Church on Morgan
August 16, 2015 | Luke 3:7-8
Our scripture reading this morning comes from Luke 3 verses 7 through 18. "John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, 'You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from wrath to come. Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our ancestor. For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees. Every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. And the crowds asked him, 'What then should we do?' In reply, he said to them, 'Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none. And whoever has food must do likewise. Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, 'Teacher, what should we do?' He said to them, 'Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.' Soldiers asked him also, 'And we, what should we do?' He said to them, 'Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation and be satisfied with your wages.' As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, 'I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming. I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.' So with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people. This be the word of God for the people of God. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Well, good morning. And this is another one of the special Sundays where I really do feel like I have the best seat in the house. It was awesome listening to y'all sing. Just powerful. Thanks, Zach, and the band, and especially Tom this morning, stepping into the mic, so that was great. So if you're new this summer to us, our whole church has been in what I think is the longest sermon series of all time. And if you're ready for it to be over, good news. We've only got about a week or two left. And if you've loved it, you still got a week or two left. But it's called Beautiful Things, a study of God's good earth. And the whole idea of this sermon series was that we noticed, both in the Old and New Testaments, the Psalmist and the Apostle Paul, both made a point of saying at some point in their lives that the creation itself tells the story of God. The creation is speaking all day and all night. If we would only have ears to hear, if we'd only have eyes to see, we might learn something about God just by the very things that God has made. So we've made our way through a number of created things this summer. We've looked at the rocks and what rocks might have to teach us. We've looked at flowers. We've looked at rain. We've looked at the desert. And this morning, we're going to turn our attention to fire and what fire might have to teach us about who God is and what God is like. You know, fire is, I've been thinking about this week. There's something about fire that I think all of us would recognize just feels innately spiritual, right? There's something primal or deep or abiding about fire. It does something to us that lots of other things in the world don't. For instance, I could stare at this flame and get lost for minutes. There's very few things in my life that are so enchanting that they would hold my gaze for a minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10. But how many of us have sat around a campfire at some time and just stared off kind of into that flame with each other? And I don't even know, we couldn't even begin to describe why that might be or why that would happen to us. So we're on Christmas Eve as we sing Holy Night, Silent Night and we light our candles and we sit there and it seems every year that the song ends too quick, right? Like we're not done playing with the wax or whatever. There's something about fire that's just enchanting to us. It's beautiful. You know, the other thing about fire that I realized this week is I have no earthly idea what it is, right? I couldn't even begin to tell you what fire is. Now there's probably some scientists in here who could say, you know, wha, wha, wha, wha, wha, wha, wha, wha, wha. But they, I would argue, they too don't really, really know what fire is. They've learned a definition that they can sort of say out loud but it's this mystery. It's just this, it doesn't have mass but it is this thing of this great power and it's right in front of us and we don't really understand it. The other thing that I think is really beautiful about fire is that historians, sociologists and the rest tell us that civilization began around fire. Fire builds community. There's something about a fire that when you put it in the center of a group of people, it creates conversation. It elicits meaning. I can hang out with the same group of six or eight people and do all sorts of things and never really get to know them but you sit us all down around a campfire for an hour or two and all of a sudden we start to tell our stories. We start to see each other differently. We start to hear each other differently. It's got this powerful way of building community. And those are just three of the things that I've thought about when I've started to kind of consider what fire might have to teach us about God. And it's no surprise then when you think that fire is this beautiful enchanting thing that we could endlessly stare at and never get tired of, that the scriptures would often use fire to reference God. It's also no surprise that when I look at fire and I have no earthly idea what I'm actually looking at that the scriptures would also use fire to talk about the great mystery that is God. And last, I don't think it's a surprise that when we look at fire in the way that it builds community that it