The Consuming Fire of God's Love

 Preached at  North Valley Friends Church

September 22, 2024

The Consuming Fire of God’s Love

When Leslie asked me to consider preaching at NVFC, I told her that I think I am always preaching one sermon in different guises, namely that God’s love must have an object and God’s creation is that object, that God loves you and me. Often this is a consoling message. As Jesus said, perhaps with a bit of wry humor, “are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and yet not one of them falls to the ground without my Father knowing. Fear not, for you are of more value than many sparrows.” Here is a bit of the flavor of Micah 3.  "Listen, pray, chieftains of Jacob and captains of the house of Israel. Is it not yours to know what is right? Haters of good and lovers of evil . . . who devour My people's flesh and strip their skin from them and crack open their bones.  And they cut it like flesh in the pot and like meat in the cauldron" (The Hebrew Bible, "Prophets," tr. Robert Alter, 2015).

It was a surprise to me to find that it took only a few hours to see that this message too is about the fact that God loves us, you and me.  This is a message about God’s grace.

But first, I want to respond to Micah. I notice that he addresses three classes of people with power in their culture: priests, judges, and prophets. These define morality for the rest of their society. They tell other people what is right and wrong. But Micah accuses them of cannibalism towards other people, skinning them, breaking their bones, sucking out the marrow. To bring this into non-figurative terms, they destroy the lives of those for whom they define the rules, those in their care, under their influence; they take away their lives in order to enrich their own. They are predatory. 

We can look at those in our own society’s leadership who also cannibalize others, who remove from them the means of life; who destroy others to add to their own abundance; who ruin others’ chances to live fully and freely. 

And while it is comforting to point the finger at corruption above us in the power structure,

it would be a mistake to hear Micah talking only to those at the top of his culture. For this to have relevance to us, we need to consider that power includes greater physical strength, greater prestige and social capital, greater ability to decide who gets in and who must stay out—gate keeping. We need to recognize our own power over others, whether it is coercive or manipulative or accidental. We need to admit when we have misused our power, our privilege, depriving others of the ability to thrive and become their whole selves.

We can hear echoes of Micah’s message in the words of Jesus, first to the religious leaders, but then to everyone who has ears. I won’t rehearse all of the condemnations of the actions of the scribes and Pharisees, but I’ll remind you of this one: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and uncleanness. You bind heavy loads on others’ shoulders but you are unwilling to lift a finger to help them carry those loads.”  I will remind us, remind me, that Jesus also said, shockingly, that anyone who makes it hard for a little one to trust God would be better off drowned, and that whatever is done to the “least of these” is done to Jesus Himself.  And also that not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do what Jesus’s Father and our Father says to do. And further that those who look on their hungry, thirsty, ragged, imprisoned neighbors and do nothing to alleviate this distress are not part of God’s sheep, not among God’s people. How much worse to actively contribute to or even cause another’s misery.  Jesus is not less demanding than Micah, and perhaps, given that he is talking right to us, is even more so. No wonder the liturgical confession includes both what we have done and what we have left undone.  

When Jesus was asked the greatest commandment, he said, “Love God with everything you are and have, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus knew he had to add the second, which he said is like the first, because we can talk ourselves into believing we love God while we are doing harm to our neighbor. But also, this contains in it the truth that when we harm others we also harm ourselves, and conversely that love for others and love for oneself go arm in arm.

We have seen that Jesus shares Micah’s outrage about the misuse of power and influence. So how can we move from admitting our selfishness and apathy and self-indulgence at others’ expense to a better understanding about God’s love for us, God’s grace toward us? We need to recognize that God’s grace may look a lot like judgment, God’s grace is surgical, and our response to this intrusive grace of God makes all the difference.

I owe much of my understanding of God’s intrusive and uncomfortable grace to three writers: George MacDonald, Flannery O’Connor, and Julian of Norwich. George MacDonald was a novelist and preacher in the 1800s whose writing was hugely influential on C.S. Lewis.  He writes in one of his Unspoken Sermons, “The Consuming Fire”:

Nothing is inexorable but love….Love has ever in view the absolute [the potential] loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more…Therefore all that…comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. (18-19)

Let us have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that cringes and craves, but with the bowing down of all thoughts, all delights, all loves before him who is the life of them all and will have them all pure. (20)

…the fear towards God will be one with the homeliest love. Yea, the fear of God will cause a person to flee, not from God, but from the self, in terror lest that person do [wrong to ] God or [to] a neighbor .… (21)

In sum, God will love us into our best selves, and whatever we carry around with us that prevents us being that best self will have to go. This is the work of grace for us.

