FIRST READING Jeremiah 23:23–29
23 Am I a God near by, says the LORD, and not a God far off? 24 Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the LORD. 25 I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed!” 26 How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back — those who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? 27 They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. 28 Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the LORD. 29 Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?
PSALM Psalm 82
1 God stands to charge the divine council assembled, giving judgment in the midst of the gods:
2 “How long will you judge unjustly, and show favor to the wicked?
3 Save the weak and the orphan; defend the humble and needy;
4 rescue the weak and the poor; deliver them from the power of the wicked.
5 They do not know, neither do they understand; they wander about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
6 Now I say to you, ‘You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High;
7 nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.'”
8 Arise, O God, and rule the earth, for you shall take all nations for your own.
SECOND READING Hebrews 11:29—12:2
Chapter 11 29 By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land, but when the Egyptians attempted to do so they were drowned. 30 By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled for seven days. 31 By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in peace. 32 And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets — 33 who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, 34 quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. 35 Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. 36 Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented — 38 of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. 39 Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, 40 since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.
Chapter 12 1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
GOSPEL Luke 12:49–56
49 I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53 they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” 54 He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. 56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
FIRE FALLING FROM HEAVEN
As a child I, like most boys my age, was fascinated with fire. We lived in Arizona, thus no fireplace, so the only time I was around fire was when we burned the trash at Grandma’s house. Needless to say, that wasn’t often enough to satisfy my curiosity. As a young boy, the neighborhood boys and I would find and play with matches setting little campfires, usually in the alley or parking area when no harm could come. However, on one occasion, we decided to build our campfire across the railroad tracks in the drainage ditch next to Jess Shumway’s, very ripe, wheat field. Everything was going well until one of the boys decided to see what would happen to an old tire that someone had rolled into the ditch.
Long story short, they burn. And despite our best efforts, we weren’t able to put it out, before someone called the fire department. Luckily, the fire department was less than 10 block away and was able to extinguish the fire, before too much of Mr. Shumway’s field was burned. Needless to say it was reassuring to know that despite our carelessness, the local fire department was there to keep our shenanigans in check.
For the last couple of weeks the gospel lesson has come from the 12th chapter of Luke, where Jesus spends much of the chapter reassuring and encouraging His followers in the face of possible catastrophic circumstance. In verse 4 we read, “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more”. Then down in verse 22 we heard, “Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life”. And then again in verse 32 we read, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom”. However, this same chapter ends on a far less positive note.
Rather than encouraging reassurance, we hear Jesus say that His ministry will be very divisive. After spending 45 verses, trying to quiet the anxiety of His followers, Jesus tells them, that He came to bring fire to the earth. He goes further to insist that He’ll not bring peace. Instead, His ministry will divide families and pit individual members of households against one another. The ministry of our Lord is to rain fire from heaven! It’s an ominous passage and one that leaves many of us scratching our heads wondering, why the sudden change in language.
I suspect His first century audience understood that imagery more readily than we do today. Generally speaking, we have only a passing acquaintance with the power of fire. With the prevalence of all electric homes, about the only time we see flames is in the fireplace. Fire has become such a foreign thing, in our daily lives, that we now worry about children holding candles on Christmas Eve. We hear of the all too frequent forest fires out west and hear the occasional siren of a racing fire truck, but for the most part, fire is relegated to the occasional campfire or the BBQ grill. Our fire departments, thankfully, are so competent and the equipment they use so advanced, that an accidental fire death makes the national news. However, ancient people had a much more intimate need and knowledge of fire.
For folks living in the 1st century, their only nighttime illumination came from the flames of oil lamps. The smoke of the cooking fire on the kitchen floor constantly irritated and reddened their eyes. Everyone’s fingers were callused from working with household fires. Their arms and hands bore the scars from burns. From early childhood, a child learned that food tasted better cooked, that flames tempered metal tools, and that the kiln’s heat hardened pottery. People also knew firsthand, the danger of uncontrolled fire.
Homes regularly burned to the ground by an overturned lamp or a carelessly maintained kitchen fire. Well into the nineteenth century, devastating fires shaped communities. In fact, fire, in some cases, spurred on the next urban renewal. So, for the modern day hearer, we hear this passage and wonder how Jesus was using the image of fire in this Gospel. For the 1st century hearer, this Gospel recalls an ancient belief that fire was a manifestation of God. What the modern ear needs to bear in mind, is that Jesus, in this passage, is reminding us of the radical nature of His ministry and is demanding we step up to the plate. To do this, we need to first see fire, as did Jesus’ audience, as a Manifestation of God.
