Ring of Fire
The Lesson: Luke 12:49-56
For the past few days I’ve had a song by the great Johnny Cash stuck in my head. If you like Johnny Cash as much as I do, this is not a bad thing. The song is called “Ring of Fire”. The lyrics go like this …
Love is a burning thing,
It makes a fiery ring,
Bound by wild desire,
I fell in a ring of fire,
I fell into a burning ring of fire,
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher,
I burned, burned, burned,
A ring of fire, a ring of fire.
As you may have noticed, fire is a common theme in our scriptures from Jeremiah and Luke. In Jeremiah, we encounter the line. “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock into pieces?” And in Luke, we hear a surprisingly harsh sounding expression from Jesus “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled?” Most of you are probably thinking that I chose these texts to have some fun getting us all ready for our little fire drill at the end of the service. Nope! Call it a coincidence, call it the Spirit at work, but these are the texts appointed by the lectionary to be read on this 12th Sunday after Pentecost. As if the weather hasn’t been hot enough already this summer. Fire in August, and from Jesus no less.
We might rightly wonder if Jesus was suffering from some sort of heat stroke himself when he said the words we just heard. He sounds uncharacteristically impatient, indignant, and highly judgmental. Jesus says himself that he was under stress, though we shouldn’t confuse this with the contemporary variety. The stress Jesus is feeling is more of an urgency related to his unshakable sense of purpose. He knows Jerusalem is on the horizon and he knows he’s running out of time. Jesus clearly uses the symbol of fire to get our attention! We have the sense that he is fed up. That he means business. That he wants to start seeing results of his teaching, or else. Fair enough, but just what is the nature of this fire that Jesus is bringing to earth, and what are we supposed to learn from it? Clearly, he’s using fire as a metaphor here, but for what? Even scholars aren’t sure what exactly he meant here, but I’ve got a few options for us to consider.
For starters, it could be that he was speaking of the fire of love. After all, “love is a burning thing” at least according to the other J.C., Johnny Cash! And I don’t just mean the romantic kind of love. Maybe it’s the fire of God’s love and God’s desire for our world that is burning in him and through Jesus? Maybe. But if so, then why does Luke follow the line about Jesus bringing fire with a line about his bringing division as well, and his tearing of families apart? If it’s the fire of love, then why does Jesus come across sounding like such a jerk in this passage, calling people hypocrites in this passage, and fools in the chapter before?
Given what follows in the passage, another perhaps more plausible option is that he had in mind a fire of judgment, that kind of fire that goes particularly well with brimstone. Think of Jonathan Edwards and his classic sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, about God holding us all like helpless spiders over the fires of hell. Maybe. Jesus seems angry enough himself here to make this case but it still seems a bit of a stretch to think that Jesus needed to resort to fear tactics to maintain his following.
Another option is that Jesus was thinking along the line of that “refiner’s fire’ about which the prophet Malachi preaches. Refiner’s fire is used not only to melt away crude impurities, but also to create something useful, and perhaps even artful. For Malachi and perhaps for Jesus, this kind of fire is kindled by repentance, by an honest to God look at our lives and actions and relationships. It can also be enflamed by a deep encounter with God’s judgment yes, but also with God’s mercy and forgiveness, with the assurance that when we are honest to ourselves, and honest to God, we will still be loved no matter what we’ve done or left undone. I’d say we’re getting warmer.
One more related option is this. What if Jesus is just talking about the bringing of truth to earth! Not just any truth, but a burning truth, the burning truth that carries with it the same authority as the word of God! More like the fire mentioned in Jeremiah, the word of God, the word of truth is like a fire that burns, like a hammer that breaks! This fire may well do some damage to our lives and world, but its not meant to destroy us. Instead, the truth is meant to set us aright and to set the world aright. It’s meant to set us and the world free!
