~ School at St. Margaret of Scotland began on Wednesday, and students all over the country are returning to the classroom these days. Truth be told, even though I’m 58 years old and haven’t been in school for over 30 years, the first day of school still fills me with some dread and a bit of sadness. I’m always sad when summer comes to a close, but also many of us look back at school with mixed emotions. It was a wonderful, carefree time, but also an awkward time for most of us. Trying to fit in, trying to find your way, trying to figure out what group you were in. High school especially always has its cliques: the jocks, the brains, the pretty girls, the misfits, and the outcasts, and so on and so on. Were you in or were you out?

In Jesus’ day, the most important group to belong to, the most “in” clique, was your own family. You were known as someone’s son, or brother, or daughter, or wife. Families bonded and shared everything, often with varying branches of the same family tree living under one roof.  So when Jesus declared, as he does in today’s gospel, “From now on, a household will be divided,” this was something shocking. Mother against daughter and daughter against mother? Unheard of! And when Jesus declared,  “Do you think I have come to establish peace on earth?, No, I tell you, but rather division,” that’s a little startling to us! This does not sound like the Jesus we know. It does not sound like the man who told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  This does not sound like the one who prayed “that all may be one” on the night before he died. 

So even though Jesus doesn’t want us to be divided, Jesus is telling his disciples, and us, in no uncertain terms, that we need to make a choice. And that the bonds we have here on earth are less important than the ones in the kingdom of God. Family ties do not matter there. Because in that kingdom, we are part of a much larger family. A family of faith. A family that embraces the good news. A family that loves those that no one else loves — the poor, the marginalized, the outcast. So the invitation, the choice, is to live in the kingdom, to have the values of Jesus, to love those he loves, to expand the circle.  

In high school terms, Jesus is inviting us to widen our circles to love those who aren’t in the “in” crowd. The ones who don’t necessarily sit at the best lunch table or get asked to the homecoming dance. Because those are Jesus’ kind of people. They are the ones he ministered to, and lived with, and ate with, and healed. And for that reason, if no other, they should be our kind of people, too.

Jesus is asking us to choose between his message, and the world’s – between living in light, and staying in the shadows of sin.

“I have come to set the earth on fire,” he says. “And how I wish it were already blazing.” Every year around this time, we hear reports of wildfires burning up the American west; this year the Canadian wildfires have been especially virulent.  Already this year, nearly 40,000 wildfires in the US have burned nearly 3 million acres.  Many fires are caused by arson or accidents, but others happen naturally, from lightning or intense heat.

For a long time, forest rangers worked to suppress fires, to stop them before they started. You may remember Smokey Bear saying “Only you can prevent forest fires”, but he doesn’t say that anymore, because foresters and conservation workers now realize that many fires occur naturally – they are a necessary part of the eco-system. Some trees even have flammable enzymes in their leaves, to encourage fires. It is a way that nature replenishes itself, and makes itself stronger. The fires burn off some of the useless underbrush, and the whole cycle of nature is able to thrive.

And that is what Jesus wants.

The fire he will set is necessary. He wants to burn off what is useless, to make the forest healthier. Jesus, the perfecter of faith, as he heard in the Second Reading, is wanting to perfect us! “I have come to set the earth on fire. How I wish it were already blazing.”

The question we have to ask: what will happen to us in that fire? Are we the tangled weeds that serve no purpose?

Or are we sturdy trees, eager to grow, reaching for the sunlight? Do we want to be “perfected” as Jesus wants us to be?  t is up to us.   

Friends, as we prepare to receive the Eucharist today, we approach the table where all outcasts are “in”…where Christ welcomes all of us, and gives himself to all of us.  Here we join something greater than ourselves, greater than any family or group or “clique” that we know.

We pray to be worthy of this gift – and to be able to share it with others by being evangelizers and Missionary Disciples.

The choice – as Jesus reminds us — is ours.