I find the process of starting a campfire fascinating.
For me, it’s routine and yet there’s never a guarantee of success.
What begins as an impressive blaze can easily burn itself out –
given careless construction, wet conditions or bad luck.
Preparation matters so much.
You need some sort of fire starter — paper or birch bark
or those weird things people make with drier lint and wax.
You have to gather sticks of all thicknesses.
Break them to the right length.
Arrange the wood carefully before lighting a match
to build a pathway for the first tender flames
to catch the small skinny sticks, then progress to thicker and thicker
sticks until there’s enough heat and energy to light the larger logs.
Provide fuel to sustain the fire but don’t pile on too much too fast,
or the flames will be smothered.
Blow on a small blaze strategically to encourage it to grow well.
The Bible, too, is preoccupied with fire.
Moses who was a Hebrew raised by the Egyptian oppressors,
found a among nomadic herders.
He was in the desert, far from the courts of Pharoah,
with his sheep one day when he encountered
the God of his ancestors in a bush that burned but was not consumed.
God spoke out of the bush- this ground is holy, and you are being called
to liberate my people from slavery.
The call of the prophet Isaiah was delivered via a burning coal
that purified his lips and activated his confidence.
In today’s passage from Jeremiah, God’s word is a fire that illuminates
all the ways we humans manipulate the divine
for our own purposes — the lies we tell
and the oppressive systems we build in the name of God.
The church was born when, on the day of Pentecost,
a tongue, as of fire rested, on each follower of Jesus,
filling their lives with Spirit.
Strangely enough, I’m finding the fire-casting, family-dividing, stressed out Jesus of today’s passage quite helpful in these times in which we live.
In her commentary on this text, professor Diana Butler Bass
describes how political differences
have created alienation in her family.
She and her brother haven’t spoken a word to each other in eight years.
She notes that in 2024, 1 in 5 Americans reported that they are
estranged from loved ones because of politics.
She writes:
“Family division is a mark of the unjust society.
There is no trust, not even the bonds of blood and heart,
not shared memories or shared parentage.
A corrupt society destroys the most intimate of relationships.
That is just the way it works.
Perhaps we can better understand Jesus:
“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it was already kindled!”
It wasn’t a threat. He was only repeating a prophetic truism:
where injustice, violence, and lies reign,
members of the same family become enemies.
Jesus looked around Jerusalem.
He saw similar corruption, the never-ending story of injustice.”
“I think he sighed,” Bass continues, “with a mix of righteous anger
and compassion, empathy surely as well:
Oh Jerusalem! How I wish this was over!
How I wish the fire of justice had already done its work!”
In Luke particularly, Jesus is portrayed as a bearer of peace.
His words in today’s passage generate creative tension
within that core identity.
“On earth, peace” the angels sang to the shepherds
when they announced the Jesus’s birth.
Luke intentionally contrasts the peace of God,
God’s shalom, or wholeness, with the Pax Romana,
the false peace of empire, the immobility that comes from fear,
the quieting of dissent achieved through threat.
It takes struggle, risk and confrontation
to free ourselves from empire’s ways.
That’s what I hear in the words that the elder prophet Simeon
spoke to Jesus’ mother Mary as he blessed her baby boy in the temple:
“This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel
and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many
will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”
(Luke 2:34-35)
It’s stressful, living under empire.
When our leaders are doing everything they can to create an atmosphere
of fear and scarcity, repression and scapegoating,
it brings out the worst in all of us.
Their actions are creating ever more division and desperation.
The building of vast prisons for immigrants. s
People robbed of healthcare, housing and food.
The challenge to marriage equality.
The push to re-draw election maps to further consolidate power
in the hands of a very few.
All this stress can tear families apart.
The fire Jesus kindles among us also causes stress,
the stress of transformation.
As a congregation we are experiencing so much change right now.
After years of laying sticks for a fire, a match has been lit
and the big logs are beginning to catch.
We are lovingly sending Sarah off, and welcoming Alice with excitement-
– shifting from the role of Parish Administrator
to that of Communciations and Administrative Lead.
We are accompanying our Facilities Manager, Brad, in his recovery
from surgery.
We are getting rid of lots and lots of stuff and fixing and painting
and laying down flooring, to welcome the offices of Southeast Seniors.
And we are imagining a newly robust partnership
among all of us who share this building.
Our years of work with the Vinery project
are culminating in the discovery of new ways we can
be good neighbors to our campus community..
And at the very same time, we working to show up powerfully
in this political moment with our bodies and our resources
and the voice of our faith to advocate for all that we hold sacred.
It is good to remember, amid all this change, that change is exactly why we’re here.
We are not here to avoid the stress of these times in which we live.
The lightening-scarred sycamore tree in Wendell Berry’s poem
bears witness to the strength and wisdom that emerges
only through struggle:
“Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in/ that has not harmed it.”
We come together to receive a word like fire, a word of clarity,
a word of truth, a word of liberation,
a word that causes division for the sake of peace.
Amen.