All Saints’, Dorval
January 12, 2025
The “Super Scooper” (from Montreal!) in action above LA
Sometimes it seems like the lectionary is brutally ironic, and this is one of those weeks.
“His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
“The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire.”
“When you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”
All week the world has watched as huge swathes of Los Angeles burn to the ground. We’ve watched with horror – a horror that is simultaneously both dulled and sharpened by the fact that these events keep coming faster and faster, closer and closer together, from Australia in 2020 to Lahaina a year and a half ago, and of course Lytton in 2021, which despite being on the other side of the continent was altogether too close to home.
We know how this goes: we check on our friends in the area, we look for the helpers, we donate to fire relief, we pray. And we wonder what it means to follow God in a world so full of agony and disaster.
Scripture does not use the language of fire lightly. The Psalm and the prophet Isaiah both emphasize God’s power: the Psalm tells us that God can send forth flames of fire like God’s voice, while Isaiah praises God’s power to protect us – we may still have to walk through the fire, but we will not be burned.
John, meanwhile, foretells Jesus’ ministry by saying that he will burn the chaff – the useless outer surface of the grain – that he has separated from the wheat. This has often been taken to mean that “good people” will be preserved and “bad people” will be sent to hellfire, but I suspect it’s much more likely that all of us have some chaff that needs to be burned away, so that the good grain can be put to use.
Even when safely contained within these metaphors, fire is scary. And when it’s not contained, but is rampaging across a real landscape and endangering real people, property, and ecosystems, it’s terrifying.
But if nothing else, fire gets our attention. And that’s what I’m seeing in today’s readings: God getting people’s attention by any means necessary. God calling the people by name and accompanying them through water and fire. God breaking the cedars and shaking the wilderness. God pouring out the Holy Spirit on newly baptized converts.
I am not, of course, claiming that because God can speak to humanity through wildfires, that means that the fires aren’t the product of climate change caused by humans. Obviously they are. But when God speaks to people, God almost always does so through naturalistic means, through creation behaving in the ways that creation has evolved to behave. In this case, what needs to be brought to our attention is precisely the ways in which our human activities are butting up against the immutable, God-given limits of the biosphere.
These fires are apocalyptic in both the popular sense – in that they make us feel like the end of the world must be nigh – and the technical theological sense, in that they reveal what has been hidden or ignored and make it visible for all to see. What remains to be seen is what the human race will do with that knowledge.
In today’s passage from Luke – despite John the Baptist’s predictions that Jesus with come with a winnowing fork and with the fire of the Spirit – things overall seem much calmer. (It helps that several verses about John being thrown into prison have been omitted from the middle of the reading.)
In Luke’s telling, Jesus’ vision of the dove descending, and the voice from heaven declaring him God’s beloved child, don’t happen in public and at the moment that he rises from the waters of the Jordan; rather, they take place “when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying.” It’s very possible that by this time Jesus was already in, or at least on his way to, the wilderness in which he would spend the next forty days wrestling with God. It all seems very quiet, reflective, contemplative even.
And yet, when my colleague group discussed this passage on Tuesday, it soon occurred to us that usually, having a bird “descend upon you” is not that peaceful. In fact, it can range from startling to messy to downright traumatic. We swapped stories of being dive-bombed by blackbirds, pooped on by pigeons, and having our fries stolen by overweight seagulls. (I was the victim of the blackbird; twice, walking under the same tree in the park by the Lachine Canal, without warning something was stabbing the back of my neck.) Even well-trained working birds can seem pretty alarming when coming in for a landing on a falconer’s leather-gloved forearm.
So this story is a reminder in multiple ways that while God certainly speaks in the still, small voice, in the quietness of the heart, and with gentleness and love, it is by no means unusual for God to grab us by the scruff of the neck and give us a good shake. In fact, often that’s what it takes to get the attention of stubborn, distracted, self-centered humans.
Sometimes we are being alerted to the suffering of God’s creation. Sometimes we are being called to the relief and support of our fellow humans. And sometimes we are being warned that it is time for some of our own chaff to be burnt away, so that the good grain can be put to use.
But just remember that at the same time that the bird is screeching at you and pecking your head (or worse), there is also a voice coming from heaven: You are God’s beloved child. With you God is well pleased. God will walk with you through the fire, come what may.
Amen.
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