I learned a similar view of God’s grace from Flannery O’Connor, a mid 20th century writer of novels and short stories. Her self-satisfied characters are often jolted awake by God’s grace in a way they would never have chosen. Their casual American Christianity is not enough. I’ll mention one character and how God’s grace destroys in order to redeem.  In “Revelation,” a good solid Christian woman named Mrs. Turpin is attacked in the doctor’s office as she is making banal conversation about who is and who isn’t trash. A young woman throws a book at her, raising a bump on the forehead, and shouts, “Go back to hell where you came from, you fat warthog.”

What makes this traumatic moment redemptive is that Mrs. Turpin turns immediately to God and complains about being treated like this, while all the while wondering why God would send her this message. And because she turns toward God instead of away, and in recognition of her willingness to learn despite her anger and humiliation, God gives her a vision of the redemption of humanity, beginning with those she places at the bottom of the heap and ending with her kind of people. She sees the vast stream of human beings moving into glory, and her own kind of people are at the end of the line.

She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were [singing] on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead…In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. (The Complete Stories, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 508) 

And finally, to Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchorite from the 1300s. She had a near-death experience in which she had a vision of Jesus. She meditated on that vision for the rest of her life and gained profound understanding about God’s love and God’s intention to redeem and make all things well.  Along the way, she hears Jesus say this:

“For I will wholly break you of your vain affections and your vicious pride; and after that I shall gather you and make you meek and mild, clean and holy by oneing (uniting) you to me.” ( The Revelation of Love, tr. John Skinner, 86)

So what can we take of comfort and consolation from Micah 3? We can rejoice that God’s love always intends what is best for us and always builds up what is best in us; we can trust that God will make us good, and we can welcome the intrusion of God’s grace when we are not good as we face the both the consequences of doing harm and the divine surgery that will save us.  We can understand that God’s grace is not about excusing but about remaking, about healing, about redeeming what is perverse, wounded, and lost.  We can take heart, even as we tremble, that God’s love is inexorable and will do us good.

Jesus, Privilege, Victims, and Empathy

John 8:1-16

Recently, an old friend said, “We are all victims.” A young queer acquaintance of mine wrote, “everyone is not a victim. everyone does not experience harm in the same way.” So I spoke to my old friend and said, “Your words were hurtful.” He reiterated his belief that we are all victims. And I said, “Until you are willing to say publicly why you are a victim, how you’ve been victimized, you don’t get to say, ‘we.’”

The #metoo campaign startled a lot of my (male) friends. Surely it isn’t true that so many (all?) the women they know have been sexually harassed or abused. Surely the women who said #metoo need to publicly say how they were victimized. Otherwise, how can people know if the women are telling the truth or are exaggerating the harm or even making things up? So said (some of) my (male) friends.

As an aside, I really liked the idea someone put forward that men should ask themselves, “Would I treat Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson like this?” If the answer is no, then don’t treat the woman or girl like that either. If you wouldn’t extend a hug past 2-3 seconds for “The Rock,” then don’t do so for a female friend or acquaintance. If you wouldn’t spread into Dwayne’s space, don’t spread into hers. If you wouldn’t ask Mr. Johnson for a kiss—or just plant one on his lips—don’t try it with a woman. (Interestingly, women will need a different image to deter them from sexually harassing a man—maybe they need to envision a giant toad or a cobra or a python. This might also help women know when we can say “no.”)

So, back to the main story. I said on my FaceBook page, “Me too,” and I didn’t publish there why I posted it. I estimate at least ten percent of my FB friends know part of my reason for joining in, but not one of them knows all the reasons. And I don’t plan to put my life history in the public eye to justify my use of the phrase.

So we have a conundrum here. I want my old friend (white, male) to ante up his story of victimization before he can join in with #metoo, before he can say, “We are all victims,” but I can hardly bear to tell my counselor—sworn as she is to confidentiality—all the ways I’ve been victimized. Shame, self-blame—these cause me to withhold many experiences. And then there’s fear—the fear that if I share, the response will be, “What did you do to cause him to treat you like that?” And a new harm will be added to my collection. Or the response will be, “You need to forgive,” as if forgiveness erased pain, shame, self-loathing, fear. The lack of empathy for the seven year old I was (and inside still am) is a failure of imagination.

Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but religion may be the first, judging from my experiences. As a Christian child and woman, it pains and angers me to say that nearly all my victim experiences have been perpetrated by Christian men. The main exception is bullying/abuse by bigger kids, though these were in Christian school.