This intimate acquaintance with the power and the paradox of fire moved the ancients to think of fire as theophany — that is, fire as a sign of God. When Moses was tending the flocks of his father-in-law, Jethro, on Mount Horeb, the Lord God spoke to him out of a burning bush. When the Hebrew people were wandering in the wilderness of the Sinai, the Lord God led them at night with a pillar of fire. On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, the very presence of God, appeared to the apostles in the upper room as tongues of fire. With these Old Testament stores very much a part of their formal education, it didn’t puzzle Jesus’ listeners, when He said that He was to bring fire on the earth. They believed Jesus to be God’s representative, and it was an ancient idea for God’s presence to be manifested by fire.
It would also not surprise those gathered that day that Jesus spoke of God’s presence as being divisive. The ancients knew both fire and God as both purifying and punishing. They knew how to put metals to the flame to temper and to drive out impurities. The Old and New Testaments use fire as a metaphor to talk about how God punishes, purifies, and strengthens the world. Those there that day believed that God worked through fire, as well as various fire-like disasters. And with a little poetic imagination, even modern folks like us, can understand that God works with “fire.”
Loren was a troubled young man and at the tender age of fourteen, he entered a life of petty crime. By the time he was seventeen, he had become one of the regulars in the county juvenile justice system. At age eighteen, the judge gave him a choice: enter the army or do hard time in a state penitentiary. He volunteered for the army and was sent to Vietnam at the height of the conflict. He was assigned to a “graves unit” where he worked to identify, tag, and then ship the bodies of young men killed in battle, back to their loved ones. The judge’s intensions were good; he hoped that military service would discipline Loren. Unfortunately, it didn’t. When he returned to his hometown, he was even more troubled. In Southeast Asia, he compounded his alcohol problem by taking illegal drugs. And with this new addiction, his life of crime took a leap into an abyss. This one-time juvenile delinquent escalated his criminal activity and started committing armed robbery.
One night he and a friend held up a liquor store. The clerk managed to notify police and the car chase was on. Loren admits that he considered using the gun he had with him to shoot it out with the police. But God was merciful and something caused him and his friend to surrender instead. Having been found guilty, the judge sentenced Loren to the Illinois state prison at Joliet.
To Loren the sentence was no big deal. In his mind he had plenty of experience in county jail and the local juvenile detention center. He was tough. He thought he knew how to do hard time. Time in a penitentiary wouldn’t bother him, or so he thought. Unfortunately, he didn’t know Joliet. He described his years there as, “being burned alive at the stake”. Loren paid his debt to society and his first job as a free man was as the church custodian. The congregation frequently used that position as a ministry.
Loren quickly proved that he had learned his lesson. His first day on the job he walked up two flights of steps to give a quarter to the church treasurer that he found in the coin return of the soda machine. He was indeed an honest man. Nor was Loren ever shy about giving his testimonial. When he came home from Vietnam, he was angry and bitter. He didn’t believe in anyone or anything. He knew he was traveling the road of self-destruction and that was fine with him. Loren had chosen the hard way to commit suicide. But by God’s grace, his life was turned around.
It was no revival preacher who issued an altar call. There was no gentle voice of God urging him to come to Jesus. It was, however, no less the presence of God — a theophany in fire. As Loren described it, “I was in Joliet for only three weeks when enough terrible things happened to me, at the hands of other inmates, that I said to myself, ‘I will never, ever, do anything that will get me into a place like this again.'” God was merciful and provided a way for him to straighten his life out.
He married and had a family. He established himself as a responsible citizen and then was able to go on to find other employment beyond the walls of the church. Criminal justice critics will tell you it doesn’t happen nearly often enough. But with Loren, the fire that rained down on his life punished him, for his foolish choices, and then that fire began to purify him and make him a better man. Those who heard Jesus say, “I came to bring fire to the earth,” knew that’s what He meant.
Fire symbolized the presence of God. They believed God used the “fires” of life to punish and purify. That belief is what provides the background for this passage of scripture. That’s not, however, the point Jesus is making. This isn’t a simple observation about how God can work through difficult times to strengthen. In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus claims that the gospel is so radical that the world will experience it as fire raining down from heaven. For those of us who follow Jesus’ teachings, He warns that we, by many, will be considered revolutionaries or at times schismatics. Jesus tells those of us who strive to follow Him, that when His message sinks into our hearts and minds, it can cause trouble in our families. It can cause trouble with our friends. And it’s a message that a lot of people find to be counter-cultural.