shouldn't surprise us that God would refer to himself as fire, the one who builds community. Over and over again in the scriptures we hear that God's presence among us is like a fire. And so in this passage that Cauley read just a few moments ago, John says that Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. That when Jesus comes he baptizes, he initiates people into his family, his tribe, his kingdom with fire. It's a powerful image. I'm not sure we know what it means, but we do have a tendency to say things like that person is on fire for God, right? And it's a compliment. It's a thing that says that divine presence, that holy fire that we recognize is God. I recognize it in that person. There's something that has caught their life on fire. It's something we would long for. We would desire for ourselves. And I think some of us on the opposite end, we question our relationship with God because we wonder where that fire is, right? Have you ever sort of looked a Christian in the eyes, right? And realize that they're just dead. There was no fire there. There was no life. And there's just this big looming question. If the creator of the universe were to invade my soul, you think it would change something. You think there'd be some fire there. Jesus says, this is what I've come to bring, a fire to baptize you with fire. In fact, as Methodists, we really trace our roots. Our story in many ways begins with John Wesley. And in his life, it begins with one specific moment where he says famously that his heart was strangely warmed. In fact, it was in 1738, on May 24th. He wrote this in his journal. He said, in the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society we call "emotional communities." I went very unwilling to a missional community on Aldersgate Street, where somebody was reading Luther's preface to the epistle to the Romans. Sounds like a real page-turner. Trust me, it is. In about a quarter before nine at night, and I read earlier in his journal, he says he woke up at five AM. So he's up at five, he's nine, it's late. He's hearing the preface to a commentary on the letter of the Romans. While he was describing the change Luther was, which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation. And an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and had saved me from the law of sin and death. What's fascinating about this to me is that this is halfway through his story. So he has already crossed the ocean to be a missionary for many years led this expansive revival. And days before, he's saying I feel so cold and so dead and so disconnected from God, I don't even know if I believe this stuff, and I'm gonna go to the Stink and Missional Community Group tonight, and I'm pretty sure nothing's gonna happen again. And as someone reads a boring paragraph to the beginning of a book on commentary out of the blue, he feels his heart strangely warmed. For years, he's been crying out begging, praying for God to give him this assurance that God was good and it worked in his own life and that he wasn't dead inside, but that the fire was there. This sort of reminds me about another aspect of fire. Is that for some of us, myself included, fires can be incredibly hard to start, embarrassingly so. So just real quick, I've only seen a fire built one way in my life. I lasted like a weekend scout, so it didn't happen there, but I had remembered seeing fires built in what I've learned is called the TP, right? It's sort of like a pile in a cone shape of wood and you put some dry stuff in the middle and you light it and it's supposed to take off. That's how I've always kind of lit a fire. And it was just about a year ago that my brother-in-law, 10 years my junior, right, came over to my house for my campfire and watched me struggle for like 10 minutes with my starter logs and my dry newspaper and my kindling and the rest and flame, you know. And he came up to the deal. He said, "Do you mind if I help?" I did, but he helped anyway and he tore down my TP and he built a log cabin. Apparently there's two ways to go about this. So, log cabin is sort of a square deal and he just rearranged some wood. He lights the lighter and it takes off, right? And everybody congratulates him and tells him thank you and what a wonderful job, incredible host he is. And so, I still have a little bit of a, this is still a sore spot I think you probably tell, but so I'm curious in the room, how many of you are TP builders? Raise your hand. And how many are log cabin people? Right, so it's about 50/50 and I will say this after looking into like outdoor life magazine and a bunch of other places who've covered this very controversial topic and done scientific studies, one is not necessarily better than the other, both work just fine, but for some reason on that night, my TP would not work for me and his log cabin did. And that's why I'm increasingly likely to go ahead with the third model which is the diesel version of starting fires and I recommend it to you as well. But I don't know if you've ever been in that moment where there's a gathering, the fires to begin and you're in charge of starting the fire and no matter what you do, it seems like everything should work. You've done all the things the diagram showed, you put the trees and the logs in the right place and the kindling and you bought the sappy fire starter deals and you're blowing air through and there's just no fire coming. I think in the same way we can recognize both in our sort of founders spiritual journey as well as our own that there's a mystery to the ways in