“Out of the Frying Pan – Into the Fire”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
December 17, 2006

Luke 3:7-17

            To hear John the Baptist’s message is to have your feet held to the fire.  He was no slick televangelist concerned with ratings or his own popularity. And he wouldn’t have made it on the cover of any GQ magazine – hair shirts haven’t been in fashion for a couple thousand years. He chose the Jordan River to baptize intentionally.  Revolutionary movements in first century Judaism often started out at the Jordan, where Joshua and the first band of Hebrews crossed to take possession of the Promised Land. The Roman secret police watched these gatherings very closely – it’s why soldiers were in the crowd that day.  Would this be another populist movement with the goal of overthrowing the Romans?

            Not quite. John wasn’t organizing a political revolution. He was initiating an ethical revolution in preparation for God’s arrival. John believed that God would take care of the Romans. What mattered was keeping one’s own nose clean in preparation for the occasion. His message to the Jews? You can’t hide behind ethnicity or bloodlines. God’s children are those who act like God’s children – so if you have extra food or extra clothing share with those who don’t. His message to the Roman soldiers? Quit moonlighting by requiring the people to pay protection money – or else! His message to the tax-collectors? Quit gouging the people. Clean up you act – now – because God was coming to set things straight.

            John was powerful. The people thought he might be the Messiah. But John is clear on this point – he is not the anointed one. He’s not even worthy to tie the sandals of the one who is to come.  You think you feel the heat now?, he asked them. “I baptize with water. He will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire!” (Luke 3:16).  Basically John is saying that if they felt the heat in his presence, wait until they met the Christ. It would be like going from the frying pan into the fire.

            There are at least a couple of different modes of Christian discipleship, you see. At one level, it’s about trying as best as we can to be good people. Being a good disciple at this stage is about exerting as much will power as we can muster to do the right thing. Share what you have, don’t use or threaten with violence, and don’t let money become your god.  In this mode the reason we come to church is because we’ve spent enough time in the world out there to realize that not all people are good. Not all that many, in fact, are losing sleep over the fact, either. So, we show up at church hoping  to add a little moral fiber to our spiritual diet. We bring our children because we need all the support we can find in raising our children to think about the well-being of others. This is an important dimension of Christian discipleship and the church needs to continue providing strong leadership to help people lead a good and moral life. 

But this is not all the church is about and it doesn’t exhaust what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Morality and ethics are the fruits of life in Christ. But there is another mode, and it’s about what John calls a baptism by the Holy Spirit and fire. This is transformational discipleship and it’s less about exerting will-power in order to be good than it is about willingness to enter into the spiritual fire of transformation.

Barbara Brown-Taylor, an Episcopalian priest, tells the story about her husband becoming involved with a local First Nations band near where they lived. One year he decided to get involved in a sun dance ritual. This is a weeklong ritual involving sweat lodges, vision quests, ecstatic dance, and fasting. At the end of the ritual, they gather together for a meal. Rev. Taylor came to the dinner and looked around for her husband. She barely recognized him. He looked haggard, as though he had aged, but his eyes were on fire. His first words to her were, “your church is too easy”.

He had experienced a native version of a baptism by fire. This wasn’t about trying to be a better person; it was about burning everything away that got in the way of him being an authentically spiritual person. Fire is a transformational element. Speaking cosmologically there were three great transformational moments in the history of the universe involving fire.

The first was the Great Flaring Forth, when out of nothing there was a magnificent explosion of fire and light. In the furnace of that explosion everything required for the evolution of life was forged. At a certain point when the universe had cooled sufficiently, the galaxies formed out of the bonded communion of hydrogen and helium. The second great fire involved supernovas, stars which imploded creating a nuclear furnace hot enough to synthesize the heavy elements necessary for the next stage of the evolutionary journey. These elements found their way to our solar system and folded themselves into the planet earth. Earth entered into a relationship with a  ball of fire one million times her size – our sun – which burns four billion tons of hydrogen every second. We’re sitting here this morning because of that fire. 

The point is that the evolutionary journey on a physical level requires the transformative energy of fire. Each of these great fire events enabled the march of the evolutionary journey of the cosmos to continue. It’s no different on the spiritual level. Except that spiritually, the fire is called love. Cockburn has a line in one of his songs Lord of the Starfields, “Love which fires the sun keep us burning.”  There’s a power more potent than fire. It is the Fire, which gives birth to all fire – love.

Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote the following words:

“The day will come when, after harnessing the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of Love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

When John says that Jesus baptizes with fire he means that he is the embodiment of a transformative love, from which all creation emerged and toward which all creation is headed. To genuinely open ourselves to Christ is to risk entering the fire, which forged the spiritual elements necessary for the next stage of evolution, on a personal and collective level. Just as on the physical level, the heavy elements were forged in supernovas, so to undergo the love of Christ is to be re-formed. Into this fire we plunge ourselves; the best of us and the worst of us, our nit-wit self and our noble self, the shadow within and the saint, all undergo a baptism of fire, and what emerges out of the fire is a heart which is prepared for the next evolutionary stage of the journey – the heart of the Christ. 

            Church is not too easy, in fact – not for those who risk encountering the Christ. The love of Christ burns like a nuclear furnace. It burns away pretense. All that’s left when we come through it is our vulnerable naked self, heart wide-open to the beauty and the suffering of it all. It burns away illusions – of who we thought we were supposed to be and all we were told about what life was about. All that’s left when we come out of the fire is the radiant miracle of a living planet and immense gratitude for the free ride on it. It burns away selfishness. All that’s left after the baptism by fire is a yearning to give ourselves over to lightening the load for others just a bit, and to add whatever borrowed energy we have to the great evolutionary journey.

            All that’s left is love. This is why we gather Sunday after Sunday. It’s why we sing our hymns and prayer our prayers. It’s why we read the Scripture and it’s why we come to Christ’s table. We want this baptism of fire – we want to encounter Christ in our very depths so that we might know and manifest the heart of God. Then, my friends, we shall bear fruit fit for God’s children. Then we shall know what it means to be good – not by an exertion of our will, but through the natural expression of a heart forged in the fire of the love of the Christ.