“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”  [Luke’s Gospel 12.49-51]

“No one will be worse off under my housing/tax/employment/education/migration policy” is what we are accustomed to hearing, especially around election time. In a world overburdened with populist politics, you will rarely hear a candidate espousing the value of our sacrifice or personal cost; unless it’s borne by someone else.

There are great speeches from leaders of the past, which hold us to account for previous missteps, or which call us to the challenge of sacrifice for others, or for our future. Such rigorous, ethical discipline appears less likely in this current cycle of history; to misquote and deliberately reverse the intent of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address in 1961, “Ask not what you can do for your country, but ask what your country can do for you.”

It’s nice when people like us.

If we ever imagined Jesus to be polite in speech and mild in approach, this passage will certainly disabuse us.  Jesus has been building a formidable list of challenges, about true wealth and the destructive illusion of finding security in a property and financial portfolio. He has warned those who will listen about being prepared, and the consequences of not being ready.

And then he fails the test of being politically electable. He tells the unvarnished truth.

Choosing to follow Jesus will be costly, in terms of friends, and family, and decisions about how we live. Jesus really isn’t nice.

When we have been raised only with images of the comforting and safe Jesus, we are unsure how to respond to the Jesus who requires our obedience and talks of his presence bringing conflict. We can’t be surprised; the simple commands to love our neighbour, and the far more complex love for our enemies have confounded us since Jesus first uttered them.

Then, if we are sufficiently courageous, we ask about the outworking of these commands. Where do we, as disciples of Jesus, locate ourselves when we try to love our neighbour who deliberately harms others?

What about our understanding of the appalling conflict in Gaza at this precise moment? Christians have found themselves on all sides of this disaster, so perhaps the following question is how do we, as Jesus’ disciples, handle our own conflicts which arise from crises like these?

When we are raised to be nice and polite, we are ill-equipped to engage with the reality of the world which we are called by Jesus to love – and to serve.

How do our communities of faith address and resolve conflict? Sometimes we maintain a stoic (read polite), resentful silence, or relocate to another congregation, or we simply acquiesce. We need to be able to have conflict with the same dignity and care which Jesus offers to us; our discipleship matters.

We need also to discern whether our opinion is like the property of the rich fool in Jesus’ recent parable: self-satisfying and self-justifying.

Last week I asked when discipleship became so inexpensive. What words of Jesus led us to think that there was no sacrifice asked of us in order to live the way to which he calls us?

There are communities of faith which avoid engaging in the world around them for fear of what it might cost. In doing so they misquote and deliberately reverse the discipleship to which we are called.

The signs are all around us, as they have always been. Our task is to bear witness in this time, confident that the one who has been crucified and raised has, by that very act, addressed the crises of this – and every – time.