Our Sunday Message

A Church On Fire!:Luke 12:49-56
Rev. Dr. Carol McCall Richardson
August 19, 2007
Twelfth Sunday of Kingdomtide

  The Jesus that says these words is not the sweet Jesus, the babe in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger bed, that we find in the first chapters of Luke’s gospel. This Jesus that we hear today has grown up, wrestled with demons in the desert and has discerned God’s call upon his life and God’s mission for him. This Jesus knows the prophetic pronouncement of the prophet, Malachi:
 See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant whom you desire, will come, says the Lord Almighty. But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire…(Mal. 3:1-2)
  And John the Baptist, the messenger of whom Malachi speaks , the John who was sent to prepare the way of the Lord, repeated Malachi’s message:
 He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire (Matthew 3:11-12).
  O my, these are not exactly words we have come to church to hear. We have come for words of comfort, words of encouragement, words of inspiration, something we can comfortably live with on this Sunday of covenant-making, not words of judgment!
  But nevertheless, hear comes the Judge!
  Here Jesus comes to determine who is on his side of life and who is not.
  He comes, our text says, not to bring peace, but division!
  He comes to judge between those who are on the way and those who are in the way and all of us shall know ourselves for who we are!
I confess I do not like this text anymore than I liked the lectionary text on possessions a little earlier in this 12th chapter of Luke because in this text Jesus runs counter to so much that I’ve tried to make him—a pleasant, soothing friend named Jesus. This is the Jesus that I want. This is the Jesus I desire. But today as Jesus begins to smolder and flicker into a white-hot flame, well, I begin to think I want to change my seat. These beautiful needlepoint pulpit chairs were lovingly stitched by some of you. The flame chair is the one in which the preacher sits—the hot sit, we call it. So today I want to move from the “”flames” to the “pomegranate chair” or the chair with the gentle dove of the Holy Spirit because none of us looks forward to judgment, do we?
  Barbara Brown Taylor, voted by Baylor University as one of the 10 best preachers in the English speaking world, gives us her vivid image of judgment. In her image she imagines “a heavenly line-up where all of us”, she says, “are standing backed up against a white wall with bright lights in our eyes and numbers around our necks, facing a two-way mirror behind which we know the Lord himself is looking us over, determining whether we are on his team or not. “Numbers 2, 5, 8, 9, and 12—dismissed!” the voice over the loudspeaker says. I look down and see the nine around my neck. I have been found out. A door opens at the end of the corridor and I shuffle out behind the others, into a place of intense heat and licking flames.”1
  Now this Episcopalian preacher is sounding more like an old fashion tent revivalist Baptist preacher—the kind like my Uncle BB, who had a wife who could shake earth with her organ playing, for here is a terrifying image of judgment, one of unquenchable fire. But if we read the Bible, we find that the image of fire—that primal element that purges, smelting off all impurities—is used many times over in Scripture. Throughout the Bible, fire is the one reliable sign of the presence of God. We read where God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush, that dry desert bush that suddenly bursts into flames—Fire! God said, “Go to Pharaoh and his evil empire! Go, Moses! Speak!” And Jesus in our text today says, “I’m consumed with that fire and I intend to ignite you!”
  And then God said, “I’ll give you a pillar of fire to guide my people into the darkness, pulling you into my future—Fire! And when Moses goes up on Mount Sinai to receive the ten commandments from God, he looks to those down below as if the mountain itself is being devoured by fire. As the Hebrews put it, “Our God is a consuming fire!”
  And Jesus says, “I’m kindling the same kind of fire.” It’s decision time. It’s division time—They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother.” Some will go God’s way and some their own way. It’s what happens when we are allowed choices!
  “You might well want to be left alone, imperfections and all, and that’s your choice,” Jesus says, for God never coerces. But this fire that Jesus bring is God’s own fire, the fire of God’s presence, a fire that demands a decision to be sure, but a fire that wants desperately    to speak to us,
   to guide us,
   to instruct us,
   to save us from ourselves.
  It is the fire of a potter who wants to make useful vessels out of a lump of damp clay. It is a jeweler’s fire that takes rough ore and refines it into pure gold. This fire does not have to be the fire of destruction, resulting from our own poor choices. It may also be the fire of transformation, a fire that
    lights us up,
    changes us,
    melts us down
    and reforms us more nearly into the image of God.
  But first a decision has to be made. Jesus has come as judge. Will we go his way or go our own way? Fire—destruction or transformation?
  Jesus is the judge, to be sure, but his court chambers are the chambers of his compassionate heart and no judgment takes place outside of there; all judgment takes place inside the heart of God, by the same Lord who offers us peace, pardon, and transformation every day of our lives. We can refuse him, of course. We can fail to believe him, we can fear him, we can run away from him or we can say, “ yes, here I am, look deep down inside me and see the way I really am, tell me the whole truth about myself. I’m tired of trying to figure out how good and bad I am; tired of trying to be my own god. You be the judge, O Lord. Be my God— refine me, transform me, baptize me with the Holy Spirit and with fire!”
  And all God needs with that kind of response; all God needs to create a human being like that is a handful of dust willing to be transformed, willing to be caught on fire for heaven’s sake.
The disciples that day were together after the death and resurrection of Jesus, praying, maybe going through the motions of worship, some sleeping, perhaps, and all of a sudden there is a rumble, a shaking of the building and the doors swing open and somebody shouts, “Fire!”
  We call that day Pentecost. The day the church was born in the crucible, the furnace of God’s fire, the Incendiary Fellowship that God called it to be—a church that would join God in God’s mission to change the world, one needy person at a time.
  God continues to look for a few good people called the First Baptist Church of Memphis who are willing to be combustible, a church afire, who even though they have no leader, are committed, who are willing to be transformed, changed, to be fully faithful in the meantime!
PRAYER:
 Lord Jesus, ignite us, set us on fire, rekindle us, and enflame us in passionate love for you. Draw us out of the confines of our safe and predictable faith and out into the fiery furnace of Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego—not to be destroyed, because you also walk with us, but to be aflame with the Spirit of God inside us. May we, your people of the covenant, burn brightly for your love and may the flame of our commitment never be quenched! Amen.
 It is covenant-making time, First Baptist Church. Are you ready to be changed into fire?

1 Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, (Boston, Cowley Publications, 1995) p.129.