Trial by Fire

Passage: 1 Corinthians 3:10-15

Over the past several weeks lighting strikes have ignited wildfires across the American Southwest.  These fires have incinerated acres of brush and woods that had turned into tinder after weeks without rain.  And the advancing walls of fire have struck fear into the hearts of all those whose homes and communities lay in their paths.  If the fire comes, what will survive?

Throughout the New Testament, fire is used as a metaphor. Typically, Christians see it as a metaphor for God’s judgment – God is going to use fire to rid the world of evil; and evildoers can look forward to an eternity in the fires of hell.  If you read the New Testament references to fire more carefully, however, you discover a much more nuanced picture of God’s work in our world and God’s ultimate purposes.

For example, the Apostle Paul talks about fire not as an agent of God’s punishment but rather of purification.  He says,

…if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw – each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. 

Here Paul refers to “The Day of the Lord”, discussed by the prophets in the Old Testament and by Jesus Christ in the New – the day when God shows up in person and finally restores all things to the way they were meant to be. The Day of the Lord is good news for all those who have grown disenchanted with the brokenness and injustices of the world, and the suffering of all its inhabitants.  In fact, during his earthly life and ministry, Jesus invites his followers to stop living for the moment, and live instead in the hope of his return.  To live not for the flammable things of this world, but to live for his eternal kingdom.This is what Paul’s talking about when he says, “Build your life on the foundation of Jesus Christ.  If you build on anything else, your life’s work will disappear in the end – as though it was consumed by fire.” 

Almost as an afterthought, Paul adds this:

If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.

This is a hopeful note for those of us who are unsure whether we’ve invested in the world or the Kingdom of God. In the end the fire of God’s presence will reveal what lasts and what doesn’t.  But even if your life’s work is consumed – even if it turns out you’ve spent your life building stuff that won’t last – you yourself can withstand the fire.  Make no mistake – everything and everyone on earth will pass through the refiner’s fire at the end of time.  But if you have found your life in Jesus Christ, and placed your life in his hands, you will pass into glory.  The reason for it is this: your life’s work isn’t God’s primary concern.  You are.  All the time you’ve been investing in your home, your portfolio, your career, God has been investing in you.  Build on the foundation of Jesus Christ.  Invite his Spirit to renovate your heart.  Partner with God as he makes you his eternal project – built to withstand the fire. 

Rebuilding

Passage: Nehemiah 2:11-20

70 years after the fall of Jerusalem, survivors of the exile return to God’s promised land.  They’re led by Nehemiah, a civic employee of Babylon, whose boss gives him a leave of absence to go back and rebuild the ruined city of his ancestors.  Nehemiah makes the trip; sets up camp; and one night goes out to inspect the city.  It’s far worse than he imagined.  The walls are completely broken down and overgrown.  It looks less like a city than a pile of rubble.  Nehemiah goes back to the camp.

And he says to his leaders,

 “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.” (Neh. 2:17)

But Nehemiah adds that God has miraculously paved the way for them to be right here, right now. And God will not abandon them at this point in the project.

In response, his leaders say,

 “Let us start rebuilding.”  

They engage the good work.

They don’t do the work alone.  A whole crowd of haters appears on day one of the reconstruction.  They stand around all day – not helping, of course – telling the workers how their endeavor is impossible.  Telling them they're fools to believe that the ruins can be rebuilt.

But they don’t do the work alone.  Nehemiah tells his detractors,

“The God of heaven will give us success. We his servants will start rebuilding, but as for you, you have no share in our city or any claim or historic right to it.”

Our God is a God of rebuilding.  A God who restores ruined hearts; reconciles ruined relationship; redeems ruined communities.  When conditions for full human flourishing are being rebuilt, God is at work.  When we step out in courage to join him in his work, we cannot fail.  Don’t stand back and hate – have the courage to jump in.  And if you are engaged in the daunting and difficult task of rebuilding – a relationship; a community; a city – don’t listen to the haters.  The God of heaven will give us success.

At Peace with...Everyone?

During his ministry on earth, Jesus introduces a radical new ethic.  He says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…” Even after 2,000 years, the command hasn’t mellowed.  It leaves the same sharp, bitter taste on our tongues.  It’s counterintuitive; it contradicts our instincts; it violates against our sense of fairness. Love your enemies.  If we respond to our enemies with love, how will justice be done?  Who will take them to task?

The Apostle Paul provides the answer: God.  God will take them to task.  Paul says,

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone.  If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:17-21)

To love one’s enemies is not to ignore justice; it is to ensure it. The only way we can answer hostility with love is on the conviction that God is keeping track.  God says, “Because I’m keeping track, you don’t have to.”

