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.
