Playing with Fire

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.19.13; Pentecost Sunday

Scripture Lesson:  Acts 2:1-21

I’ve always loved fire.  It’s just part of how I am, that fascination with flame, and it goes back quite a ways.   I’m not a pyromaniac, mind you.  Pyrophilic, perhaps.  

My memories of fire go way back.   As a little boy growing up in Africa, I can remember one afternoon going to the movies.   That was exciting, because there weren’t a whole bunch of broadcast entertainment options in Nairobi.   Most of what was broadcast over Kenyan national television wasn’t exactly must see TV.  Imagine if there was only one channel, and it was CSPAN.  That was Kenya in 1974.   Using the TV to sit your kids wasn’t an option, unless your kids liked watching sweating men in ill fitting uniforms talk about Kenyatta’s five point agricultural plan for the next year.

Screens showing fun stuff were a rare treat.   The moviehouse seemed to me like this great big warehouse of a space, which means...given that I was in kindergarten...that it was probably a building around this size.   Parents would drop off their kids with a few shillings in their pockets for popcorn and lemonade, and an old projector would clatter to life, and in that hot crowded room we’d watch old Woody Woodpecker cartoons and silent Buster Keaton films and old damaged prints of Herbie the Lovebug.

It was at least twelve times as magical as an iPad.   But there were better things.  On one afternoon, as the movies wrapped up, I became distracted.  Snuck out, in fact, because another boy had told me something even better was happening outside.   There was a fire, and we went out to watch it.

It was a semi-controlled brush fire, the tall grass having been set alight to prepare it for farming the fields right by the moviehouse.   It’s an old memory, so it may not be entirely accurate, but I do have a deep sense recollection of just how immensely hot it was, standing in the cut grass just a few yards from that roaring wild thing.   The flames were higher than the building behind me, three, four, five times the height of a man, leaping skyward.   It was ferocious and alive and dangerous, and that made it fascinating. 

I seem to recall getting quite the talking to about that, being pulled away by my folks who were equal parts worried because they didn’t know where I’d snuck off to and because they’d found me standing yards from a wildfire.   I remember my face, my arms, my shirt, still glowed with heat.

Because fire is dangerous.  Don’t play with it, said your teachers and your parents.   Matches are not toys, we were told.  But from a British Scout Manual from the late 1950s, I’d learned that you could make tiny little solid rockets out of paper matches, and I would sneak off on sleepy Sunday afternoons to fire them at my toy soldiers.

And no, I’m not going to provide schematics.

We are taught to be wary around fire.   But Pentecost, this day we’re celebrating today, is all about fire.

It’s a strange word, Pentecost.  Here we have a word describing a Jewish holiday, and it’s not even in Hebrew.  It’s a Greek term, and it has nothing to do with fire.

Pentecost means, in the Greek, “The Fiftieth Day,” marking fifty days after the celebration of the Passover.  This festival was often called either the Festival of the Weeks or the Feast of Harvest.  Traditionally, this festival was also assumed to remember the giving of the law to Moses. 

We’ve been working our way through the Acts of the Apostles these past few weeks, and much of what we’ve been hearing has to do with preparing us for Pentecost.  This is a pivotal story in the tale told by the author of Luke and Acts, one that has been carefully foreshadowed.   In Luke 24:49, Jesus tells the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they receive what God has promised.   “Stay until you have been clothed with power from on high,” he says.   In Acts 1, he’s more explicit.  “...you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

In Luke’s story, the Last Supper is Passover, so they wait for fifty days.  During that time, Acts chapter one tells us that they pray and have meetings to discuss organizational structure and leadership transition dynamics, a sure sign that the earliest church may have been Presbyterian.

That foreshadowed event does arrive, and when it does it is significant.

The first thing that the disciples encounter is a sound, in the Greek, an echos.   That doesn’t meanmeanmean that ititit repeated itselfselfself.  It’s just the term for a sound.   It also is not the blowing of wind itself, so any visions you might have of that Upper Room being blasted with wind machines needs to be set aside.  It is just the sound, like the thundering of a train that augurs a tornado or the dragon breath roar of an incoming derecho, but wind is the closest analogue we can think of.

Following that comes the arrival of tongues of fire, again, not actual fire, but something remarkably like it.   Fire is fairly consistently used to describe the divine presence in the Bible.  There’s the burning bush from Exodus 3, the pillar of fire that leads the Jewish people to freedom in Exodus 13, among others.   At the beginning of the story of Jesus, John the Baptist suggests that the arrival of the Holy Spirit will be a baptism not like the baptism in water, but will involve a different form of transformation.

The impact the arrival of the tongues of fire have is to suddenly allow the gathered followers of Jesus to speak in an array of languages, languages that allow them...as they pour out into the street...to speak and be understood by all who had gathered in Jerusalem for the festival.

“Who are these people,” they ask.  “Galileans?”   That would have been especially confusing, because the people of Galilee were generally assumed to be the most backwards and linguistically incompetent of people.  In the ancient world, Galileans were the sorts of people who spoke with a drawl, droppin’ their cons’nants and not speakin’ cirectly and generally showing themselves to be ignorant backwoods types.  Here they could barely speak Aramaic, their own language, and suddenly they’re talking in every language under the sun?  

But what is most striking, most significant, most notable about the arrival of the fires of Pentecost is that they are dangerous.  Oh, they’re not dangerous in the way that fire is dangerous, but they nonetheless pose a threat to the way things are.

It’s not a soft wind, a gentle babies’ breath, the sweet sussuration of the breeze through a willow in some pastel motel room painting.  It is a pneuos biaios, a violent wind, a “mighty rushing wind.”  

And what the Spirit does, much to our consternation, is destroy those things that tear us apart.  It is a radical and unmediated interaction with our Creator, and that’s an immense and terrible thing.   It is dangerous to our persons, and it is dangerous to our communities.

That’s not because it bears the weight of God’s anger.  It’s because it is the expression of God’s radical love.

That love is a threat to us personally because it challenges those things within ourselves that we’d prefer left unchallenged.  Those deep resentments and carefully nurtured hatreds, those sustaining fears and the anxieties that we use to organize our lives, none of those things survive an encounter with the Spirit.  That fire consumes them, and turns them to nothing.

It refines us and purifies us...which is why “fire” is the metaphor of choice for God’s presence.  We get the word “purify” from the word puros, the Greek word for fire.

That Spirit does the same thing for us as social creatures.  It takes down the biases and bigotries and selfishness of our gatherings.   On that first Pentecost, the gift given to the disciples was that very gift, the ability to make themselves known across the boundaries of culture and language, to speak the grace of what Jesus offered in a way that everyone could grasp it.

Some fire, we need to be wary of.  But the Spirit?  Where you feel it moving, where you feel it challenging, where you sense it at work, let it be at play in you.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.