INRI

Propers: Whitsun (Pentecost), A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Within your heart there burns a living flame. You did not light it, and you cannot put it out. It was never kindled but has always been, from long before this world was born. And someday that fire will consume you, body and mind, heart and soul. And you shall arise from your own ashes as a phoenix, ready to burn down at the last the foundations of this cosmos, the very walls of time and of space.

Fire is a sacred thing. It always has been. How could it be otherwise, given its elemental beauty, its wonder and its terror? A Russian once told me a proverb, that there are three things a man never tires of watching: fire burning, water running, women working. Honestly that sounds to me like a pretty good summation of the Gospel: fire and water and women bringing new life in Christ to the world.

Growing up in the Boy Scouts, we all loved tending the campfire. How it crackled and smoked and sparked, how like a living thing it grew and writhed and ate. It would warm us, enlighten us, cheer us and incense us, blessing us with its smoke. Fire was a wonder—neither matter nor energy but a process of transformation, of refinement. Fire turned meat into food, darkness to light. It cauterized wounds and sterilized water and fertilized fields. Through ancient secrets of alchemy it could turn rocks into gold, stones into steel. Fire is the forge of creation.

We tend today to think of fire as destructive, as bombs and bullets. We forget that every engine, every lightbulb in the modern world, consists of bottled fire. It strengthens and clarifies and cleans. Everything impure, placed in those flames, goes up in smoke. But the salubrity, the utility, the beauty of the secrets deep within—these the flames unlock and reveal.

It is no accident that our words for “hearth” and “heart” are so similar: the fireplace has ever been the heart of the home, a dwelling for the spirits of the house. In religion we light fires, we light candles, we light lamps of precious oil, all to signify the Spirit and the presence of our God. The Zoroastrians took this to its logical conclusion, using sacred fire as the symbol of their faith. For them, the flames are like the Crucifix, a visible image of the invisible God—as they are for us as well. For while we tend to portray God the Spirit as a dove, He shows up throughout the Bible as an all-consuming fire.

Think of Moses and the burning bush. Think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The fires of God, the Spirit of God, the presence of God on earth, always burns, always purifies, always reveals—yet never destroys. Rather, the fires of God transform, exalt, and sanctify, lifting our prayers before the heavenly throne, raising our souls aloft to realms beyond space and time.

The fire of God is the Spirit of God, ever burning, every consuming, ever transforming this world from death to life, darkness to light, sin to glory, and Man to God.

And this is the same fire that Christ has put into you. He has breathed into you, into His Church, in our Baptism, the flames of the Holy Spirit who is the presence of God. The same fires that forged the stars and cast Satan like lightning from Heaven burn now in our hearts, in our souls, in our chests. In ancient times, Jews and pagans alike filled their temples with sacrifice, fire, and smoke; you are that Temple now. You are God’s chosen sanctuary, His house upon this earth, the sacred precinct in which the Almighty deigns now to dwell.

You, in short, are the Temple of the Holy Spirit. And like any temple, your job is to serve as the liminal space, the threshold between worlds, in which God descends to mortal realms, eternity breaks into time, and humanity thus is raised in Christ to deathless and infinite glory. This is why Christ calls us the light of the world, why Paul says that our bodies are sanctuaries of the Spirit. Jesus builds His Temple not of oak and stone but of flesh and blood, of living stones, of sanctified sinners saved by grace and made one in His Name.

That flame within you is God. And no matter what you do, how far you fall, or how badly you sin, you will never be able to put that fire out. You cannot smother it, cannot drown it, cannot bury it—for the Spirit is immortal, eternal, and infinitely hot. He will burn within you, burning through you, long after this fallen world has fallen away. So you’d best make your peace with God, for He is deeper in you than your own heart. And let me tell you, He ain’t goin’ nowhere; least of all without you.

So here’s what you do: give everything in your life to that fire. Offer the God within your every thought, every hope, every fear, every cruelty. Offer Him each dream you have of the future, and each regret you have of the past. Offer Him your gratitude, your worries, your doubts, and your faith. And He will do what fire does. He will consume it, sanctify it, and raise it up. He will fill it with light and heat and His own deathless flame. He will purge from it, purge from you, every impurity, every weakness, every failure as ash in the wind.

Yet all that is real—all that is Good and Beautiful and True—He will purify and strengthen and return to you ten-thousandfold. God will be the forge within your heart that makes all things anew. This is what St Paul understood, when he said to test all things and keep the good; that we are like silver refined in the furnace seven times; that some will be saved as through fire.

For indeed, many a mystic has come to the conclusion that the fires of hell and the fires of Heaven are in fact one and the same: that they are both the fire of God. If we define ourselves by our dross, by our sins, by all that is not properly us, then we will experience those flames as destructive, burning up who we think that we are. Yet if we know ourselves to be children of God, co-heirs with Christ, and temples of the Holy Spirit, then we will experience the presence of God as purification, burning out of us all that is not true, all that is not us, liberating us for life everlasting.

And we will rise, glorious, as gold from the crucible, as a phoenix from the ashes, as Christ Resurrected and resplendent from the tomb! Salvation and damnation are both alike in Jesus. Who we truly are, and someday will be, and were in fact always meant to be—that person is saved. And all that we are not, all our sin, all our failings, all our wickedness will cease, to burn up and to vanish like smoke upon the breeze.

It is the will of God that His beloved Creation be saved. It is the will of God that not even one of His little ones be lost. And it is the will of God that the Resurrection begun in Jesus Christ, the firstfruits from the dead, continue in us—in you and in me—until the fires of God’s Spirit, the fire of His Light and Life and Love, extend out to every nook and cranny of the cosmos, that God at the last shall be All in All.

That is your calling, your purpose, and your destiny in life: to let the love of God consume us until we are all fire; that the flames from out His Temple—His Body, His Bride, His Church—may consume all the universe, at every level of reality, and lift us all up as one in Him, forever. The alchemists had an alternate interpretation of the INRI above Jesus’ Cross: igne natura renovatur integra. “Through fire is Nature reborn whole.”

That may sound rather lofty. Indeed that may sound rather crazy. The promises of God often do. Suffice to say that He has chosen to live and to dwell in you, as a tiny deathless flame, a small yet infinite spark of the divine: a starforge in your soul. And there simply is no getting Him out of there now. I’m afraid that God just does not break promises.

My advice? Make peace with the Spirit and the presence of our God. Seek Him out within. Seek Him out in silence. And there upon His Altar in your soul, offer up your life, your minutes and your days, your decades and your years. Watch them curl up like paper in His flames—raised to something brighter, raised to something higher. And know that all this wonder here below is but a foretaste of the feast to come.

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