Sermon: "Peace on the Far Side of Division"- August 17, 2025

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Luke 12:49-56

The Rev'd Ezgi Saribay Perkins, Rector 

Transcript

I grew up in a culture that prizes peace within the family. The peace I grew up believing in was held together by the expectation of living in unity with one’s relatives and neighbors. I later learned in life that unity does not have to mean uniformity. That there is such a thing people love to maintain: false facets of peace.  If push the boundaries of a Middle Eastern culture and introduce differing convictions and point out the problems, which I often did, the Turkish traditionalists will quickly identify you as the odd-shaped puzzle piece that doesn’t fit. In my own culture, such people were often labeled as disturbers of peace. 

Jesus, we meet on Hallmark cards and in Christmas carols, too, promotes peace, unity, and concord. He is no disturber of peace, is he? Every Sunday we recite the angels’ song from Luke’s nativity story: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.” Christians are, after all, supposed to be the people of peace. So we believe, without thinking twice.

And yet — in Luke 12, Jesus disrupts our stereotypical notions of peace. He speaks not of comfort of peace but things like fire, baptism, and division. Is the peace we expect from Jesus as Westerners the same peace he is offering us? His words jolt us this morning: “I have come not to bring peace, but rather division.”

These types of sharp statements were tools the Old Testament prophets often used  to shake people out of their comfort zones so they could hear the truth. Jesus is not saying he is against peace. Jesus here shows the difference between God’s ultimate peace, which will come in the fullness of his kingdom at Jesus’ second coming, and the reality of following him right now. His words — “I bring peace / I bring division” — force us to face the truth that the road to God’s peace often passes through hard and painful decisions.

Which brings us to the crux of our text today. The text centers around this idea: “Jesus’ peace demands decisions that will bring division, while testing our deepest loyalties. Yet through these trials, we are called to actively discern the signs of true peace amid a conflicted world.

First, Jesus’ peace requires costly decisions that may provoke division even from those closest to us.

Jesus says, “Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division,” When he says this, we can almost feel the air shift in the room. The statement lands like a stone dropped in still water — unsettling our assumptions about peace. We imagine Jesus as the one who mends fences, who gathers people together, who brings the kind of peace that means everyone gets along. And indeed, the peace he offers is authentic— but it is not a peace we can have without cost. It is the peace of reconciliation with God, which requires a decision, and that decision will inevitably create lines between those who say “yes” to him and those who do not.

We see this pattern at the beginning of the gospel stories. Even Jesus’ greater family did not immediately understand him. His hometown could not see past “the carpenter’s son” to recognize the Messiah in their midst. His relatives once tried to take him home, thinking he had lost his mind. If the Son of God himself met resistance in the very places he was most known, it should not surprise us that his disciples experienced the same.

Following Jesus meant making decisions that disrupted the familiar patterns of people’s lives. Peter and Andrew left their fish nets mid-cast. James and John walked away from their father in the boat whose business they were running. The women who traveled with him, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna stepped out from the safety of their households, travelling as solitary women opposing what their families expected of them. 

None of these were romantic sacrifices. They were examples of the division that runs through households and friendships. Luke’s gospel records the division within the family with an almost crystal clarity: father against son, mother against daughter, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law. Alan Culpepper puts it poignantly: “Jesus taught the kingdom of God characterized by reconciliation and peace, but its announcement is always divisive because it called for decision and commitment.” As one theologian observed, “The call for the Christian decision is a call for division. Indecision does not divide, but decision — by its very nature — divides the chosen people from the not chosen.”

Friends, we have the agency within us to make this hard decision: to go with the cultural and familial grain or depart from it when necessary. We can ask ourselves these questions to sort this out: What kind of peace am I seeking? What kind of decision is Jesus calling me to make, even if it separates me from my family physically, emotionally, or spiritually? Is baptismal water really thicker than blood kinship?

When I first began to follow Jesus, I didn’t fully understand that his peace would cost me what it did. Saying yes to his call as a priest meant saying goodbye to all my Muslim family for the remainder of their lives because I can’t easily practice my vocation at home. To this day, It still means choosing to leave behind the very things that give me a sense of security and belonging. It means committing to staying that “odd-shaped puzzle piece” in and out of Turkey as the only female Turkish Episcopal priest in America and perhaps the world. Some days, that is incredibly lonely. Yet, it is the cost of my discipleship.

We often skip over the true cost of discipleship. The road to God’s peace runs through places that test our loyalty, that ask more of us than we thought we could give.

But…. The same Lord who tells us that division will come is the Lord who steps into it ahead of us. Jesus endured the loss of every kind of human approval and the breaking of earthly ties to secure our peace with God. At the cross he was not only rejected by rulers and abandoned by friends; he also allowed the earthly bond with his mother to be painfully shattered, while committing her to St. John’s care. At the very beginning of his life this was spoken about him to Mother Mary: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed … and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” In Jesus, God does not ask us to bear anything he has not first borne for us; the path he calls us to walk is the path he has already walked through grief and sorrow to bring about true peace.

Which leads us to our second point: Jesus himself embraced the cost in his “baptism” of suffering, which he undertook out of love for us to secure our peace.

When Jesus speaks about having a “baptism to be baptized with,” he isn’t talking about the Jordan River. He’s talking about being plunged into suffering and into the cross itself. This is not water, but blood, sweat, and tears. It’s betrayal by friends, being misunderstood by his own people, enduring injustice, and carrying the sin of the world on his shoulders. And yet, he is determined: “How distressed I am until it is accomplished!” He knows what it will cost — and still, he goes.

