Did you notice what we just did? I quoted Jesus, "I come to bring division and fire and enmity among everyone." And you all said, "Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ." Give me a break.... My goodness....I'm not so sure! You know, this passage does raise a serious question for me, Jesus talking about "I've come to bring fire and division." It raises a serious question for me and, in fact, this is Luke's version, Luke's Gospel. In Matthew's Gospel, it's worse. Jesus says, "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword." And the serious question it raises for me, is, "Are we better off? Is the world better off or worse off since the coming of Jesus and Christianity, BECAUSE OF the coming of Christ and Christianity? Are we better off, or worse off? I know the knee-jerk reaction of good church-goers like ourselves is "Of course, religion is good; Christ is good; everything is better." But I think it's a fair question.

What's the difference in the world since the coming of Jesus? Well, talk about fire and the sword and division. There's been plenty of that. From the beginning, it's been Christians fighting with Christians, first of all, over who's got it right. And we're not talking about minor disagreements. We're talking about people shedding blood. We're talking about religious wars. We're talking about persecutions. We're talking about the Inquisition. We're talking about crushing people who just want to follow their consciences. We're talking about torture. We're talking about burning people at the stake. Christianity seems to have brought that.

And then there are the Crusades in the name of Christ, countless people slaughtered in the name of Jesus. And then it should be an oxymoron, but it isn't. What about Christian anti-Semitism? Now there's a debate going on, and you can be on either side of it, whether the Church did enough, and the Popes did enough, or didn't do enough, when it came to the Holocaust. But, it was the Christians who invented the Jewish Ghetto, and Catholics for hundreds of years prayed for the "perfidious Jews" and the "unfaithful Jews." That certainly didn't help.

And the on-going struggle between Catholic and Protestant, Christian against Christian.... Northern Ireland, for example, where the basic problem is economic and social, but the division over Christ and the division over Christianity certainly added fuel to the fire.

And then you can come up with some wonderful things that we have today that we don't even think about. We take for granted. But we got them only after great opposition and hostility from the Church: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, separation of Church and State, universal suffrage, everyone being able to vote. The Church opposed all of that.

So, I think it's a fair question. Are we better off or worse off, as a world, with the coming of Christ and Christianity. Now, I think you know how I'm going to answer that because, you know, I get these big bucks for this job. I'm not going to give up my job! Actually, I am going to answer it with two other questions. Who gets the headlines? And, what are my convictions?

Who gets the headlines? For two thousand years, much of the headlines have gone to religious wars and persecutions and the struggle for control. Who's going to be in charge? Most of the headlines have gone to Popes and to Bishops and to Kings. There have been a few good ones, but, for the most part, they have been very, very poor representatives of the human race.

But the real story is not in the headlines. The real story is the Church, the people of God, the Jesus Movement, the movement of Jesus' spirit, of people as Church who shaped families, who passed on the tradition, who passed on the values of Jesus and His Gospel, who passed on the Sacraments and worship of God, who touched lives, and who served the needy and the poor. And that's the real story that goes on behind the headlines. That's the Church at work, very ordinary, very quiet, and really incredible. I'm going to give you just one example. And I chose this example, not because it is so different, but because it is so much the same. It's reduplicated in our Bay Area and across the world today, and in generations before us and before then, and before then. For two thousand years, it is what Christians have been up to.

1968, in Europe, was the year of student riot and revolution across the country, across the European countries. A group of high school students in Rome, studying the Gospel, in a little Church called San Egidio, said, "We want to do something revolutionary in terms of the Gospel." They took as their slogan, "The Gospel and Freedom." Today there are ten thousand of them in Italy, ten thousand outside of Italy, the Community of San Egidio. If you were a tourist in Rome you would walk by it, another ordinary church, just across the Tiber, except you'd see a lot of young people hanging around. They've set up a hundred satellites throughout Rome for teaching, tutoring poor children. They have a huge liturgy there each weekend and every night of the week for young people. They feed fifteen hundred homeless every day, and not in a soupline. They sit them down and have them dine in grace and in elegance. They bring food to another fifteen hundred shut-ins every day. They have set up three refugee centers in Rome, two AIDS hospices, and they teach the language to refugees who come to the country. But, in trying to help the poor, they have decided that the greatest poverty in the world is war. And this community has brokered peace treaties in Guatemala, in Argentina, in Algeria, and in the Balkans.

The work of the Church doesn't get any headlines.... ordinary, quiet, and incredible. Those volunteers and part-time staff say, "All we are trying to do is use the weak strength of the Gospel." And isn't that what Jesus told us? Jesus didn't say the Church was going to be as important as the New York Stock Exchange. He didn't say the Church was going to be as powerful as the Pentagon. He didn't say the Church was going to be as reliable as Ford and Firestone. What He said was the Church would be as small as a mustard seed and as lowly as a foot-washer. So, you are not going to find the work of the Church in the headlines, but beneath the headlines and behind them.

It's interesting the so many historians and scholars today would say that, beneath the headlines and behind the headlines, the values of Jesus have changed the course of the history of theWestern world. The values of Jesus and Jesus' people have been like a huge, powerful underground river that has changed society in ways that it could never have gone. They point to the abolition of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement. They point to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They point to organizations like the U.N., the World Court, Amnesty International, and they say, "None of this was possible, imagineable, or acceptable in the world of Greeks and Romans that Jesus came and preached to, that Jesus has changed it." But who gets the headlines?

The second question is "What are our convictions?" What are my convictions? We are supposed to be a people of convictions and we are supposed to give those convictions flesh and blood in our daily lives, in politics and policies, with an institution to undergird those values, those convictions with structure, with leadership, with heirarchy. But, what are the convictions?

Well, there is a conviction that God exists, conviction that God is Father, Son and Spirit, conviction about Jesus, about the Sacraments, about worship, about Church.... But, chief among the convictions must always be compassion.... compassion. Conviction without compassion is what keeps getting the Church into trouble. Compassion means respect for those who differ from us. It means tolerance. It means forgiveness. It means love of our neighbor. And Jesus defined "our neighbor" by using the example of somebody who had different politics, different race, and different religion. And said, "That's your neighbor!"

The Church, to be true to itself, and we, to be true to ourselves, must be a people of both convictions and compassion. Now, what about ourselves personally? I would suggest, personally, we have to take an inventory, every once in awhile, of our convictions. Look at what we think about faith, what we think about God, what we think about Jesus.... But make sure that chief among our convictions is compassion. And we don't have to worry about the command, if it is of Jesus, to bring fire to the world, and to bring division to the world, and to bring war to the world. You know, we don't have to go looking for a fight.

A small dose of faith and a large dose of compassion will get us into more trouble than we need. A little bit of faith and a lot of compassion will get us into the right kind of trouble. Amen.