which God works in our lives. The scripture say that you can't sort of tell where the wind blows from or where it's going to. That God just sort of moves when God decides to move and sometimes we'll find ourselves waking up early, reading the scriptures, going to community groups, showing up in worship and all we feel is cold and dead inside. And then you'll find yourself in some less than holy place and God will grab your attention and you'll feel this warmth that you've never experienced before. You'll be reading the preface to a boring book at nine o'clock with a group of people and you'll say, I know that God is real and it work in my life. This is sort of the great mystery of faith. That God moves and woos whenever God chooses to. And God too, like fire, is unpredictable. We want to control God. We want to say you do X, Y, and Z and fire will happen. But more often than not, we're surprised by it. We're surprised by it. And so I think we're right to pray for God's fire to come, to pray for God's spirit to move among us. So I was a teenager, I think probably the most popular song we ever sang at camp and man, we sang it every year and it felt predictable. When you sang this song, the fire always came, right? But was light a fire in my soul, right? I don't know if you grew up in youth group or went to these camps or these retreats, but this was sort of like the closer, right? This was when things had been going good and we're ready and you bring out light the fire and then it's just the spirit comes. And this week is I've read Luke three over and over again. I've been thinking, what the heck were we singing, right? I don't know if you saw this, but at the very beginning of this passage starts with people have come to John to be baptized and he goes, listen, you brood of vipers, right? Imagine if that was my invitation to parents when they bring their child. Listen, you snakes in the grass. You've brought your children for baptism or you yourself and you should flee the wrath of God, right? This is kind of the language of fire that it opens up with. Jesus says, listen to me or John says this about Jesus. Does the ax is at the root of the tree and every tree that doesn't produce good fruit, it's about to be cut down and thrown into the fire. I mean, what in the world were we asking for? This is sort of the fire too that God brings. I think maybe most jarring is that and we may have this passage here at the very end. This is how he ends. He says, listen, his winnowing fork, which this is a greater end deal, I think I have to understand this, but there's like a fork with all the wheat and chaff, chaff's like the stuff that you don't eat or need and when they would lift it up with the pitch fork or whatever they had, winnowing fork, the heavier wheat would fall through but the chaff would stay on and they'd throw the chaff out into the field and then they would burn that, right? And so he says, Jesus, he's coming, he's about to be here and when he brings his winnowing fork in his hand it cleared the threshing floor to gather the wheat and to the greenery but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. And this is the part I just like laughed out loud when I read it. And so with many other exhortations he proclaimed the good news. You're like, you wanna run that by me again, right? Was a good news, like where's the good news, right? The whole passage about fire is about this holy wrath and judgment and justice that God is gonna burn up all that is not worthy. And I'll tell you, that's where I've sat since about Tuesday trying to figure out where in the world the good news is in that fire. I get the sort of warm fuzzies, my heart was strangely warm but it seems that in some way that same fire is the one that's gonna burn up all of the chaff. This God brings fire and that fire is a reminder of his presence but his presence is so holy that in the scriptures in the Old Testament says even to look on him you would die, right? This is sort of the holiness of God. And I read this article about forest fires. Now right now this is just a horrible season. We've got 50 wildfires over 50 on the west coast just burning from Washington down to California out of control in ways that many of the firefighters would say they've never seen before. And so there's something incredibly we can recognize destructive about fire. And there are people who've used fire in our lives in very destructive ways. Think about arsonists, think about horrific images, people burning crosses, things like this, right? There's ways in which fire can be destructive and evil and broken and yet even a forest fire, some forest fires and the right condition is actually a really healthy thing. It's part of the problem that we've prevented some of these from happening in our history. And the way that a forest fire is supposed to work, how the way that God designed creation is that when a forest fire would come through the weaker trees, they would be burnt up and the stronger ones would survive. And as the weaker trees were burnt, they would re-enrich and fertilize the soil so that new life, stronger life, more verdant life, could come of it. Another way to think about how it might be that fire could possibly, this kind of burned up fire be good. I started thinking about my own sort of childhood curse that continues to stick with me and will arrive in about a week, which is I have hay fever. It's my only allergy I have. It shows up about last two weeks of August in the month of September and with it, for whatever reason, I get nosebleeds for like