Interpreting the times
Sermon for Pentecost X, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 12:49-56 This morning’s Gospel reading doesn’t sound like Jesus as he appears in other passages we’ve read, and this isn’t the first time we have run across this change in tone. This is the challenge of reading all four Gospels all the way through, where we are confronted with Jesus not being as consistent as we want him to be. He is human like us, yet divine like God, and it is this mystery of being both that we wrestle with as we encounter the human and the divine. It can be disorienting where we want the predictable consistency of the Jesus we want to see. The reading starts with Jesus saying he is bringing fire and division, and compared to the gentle love expressed in the Beatitudes, that makes it even more challenging. My first thought on hearing of fire and division is to think of our present political and cultural times, but I’m not going to go into that. That fire and division...