"A House Divided"

Based on a Sermon given at Christ Church Unity of Springfield, MO (09-18-05)

Biblical texts referenced: II Chronicles 10:6-11; Mark 3:22-26

The title of this Mid-Week Message is “A House Divided,” and it is based on two readings…one, the parable of Jesus in the third chapter of Mark: “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” The other is not as well known…from II Chronicles 10, where the son of King Solomon the wise shows two things we all know instinctively…even a genius can raise an idiot. And you can’t teach kids anything until they decide to learn it.

According to II Chronicles, when Solomon died and his son, Rehoboam, became King of Israel, the leaders of the tribal areas came to him and said, “Your father placed heavy burdens on us. If you will make these burdens lighter, we will be your loyal subjects.” (TEV) Rehoboam called his advisers and sought counsel. The older ones said, essentially, “Take the deal.” But the younger hot-heads advised the King, “Slap them down like a pimp collecting from a crack `ho.” (Well…okay. Not exactly those words, but you get the sense of youthful arrogance.)

Rehoboam agreed with the young men. He gathered the tribal leaders and said, “My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions." (NRSV) You don’t have to be a Nobel laureate to guess the results. We can date the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah from that second meeting.

Which brings me to the second passage, Jesus’ well-known quotation about a “house divided.”

"If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand." (Mark 3:25, NRSV)

I have meditated on these two passages at length. I believe they contain the essence of Unity’s religious philosophy of life: cooperative compassion and non-resistance, based on faith in Divine Order. Jesus reminds us that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Today. the world remains a house divided. And not just among nations, too often closer to home. At home, actually. In his short story, “Capital of the World,” Ernest Hemingway illustrated how the far “House Divided” reaches. The story, based on an old Spanish tale, was set in Madrid. A father and his son, Paco, had a terrible argument, and the son left home. Then the father cooled down he tried to find Paco. He searched all his familiar hang-outs for months with no success. Finally, in desperation, the father turned to the newspaper for help. His ad simply told "Paco" to meet his father outside a certain hotel, assuruing him that all was forgiven. On the appointed day, eight hundred young men named Paco showed up at the hotel.

Well, it’s just a story…or is it?

The world is a house divided. Every town and village is filled with people who desperately long for reconciliation—with each other, and with God. But there is a time for every purpose under heaven…And New Thought Christianity understands how such reconciliation works. Release the anger. Use your power of elimination to let go of the hurt. See the Christ in the other person, regardless how hurt you feel, regardless how justifiably outraged you are.

The world is a house divided. Many children grow up in homes where family quarrels and regular conflict is the normal daily fare. And let’s face it…when you live with other people, sometimes you’re going to disappoint them. And sometimes they’re going to disappoint you. We used to say, “A man’s home is his castle.” Anybody who’s lived long enough knows how quickly a domestic castle can settle into a four-season pattern of siege warfare.

Sometimes, we feel separated from even our closest loved ones. It’s the price you pay for the privilege of having a human body… You’re inside your head, they’re inside theirs. And it seems the longer you live with someone, the more you know about them, the less likely you are to actually listen to what they have to say. The little daily squabbles inside your domestic castle, especially with children, can teach you quickly that just because you have a castle doesn’t make you an absolute monarch.

Can we reveal a secret of the ages here, a halo of divine illumination for anyone who hasn’t realized it yet? People you love occasionally disappoint you, just as you occasionally disappoint them. It isn’t because they don’t love us. It isn’t moral failure. It’s just the nature of the human psyche. People have bad days. People get lazy about things you passionately care about. And they don’t always know what you care passionately about, regardless how long you’ve been sharing the refrigerator. Nobody is inside your head but you.

How much better is it to detach all moral and ethical values from the circumstances which make you crazy? It is not for the express purpose of driving you stark raving mad that the children refuse to remember to take out the garbage. Many people live in a house divided…but there is a time for every purpose under heaven. Reconciliation is possible…the Christ is available in each person.

Paco, come home, all is forgiven…

Our homes can be a house divided. Family conflicts are commonplace, but also conflicts at work. Turf wars, disloyalty and deception, infighting and passive aggressive behavior can waste time and keep a business from realizing its true potential.

At a county fair, the townspeople held a horse-pulling contest. The first-place horse ended up moving a sled weighing 4,500 pounds. The second-place finisher pulled 4,000 pounds. The owners of the two horses decided to see what these horses could pull together. They hitched them up and found that the team could move 12,000 pounds. By working separately, the two horses were good for only 8,500 pounds. When coupled together, their synergism produced an added 3,500 pounds. It's a hard lesson for us, but unity of purpose consistently produces greater results than individual efforts. Teamwork divides the effort and multiplies the effect.

The workplace is a house divided…but there is a time for every purpose under heaven. We can learn to release the need to defeat our co-workers, we can learn to work together for the greater good, because unity of purposes consistently produces greater results than individual efforts.

And it goes beyond the workplace. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and nationalism…the environmental abuse of the Earth, too. If we feel separate from and superior to nature, as if we are floating on top of the ecosystem—walking paved streets, cruising along on asphalt roads, never touching the soil of the planet from which we evolved—how much easier it is to suck all the oil and fossil fuels from the veins of the Earth, like energy vampires. If we are alienated from our organic link to Mother Earth, why should we care if global warming melts the icecaps, or the barrier reefs and rain forests disappear, or the oceans are fished out, or species after species of land animals, fish, and birds go extinct?