Instead, God invites us to abandon the road of revenge for the much more difficult path of peace. One way to eliminate conflict is to obliterate all your enemies. Experience and history have taught us this approach never pays off. In the process of eliminating old enemies, you make new ones. And you can always find some enemy if you look hard enough. Imagine what would change if you went looking for friends. What would the city look like if every stranger was a future guest; neighbor; member of the family?  We always have a ready excuse for not helping: “He doesn’t deserve it.  She doesn’t deserve it.  They’re takers.  They’re users.  They’ve abused the neighborhood; they’ve abused the system.  They’re the enemy.”  If God is real and the Gospel is true, then enemy is no longer a meaningful category.  Settling the score is God’s job.  Let God do his job, and do the job God has given you.  Feed the hungry.  House the homeless.  Comfort the sick and the imprisoned.  If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 

Welcome One Another

Passage: Romans 15:1-7

Hamid Mohsin’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a story within a story.  The main story is the fictional memoir of a young Pakistani man who comes of age in New York City.  Driven and extremely bright, the man graduates at the top of his class at Princeton, and gets hired as a the top draft pick of a competitive Wall Street consultancy firm.  The trajectory of his life is radically altered following 9/11, when his accent and skin color take on a new significance.

He recounts the story as a middle-aged man working as a professor in Lahore.  He tells the story to an American visitor who, over the course of the conversation, becomes increasingly agitated.  The narrator notes, in passing, that in some circles he’s been labeled anti-American and that there is some concern that an attempt may be made on his life.  His American guest may, in fact, be there to kill him.  Ironically, the narrator is abundantly welcoming and hospitable to this stranger. 

We’re always looking for reasons to write each other off.  In this polarized time and place, it feels as though we scrutinize one another for any identifying feature.  Like soldiers in a revolutionary war, we want to make sure the person we’re talking to is an ally.  If there’s any indication to the contrary, we shut down the conversation. 

At the end of the Book of Romans, the Apostle Paul tells the church to adopt a radically different approach.  He says,

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.  For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.”

Paul says, “Your default setting is friendship. When you were God’s enemy, Christ treated you as a friend.  Do the same.”  Paul concludes,

…welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

Our goal is harmony.  Christ provided us harmony with God at the cost of his life.  The call of the Gospel is to militate for peace and harmony – with neighbors; strangers; even enemies.  No matter the cost.   

Cleansing the Temple...Again

Passage: 2 Chronicles 29:3-19; Matthew 21:12-14

When Hezekiah, one of the last God-fearing kings of Judah, takes the throne, he finds the temple of God out of order.  His no-good predecessor, Ahaz, sold the gold and bronze temple furnishings to finance his predilection for wine, women and song.  The general populace had long since forsaken the boring temple for the more entertaining and sensational worship of Baal and Asherah.  The dutiful clergy, the Levites, have all taken other jobs, and eventually just boarded up the doors and windows.  God’s temple is out of business.  At Hezekiah’s orders, the boards are pried off the windows and the chain barring the door removed.  The dust and detritus of years of neglect are exposed to the light of day, and swept out into the street.  The Levites are given their old jobs back, and they get to work cleaning out the temple, and cleaning themselves up to prepare for worship.  When the work of cleansing is done, Hezekiah commands his people to come back to God. 

In the Gospel of Matthew, the temple is once again out of order. At the beginning of the week that will end with his death, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.  Onlookers recognize him as the Messiah – the triumphant king come from God to set all things right.  Jesus rides straight to the temple.  There, he throws open the doors.  He kicks out the merchants who are there to make a buck off of people too gullible to know that God’s favor can’t be bought with a religious trinket and a Hail Mary.  He turns over the tables of money changers who promise to turn Roman currency into the currency of Heaven – at a very profitable exchange rate.  Jesus sweeps out the debris and detritus that have built up and blocked the way to worship.

In 1 Corinthians 6, the Apostle Paul says, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?”  Paul’s addressing a church whose hearts are at risk of being clogged with the debris of a broken world and the detritus of sin.  The Holy Spirit comes to us, cleansing us and opening up the way to true worship.

When Hezekiah cleanses the temple, it is finally fit for worship.  When Jesus cleanses the temple, something else happens.  Matthew says, “The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them.”  We resist the monumental task of temple cleansing because we’ve gotten used to the debris, and we’re afraid of what it will cost us to clean house.  Look at what happens when Jesus cleans house: Healing; restoration; redemption.  Let him in, and let him get to work.  

