Tongues of Fire

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Hebrews 12:18-23

August 21, 2016

Jeremiah asks a perfectly reasonable question, and one that, no matter what one’s age, strikes me as always pertinent. In response to God’s invitation to speak, Jeremiah says, “who, me?”

The author of Hebrews underscores the challenge. When God invites us to speak, the invitation is to wrestle with something that we cannot control: “a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and a sound of a trumpet.”

If those attributes sound confusing and contradictory, that’s because it is never easy to discern, act, and speak out about the deepest mysteries of the soul and its encounters with the divine. The mystery of it all should, at the very least, draw us into humility when we open our mouths to speak a word about our own understanding of God.

The challenge to speak a word about God is daunting enough, but the invitation to speak a word somehow on behalf of God is more than doubly so.

That difficult no doubt accounts for some of the crazy stuff that gets said in the name of God. It doesn’t, of course, account for all of it. Basic human brokenness – greed, the lust for power, bigotry, and the rest – accounts for its own fair share of stupid stuff that gets said in the name of God. As I’ve heard it said, “when God hates all the same people you hate, you’re probably creating God in your image not the other way ‘round.” Or, in the case of human speech, you’re probably putting words in God’s mouth rather than speaking words that God has put in yours.

Nevertheless, the difficulty and great challenge of speaking clearly, honestly, accurately and with humility do not condemn us to silence nor do they get us off the hook for the responsibility of speaking.

Just because Jeremiah made his case – “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” – did not mean God looked elsewhere for a prophet. It’s a good thing, too, else we would never have inherited the word jeremiad, and that’s such a fine word!

Like Jeremiah, we are called to speak. Christian scripture is full of reminders ranging from the Great Commission at the close of Matthew – “go forth into all the nations … and teach them everything I have commanded,” to Paul’s insistence that, through the work and witness of the church, “Those who have never been told of him shall see, and those who have never heard of him shall understand.”

As our Brief Statement of Faith puts it, “the Spirit gives us courage … to witness”; and, in particular, to witness to our own experience of God.

Our lives are our greatest testimony, and our words, our stories, matter deeply. I am reminded of this every time I do a volunteer shift at the Martin Luther King Memorial. Stories matter. Words matter. How we speak of the lives of the saints matters. How we share our own stories matters.

Our own stories begin to get real when they touch on common human experience. That’s why we spent some time this morning looking at pictures. One of the wonderful things about sports is range of human emotion that is so close to the surface, so easily and readily revealed in the midst of intense competition.

Not too often in our everyday work lives do most of us get the opportunity to express ourselves in such open and raw fashion as athletes. There’s good reason why we are familiar with the phrase, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”

But just because we don’t get to those emotional levels in our work most days, certainly does not mean that we don’t get to those emotional places in our lives.

So, looking at the words you jotted down about the emotions you discerned from the pictures, can you recall times in your own life when you felt these ways?

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Now, with those moments – whether you shared them or not – in mind, I invite you to reflect on these questions: who was with you through those intense experiences? What was your experience of community companionship or compassion? What did that feel like?

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Let’s take that one step deeper into mystery: where was God in the midst of that experience? Did you sense the presence of the divine, the holy in those moments? What did God feel like?

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As I looked at these pictures, I found myself drawn particularly to the ones of deep joy. Maybe it’s just because I wanted to feel like a winner, but throughout the last week of watching a lot of sports I only tune into once every four years I have been struck over and over again by the universality of the human smile – the way it touches and sparkles from eyes of every shape and color, the way it makes a face open up and shine, the way it draws you into a story you’ll never actually know but, for a moment, you know you’d like to know.

As I considered the pictures of joy, I reflected on the moments of deep joy in my own life. I have led such a lucky life in so many ways, and though there have certainly been times of loss, of fear, of pain, and a few dark nights of mourning and despair, I have experienced way more than my share of simple happiness, comfort, Sabbath rest, and deep joy.

The deepest joys of my life have been the births of our three kids. There is something elemental in that experience, though it is neither universal nor necessary to the experience of being human.

Those moments have been the ones of the most raw, pure, and total joy of my life, and also the moments of deepest theological insight. Oh, I promise you – and even though she’s out of town this morning, Cheryl would back me up on this – I promise you I did not stop at the moment of our kids’ births and offer up theological reflections.

But I felt a breaking open of my own heart and a spirit flooding it that I can only call holy and wholly other. When, later on, I reflected on that experience I was driven to understand something I’d never quite gotten before: if God’s love is in any way like the love of a parent for a child, and if that Divine love is a perfection of such human expression, then the love of God for God’s creation is unfathomably deep. That I could be loved that much, and that everyone else is, as well, changes everything.

That, my friends, is a story worth sharing. That story, told in a million different ways over thousands of years by countless people and communities, is the story that shapes the life of the church. It is the animating heart of the gospel. It is the story God invites us to inhabit, and to share. Amen.