Yet, there is reason to hope. Responsible scientists are working on the problem, even if we can’t seem to get the President of the United States to admit that global warming even exists. And there is the tree of Nagasaki. After the atomic bomb was dropped, scientists predicted nothing would grow there for decades. Yet, the plants came back rather quickly. More astonishingly, a slender sapling survived the blast and is today a great tree which puts out new leaves every year. Halfway around the globe in the jungles of Africa, naturalist Jane Goodall carries a leaf with her from the lone tree of Nagasaki as she goes about her work with the chimpanzees in Tanzania. Jane Goodall says one of her reasons for hope is nature’s amazing resilience, which the Nagasaki leaf symbolizes to her.

The world is a house divided, but there is a time for every purpose under heaven. We are estranged from the natural world, but only because we believe it is so. We have accepted the error-belief of separation from our world, our environment, our co-workers, our neighbors, our families. We have accepted the error-belief that there are many powers, many forces at work, many different types of consciousnesses. There are not. There is only One Presence and One Power in your life and in the Universe, God, the Good, Omnipotent.

You have the power to heal the Earth, heal your workplace, heal your relationships, heal your self…mind, body, and affairs…because God wants you whole, healthy, prosperous, and happy. And how do we affect this miracle? By prayer, by centering on the Christ-within, by affirming the good omnipotent despite all appearances to the contrary, by positively refusing to give in to the negative spirit of the age, and by holding the Truth and knowing the Truth in the darkest moments of your life.

There is a verse in the Tablet of Ahmad by the Persian prophet, Baha’u’llah, in which God calls humanity to unwavering faith:

“Be thou so steadfast in My love that thy heart will not waver, even if the swords of the enemies rain blows upon thee and all the heavens and the earth arise against thee.”

Gary Simmons’ marvelous book The I of the Storm makes the point that no one and nothing is against me. Very well, I understand the metaphysics of panentheism mean we are all one at the quantum level of spirituality, so nothing can be “against” anything. But nevertheless, Baha’u’llah is also right, because in the existential predicament of everyday living, some people hate and some people love, and attempting to see it all as Oneness does not always siphon the discontent or blunt the pain. At least not yet, at my level of awareness. I am working at rising above, to accept life as it is, playing the cards I am dealt, regarding all creatures great and small with Christ-like compassion. But, may I confess the obvious?—The goal of Christ-consciousness is still in my future. I still feel some days like the “swords of the enemies rain blows upon” me “and all the heavens and the earth” have arisen against me. Yet, I know it’s only because I have bought into the error-belief of a house divided. Perhaps I am still responding to the jagged edges of daily life by threatening to flog the dislocated pieces into shape, beating the rebellious events with the scorpions of dualism.

Dualism introduces the idea of more than one Presence and Power is at work in m y life and in the Universe. Yet, I know it simply is not so. All nature and all sentient beings are facets of the One Presence, One Power. Organically, fundamentally, spiritually, existentially, and literally linked together. Knowing and realizing are the capital cities of two great empires of Spirit, separated by an ocean of possibilities.

Recently, I’ve been using the metaphor of the river, saying we’re like fish swimming in the same river. But as I think more about it, the river analogy isn’t large enough. I needed an ocean. All existence shares the same Divine Ocean…sharing the spiritual ecosystem, drawing the very power to exist from God’s energy, which causes everything to be. The world only APPEARS to be a house divided, but there is a time for every purpose under heaven. And sooner or later, everyone will realize our oneness in God, our common kinship with all life, and appreciate our lovely opportunities to learn and grow no matter where we are or what circumstances come to pass.

Meanwhile…join me in an experiment. Try seeing the people and places in your world in their ideal light. Affirm good things about the people you live with, work with, come in contact with during your normal week. The more difficult the person is, the harder you affirm their true inner goodness. Treat everyone as a secret angelic visitor. Think of everyone as a superstar waiting to be discovered.

We could also look to the model of Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth who was born in Bethlehem and pointed the way to God for all of us. It may be a little early in the year to invoke the manger at Bethlehem, but bear with me and consider the following pre-season warm-up.

Norman Vincent Peale had a mental image of what it might have been like when God sent Jesus to Earth. It sounds like a Norman Rockwell painting, God sitting with Jesus while to train to Earth pulls into the station, but I like the imagery… mythological or not. Dr. Peale envisioned that God might have said, “Son, I hate to see You go. I sure am going to miss You. I love You with all My heart. But I do want You to go down to earth and tell those poor souls down there how to live and point them to the way that will lead them back home."…And the last thing God said to Jesus was, "Give them all my love." Peale added: “Now that is simple, but it's human and it's divine.” (Norman Vincent Peale, “The Timeless Time”, Guideposts, December 1990.)

All of us have the same human and divine nature. We have been sent to this world by God to create, learn, and follow the path toward our highest good. People and events will flow with us if we put away the whips and scorpions and work together for common goals… a house divided cannot stand. We are all one with the Father-Mother God, capable of greatness of spirit, greatness of achievement, and greatness of love. This house is not divided. We can do it. Don’t wait for Christmas to welcome the Christ. This is the time, this is the season.

Paco, come home, all is forgiven…And God will be with you every step of the way.