Cain, Abel, and Us

Passage: 1 John 3:11-15

In his ongoing discourse on love, John brings up the old story of Cain and Abel.  It’s the story of the first siblings.  It’s also the story of the first murder.

In the story, Abel the shepherd offers God the gift of his best sheep.  God is delighted.  Cain sees God’s delight and, thinking he’d like some too, goes to his garden.  He picks some of the fruit of his own labors, and brings it to God.  He stands back, waiting to bask in the praise he has coming.  It doesn’t come.  Cain’s surprise is replaced with disappointment, then rage.  Abel becomes a constant reminder of the prize Cain wasn’t given.  Cain has to erase the reminder. 

John says that God rejected Cain’s offering because Cain “belonged to the evil one.”  Cain in turn murdered his brother because “his deeds were evil.”  It’s too simple an explanation.  Could it be that murder comes not from a wicked heart, but a broken heart?

What are the places in our own hearts that give birth to murder?  The desire to see a celebrated sibling fall from grace?  Or a successful colleague slip?  Where does that instinct to verbally dress down a neighbor or friend or fellow churchgoer come from, if not the same place in our hearts that harbors our own deep senses of inadequacy and failure?  And what good can come of actions that are driven by a sense of inadequacy? 

Cain’s offering came up short not because Cain didn’t produce good fruit.  But because Cain used it to try to pull himself up in God’s eyes.  Cain never got the truth Abel believed out of hand: God loves his children equally.  God’s love comes to us not as a condition of a contract, our half of which is hard work and stellar performance.  God just loves us.  And no amount of performance can improve upon it.  Cain used his offering to get something that was already his.  His fatal error was failing to believe it in the first place – doubting that which God offered freely. 

God gives us his best.  And this is what enables us to be our best.  Ironically, when we’re convinced of the truth of God’s love, we don’t need to be better than we really are.  We certainly don’t need to be better than our siblings.  We can love – wholeheartedly and unreservedly – because we’ve been filled to overflowing with the love of God the Father.  

Love One Another

The Letters of John revolve around a simple command: Love One Another.  It’s not John’s command.  It’s something John heard from his dearest friend right before that friend died a horrible death in John’s place.

“Love one another” is something Jesus says at the last supper.  Jesus and his disciples sit around a table enjoying Passover, the feast commemorating the miraculous way God spares his people from certain death.  At a certain point in the meal Jesus sets down his napkin and says,

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.  (John 13:34, 35)

Have the disciples even registered Jesus’ words?  Peter says immediately, “Lord, where are you going?”  This is because Jesus prefaced the command – the center of the Christian life and, it turns out, the center of the entire universe – with a statement that seems, in the moment, more pressing:

My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.

Jesus and Peter have this exchange:

Jesus: Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Peter: Lord, why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.

Jesus: Will you really lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times!

And here we get to the heart of Jesus’ command.  A simple, impossible command: Love one another.  For us, love is a feeling.  Deep affection.  All-consuming passion.  All too fleeting.  For Jesus, love is an eternal commitment to the giving up of his very life. 

Peter declares, in the moment, that he would give up his life for the object of his affection.  How many minutes has it taken for him to forget that it was Jesus, not Peter who stripped to the waist and washed the waste of the day off his friends’ feet?  How many more will it take for Peter’s all-consuming passion for Jesus to be replaced with an all-consuming passion for his own security?  Love is not a feeling.

Decades later John – the beloved disciple of Jesus – recalls this exchange as the words and actions of Jesus coalesce for him on the page.  Love is not a feeling.  It’s a force.  It’s the force through which the universe was made. 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.  The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. (1 John 1:1-2)

That force took on flesh, and in the flesh spoke and showed and served up love in dimensions not seen since the beginning.  And through him a way was made – a way out of life in two dimensions into three; out of life in black and white into life in vibrant Technicolor.  Life as it was always meant to be lived.  Love.

So John, a lifetime later, repeats the command that was almost forgotten.  A command so old it predates human existence.  A command so new it undoes the current world order and ushers in a new one:

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard.  Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining. (1 John 2:7-8)

Love one another.  As I have loved you – laying aside my pride to meet your basest needs; laying down my life to preserve yours – so shall you love one another.

This isn’t a marching order.  It’s an invitation.  We respond like Peter because we’re afraid of what we stand to lose.  Jesus knows what we stand to gain.  Trust him.  Trust that your act of (and your active) self-sacrifice will change someone else’s life; your life; and the world.  Love one another.