"Division, or transformation?"
A sermon reflecting on the breaking down of walls and Jesus's disruption
Stuart Higginbotham
August 17, 2025 sermon
Division or transformation?
For what it’s worth, here is my sermon from Sunday. You can also listen to it on the Glimpses of Grace podcast. Both mine and Brandon’s sermons are there, as well as conversations with Meg McPeek, Brandon, and me. (And a new one of those is coming soon!)
Why do we build the wall, my children, my children?
We build the wall to keep us free
We build the wall to keep us free
How does the wall keep us free?
And we build the wall to keep us free
We build the wall to keep us free
Last year our family saw Hadestown in New York, and these lines from the song “Why We Build the Wall” have remained with me. In the song, Hades tries to convince all those in the Underworld that the only way to ensure their safety is to build a wall around themselves. Of course, the question rises: is the point to keep others out or to keep a transforming idea out that would challenge his own pursuit of power and control?
The lines from this song, and the feeling around them, returned when I prayed with today’s texts. The prophet Isaiah envisions God speaking, daring to give voice to what God feels with the faithless actions of the people, in the face of the threat of the Assyrians and Babylonians.
In the text, the beloved has built a vineyard, paying attention to the fertile soil and water. He has even made sure to place a watchtower there to guard it. God describes how he hoped the bounty would be great with the land that was entrusted to them, but that was not the case.
When I expected it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?
God’s response to their unfaithfulness is this:
And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down. (Isaiah 5:1-7)
In this act of prophetic imagination, Isaiah describes how God entrusted the land to the vintner, named explicitly as Jerusalem and Judah here, to make the point. But their faithless actions have led God to remove the protections they thought would keep them safe. Isaiah goes further and describes that the harvest God intended was righteousness and justice, but there was only bloodshed and crying. (Give us eyes to see, O God.) Because of their injustice, God acts.
God breaks down the wall and exposes their injustice, removing the constructions they thought would protect them and their agenda. Sitting with this text even more, I have several questions: If God entrusted the land to him, why the impulse to build the wall? What was the motivation there? How did the vintner yield to the impulse to grasp, to the impulse of greed, at the expense of God’s original intention?
Here, Isaiah’s prophetic imagination reminds me of lines from that great Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall.” Frost describes how he and his neighbor walk their shared fence wall and notice there are gaps, but they don’t know what causes them. He writes:
…The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there…
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
As the poem progresses, they reach a point on their walk where thick trees fill the border between their land. Frost doesn’t believe they need to construct a wall here, as he says:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
And there’s the line we may know well: “Good fences make good neighbors.” To his neighbor’s impulse to build a wall, Frost dares to ask “why?”
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Asking questions about our motivations lies at the heart of what it means to nurture our spiritual practice. Daring to ask “why?” is a hallmark of conscious engagement and discernment.
In Isaiah’s prophetic imagination, God breaks down the wall, the grasping agendas, of the faithless vintner, allowing the consequences of his injustice to take effect.
God’s actions are a disruption to the vintner’s agenda, an action that is echoed in today’s Gospel reading where Jesus says
"I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (Luke 12:49-56).
This is an image of Jesus that may make us uncomfortable, because we want Jesus (we construct our image of God) to always affirm how we are presently living. With our present Christian expressions, we have neglected images of God that are disruptive in favor of a domesticated image of God that only reinforces our agendas and plans. This is an enormous spiritual problem for us to confront.
Perhaps we are being called to ask just what the “division” is that Jesus is speaking of. The text describes a family divided–an image that hits very close to home these days. Everyone feels pitted against one another right now.
But the division Jesus is speaking of is not merely a family argument. Here’s what I think: the deep teachings of Christian practice demonstrate how the wisdom of Jesus cuts through our illusions and patterns that thwart our own spiritual growth and evolution. That is the point of what we do, the goal of who we are.
As our baptismal covenant describes, we are called to “grow into the full stature of Christ,” so anything that impedes that vocation must be examined and, ultimately, purged. Of course our egos do not like this, so we tend to construct patterns and customs that reinforce our agendas. We want to preserve the norm that we feel benefits us, even if it is on a more superficial level. We prefer instant gratification over sustained transformation.
God desires that we be fully transformed, while our shallow selves desire to maintain the status quo of our human ambition, what Fr. Thomas Keating called our Emotional Programs for Happiness: which are the patterns that seek to reinforce our pursuit of power and control, safety and survival, and affection and esteem.
The purifying fire of the Spirit challenges this grasping, and here is why our spiritual practice is so essential. This is what we mean when we say our lives are our practice.
So, the division Jesus speaks of is actually the necessary experience of initiating a transformation, of moving our souls into a different state of being. It feels like division because the systems we operate in want to preserve the status quo. Put another way, no one likes a prophet, and no one appreciated Jesus challenging the religious and political regime, what Walter Brueggemann would call “the royal consciousness” that sees the king wanting to preserve his power at the expense of the most vulnerable. Just look at our lives now to see this age-old pattern lived out in real time.
The desire to grasp and control is what leads to the claim of “good fences make good neighbors.” In that same vein, we could also claim good patterns make good families. Or, good customs and traditions make good Christian communities. Or, good protectionist actions make good nations. Our practice of faith teaches us that all these are illusions. All these claims are shallow claims that seek to reinforce our own self-centered agendas.
Jesus tells us that he has come to bring the sword, a sword that will cut through our patterns of egoic grasping and self-centeredness. Isaiah describes how God will break down the walls, highlighting the injustice that has come from the vintner’s grasping. Disruption and division as an initiation into transformation.
Good fences do not make good neighbors. What makes good neighbors, according to the deep teachings of our practice, is a consciousness that leads us to honor one another as fellow incarnations of God’s redeeming love in Christ. What makes a good neighbor is a willingness to care for the well-being of the one whom we have seen as an “other” that must be contained or detained so that our sense of prosperity or greatness can be affirmed.
Like I said, Jesus’s actual teaching makes us very uncomfortable, but perhaps we should ask just what is the part of ourselves that is being made uncomfortable? What is the part of us that feels threatened? It is our egoic grasping, our shallow self, that resists the wisdom of Christ consciousness.
But in the end, God assures us that the walls will come down so that we all can ultimately be made whole.