The law, the commands and directives of God, those things in the Bible that trouble us and identify our sin, are words that many times runs head-long into the feel-good, self-centered teachings of the world. The law of God tells us to deny ourselves, to shun evil, to worship God alone and to love our neighbor. It’s a message that society today sees as nonsense.
Society today says, satisfy the self above all else: do what seems right in your own eyes: there is no God. When we choose to follow the way of Christ, we can, and likely will, get in trouble in our public life. Just ask a confessional chaplain in one of the military services, a teacher in one of our public schools or one of our servants of the court system. Proclaiming God and following His commands can cause problems in the public sphere. This Gospel can also have a negative impact on our familial relationships and friendships.
When we take our faith seriously, we will love others so much that we’re willing to speak God’s truth in love. At stake is the eternal soul of all who stand against the gospel. And for some, in many parts of the world today, adhering to this faith and speaking out, just might even get them thrown in jail or worse yet, killed. But the same can’t be said for us here in the US. It seems that the radical nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ has been lost.
Most who now claim Christianity as their religion, understand Christ as the Prince of Peace. That means believers can seek personal healing and forgiveness. It means our faith promises contentment and personal security in the here and now and entry to heaven at the moment of death. But this easy western Christian view also means we refer to almost any nice, kind, gentle person as a “Christian.” We seem to have forgotten that the kingdom of God, that Jesus introduced, was quite radical.
All of us know that Jesus was crucified. The Romans didn’t give Him an award for keeping Jewish citizens quiet and content. Most of His apostles met violent deaths at the hands of those who were outraged at the revolutionary changes they wanted to make both in society and in the lives of individuals. When Pliny was governor of a province in Asia Minor, he wrote a letter to the Roman emperor telling him that he didn’t know what these Christians believed exactly, but they were the most willful, obstinate, rebellious, disobedient people, he had ever encountered. Therefore, he had put some of them to death just on general principles.
Stanley Hauerwas, a seminary professor at Duke’s Divinity school, opens one of his classes by reading a letter from a parent to a government official. The parent complains that the family was paying for the very best education for their son. Then the young man got involved with a weird religious sect. The parent pleads with the government to do something about this group that was ruining his son’s life. Dr. Hauerwas ends by explaining that the parent is not complaining about the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, or some other group. The professor had assembled snippets from different letters written to the Roman government in the third century about a weird religious group called the Church of Jesus Christ. How that differs from the claims the church makes on people’s lives today!
Instead of high demands and radical changes, we think Christianity is to make us feel good about ourselves. Rather than an institution inciting revolutionary change, the community today wants the church to be a well-maintained, a quiet presence that never threatens property values. Jesus said that he came to rain fire from heaven. But in the last couple thousand years we’ve managed to get the fire under control by reducing it to candles on the communion table. Every once in a while, however, things change.
Some of us catch the vision that there’s more to the good life than just acquiring more and more. Some realize that their Christian faith calls them to do something for others, rather than just feeling good about themselves. Sometimes people decide to go to seminary rather than law school. Some decide to pursue a Master of Divinity rather than a Master of Business Administration. Some people feel the heat of God’s presence and are moved to extravagant generosity. Some people catch on fire with the presence of God and do things that disrupt their family life — just as Jesus predicted.
Jim was a prominent businessman in town. He belonged to the church, but had never taken it very seriously. Some of his friends were active in a spiritual renewal movement and encouraged him to attend one of the weekend retreats. “You’ll really enjoy it,” they promised. Reluctantly, Jim went. He didn’t really believe the church had anything to offer him. He went and listened carefully, but he didn’t enjoy the weekend at all. In fact, it was a terrible experience for him and for his family. You see, Jim had been embezzling money from the company where he worked.
They talked a great deal about Jesus’ teachings at that retreat. For Jim, it was as if the Word of God was fire rained down from heaven. The Monday morning after the retreat he walked into the office of the owner of the company and confessed. He spent the next few years in prison. When he returned, he became one of the leaders of that spiritual renewal movement. Jim experienced the teachings of Jesus as disruptive. It was nothing less than a firestorm from heaven. Faith in Jesus Christ can, and does, change lives.
But for that change to happen, we must be open to that fire God rains down from heaven. We must be open and willing to accept the fact that God in Jesus Christ will strengthen and purify us. And we must be willing to speak the truth in love, even when it offends the sensibilities of others. When we truly love, as Jesus taught us to love, our concern is for our family’s, neighbor’s and friend’s eternal future. We must be willing to serve no matter the cost. As hymn writer Adelaide Pollard puts it, “Have thine own way, Lord. Thou art the potter. I am the clay. Mold me and make me after thy will, while I am waiting, yielded and still.”
Amen