Fire to the earth
15 August 2016 | XIII Pentecost | Luke 12:49-56
The Rev. B. P. Campbell
On the evening of October 7, 1983, I stood on the corner of Main and 17th Streets, on the South side of the street, beside an architect and developer named Larry Shiflett. The sky was a deep black, with bright stars. We were looking across the street at Main Street Station, the majestic brick railroad station in Shockoe Bottom. Smoke was coming out of the windows – the station was on fire.
Larry and his partner, David White, had purchased the train station and were renovating it into a shopping center. They were nearly finished. Now, it seemed, their entire investment was about to go up in smoke.
Main Street Station is a five story building with a beautiful clock tower on its side and a large train shed extending to the north. The brick complex of waiting rooms and offices at one end is called the Head House. The tile roof of the head house is steeply pitched, and goes up nearly three stories with dormer windows protruding from its sides. It was at that head house that we were looking as the smoke poured out of the windows. We wondered if the fire could be extinguished.
Suddenly, as we stood there, the entire roof exploded in flame. The fire that had been gathering and smoking inside the building erupted hundreds of feet into the sky. Burning, melting shards of the roof tiles sprayed upward, and the station was a giant roman candle illuminating the sky of downtown Richmond.
The fire had been smoldering, smoking, hidden, gathering strength. And suddenly it exploded. Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:49-50)
In his little book The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton reproduces this story from the Fourth Century:
Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation, and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire? [LXXII:50]
Reflecting on the work of these same desert fathers, the great 20th century spiritual writer Henry Nouwen talks about silence and solitude. Solitude, Nouwen says, is “the furnace of transformation. …(It) is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter – the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self. … Jesus himself entered into this furnace.” [Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, pp. 25-26.]
Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:49-50)
How can we understand this except to say that Jesus saw the coming confrontation with the Jerusalem authorities and the Roman Empire – his own impending murder – and the impending resurrection appearances – as the explosive eruption of the fire of God’s Holy Spirit.
John the Baptist had used this language of prediction in his preaching: “I baptize you with water; but he who is mightier than I is coming, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” [Luke 3:16]
We fail to understand the true power of silence and solitude, even while we properly exult in the calming and peace-bringing power of God’s Holy Spirit. There is a deep peace, the peace of God which passes all understanding. It grows and is fed by the Holy Spirit and its redemptive, transforming power. It is made present in the peace of silence. But that peace is not passivity. It is the inner assurance of a stability which permits the transformation of the world to break out in what looks like instability. It explodes in the Holy Spirit and in fire!
There are three things about the fire of the Spirit in tonight’s Gospel.
- The fire of the Spirit causes instability in relationships.
- The fire of the Spirit provokes instability in societies.
- The fire of the spirit defeats the passivity of virtuous people.
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The fire of the Spirit causes instability in relationships.
I was looking at this list of relationships that Jesus says will be made unstable through the fire of the Holy Spirit: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws.
We know only too well the instability that can occur in all of these relationships. What is significant in Jesus’ statement is that the distress in faily relationships it can be the work of the Holy Spirit’s explosive power.
Probably the impact of this is least visible in a society like our own, where familial relationships have shrunk to single family households, at best. But in much of the Middle East, still today, extended families and clans are the dominant form of social relationship. In that context, the individual self-discovery invited by the Holy Spirit can be obvious and dramatic.
A healthy relationship changes all the time. The Holy Spirit and spirit of love hold it together. On the surface, it may appear unstable – but the healthiest relationships are able to last through constant dynamic change through the power of the Spirit. Of course, not all instability is the work of the Holy Spirit. That is why Jesus’ statement is so shocking. Destruction of relationship is sometimes just that – destruction, meanness, misguided opposition, control. In personal relationships that we see most clearly that the peace of God is a dynamic peace, one that demands relationship rather than static arrangement.
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The fire of the Spirit provokes instability in societies.
Wars and rumors of wars. Great instability in societies. Can’t you see? Every social change speaks to some reality, even if it speaks wrongly to it. Don’t you think that Donald Trump is trading on the work of the Spirit, even if he is blaspheming it? The society has been out of control, in the hands of manipulative, destructive wealth, destroying employment, taking away pensions, ripping apart communities. Injustice is inherently unstable. Demagogues use the instability of injustice for their own purposes. What horrible instability is involved in today’s Middle East and Europe? How are the great divisions of ethnicity and religion involved in the destabilization of stable societies?
You know how to predict the weather? Why can’t you see the signs of the times? We mistake stability for peace. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was more stable than that nation has been in the last 20 years. Was that peace? Virginia maintained enslavement of the population and racial segregation as official state policy for 363 years, until 1970. That was stability of a sort. Was it peace?
Today, metropolitan Richmond is stably based on segregating low income black people and some Latinos into underfunded, high poverty schools, and keeping them in their place by refusing to allow public transportation in 90% of the metro city? Where did that idea of stability come from? Will the spirit explode against it?
“If you want peace,” the Catholics say, “work for justice.” Nothing else than the dynamic quest for justice is ever truly stable. Its stability is a living stability.
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The fire of the spirit will undermine the passivity of virtuous people.
The fire of the spirit is the resurrection power of Jesus. Defeating passivity. Bringing love, justice, truth, cleansing power, transformation.
Jesus’ words strike a paradoxical chord in contemporary metropolitan Richmond, and probably in America as a whole. Here in this metropolitan city we have established a stable economic law of disintegration and fragmentation. We attempt to maintain peace by not being in relationship. We are separated into single-family households and travel in individual automobiles. We divide our communities by income, and race. We tax the upper income people less than lower income. We reserve access to employment to those who can afford to live near it. We give the least support for education to those who need it the most. We do not even have the most rudimentary form of contact with one another through public transportation. That’s our present so-called stability.
Passive acceptance of the structures of disintegration is our current status. The result of the structured disintegration is increasing injustice and violence throughout the nation. Is it not clear? The peace of God demands that we break through the barriers that separate us and deliberately send out ambassadors of communication. This means breaking social patterns and deliberately establishing relationships across geographic lines. Religion does a good job of sanctifying the present. It talks about the Holy Spirit. But if the Holy Spirit comes, it can undermine the passivity of virtuous people.
Jesus said,“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? [Luke 12:49-56]
The Rev. B. P. Campbell
Richmond Hill
