Consuming Fire

Scripture: Gaudete Sunday, A.D. 2015 C

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

How do we define ourselves?

Are we defined by our sins—by our pride, by our wills, by all the things we seek to accomplish apart from God—or are we defined by the unmerited love shown unto us by the One in whom we live and move and have our being? Is it more important to assert for ourselves that “I am,” or to acknowledge God as the great I Am? This is an important question, you see, because how we define ourselves also determines how we experience God when we encounter Him. Will God burn us up, or will God gather us in?

Our God, according to Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, is a consuming fire. And this is an image we see repeated throughout the Bible. God is light and heat and glory unfathomable. His very presence burns up the wicked. His Spirit is a breath of fire. His winnowing fork is in His hand and He consumes the chaff with unquenchable flames. We are warned of Gehenna, where the fire never dies, and we hear all too vividly the agonies of the rich man who ignored poor Lazarus suffering at his doorstep. Terrible fires everywhere.

Yet these are the same fires that blazed out on the first day of Creation to initiate the world; the same fires that appeared to Moses in a burning bush that was not harmed; the fires that led Israel by a pillar of flame and kept the armies of Pharaoh at bay; the fiery furnace that preserved Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; the tongues of flame that alighted upon the heads of the Apostles to fill them with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Here we find gentle and holy fires, that do not destroy but fulfill, that do not kill but resurrect: fires of blessing, fires of hope, fires of an eternal and unquenchable love. We know that God is One, and that the God whom we are taught to fear is the same God whom we are called to love. What if the various fires of God that we read about, some terrifying, some vivifying, are one in the same as well?

John the Baptist tells us that Christ will come to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that the wheat He shall gather into His granary while the chaff He shall burn up into smoke. And we tend to read this story as our ancient Hebrew forebears might: that there are the people of God and then there are the nations of the world; and that God will save His people while simultaneously destroying the nations. This was the expectation of Israel from time immemorial, a great and godly reckoning. Yet this is not at all what happened when at last the Messiah arrived.

Rather than gather in Israel and put the rest of the world to the torch, Christ broke open the people of God with a New Covenant in His Blood, allowing the wild branches of the nations to be grafted onto the cultivated root of Israel. Now God’s people were no longer limited to a single nation descended from a single man, but instead God called forth saints from every nation and tribe and tongue under heaven. And while the fires of war did eventually fall upon Jerusalem as a result, this did not destroy God’s chosen people but purified and liberated them.

The division between wheat and chaff is not the division between one sort of people and another—the sons of light against the children of darkness, or that sort of thing. No, that would be too easy. Instead the division lies right through the middle of each and every human heart. St. Paul speaks of God as a consuming fire, but also as one that tests and purifies. God does not consume entire persons. What God consumes is our sin, our impurities, the dross that mars our lives. And what is left behind is purified, as gold and silver in a furnace. He burns up what is wicked and broken, and brings out our intended beauty, our intended holiness.

Imagine that you are a lump of ore, a rock, and that someone throws you into a furnace. The parts of you that are base, the dross contaminating your metal, will be burned away. That’s the entire point of smelting ore. What will be left is purer metal, flawless and beautiful, a glory to behold. Not only is the refined product more pleasing to the eye, but it is also far more useful to the forger. Now you, once just a rock, have luster and strength and malleability. Now you have been prepared for any number of noble and glorious purposes.

Let’s stretch this image a little further. You are the rock. The fiery furnace is the overpowering glory and love of God. If you define yourself by your impurities, by all the useless dirt that the metalsmith does not intend, then you will look to the fires with terror. Those flames will burn you up, burn up who you think you are. In some sense, the rock is destroyed in the furnace. But if you define yourself not by your flaws but by the glorious and transformative vision of the smith, then you will experience those same flames as mercy and grace. They will remove from you the corrosion of sins, the false idols of pride, and reveal you for what you were always intended to be: pure, holy, flawless, and strong. The same God. The same flames. Very different understandings.

We speak of some going to Heaven and some going to hell. But the Bible is clear that in the end of all things, when Christ’s victory is fully completed and all Creation set right, God will be all in all. There will be nothing that is not God. For those who love the Lord, everywhere they look will be joy and peace and exultation. Yet for those who love only themselves, who prefer darkness and lies to the living Truth that they can no longer escape, everywhere they look will seem torturous. It may very well be that, in the end, Heaven and hell have the same address.

In this life there are times when God seems frightful and angry, or worse yet uncaring. And there are times when we encounter God as unspeakable, unlimited grace. Sometimes the fires burn us; sometimes they heal us. Yet He is always the same God, radiating the same love and glory. We are the variable. We are complex. God is simple. God is Love, unchanging and unchangeable. God will always hate sin, without exception, because sin separates us from the love of God. And God will always forgive us, without exception, whenever we humble ourselves and return to His mercy.

This love of God—this unquenchable and consuming fire—compels us to surrender all our false idols, all our false images of ourselves. It is no easy thing to love God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. It kind of kills you. But the only thing that is dying, that God is burning away, is the false you, the false vision of who we think we are, who we’ve made ourselves out to be. There’s all the difference in the world between a sadist and a surgeon. Both of them cause us pain, but the surgeon does so only to bring us to new and greater life.

Remember that God sent His Son into the world not to condemn the world but to save it. Remember that this same Son of God promises us that His Father’s will is that not even one of His little ones be lost. Remember that God willingly offered up His life on the Cross so that we who killed Him would never need to taste death. Remember all this and know that the fires which have so frightened us throughout the ages are nothing more than the fires of a love so intense that we cannot possibly imagine its ferocity. And yes, that can be scary. But true love always is.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.