Proper 15 (August 14-20)
Texts: Luke 12:49-56;
Jer 23:23-29; Heb 11:29-12:2
YouTube: https://youtu.be/jpdGK1b6Iy8
Sermon Take-Home Notes
LEARNING NOT TO BE DIVIDED AS JESUS EXPOSES
THE LIE OF US-VS-THEM, DIVISIVE THINKING
When you’re a kid on a hot summer day like today, what’s the one thing you want to do the most? Go swimming, right? Here in Racine, you’re in luck, because there’s a beautiful, large public beach on Lake Michigan. You just have to convince someone to take you to the beach. When I was growing up in the Detroit area, I remember having a small pool we could erect on a corner of our driveway on hot days. But as my siblings and I outgrew those small pools, I remember that the chance to go swimming on a hot summer day was one of the few things I felt lacking in my life. There was a large swim club in our neighborhood that many of our neighbors enjoyed, but our family didn’t belong to the club. My parents didn’t choose to work the annual fee for the swim club into the family budget. So I remember missing the opportunity to go jump in a pool on hot day like today.
It’s only in recent years that I’ve discovered the rest of the story. That I was born about ten or so years too late for the age of public swimming pools in America. They began to spring up in America back in the 1920’s. Then, during the New Deal public projects of the 1930’s they really began to multiply. Many, many communities across the country dedicated public tax monies to building public swimming pools, just like the roads and the schools. It become a commonplace thing across America for cities to have several public swimming pools as part of their city parks.
So what happened? Where are those pools today? Racism happened. The white people in charge made the public swimming pools for white people only. In northern cities, you would sometimes see maybe one of the public pools open to people of color. I have a picture in your Sermon Notes of Pool #2 in the City of Baltimore in 1948 — the only one of the city pools open to non-whites. It pretty much became a pool for people of color only, because no white people chose to use that one. They had several of their own that were for whites only.
But the fate of public swimming pools changed drastically the year before I was born. In 1955 the Supreme Court ruled in Palmer v. Thompson that if swimming pools were built and maintained with public monies, then they couldn’t be segregated.1 Those pools must be open to all of the public. And so it was that beginning in the late fifties, the white people in charge of public pools began to de-fund them. They quickly closed. They were filled-in, disappeared. I have a second picture in your Sermon Notes of Baltimore’s Pool #2 today. You can see the rectangular outline of the pool. There’s even a railing or two at the pool’s edge still standing. But the pool itself is grass. It was filled in and turned into a park lawn. And so ten or so years later, as I grew up in the Detroit suburbs, I only knew of swim clubs with private memberships, not open to the public.
What does this have to do with today’s Gospel Reading? Let me recap where we’ve been in recent weeks (see Proper 13C and Proper 14C). We’ve embarked on the economic part of Luke’s Gospel. And we’ve especially noticed that, since Jesus was an indigenous person living in someone else’s empire, we need to seek to understand the economics of God’s reign through indigenous wisdom. Jesus’s economics are grounded not in scarcity, but in seeing the whole creation as a gift of God’s abundance for all to share. “Consider the ravens . . . the lilies . . . ,” he says, and goes on to lay out for us the creation as gift. So we’ve been consulting Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, The Serviceberry,2 where she dispenses similar indigenous economic wisdom — she is Potawatomi — that focuses on the creation as gift. “Consider the serviceberry tree . . .” Learn from the relationships in creation of how we might all share in its abundance.
Another favorite book on economic policy, from which I’d like to share wisdom and stories in the weeks ahead — this part of Luke’s Gospel, where we encounter rich men and learn the lessons, goes on for several chapters yet — my other favorite book is by another indigenous woman, an African-American, Heather McGhee. The full title of the book is The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.3 As you might guess from the book cover in your Sermon Notes, she uses this story of America’s swimming pools as a metaphor for helping us to better understand America’s history with economic policy. Especially the last forty years — part of what Jesus is talking about in the need to learn to read the signs of the times. Learn to read them from this indigenous perspective of the abundance in creation.
As we look at our times, at our economics, it seems that wealthy white leaders tell the story in terms of a Zero-Sum Game. That there’s always winners and losers in the economic game, because there’s just not enough for everyone. Some people must unfortunately miss out on their share of the economic pie. And these leaders convince enough of us, especially their fellow white citizens, to buy their story. We keep voting for it.