The way it works, as I see it, is this: a person of privilege has to drag out the story of victimization in order to show that he or she has the standing to speak to/with other victims. Those with less privilege can say #metoo, and they do not have to drag all the shaming things that have happened to them into the light. But when these things are dragged into the light, privilege may have something to answer for.

We can see the torture—perhaps even unmentionable rape by Roman soldiers—and crucifixion as evidence Jesus knows what we experience when we are harassed or abused. And these end-life events were not his only moments of rejection, shame, and threat of personal harm.

When he publicly claimed that God was sending him, that he was the one, his hometown folk tried to kill him, to push him off a cliff (Luke 4:29). Jerusalem folks threatened to stone him (John 8:59, 10:31). He evaded these physical harms, but the rejection fueled many of his hot statements condemning faithlessness and hypocrisy. The long-term result of Jesus’s victimization is the deconstruction of privilege everywhere.

A story found in John’s Gospel shows us this.

As a Jewish male—and one often recognized as a rabbi—Jesus had some of the marks of privilege in his culture. At the same time, his country was occupied by Roman soldiers, some of whom, it appears from John the Baptizer, extorted money from the citizenry and bullied unprotected Jews. Jesus’s privilege was also bounded by his status as illegitimate, which limited his ability to marry and made him a target for malicious ridicule (John 8:41).

Jesus used his privilege to welcome (Zaccheus the taxman, the sinful woman and her tears, the hemorrhaging woman, the children) and to confront (the rich young ruler, the religious elites, his own disciples, the Syro-Phoenician woman). He gave away privilege to talk as equal human beings with the Samaritan woman, with Mary and Martha at Lazarus’s tomb, with his mother Mary at the Cana wedding.

So Jesus’s behavior chronicled elsewhere in the Gospels is in line with what we see in the story of the woman taken in adultery and brought to him for judgment. The men in this story have all the privilege. The absence of the male adulterer speaks to this fact. The crowd speak to Jesus as a person of privilege—male, Jewish, a rabbi—and test him to see if he belongs with them. Will he uphold the system that privileges him?

Jesus resists their manipulations. He takes his own sweet time to sketch in the dirt. He knows he is inside a hostile circle. He knows a stray rock—or many stray rocks—may hit him as they punish the sinful woman. He knows that the only way to retain privilege and to stay personally safe is to step away from the woman and join those holding stones. But he stays beside her and challenges the crowd. He raises the double standard which privilege makes the norm when he says, “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.”

As the members drop their stones and slink away, he speaks to the woman. I have always seen her in my imagination as cowering in terror, but perhaps she was defiant, loud, shouting to the crowd that she knew things about them, that she might hurt them if she got a chance. Either way, as the members drop the rocks and edge away, Jesus speaks to the woman, cowering or shouting obscenities, inviting her to be calm, to look around, to go without shame or blame, to go forward as a responsible human being.

So what can we learn from Jesus about privilege, about #metoo, about “we are all victims”?

1.     What Jesus does is to stand by the least powerful person and against the crowd. As the only one on the scene with the qualifications to act as judge and jury, Jesus chooses to be with the accused and to share her fate.

2.     What Jesus exposes, at the same time, is that all are sinners. All have erred, strayed, avoided obeying, disobeyed, bent what is true, and so on. No one has superior status, either social or moral. We have to confront personally and seriously our own carelessness or cruelty as part of learning how to be humane, to be kind rather than victimizers. Not one of us gets to be judge and jury for another.

3.     To say “We are all sinners” is not the same as saying, “We are all victims.” It is saying “We have all done harm to others, we are all complicit in making others into victims.”

4.     So whenever we find ourselves in a crowd with rocks in our hands, we will find Jesus standing beside the person who is about to die, whose shame and fear are leaking out everywhere, who feels completely alone.

5.     Jesus told us, “Just as you have acted toward the least—the powerless, the alien, the despised other—you have acted toward me. When you assert your privilege to exclude, silence, shame, blame, diminish, even destroy another person, you are doing the same to me.”

William Blake pointed out that it is natural for those who have experienced tyranny to rebel against it and to overthrow it. It is also natural for the former rebels to become tyrants in their turn. We who have privilege can break this cycle. We must recognize who the outsider is, whom the present system victimizes, and stand beside them against the powers that be. The tide can turn, and those who previously stood above in the place of privilege can find themselves in the center of the circle, threatened with stoning. In that moment, Jesus stands inside the circle again, drawing in the dirt, facing the accusers with the same challenge. “Let those among you without sin cast the first stone.”

"You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry"--Bob Dylan

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