Our Storied Faith
August 17, 2025, The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 5:1-7 | Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 | Hebrews 11:29-12:2 | Luke 12:49-56
As I get older, I find that I like listening to how stories are told, especially the ones that are on repeat, the family favorites. My memory seems to be attached to earlier versions of the stories, so I listen for the changes in details. Are they significant? Worth correcting? Or do the changes that have been made reflect more of what we want to hear or remember? Why would our faith be any different? This is our church family, after all, and the stories we share reflect who we are and what we believe about God and one another.
In just over four months, we’ll be celebrating the birth of the Christ Child, and that’s a familiar story to us all, celebrated with our darling angels, sheep, shepherds, and a whole cast of characters in our annual Christmas pageant. An angel tells us about the birth of a Savior, and the angelic choir sings “Glory to God in the highest!” There’s great praise to God with the sentiment of “peace on earth” and “goodwill toward” everyone. It’s not a giant leap to associate the birth of Jesus to peace on earth. We even “hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace” in a Christmas hymn.
So why, as we heard in today’s gospel lesson, is Jesus so adamant that he has not come to bring peace to the earth?
Maybe it’s because even in his lifetime, the story–his birth story–already evolved into a version that’s more palatable, more comfortable than the truth.
Humans are wired to seek comfort. We want to feel good, and feeling good is as much physical as it is emotional and spiritual. I listened to a podcast about dopamine, the “feel good” hormone, so the episode was essentially about addiction. While avoiding pain was and is critical for human survival, these days almost everyone is addicted to something because there are so many readily available means to get our dopamine levels up . . . and up some more . . . from drugs and alcohol, to sex and shopping, to swiping left and scrolling up in an endless feed of whatever tickles our fancy and triggers our sense of reward.
Dr. Anna Lembke, the Medical Director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Program who was the guest of the show, said humans are designed to be at homeostasis, level, or–as we often say–balanced, and she used the image of a see-saw to represent our inner equilibrium. When we’re happy and feeling good, the dopamine or “joy” side of the see-saw is high, so to bring us back to homeostasis, she said that it’s like little gremlins hop on the suffering side of our see-saw to counter the joy and pleasure we feel. They’re not doing it to be mean: they are doing what they can to bring balance to our person, though they can overcompensate and bring us crashing down. Consciously or more likely not, in response we’ll reach for the fastest way to feel better again as soon as possible, and a vicious cycle repeats itself, often leading to addiction. Our bodies are designed to be balanced, and when the systems are working as they should, we can experience joy and suffering in this world in equal measure, knowing that there will be balance, obtaining a sense of peace that isn’t attached to either the joy or the suffering yet fully aware of what is.
No one is more aware in the midst of life than Jesus. Perhaps he knew how far we would get from his story, not just of his birth but of his life’s ministry and his death and resurrection and what it means about our life as disciples and as community.
According to Luke 2:14, at Jesus’s birth the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom (God’s) favor rests.”
God intends peace on earth . . . to those with God’s favor. Jesus did not come to bring peace simply by arriving on the scene. Jesus came to be the way, the truth, and the life, the means for the manifestation of heaven on earth. Being of God, Jesus gives us a rule, a measure by which to gauge what is and is not of God, what has God’s favor or not. Therein the division lies: are you of and for God or not?
If we have some lived experiences and some years behind us, we have accumulated enough stories to know what it means to be of God or not. Former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” I like his litmus test of asking if it’s loving, life-giving, and liberating for all involved. Cries of oppression are red flags that God has been excluded, and we are wise to heed the prophets who sound the alarm.
We know from the stories of Jesus that what is loving, life-giving and liberating might not look the way we want it to look. We don’t want to give up our comforts and security. We don’t often want to do the hard thing, the right thing, and we don’t want to risk the pain, suffering, or persecution that might come when we go against the tide of popular opinion, as exemplified by those we’re reminded of in the letter to the Hebrews. But Jesus said to take up our cross. Jesus said to love our neighbor. Jesus fed the hungry, healed the sick, ate with outcasts, cast out demons, and spoke the truth, and Jesus Christ still invites us to participate in the work that will build up the reign of God on earth, that will bring peace and goodwill when everything has been restored to unity in God.
Today, would Jesus call us hypocrites, too? We have forecasts and projections and statistics of every kind for the future, and we focus mightily on our finances and church decline and every kind of crises. But what about the present time? In this moment? Who are we?
Maybe God would say “we’re nothing if not consistent.” Like the ancient Israelites, we can fail to bear fruit even when God provides all we need. Like in the psalm, we cry for mercy and the light of God’s countenance when we know we’ve gone astray. Like the Hebrews, we have abundant examples among our great cloud of witnesses of lives of faithfulness even amidst imperfection and still we get discouraged in our own lives. We are a people who forget and need to come together to remember the truth about the story of our salvation through Christ and what it requires of ourselves if we are the believers we say we are.
As we walk alongside one another, finding our way toward union with God through Jesus Christ, perhaps we can listen more attentively to one another. If we dare to be faithful, perhaps we can risk sharing the hard stories with people whom we can trust. We might have to do more listening than telling, more discerning than acting until we find the right community, but God is faithful.
Can we truly see the Light of Christ in each other? Perhaps we can recognize similarities in our stories not only with one another but with our saints and ancestors who walked ahead of us. As we make our way, we can help each other by holding ourselves accountable to living in the love of God–mostly that means loving one another and letting God be the judge when we go astray. Living in the love of God can also mean walking away from that which is not loving, life-giving, and liberating. None of us are ever too young or old to be encouraged to make good choices.
And in a way, Jesus is telling us to make good choices, for there is a choice to be made. Jesus fulfilled what he was given to do, and he both showed and told us that we have work to do, too. We have choices to make, our own story to write. We have what we need to be faithful to God here and now, and we have the opportunity to be part of the story that builds toward the beloved community where there is peace on earth, where God’s will is done.
When the dialogue gets tough, when we face truths that are hard to hear, and when we question whether we believe anything about God, we can do what I once heard about gauging a married couple’s interest in each other: go back to their origin story. Let them tell you about how they met, let them argue over the details, but watch and listen how they interact in voice and body. When Jesus gets irritated, when God is angry, we can revisit the beginning of Creation and rest assured that God is with us always and gives us the freedom to choose God every time.
~The Rev. Sara Milford