God’s Fire and Hammer

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Fire and Brimstone Preaching!

Does It Lead to This?

Isaiah 43:2

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

Matthew 8:26

And he said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, you of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm.

Words of Grace For Today

The verse for today from Matthew may have Jesus calming the storm, but in the first verse of this upcoming Sunday’s Gospel lesson from Luke 12:49ff Jesus says, I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

In the Old Testament Lesson for this coming Sunday from Jeremiah 23:29, Jeremiah speaks God’s Word: Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?

God’s hammer and Jesus’ fire. These are not the usually expected comforting, inspiring, prodding, and demanding Words that speak of our God’s relationship to us. Often we ignore the Fire and Hammer of God’s Word, well, unless we are firebrand preachers that rain down ‘fire and brimestone’ on our people. But that’s not us. That’s not our faith. That’s a faith of long ago and of backwards people and of mad preachers, right? Yet the Word rises up again and again, as Fire and Hammer.

There are many ways to dismiss them or ignore them outright. But they do say something important. These aspects of God’s Word remind us that we always remain sinners, and God’s response to Evil applies to our sins and to us as well. God burns down Sodom and Gomorrah. God judges each person, dividing the kernels from the chaff and burns up the chaff. God smashes our efforts to be gods. God smashes our hard hearts. God smashes our altars to other gods, especially our gods of money and power. God purifies creation with these (and other) destructive forces.

If we resist and manage to avoid the Fire and the Hammer, they will eventually catch up with us and then their destructiveness is even greater. Fire in forests is a great example. We’ve suppressed them for nearly a century now, and the fuel for wildfires has accumulated so great that when the lightning of the storms torches a tree the fire spreads and grows without bounds, until we put great energy and resources into stopping it. Even then our efforts are a drop in a hot skillet. We hope for rain, or cool temperatures, or a turn of some kind that is beyond our control in order to limit the damage from the wildfire. So many homes, communities, resources are burned. If we’d allowed smaller fires to consume and cleanse the countryside the fires would have less fuel. They’d be destructive on a smaller scale. And with climate change we can anticipate that wildfires will only get larger and larger in the coming decades. What will we do then?!!

Wildfires are only one kind of the many storms that get more extreme, more damaging each year, because of climate change caused by our unrelenting use of energy to build our own security.

There are even more kinds of storms, worse storms, that assail us as people, and as the church, the boat we are in. So many churches have closed in recent decades. More close every year. There are so many on the verge, even now. People are not interested in belonging to a church. Why not?

There really are so many reasons. Today we have a sense that so much is secure or secure enough in our lives. Or more importantly so many people determine that the way to gain more security in life is not by joining people each week singing, praying, and being berated by a preacher. Sadly it’s often been a preacher of little education or sensibilities. As seminaries struggle to recruit and train pastors the bar keeps dropping and the education is less and less rigorous and the results are palpable as one sits and listens. But then even some of the ‘doctors of ministry’ preaching out there are pretty good examples of just plain bad preaching. As for the rest of the worship: old rituals are not needed. Life passages go just fine without the church’s involvement. Birth, baptisms of a kind (our own kind thank you), puberty passages into adulthood (well barely for most, but we let the kids drink and drive and toke up as a rite of passage), marriage (but who gets married anyway, it’s hook ups, live ins, and making house and home together for a while), and death (well that bites. That just bites, but when the church was not there through the rest of it, it’s pretty hard to receive anything from the church.) What we need in the way of spirituality we pick up and make up on our own, some of it ‘old’ and some of it ‘new’, although in reality none of it is ever new. It’s all been done by so many people over so many millennia. The only thing new about it is that those that adopt such beliefs and practices are unaware of how it was used by so many before them, so they’re on their own. The bend and colour of these belief gatherings and rituals are not life-giving, but self-serving.

So they are pretty much what so many congregations have allowed their faith and practices to decay into. No wonder people are not interested in the church. It’s just the same self-centredness mixed into a weak faith (weak in that it really cannot address very well the evils of our everyday lives), only at church they try to control you with their mix of weak made up faiths.

This kind of turning congregations into life-draining communities, and this kind of self-centred ‘made up’ faith systems are exactly why God’s Word is a Fire and is a Hammer. We need to be cleansed of this chaff and these hard structures that rob life from us and the planet.

So the Fire burns. Churches close. The Hammer smashes. Lives are left in ruins. Countries go to war. Energy is disrupted. Oil spills into waters. Nuclear plants meltdown for all sorts of different reasons. Storms pound us with water, wind, and hail, or tsunamis and earthquakes rip the earth right out from under us.

At these points of destruction it is all good and well to trust God. But turning away from using everything at our disposal and doing everything we can to help as many people survive as possible, or refusing help that is offered is simply not faith. It is only self-centred wishes for death to claim others, and perhaps us as well.

How to survive even the thought of that day when we and those around us need rescuing from the angry ‘climate changed’ planet?

Faith. Trusting Jesus words that the Fire will not burn us, and the Hammer will not destroy us. Any other stance is to succumb already to the destructive forces unleashed. We may die from the fires and get crushed by the hammers, but we live on with Jesus.

That hope can inspire us to live, and live well. And to give everything we have to helping others survive the fires and the hammer blows that are inevitably coming our way.

So what will we do this day? We will not make up our own faith. We will continue to rely on the great cloud of witnesses and saints that have gone before us. We will continue to begin each day confessing our sins and giving God thanks for all the blessings showered down on us. We will continue to pray for all people, even our enemies. We will keep the rituals that give life so that they become burned into our hearts and minds so well nothing can remove them, not even the worse disasters. We will sing God’ praise, and our desperate cries for deliverance from our enemies. And we will continue to give thanks. Thus anchored in God’s Word, today is just another day. Evil abounds. God’s Grace abounds even more. We stay alert, humble, and holy.

It’s just another day. There’s work to be done. There always is.