Imagine Jesus bringing a truth that will burn in your souls until you are fully and deeply transformed into the person God has intended you to be since the day you were born? It will burn away all of our false pretensions, all of the lies we tell ourselves about the things that we want and need, all the untruths we tell ourselves about what we can and cannot do. This fire of truth can melt right to the heart of whatever painful tensions exist in your relationship with loved ones, melting whatever secrets, empowering us to speak the truth, even to our own parents, or to hear the truth, even from our own kids. Did you notice how the family division about which Jesus speaks breaks down along generational lines? It’s because Jesus knows that families are complicated and so often full of firewalls! Indeed, most of us struggle to tell and hear the truth when it comes to our relationships with our parents and with our kids. Who among us doesn’t have things we really want to say to our parents, or things we really don’t want to hear from our kids. Or who among us doesn’t have old voices from our families that shape us in unhealthy ways, that need a bit of the refining fire of God’s truth to counter our family’s lies about us? Indeed, this fire of truth may at first bring more division than peace, more disquiet in our souls than calm assurance. Can you feel it smoking within you yet? Can you sense that ember of unspoken or unheard truth, against unchallenged lies? If so, then imagine Jesus right by your side holding the bellows! Imagine yourself falling into that ring of fire, down, down, down and the flames go higher and higher and imagine where it might lead! It may not be a pretty picture, but then again neither was what Jesus saw in store for him on his way to Jerusalem. And like Jerusalem, it will reveal a deeper truth, unleashing and resurrecting a truer power as false beliefs are burned away.
Setting aside the firewalls in our families, he moves on to address other spiritual crises. He says to his followers that they can tell the weather but they can’t read the signs of the time. As Eugene Petersen translates the last verses of our passage for today, “”When you see the clouds coming in from the west, you say “Storm’s coming” and you’re right. And when the wind comes out of the south, you say “This’ll be a hot one” and you’re right. Frauds! You know how to tell the change in the weather, so don’t tell me you can’t tell a change in the season, the God-season we’re in right now!” There’s that urgency again. Jesus is always pressing his followers to look beyond the surface of their lives and their relationships and the ever present power structures of the world. Jesus wants to urge people beyond the lies that keep us living in comfort and thinking that everything is going to be okay. These days, we can read both weather—Global warming that is--and the stock market and tell that everything is not going to be okay, and yet what are we doing about it? How are we engaging our own faith in God? How are we turning the smoke of our faith into a fire that can radically change our lives to the point of our dying for a cause that is greater than our lives and our families?
As the esteemed mid-20th century theologian, Karl Barth, has written… “Oh yes, there is smoke upon the earth, smoke of fervid, urgent love God and [humankind]; smoke of quiet, sincere faith, smoke of anxious, unshakable hope; smoke of profound, progressive ideas; smoke of noble, courageous zeal for the good, smoke of universal movements for the betterment and recreation of temporal circumstances….But, [Barth continues], smoke is not fire. We dare not become too easily satisfied about what Jesus expects. Jesus was not so easily satisfied either in what he desired to bring and to give us!” Powerful words. Indeed, the fire of truth that we encounter in the word of God and in Christ himself will do more than leave us discolored. It will leave us completely utterly changed, transfigured and transformed! It will empower us to call out the lies under which we have been living, some of us since our childhood; it will take down the firewalls! Ultimately, it will unleash a new sense of compassion, justice, mercy and freedom for our lives and for our world.
Where do we begin to turn our smoke into fire? We can start by identifying those places in our lives and worlds where fires are already burning. We can start by fighting fire with fire! Let the fire of God’s truth touch those places in your relationships that are already burning! Chances are you already know where these places are and you already know what to do. If you need some help in lighting the match, tell a friend and ask God for courage to make a move! The fires in our world are even easier to locate. Consider all the images we’ve been seeing lately of oil burning in the gulf coast, of forest fires or fires caused by lighting? We need to let the fire of God’s truth burn away our daily habits of oil dependence and ignite our outrage about how little our government is doing to address global warming! Just today, there’s an amazing article in the New York Times magazine about a different kind fire burning in Africa, fires that burn from used computers, filling the air with toxic smoke until the computer is melted down to metal parts. Would we stand for such fires burning in our relatively pristine neighborhoods? Not a chance. We need to fight these fires with the fires of God’s truth that will burn through our false sense of virtue at sending old computers to foreign places where instead of helping bridge the technological divide, they fuel environmental poisoning, of both the earth and the lives of young teenage boys that scavenge among the refuse.
Sisters and brothers, the alarms are sounding all around us. This is not a drill! This is the ‘yet more light and truth that is breaking forth from God’s holy word’ even as we speak! Jesus came to start a fire, to set a fire under each of us. It’s ours to receive it and to let ourselves be changed by it, that the world as it is may become the world as it should be, the world as God created it to be! Amen.