A House Divided

6-10-18 (Proper 5/Ordinary 10 B, Semi-Continuous)

1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15; Mark 3:20-35

A House Divided

On the evening of June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln stood in front of the Illinois Hall of Representatives and delivered a speech that would ultimately end up costing him a Senate seat to Stephen A. Douglas.  In that speech, he quotes from the passage of scripture that we have heard today - “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  His speech focused on a country that was divided - a country that found itself half slave and half free - and expressed his conviction that it would not be possible for the Union to continue if the country itself continued to be divided.  He shared that he did not believe the union would dissolve, but that a decision would be made that would eventually unite the nation, one way or another, though his goal and his hope was that the nation would ultimately decide for freedom.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand” - we hear these words spoken by Jesus some 1800 years before Abraham Lincoln quotes them in his speech.  And they are spoken to a people who are similarly divided.  The Jewish people are in disarray as they have moved from one kind of captivity to another, from Babylonian to Persian to now Roman government, and the people of Israel have come to varieties of opinion as to how to deal with this captivity, even as they reside in their home land.  Some sought to overthrow the Romans and reassert their own sovereignty, while others deemed it best to cooperate with the Romans.  Still other groups were less focused on the political side of matters and preferred to turn their attention to how the Jewish people could best continue to live out their lives according to God’s commandments and laws, regardless of who ruled them at any given time.  And even these people were divided - the Pharisees and Sadducees differed in their views and interpretations of the Law and bickered over purity laws, temple practices, and more.

And then comes Jesus into all this mix, preaching a wholly different message, an impending new Kingdom, a call to repentance and a kind of living that was all too often critical and at odds with what all these other factions and schools of thought at the time were teaching.  We see through the first part of Jesus’ ministry that his message is relatively well-received - at this point in the Gospel, Jesus has called his twelve disciples, has engaged in healing and miraculous acts, and has gained a pretty strong following for himself with crowds coming in from all over the place to every village he enters, seeking healing and to listen to his teachings.  And yet, at the same time, Jesus has also begun to make waves, and people are starting to get concerned.  As we come onto Jesus in this passage, we begin to hear from some of those concerned people - his family are beginning to think that he’s gone off the deep end and they want him to stop all this and come home, to get a good meal and some rest.  The leaders of his “church” have seen him casting out demons, healing on the Sabbath, and otherwise raising a ruckus and they think that he must be evil, in league with the demons and engaged in a devilish ruse to lead people astray.  Whatever it is that people think Jesus has set out to do at this point, the people are still divided and now have even more to argue about.

What’s more is that, as we look at the Old Testament reading for today, we realize that this division, this conflict among the Israelites, is far from being anything new in the story of God and God’s people.  Samuel begins his career as one of the fabled “judges” of the Israelite people that followed in succession after Joshua - he’s the last in the line of such storied legends as Samson, Gideon, and Deborah.  And as he comes into his autumn years, he’s begun delegating some of his duties to his sons, preparing them to take up the mantle when he dies.  The trouble is, his sons are pretty lousy at the whole “judge” occupation, and the people of Israel are frustrated.  They come to Samuel asking him to appoint a King to rule over them, so that they can be like all the other nations.  The interesting thing about this passage, however, is not so much that the people are divided against each other this time around, as much as that God lays out the problem plainly to Samuel as the tired judge brings the request before his Creator in prayer.  God tells Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.”

And it is here that we find the crux of the situation, the source of all of this division - because what God says to Samuel is the basis for every issue that arises in the entire storyline of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation: God offers to be the only ruler we ever need, and we stubbornly refuse that offer and choose to bury our heads in the sand because we think we need something more, or something else, or something somehow better than what God is offering us.  God offers Adam and Eve paradise and they want the one thing they aren’t supposed to have.  God offers the Israelites freedom from slavery and a land of their own and they turn around and ask for a King.  God gives the people a King and they run to other gods, which puts them back into enslavement and captivity, and so the people call out for a Savior.  God gives them a Savior and they want another King, so they put Jesus on the cross.

It would almost be humorous if it weren’t for the fact that we still continue this pattern, even today.  We’re still a people of division, still a people who are almost impossible to please, who find it hard to be satisfied with anything.  We’re frequently looking at how green the grass is over on the other side and wondering how we can get what the other guy has for ourselves.  We divide ourselves into tribes over everything - Republican or Democrat; Liberal or Conservative; Black or White; Presbyterian or Methodist or Baptist or Pentecostal or whatever your denomination is; Coke or Pepsi; Star Wars or Star Trek…. and all the while we keep dividing ourselves, we also keep losing sight of the God who connects each and every one of us, who calls us as his beloved people and sets us to work toward a Kingdom where such divisions do not exist because “there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free.”

Jesus enters into this world of division and boldly proclaims a message whose entire aim is to recenter, to refocus, to remind God’s people of what God has been calling them to all along - he deftly rebuts the idea that he is in league with demons as he reminds the people that evil cannot cast out evil, and proclaims that idea so profound that it would move Abraham Lincoln to use it in his speech against slavery and against the fomenting sedition that would lead to the Civil War: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  Even in the face of his own mother and siblings and their concerns for his health and safety, he lives out the statement - in Jesus’ household, family is not defined by blood, but by dedication to God: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  Jesus comes to remove the divisions that threaten to separate us as we find a new identity within our Savior.  None of the boundaries that seek to divide us, to keep us from seeing each other as children of one Heavenly Father, none of these divisions matter in Christ - not even the boundary of sin can divide us anymore, unless we doubt the very ability of God to forgive us of our sins in the first place.  In Christ, we are given the opportunity and the charge to be a house truly united.

The people of Israel were presented with a vision of what it would mean for them to choose an earthly king over a heavenly Father - Samuel warned them that they would move from a relationship of Sonship with God to servanthood for a king ;that they would change from a society that cares for the most vulnerable among them to a society that worked solely for the benefit of their king; that they would have their own children, their inheritance from God, to be used for the good of the king instead of the good of a promised nation.  Their desire to be like other nations caused them to reject the kingship of God - but Jesus gives us a new choice and reminds us once again of God’s vision.  Jesus gives us the opportunity again to re-center our values and to rethink our allegiances, and leaves us once more with the choice: which will we choose?  Whom will we serve?  And what are we willing to give up to follow that allegiance?  Will we be united in Christ and stand together, or do we remain divided in our own tribes, our own allegiances, our own agendas and desires, and continue to fall again and again and again?  The choice is ours to make - it always has been.  May God give us the strength and the wisdom to choose a united house.  May our allegiance be always to God above and before any other.  And may that allegiance continue to move us to love, to unity, and to grace.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.