Playin’ with Fire
Whatever your reason for coming to church on a Sunday, I’m willing to bet that it is not to hear the kind of words Jesus spoke in today’s Gospel. The words are puzzling, disturbing, even frightening. They seem so inconsistent with the rest of Jesus’ministry, we’re almost embarrassed to have to quote them:
“I come to bring fire to the earth. Do you think that I have come to bring peace to earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From households will be divided, father against son, mother against daughter.”
Makes you wonder if Jesus was having a bad day or was totally stressed out, or maybe just bone-tired and out of patience. Do we think that Jesus came to bring peace on earth—of course we do! And we have good reason to think that. The Bible tells us so.
What were the angels singing in the story of Jesus’ arrival on earth? Peace on earth, good will to all.
What did Jesus say on the Sermon on the Mount? Blessed are the peacemakers.
What did Jesus say to his disciples on the eve of his death? My peace I leave with you.
How do many of the epistles in the New Testament begin? Grace and peace to you from God our father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
I could go on and on with this. So, excuse me, Jesus, but yes, I do think you came to bring peace on earth. Why does it seem like you are denying it here?
I admit this is a baffling piece of scripture and one that many preachers would just as soon avoid. That is ironic, because it seems that the message of the reading is that conflict is not something to be avoided at all costs.
With that in mind, I feel we have no choice but to plunge straight into the rapids of controversy this week to see if we can find what’s going on here. Tackling this has been kind of a wild ride this week; I have tried to let Scripture be my guide to get me through this. Let me tell you where this ride has taken me.
First, it has taken me back into the ancient book of Jeremiah, our Old Testament reading for today, where we read, “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, “and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?”
God’s word is like fire. Now that’s an interesting clue to what Jesus is saying. There was a time in our marriage when Linda was appalled at my memories of the creative things that my brother and I used to do with fire. I don’t know that I should repeat these stories here in front of possibly impressionable young people. Suffice it to say that Linda generally had 3 questions about these stories:
1. What on earth were you thinking?
2. Where were your parents?
3. How did you manage to survive to adulthood?
For awhile Linda thought there was something uniquely warped about my early fascination with fire. But as she began to make inquiries, she discovered that it wasn’t unique to me. Any time she asked a guy about his experience with fire as a kid, out would come stories similar to my own. She found that he surest conversation starter in the world with any man my age was, did you play with fire as a kid? We all did. From the stories I’ve heard about Daniel Riley, it seems the tradition lives on.
Fire is fascinating. It is other-worldly. It is powerful. It is dangerous. It is comforting. It is useful. It is miraculous.
This past week, I was led to contemplate the extremes of what fire
can do. We were camping in
As I looked into that peaceful fire, I recalled that we were at that
moment right across the bay from the place where fire was the agent of
unspeakable evil. Across
But on October 8, 1871, high winds combined with dry brush, hot temperatures, and logging sawdust to blow up a small prairie fire into a raging inferno. The devastation was so great that no one knows how many people lost their lives, but the estimate is somewhere over 2,000. Fire burns and destroys. It is a terrifying thing.
Jeremiah says the word of God is like fire. It is wonderful, it is terrifying. It gives life, it can bring death. It can bring peace, it can bring ruin. But does that really describe the word of God?
I couldn’t see it, until another piece of the puzzle as to what Jesus was saying emerged as I read the other two Bible passages for today. Hebrews is all about conflict, about conquering kingdoms, and fighting lions, about fires and war and floggings and imprisonment and persecution and stonings and worse. Psalm 82 is a psalm of justice. In it, God demands of the world, How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? God demands: Give justice to the weak and the orphan, maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
And this Luke passage started to fall into place for me as I read
those words and recalled our visit to
As you read about these people, you realize that many of them echoed the paradox of Jesus. Many of those people most honored for bringing peace to our world were people who created conflict, who sowed division. They did so in the name of Psalm 82, in the name of justice.
People such as Jane Addams, reviled as a traitor in her own land for
her efforts at aiding humanity. Carl von Ossietsky, a German journalist who
dared stand up against the rise of the Nazis in the 1930, and was executed
for it. Martin Luther King, who forced
Some of the greatest peacemakers of our time and yet each of them could have echoed Jesus words, “I came not to bring peace but division.” They brought the reign of God by creating division against injustice. They stood up to the powers of the wealth and privilege and ambition and greed. They brought peace by wielding the fire and the hammer of the word spoken of in Jeremiah, for the cause championed in Psalms.
Conflict is a dirty word in most church circles, and for good reason. I’m well acquainted with how conflict can destroy a church. For many years, we were members of a congregation that could have been the poster child for dysfunctional churches. I’ve seen people spew venom at annual meetings and others storm out of the church in disgust, never to return. As president of a congregation, I’ve had to ask a pastor to resign. I interned at a church where after one meeting, a member stood in the parking lot making obscene gestures at fellow members as they emerged from the church.