The Church Fathers remind us that before the fire of the Holy Spirit could spread across the world, the cross had to be endured. Before there could be resurrection, there had to be crucifixion. The miracles, the teaching, even the love that drew crowds, all of it pointed to this one decisive act. Cyril of Alexandria says the cross is like a fire that, once lit, spreads to every corner of the earth. Jesus’ death in one place, in one moment, became the spark of salvation for all.

That’s why the peace Jesus gives is not fragile or sentimental. Wright once said: “This is not the peace of a polite truce where nothing hard is said. It’s the peace of sin defeated, death undone, the world set right again.” This is shalom — the Hebrew word that means wholeness, everything in its right place, where relationships are restored. But in the Middle East, and sometimes in the South, keeping peace often means avoiding hard truths to preserve family honor and harmony. Jesus rejects this kind of false peace. His peace isn’t the silence that comes from swallowing the truth — it’s the wholeness that comes after truth has been spoken and wounds can be exposed between people. Only then they can be healed.

Jesus never asks us to walk that road alone. The baptism of suffering he endured was for us, and it is what enables our hardest sacrifices to become part of the peace he is making for the world. Our trials, joined with his, is like a mirror that reflects the image of the love he has for the world.

Finally, we are called to recognize the many faces of false peace, seek the signs of God’s true peace, and hold fast to hope with the help of great cloud of witnesses who will support us to retain it.

One of the most vivid images Jesus in this passage is the ability to read the weather while remaining blind to the nearness of God’s kingdom. In the hill country of Palestine, no one needed a forecast to know what the clouds in the west meant. The Mediterranean winds would carry condensed air. After they met the cooler hills, they would release their rain. When the south wind blew from the desert, everyone knew that the scorching heat was on the way. Yet, Jesus says, how strange that they could read the sky with such clarity and still failed to recognize the greater reality that God’s kingdom was already breaking in through his very presence.

That same kind of spiritual blindness is still with us. We can so easily mistake the absence of conflict for the presence of peace, confusing the silence of avoidance with the harmony God intended from the beginning. We call this “keeping peace” when what we really mean is protecting our ease, avoiding difficult conversations, so that no one will accuse us of stirring the pot. But that kind of “peace” according to many Christian thinkers is a fragile truce, and it cannot last. Because it leaves the deeper wounds of division untouched. The true peace of Christ is strong enough to bear the truth and courageous enough to name what is broken.

Those who did this successfully in Scripture did not earn medals; they were shunned, beaten, and driven away. For example, Jeremiah sank into the depths of depression. Elijah fled to the wilderness in despair. Jonah ran in the opposite direction of God’s call. They all suffered because speaking the word of God into an untruth loving world demanded every fiber of moral courage they had. What is the good news then? We are not alone this work.

The Book of Hebrews reminds us that we are “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” urging us to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely” and to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” Among that cloud we find the saints like Athanasius, the 4th-century bishop of Alexandria. He spent decades defending the truth of Christ’s full divinity when the political and ecclesial pressures favored compromise. Nearly the entire world, including emperors and bishops, embraced heresy of Arianism at that time for the sake of unity — but Athanasius refused a false peace that denied the eternal Sonship of Jesus. He endured exile five times rather than diluting the gospel, standing almost alone in defense of the Nicene faith.

Alongside him is another woman named Catherine of Siena, a 14th-century saint with no official position or power, yet armed with a love for Christ and his Church. She confronted corruption among the clergy, spoke directly to popes, and urged the papacy to return from Avignon to Rome — not to gain political influence, but because she longed for the Church to be whole, holy, and faithful to its calling. She refused the shallow peace of avoiding scandal by ignoring sin, and believed that only truth could heal the Body of Christ.

To retain that kind of peace, Jesus asks us to discern with clear eyes the difference between what is comfortable and what is true, to trust the Holy Spirit’s guidance even when the way is costly. Saints and prophets testify to the way of Christ’s peace. They are cheering us now and praying for us to not lose sight of true peace. We are not alone.

Seeking Jesus’ peace will mean costly decisions, sometimes even the loss of relationships we hold dear. It will mean embracing our share of the cross, trusting that his “baptism” of suffering has already secured our peace with the Lord. And it will also mean learning to recognize and reject the fragile truces of false peace, choosing instead the truth that heals and the reconciliation only God can give at the end.

So as we leave here today, let us ask: What kind of peace are we seeking? Where is Jesus calling us to speak the truth, even if it disrupts our comfort? And how can we hold fast to the witnesses who have gone before us— from Athanasius and Catherine to the saints in our own life? Because biblical and Christian history remind us again and again, they are the great cloud of witnesses to Christ’s peace. They are also broken people who did not waver from the truth even if it cost them great losses. They chose Christ over any familial or worldly comfort. In Anglicanism, we believe that we are always supported by the fellowship and the intercession of those giants called the saints. Though true peace may come through difficult decisions and familial divisions, we have this promise. And if we allow it, the road of our own crosses will take us to God’s eternal and unending embrace. May the Lord, help us to seek the causes of true peace in courage, in mercy, and in silent but convicted assurance wherever we may find ourselves this week. If speaking peace for the sake of Christ is costing you or maybe hurting you right now, stay assured, you are indeed on the right path. AMEN.