Luke
12:49-56
Let me tell you a
little story about some people you see every week when you walk into the
narthex, staring at you from the wall.[1]
The first of them is
Barbara Heck. She was born in Limerick
County, Ireland and grew up speaking German.
She lived in New York and died near Montreal. Her married name was actually Hescht, but in
English it turned into Heck, and apparently that was entirely appropriate. She understood what Jesus was talking about
when he said,
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will
be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against
son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against
mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against
mother-in-law.” [Luke 12:51-53]
See, she had grown up in a community
of German immigrants who had settled in Ireland as part of the same mass
migration that brought the Pennsylvania Dutch to New York, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania. In Ireland, like here,
they proved to be excellent farmers, but there the landlords responded by
raising rents on them and milking all they could out of the migrants. The poverty and the anger and the isolation
led them to become an especially hard-living group that was known for its
excesses. It didn’t help that in fifty
years they never had a pastor who spoke German.
That was until John Wesley, who spoke it fluently, began to pass through
there on twenty-two trips to Ireland.
His preaching set off a revival, and at the age of eighteen, Barbara
gave her heart to Christ. That took place
right before the landlords began to confiscate the common lands and the Irish
Germans, pushed to the limit, decided to move to North America.[2]
In 1760
Barbara Heck found herself, then, in New York City. They had been there
about five years when they were joined by another group of Wesley’s people from
Ireland, including her cousin Philip Embury, who had been a local preacher
before emigrating.[3] During that five years, the Germans had
slipped back into their old habits, and there came a day when Barbara walked
into a room and found a group of men, possibly including Embury, gambling at
cards. She scooped the deck off the
table and tossed it into the fireplace and told Embury in no uncertain terms
that he needed to start preaching to them again or the Lord would hold him
responsible for whatever depths they fell to.[4]
Shortly
after that, she marched her husband, their slave Betty and a day laborer whose
name is unknown and sat them down in Embury’s house to hear the gospel and to
pray. The group grew quickly, made up
mostly of Irish immigrants and Africans that shortly outgrew the house and so
they built themselves a chapel. There
they were joined by this man, Captain Thomas Webb, a British regimental commander, who kept the group together
when the Hecks left New York City as they saw the Revolution coming.[5]
It is
now the John Street United Methodist Church, two blocks from Ground Zero, and
in addition to housing a vital congregation it was the site of our ministry to
the workers cleaning up after 9/11.
Barbara
understood that when the gospel comes into somebody’s life, that it shakes
things up because it reorders our priorities.
She had seen the destruction of lives that had been part of the
community’s experience in Ireland and knew the danger that gambling presented,
then and now, and would have none of it.
She was not simply going to stand by and watch the cycle repeat. She knew that it did not have to do that, and
the way to break out of it was to begin right there, with her own family, and
with the good news.
People
in the same family will have different priorities. If you are certain of yours, then stick with
them. Understand that not everyone – not
even those closest to you – is going to get it:
“five in one household will be divided, three against two and
two against three; they will be
divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and
daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and
daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
A college chaplain I knew told me about a call he
received from some parents one time, worried about their daughter, whom they
knew to be active in the Wesley Fellowship on that campus. They wanted him to sit her down for a
talk. “What’s the problem?” he
asked. He knew her well, and thought
everything was going alright for her: she was a medical student who was about
to go out and start her residency. That
was the problem, said her parents. She
had just told them that she was turning down a residency in surgery and announced
that she was going into public health.
Instead of a respected and honorable career leading to a comfortable
retirement, she was looking at years and years of civil service jobs, dealing
with immunization clinics, and infectious disease control in slums. They were sure it had something to do with
what she’d been hearing on Sunday mornings and wanted the chaplain to clarify
things for her; she’d clearly misunderstood.
The
thing is, that she had understood perfectly.
She knew well Matthew’s version of the words we heard from Luke this
morning.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace
to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against
his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against
her mother-in-law; and one’s foes
will be members of one’s own household. Whoever
loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son
or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the
cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake will find it.” [Matthew 10:34-39]
It’s a great story, and I have no idea how it
ended. I’d like to think that her
parents came around. I’d like to think
that eventually they came to realize that life is found in that kind of
discipleship – but I just don’t know. What
I do know is that somewhere on this planet there is a town or city where a
child has been vaccinated because of her choice, or where a parent has been
kept healthy enough to provide for their children because of her dedication, or
where a grandfather has lived long enough to hold a baby in his arms and pray
for God’s blessing, all because of a disease that he did not catch from a
mosquito that did not bite him because she insisted on good drainage.
And I know that she did
that because she chose to follow Christ.
[1] The
paintings are part of a longer series of water color portraits of people of
faith, mostly Methodists, by Jack Schaenkle that hangs in the back of First
United Methodist Church, Phoenixville, PA.
Come see them.
[5] http://media.sabda.org/alkitab-6/wh2-hdm/hdm0211.pdf Webb was instrumental in the establishment of
Methodism in Philadelphia and the founding of St. George’s United Methodist
Church.
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