We fear conflict because we understand the harmful effects if is not controlled. And so we gloss over Jesus’ disturbing message that he came to bring conflict.
But just because fire can cause the type of destruction that devastated Peshtigo, is it something to be avoided at all costs? Fire is a wonderful thing. Fire is what keeps people alive in cold weather. It heats water, it cooks food, it powers transportation, it smelts steel. It provides the light and energy of the sun, without which life would not be possible. We really cannot live without it.
Yes, the fire of conflict can be dangerous, even deadly. The world is filled with the charred earth and shattered lives of people caught in the inferno of uncontrolled fire. But the fire of conflict is something we cannot live without. Fiery passion is what moves people to action, to see through difficult times, to change their lives. Conflict is what hones and crystallizes are thoughts and convictions.
My second year of seminary I happened to have classes with a couple of professors who made me question my career change. It became clear to me that if I had to believe what they taught, and what they said I had to believe in order to be a Lutheran, then I was not going to stay Lutheran, much less try to be a pastor in the ELCA. I seriously pondered changing seminaries or just going back to writing. But I received some encouragement from other members of the faculty, and it turned out that taking classes from those two was a good thing. It forced me to formulate exactly what I did believe. It forced me to dissect what was wrong with what they were teaching, and filled me with such a passion to articulate the Gospel as I understood it that I often got very little sleep at night trying to figure this thing out.
The seminary conflict turned out to be a good thing because I emerged from the fire with a much clearer and confident understanding of the message that God called me to deliver.
A similar thing happened to our daughter in high school. There was
one church in town that reached the critical mass required to attract youth
to their programs, and it wasn’t our congregation. This place became THE
place for teens to gather in
It turned out to be a wonderful. While she had a good time, she would sometimes get so mad at some of the doctrine that was being pushed on her that she would come home steaming. She wanted to talk about it. A teen wanted to talk religion with her parents. The best conversations we ever had about faith and religion came from her wanting to discuss what she was hearing. They arose out of the fire of conflict.
Without the fire of passion in the word of god, the church shrivels into a lifeless, flabby, tasteless pile of goo that stands for nothing and accomplishes nothing. As hard as it is for a conflict avoidance personality like mine to admit it, conflict is a good thing and Jesus came to bring it. Jesus brought fire and fire is a wonderful thing. It brings life and warmth; it brings change when needed, it tempers steel, it provides power.
Yet fire, if not controlled, burns and destroys and kills. That is the experience that too many churches have with conflict. The fire quickly gets out of control. Things are said that should not be said. Actions are taken that should not be taken. People get angry, people get hurt, people get disillusioned with the whole thing. The church’s mission is replaced by the need to win, and when winning is the goal, we bring in the heaviest artillery we have to bombard our foes. We bring in howitzers to knock down spider webs. We will destroy the earth in order to achieve victory. And the peace that Christ puts into our hearts is incinerated.
There was an annual meeting in particular when I was a congregational president that involved a rather heated conflict. When I returned home from that meeting, I was so upset over what had happened that I had to go out on a 10-mile run to blow off some steam and settle down.
When I returned I received a call from the man who had been my main adversary in this battle. He said that he had been thinking about the meeting and what had happened. He did not want the conflict to ruin our friendship. He said that he respected my position and was sorry for some of the things that he had said, and offered to work out a solution with me. It was a crossroads moment in our relationship, and he was the one who stepped up to the plate. He was the one who reached across the battle line.
I think the conflict needed to happen and I’m not sorry that I fought the fight that I did. But he was the one who controlled the fire, who cut off the fuel of passion before it got dangerous. I will always respect him for that and I hope I have learned from him how to manage conflict.
I am aware this church has experienced conflict. Most congregations do, if there’s any fire in them at all. I’m a little concerned with how reluctant people are to talk about past conflict. Sure, no one wants to rekindle past fires, especially if they have proven hurtful and destructive. But neither is it a good situation to let them smolder underground like a peat fire that is never extinguished because no one can find where the fire is. If that is the case, whether it is in this congregation, or in any of your other relationships, don’t wait any longer. If there are any smoldering fires around, even if it’s been 10, 20, 30 years, be proactive. Don’t wait for time to put them out. Time isn’t fireproof. Step forward and put them out, now.
Jeremiah tells us that the word of God is a targeted burn. The fire of conflict has to happen from time to time, like a prairie fire that rejuvenates and brings new life to the entire biome. We need passion; we need to stand for something. We need to stand for what Psalm 82 tells us to stand for: justice, and any fire that moves us in that direction is a life-giving fire—in our church, in our society, in our family, in our marriage.
In any future conflict that arises, make sure the fire is from God,
from Psalm 82. Then take away the fuel of self-interest that enflames that
fire. Keep the peace of Christ in your heart and the fire will do only what
it is supposed to do—bring forth the