Holy Fire (5.31.20)

Holy Fire
Pentecost Sunday
May 31, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

This isn’t the one where I pretend I have the answers to the questions; especially the questions that aren’t yet fully formed.

This isn’t the one where I suppose myself to be an expert on much of anything because I know I’m barely an expert even of myself.

This isn’t the one where I pound my fists and make my case and see the straight line before us to march together into the streets.

This is the one in which I acknowledge my complicity in systems and structures that benefit me, my family, and the congregation I pastor because most of us were born with white skin.

This is the one where, imperfectly, I tell some truth about my life and pray to God you hear the invitation to do the same about your own; stumbling as we go.

This is the one where I reach way back into the words of the ancients, the ones who told sacred stories to their children and their children’s children and miraculously wrote them down for us to do the same.

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The story begins, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God[b] swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

It’s fire only in that it’s a fiery ball of gases far from the earth. But these very first words of Genesis matter because when held up against the origin stories of other ancient near eastern religions. In some traditions, a god possessed the power of fire and embodied it. For Israel, the light-giving fire in sky was a gift of creation alongside the waters and trees and plants and animals. Grace. Pure, unearned gift.

In Daniel 3, we read a story of fire as a form of torture and death used by the state against its enemies…or by the king and his empire against threats to his power.

Nebuchadnezzar was so filled with rage against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that his face was distorted. He ordered the furnace heated up seven times more than was customary, 20 and ordered some of the strongest guards in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and to throw them into the furnace of blazing fire…the three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down, bound, into the furnace of blazing fire.

24 Then King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished and rose up quickly. He said to his counselors, “Was it not three men that we threw bound into the fire?” They answered the king, “True, O king.” 25 He replied, “But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the fourth has the appearance of a god.” 26 Nebuchadnezzar then approached the door of the furnace of blazing fire and said, “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out! Come here!” So Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out from the fire…the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men; the hair of their heads was not singed, their tunics were not harmed, and not even the smell of fire came from them.

Leviticus is a book we often overlook in our Christian tradition and dismiss as too ancient, even too tedious, to be essential. But in the midst of all of the rules and guidelines, we are reading ancient ways of connecting to, protecting, and preserving God’s presence in the midst of God’s people. Leviticus 6 guides the priest through the sacred steps of burnt offerings and reminds the people, “The fire on the altar shall be kept burning; it shall not go out. Every morning the priest shall add wood to it, lay out the burnt offering on it, and turn into smoke the fat pieces of the offerings of well-being. 13 A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar; it shall not go out.”

The perpetual fire is a symbol of God’s continual presence among God’s people. It is to be tended, nurtured, guarded, and maintained. The holy fire is promise, sign, tool, and portal all at once.

“Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’ 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ 5 Then he said, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’”

Exodus 3 takes us to a holy fire from which God speaks. A fire with heat and power that does not burn the bush that contains it. A fire that calls to Moses and makes the ground holy. A fire that connects mortal, earthly Moses to eternal, mystery God and changes the history of the world with the sacred exchanges of “I am.”

Burnt offerings send the smoke of the fire to the presence of God. God leads the children of Israel with flaming torch, smoking fire pot, pillar of fire. 

When “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. They took their stand at the foot of the mountain. 18 Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended upon it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently.” (Exodus 19:17-18)

The Lord your god is a consuming fire. (Deut. 4:24) The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. (Ps. 29:7) Ezekiel’s holy vision includes “a stormy wind…out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber…I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all around; and downward from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all around. 28 Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of someone speaking.” (Ezek. 1:4, 27) 

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Fire is intimate, terrifying, exhilarating, powerful, essential, threatening, warming, life-giving, life-destroying. No wonder ancient people understood it to be something both deeply, personally connected to survival on earth and mysteriously, cosmically rooted to a God who cannot be seem but goes by the name “I am.”

On this Pentecost Sunday, we retell the story of holy fire rushing through a gathering of folks from all different parts of the world, as they knew it, and somehow hearing each other in their own languages. Not just hearing but understanding, listening, communicating. Fire that burned down the divisions between them and enabled them to truly know one another and to connect in the truest ways of mother tongue.

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” (Acts 2:2-3)

Holy fire destroys the barriers between sacred and secular, between heaven and earth, between stranger and foreigner. Holy fire leads and guides, protecting and sustaining, through wilderness to promised land. Consuming fire purifies what is destructive and toxic, leaving what is essential and vital. No wonder the eternal mystery, the creator of the universe, is wrapped in fire, appears through fire, is symbolized by fire, embodies the metaphor of fire.

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In a week of fires raging alongside protests across the country, preachers like me on this Pentecost Sunday are wondering how we hold this ancient tradition of God as fire and in the fire and using fire as a tool alongside the demonstrations of rage and exhaustion and righteous anger around our nation.

News is coming out today that some of the fires in Minneapolis may actually have been sparked by white supremacist agitators wanting to incite more violence and lay the blame at the feet of black protestors. So clearly, the lines I’m drawing between ancient tradition and modern-day flames are not necessarily clean and neat. But they’re not nothing. 

Our home-for-a-decade, Richmond, VA, has seen flames and spray paint and protest the past two nights around giant monuments and edifices to the civil war. It is not lost on me the symbolism of 21st century protestors making a statement today about the violence and injustice against black and brown bodies in the shadow of monuments to a war waged over keeping those same bodies enslaved and in service to the powerful white men who owned them.

Holy fires are raging. People are exhausted and angry and not willing to live within the status quo anymore. Something absolutely, decidedly needs to be burned to the ground.

We need holy fire to purify what is tainted and sinful in our systems and structures. The very systems and structures that benefit me and make my life just *that* much easier.

We need holy fire to destroy the dividing lines between our ears that we might really, truly hear one another and speak the same language. My white, Southern, country club upbringing may as well be from another nation with another tongue when compared to the life and world of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery. White folks like me need a holy fire to hover over us and spark a new movement that is rooted in our listening and in our hearing.

And the holy fires won’t be most effective on confederate monuments and cars and police precincts. The holy fires need to burn our systems of mass incarceration, our policing policies that stop and frisk bodies based on skin color, our laws and fines and fees that masquerade as public safety but really just extend the mentality of the plantation by keeping people of color stuck, broke, locked up, indebted, and “in their place” however the structures and systems define it.

The holy fires need to burn through gerrymandering and into state houses and congress, purifying representation like the flames of Pentecost until all voices are heard and valued and understood.

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I don’t know where my place is in all of this. I don’t know what my role is our how my voice and calling are part of the work that is to be done.

My work continues. My learning continues. My listening continues.

I pray the fires that are burning in protest will burn down our assumptions, our biases, our prejudice, our racism, our complicity in sustaining the systems and structures that benefit nice, smart, good white folks like us…

May God guide us with a cloud by day and then in the night the glow of a burning flame.

May we see what is holy and who is holy in our midst.

May we not fear what is burning but look instead for the presence of God within the flame.

Amen.