a month. And so you'll regularly find me coming out of a bathroom like, oh man, and I think half of the city thinks I have, you know, like a drug problem or something. And I just, it's brutal. Now, there's been a solution for this for 15 years, right? Ever since I was a kid and I would get these nosebleeds, it will last for 15, 20 minutes, whatever. My doctor always said, it's not anything crazy just. And all we have to do is cauterize that blood vessel that keeps bleeding. And I would say, what's cauterize, right? And they go, well, basically, we will burn it off. And we can do that with chemicals or acid or fire, right? Or hot metal. We can sort of brand the inside of your nose. And that's-- I've just always been willing to go for another nosebleed, right? [LAUGHTER] And so I continue to have a struggle. And now my poor son, just this week, he, at five years old, he's had two nosebleeds this week, right? And so the legacy continues. And he'll be faced with the same difficult decision to be burned or not to. And I think there's this deep relationship between the fire that God brings in our life and the burn and the pain that it entails is related to the healing we long for. This idea of cauterizing, of burning a wound, has been in practice since the 14th century. They would use it when folks had an amputation needed, but to stop the bleeding. They would burn sort of the ed where they had to amputate an appendage. This is how they often in days past would treat a growth or a tumor. They would burn it off. Even how they close wounds now inside your body during surgery, they'll often use fire to do it. There's this sense in which as painful as the burn might be that it can bring about healing. So when I think about this reality that God says, God's presence is like a fire and that this fire, it does burn. But it burns to heal. It burns to heal. It's the kind of fire that John tells those gathered when the crowd asks, what will this fire do to my life? He says to the crowds, well, if you have two coats right now and you let this fire in, it will lead you to get rid of one. And if you have extra food, this fire will so move and work and burn and heal in your life that you'll give the extra food away. And the tax collectors, they raised their hand and said, well, what would the fire do to us? And John tells them, well, that fire in your life, it will make you honest tax collectors. You'll quit taking extra from the people you're called to tax. You'll become fair. And the soldiers standing by, so what will it do for us? What would the fire do in our lives? Well, it would lead you to be people who no longer blackmail others because of your power and your insight. The flames of God in our lives are the flames of love. It burns. It burns away our greed. It burns away our self-centeredness. And it definitely hurts, but it leads to healing and love. And so as I've been thinking about our community this week, I know there's some of us in the room that you're in that place where, like John Wesley, you've been going through all the motions, you've been stacking the wood just right, and yet it feels so cold. And so I pray with you, spirit, come. Would you light fire in us again? Would you baptize us with that? Would you make us people that, when others look in our eyes, don't see cold, dead corpses talking about the Creator who inhabits them, but are full of passion? And then there's others of us who so flippantly sing about fire and call for fire and talk about God's fire, but our lives, if we're on, they haven't been touched by this kind of fire. The kind that would stay and burn the self-centeredness out of our lives, but would do so in such a beautiful way that it would bring good news to our neighbors. That people who lack would have an abundance. That those we've cheated would be restored. Those we've lied to would be told the truth. This is the fire that we pray for. And in Luke 12, Jesus said that this is why he came. He came to the earth to set fire to it, not to destroy it. God's fire doesn't destroy us, it destroys our sin. And it makes us more and more to his image. So may God do that for you this week as you take time to be still and to quiet and to ask for him to come. Let me pray for us. God, thank you that you've given us beautiful things to be surrounded by great reminders of you. We thank you for fire. We were a member in the scriptures, God, that you first showed up to Abram in fire. That Moses was first called when he turned and looked at a bush and saw that it had caught fire. That you led your people, the Israelites, out of captivity by a pillar of fire at night. God, we remember that you had put this as a symbol in front of your people in the temple, this eternal flame that would never go out in the space where they worship, that they might remember that you are fire, that you came and told us you'd come to bring a fire, that on Pentecost, the Spirit so fills your people, that they said they could see fire over each other's heads. Then we remember that in the end of our story, it says you'll come and when we look in your eyes, we'll see fire. And that fire is love and that it's good for us and though it may burn for a season, it will ultimately heal. And so we pray, we ask that you would because we can't control it, because your love is unpredictable, because like the wind, it comes and it goes, but we pray that you would blow in our direction, not only for our own healing, but for the healing of the world. It's in your name we pray this day, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]