Luke 12:49-56

God Almighty, we just don’t need any help heating up our planet.  No more fire!  Its already breaking out all over the globe.  We pray for your help putting them out – the hot blazing, roaring red and gold and orange furnaces that consume acres and acres of land.  Send giant plumes of smoke far and wide to mess with the very breath of your creatures…we don’t need any more of that.

We pray for relief.

And you send us Jesus… whose very first word in this story is FIRE.  Whose first five words do not speak of relief or assistance but of worsening what is.

FIRE…I have come to throw it upon earth.

Please…no…

That’s my first reaction to these words.  It’s the reaction Jesus intends. No doubt about it.  His world knew fire too, fire that enemy of safety, whether it was the fire of military oppression, torched houses and fields, burned cities. Or domestic fires kindled by overturned oil lamps and kitchen hearths.  Managing fire…surviving fire… was a major challenge.  You paid attention when someone called out FIRE.  And we still do.

I is a measure of our human fears, our being taught to expect bad news, that the word Fire first evokes fear.  Find the extinguisher, Evacuate.  Fire grabs our attention, we creatures who value its energy, beauty, and power…and wisely fear it as well.

Moses’ attention had been captivated by fire, a fire which burned in the dry brush of the Sinai desert and yet did not consume its fuel.  What kind of fire was that?

Thanks be to God Moses didn’t run the other way or use precious water trying to put out a brush fire before it spread.   He went to look and in that fire was something, someone, the voice of God, that grasped him…the fire heralded a call to lead his people out of Egypt.  Indeed, to divide families and nations.  To create tumult.  To create a people for and with God.

Perhaps that’s the kind of fire, Jesus came to cast upon the earth.  The fire of God’s presence.  A fire that holds our attention and speaks our name…

My own grandpa used to cast fire on the earth.  Okay… not quite that dramatically, but for a little girl who loved the woods, the fire was pretty dramatic.  Grandpa lived in the Pennsylvania mountains, a place of creeks and pines and old rocks.  Hidden in fallen leaves and pine needles, you could find tiny bright red tea berries and the even tinier red arms of British soldier lichen.

One early spring I was there when Grandpa and some friends and neighbors gathered in their part of the woods and set the ground on fire.  What?  It was incomprehensible!  They spread throughout the area with rakes to keep the fire within invisible bounds I couldn’t see.  Next morning the ground and the pines were blackened, the ground still breathing smoke and crispy underfoot.  I grieved.

Yet, sure enough, the liches and berries returned.  The pinecones released their seeds.  The forest was restored, the scars of burning fading with the rains.  Later I learned that my family did a burn every spring to keep the forest clear, help the trees grow, manage the insects. It was all done to create the woods we loved.

The word fire–from Jesus—let it evoke a burning bush, a cleansing burn rather than a giant, unmanageable conflagration.  This is not the fire of a grim apocalypse of flaming brimstone.  This is baptismal fire, the fire of the Holy Spirit that John said only Jesus could bring.  “I baptize you with water, but the one who is to come will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

And there it is.  Jesus comes with fire that burns with God’s presence and a calling and does not consume the bush or us.  The fire that spreads through the dead underbrush of a forest to let new life emerge from under the shade of dried leaves and sticks.  The fire of the Holy Spirit, that will come like tongues of fire upon the very heads of Jesus’ followers AFTER his return to life.  The red of Pentecost fire combined with the dove of the Holy Spirit.  No wonder Jesus was desperately eager for God’s fire, God’s presence to be cast upon the earth.  To begin a new kind of covenant life where beauty and fruitfulness hidden in the shade of death, can begin to emerge again.

But Jesus wants our attention.  This holy fire is not simply something to cozy up to on a cold winter night.   There’s tension in God’s fire, even in that dove of peace. This fire gives us light to see God’s presence in the world…to all that might be…to all that should be.  And we can’t undo that vision.  Baptized in fire, we step into a world we know as God’s, not Caesar’s.  it’s a world that stretches beyond our limited vision of boundaries.  We step into it, burning, but not consumed, to unearth the beauty and power of lives we had not even noticed before.  And we can’t un-see it.

Of course there is division, separation even within our families as fire teaches us to imagine bigger families>  This world where what we casually walk, as I did in the forest, has beauty and an up-welling power, a Holy spirit embedded deep within.  Jesus’ fire enables us to see Holy Ground all around and within and among us creatures.  It is an awesome vision.

As holy promises come true as the mighty are cast down from their thrones, the rich sent empty away, the proud knocked off their high horses—just imagine that!–not everyone will be happy.  Our own times are  such a wild, inescapable example of how desperately hard it is to see green shoots emerge from ruined landscape.

And which fire is Holy fire?  How do we see and trust that the rifts and struggles among us may reveal new life?  That question brings us to the very last word in Luke’s story.

“You know how,” Jesus says.  “You can see what is around you.” Jesus ends this harsh-sounding call with the quietest, most serious word we almost ignore.  Fire got us started.  Discernment  is the goal, the very last word in the ancient text (Luke 12:56).  Jesus’ holy fire gives us the power of  discernment.

Our translation underestimates what’s really at stake.  Its not just interpretation to which we are called:  its seeing what’s really there.    Jesus’ holy fire gives us the power of discernment.  And forgives us when we fail.  The ability to know where we are and what at least one next step might be. And not give up when we misstep.

Dear church, this is Gloria Dei’s task always and especially at this time of openings here.  We grieve the losses of beloved leaders who bound us in community and helped us celebrate, losses in our church and in the world around us.   Now we pray, reminded by even this tiny fire of the Holy Spirit (hold up small discernment candle), for discernment of the green springing up, the life up-welling among us and in the world around us.  It is here…new life is here.  Amen