So here’s the bottom line: Mixed with our history of racism, it has been people of color who mostly miss out. But the thing is that many white people do, too. There continues to be, in shear numbers, more white people living in poverty in this country than people of color. But the rich white people in charge have always been able to convince their poor white numbers of the zero-sum game of scarce resources in order to accept economic policies that adversely effect them, too. They use race to convince enough of the white population that, instead of making sure there is enough for everyone, we choose economic policies where, yes, some people miss out, because there isn’t enough for everyone. And it’s all a big lie, of course. The economics data of the last forty years clearly show this. The numbers don’t lie.4 The truth is that the rich are simply taking a bigger slice of the pie for themselves, and they’re able to sell it by making sure that those others who we white folks are against get even less. And so we vote against our own economic interest.
Our history of economic policy is like the history of public swimming pools. White people say to themselves, ‘If those people are going to enjoy them, too, then let’s get rid of all the pools and build some for ourselves.’ Zero-sum game. Winners and losers. Even if some white people end-up missing out on swimming pools, too. It’s all based on an age-old tactic, where the wealthy throughout human history keep the masses content, using Us-vs-Them thinking, by assuring the base citizens that, ‘We are at least getting more than them.’
Jesus came to expose this lie and to give us a new way to tell the story. This morning’s Gospel begins with Jesus lamenting. He seems a little bit out-of-sorts. He talks about his impending death on the cross as a fiery baptism which he must undergo. So in his frustration he says something a bit out of character about households becoming divided.
But here’s the question we need to answer and understand: Why will he be taking on the fiery baptism of the cross? To expose the kind of lies we’ve been talking about. To expose our failed human ways of trying to achieve peace. Jesus knows that the wealthy among us try to keep the peace on the basis of Us-vs-Them thinking. They sell us lies about the outsiders, those who aren’t like us, and they get us to accept our lot in life just so long as it’s better than those outsiders. Our age-old way to keeping peace is based on accepting lies based on Us-vs-Them thinking. We can count on living peacefully in our homes as long as our wealthy leaders keep the undesirables in their places.
But what happens if someone exposes the lie? What would happen to the lies of peace based on division? It would cause division, even within our households. This is what the cross and resurrection will do, and Jesus knows it. In letting himself be executed as one of those outsiders but being raised by the God life three days later, this will now be a story that exposes the lie. Jesus, of course, came to ultimately give us a new story that leads to true peace. It’s a story in which we come to see that there is, in fact, no Us and Them. There’s only Us. It’s a story not of a Zero-Sum Game with winners and losers but instead what can happen if it’s actually about the Sum of Us.
But the first effect of exposing our age-old recipe for peace based on Us-vs-Them thinking as a lie is that the old way of peace will fall apart. Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of world is taking away our favorite way of seeking peace. Peace through dividing and conquering. Deprived of that false way of peace will lead to division before we either find and accept Jesus’ way of peace, or we double-down on our old way. Two thousand years later, this is still our choice.
In my efforts to read the signs of the times, I think that what we’ve been seeing is a backlash to electing our first African-American president as an effort to double-down on our age-old way to peace through the lie of Us-vs-Them thinking. And it is keeping our house divided. Literally. How many households have found Thanksgiving dinners with family more difficult in recent years? And how about our households of faith? Especially those like ours which are mostly white? Do we fear Jesus exposing the lie of things like racism? ‘Let’s not rock the boat,’ we say. And so we don’t. And the reality of racism remains.
But when we followers of Jesus fully understand what he was up to in enduring the fiery baptism of the cross, then we are yearning for that new story, too. The stories in Luke’s Gospel which we will continue to see in the weeks ahead are Jesus continuing to expose the lies of the wealthy, as we will encounter five more rich men.5 Ultimately, we must learn to trust that Jesus, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, is the pioneer and perfecter of a new and more faithful story of peace. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, August 17, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/jpdGK1b6Iy8
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. I had this slightly wrong. It was a series of federal court rulings throughout the 50’s, of which Palmer v Thornton was the one which effected Baltimore, that turned the tide. The Supreme Court didn’t weigh-in on the matter until public swimming pools had already changed over to private ones. See the McGhee book below for the full story, pages 23-28.
2. Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner, 2024).
3. Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World, 2021).
4. McGhee’s book details the economic numbers with hundreds of references. She is telling the economic story racism, division, and inequality being told by a majority of reputable economists. For the numbers story of our economics from a Nobel Prize winning economist, see the work of Joseph Stiglitz, such as The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do about Them (W.W. Norton, 2015) and The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (W.W. Norton, 2012).
5. I am using the Kimmerer and McGhee books as contemporary guides to Jesus’ indigenous wisdom. The book which is my guide to reading Luke 12-19 as “Six Rich Man Sequences” is Ched Myers’ Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025).
