism. On the surface it seems like Jesus is talking about two totally separate concepts, but in truth both fire and baptism refer to purification and judgment and the means by which Jesus will be bringing such a future to this world through his death on the cross.
But it’s the third section that leaves us scratching our heads; does it not? “Do you think that I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, not peace, but division. From now on, there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.” “How can this be?” we ask ourselves. Doesn’t the Bible speak of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace?” Yes, it does. But the peace about which Jesus is speaking here is a wholeness that can only be known when a person makes living for Jesus the most important thing in life, more important than anything else or anyone else.
Let me be perfectly clear; in this teaching Jesus is not encouraging believers to turn on their loved ones; not at all. Neither is Jesus suggesting that conflict and destruction are somehow Kingdom priorities. Anyone who suggests otherwise simply isn’t being fair to Jesus. All that Jesus is saying is that anyone who seeks to live for him will ultimately find themselves at odds with the prevailing culture so that when that time comes, they shouldn’t be surprised at all by the opposition or disregard they receive, but they should instead come to see it as the surest sign that they are firmly on the side of Jesus and have made his cause the defining priority of their life.
I’m not sure that we preachers have been honest enough with our churches about the implications of such a teaching as this one. Maybe it’s because we don’t want to give room for any kind of discord in the church. Maybe it’s because we’re concerned that this kind of teaching won’t attract many newcomers to our gatherings. Maybe it’s because we’re more interested in being perceived as a nice and respectable group of people in twenty-first century society lest we encounter criticisms that we’d prefer not to have to handle. But the truth of the matter is that the more different followers of Jesus are from the prevailing culture, the more the prevailing culture will seek to punish us for it. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when that happens. That’s all Jesus is saying.
So, are you willing to live for Jesus even when doing so won’t win you many friends or enable you to influence people? And are we willing to do that together so that the priority in our church is to focus our time and our energies on advancing the cause of Christ, letting the chips fall where they will?
When we as Christ’s followers are controlled by our concern over what the culture thinks of us, our first instinct will always be to focus on numbers and demographics and polls and how things will play out in the community, none of which is unimportant. Now, we should certainly be aware of these things so that we might best understand them. But we must never be controlled by them. We must be controlled by the promise of Jesus to sustain his church so that we follow his leadership instead of what either public opinion or the proverbial market might suggest. Otherwise, we end up “straining at gnats and trying to swallow camels” as Jesus also once said to religious people who had misplaced their priorities.
Susan Howatch is a British author, whose writings center around family sagas that contain numerous religious and philosophical themes. Her novel, Ultimate Prizes, involves an ambitious but flawed Anglican cleric. At a critical point in the novel, the cleric’s sister takes the opportunity to chide her brother for what she perceives to be his empty chase of worldly success. “You and your prizes,” she says to him. “The only prize worth winning is love – and just you remember that which you’re a lonely old man trying to comfort yourself with your bank balance and your fading memories!”
But sure enough, the cleric can’t help himself. He keeps pursuing worldly success and in the process keeps cutting himself off from the company of others so that toward the end of the novel as he sits alone in his grand house reflecting on the sadness that has come to him, he looks around at all the mementos of the past, what he thought were ultimate prizes, and thinks to himself, “What a success I was. But after a while…I came to know that the only prize worth chasing is the prize I’ve managed to lose.”
The only prize worth winning truly is love – God’s love, not the world’s love. So, let us make God’s love, the love He has shown us through Christ Jesus, the priority of our lives. Then, when division comes, as it inevitably will, while we may lose the love of some, even some we care about deeply, we’ll never lose God’s love and whatever we must go through now will most definitely be worth it in the end.