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Fire
Acts of the Apostles 2:1-24
Preached by Rev. Susan J. Murtha
May 31, 2009, Pentecost
And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,
and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.
All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.
-- Acts of the Apostles 2:2-4
On August 5th 1949, on the hottest afternoon ever recorded, lightning struck the remote area of Montana’s rugged Mann Gulch. To fight the fire, the U.S. Forest Service dispatched fifteen young men from the elite unit of Smokejumpers. They regarded the fire as routine, figured they would be home by the next morning. But the fire acted unpredictably, driven by an equally unpredictable wind. It was not the sort for human beings to control, never mind conquer. Within two hours, thirteen lay dead.
Norman McLean visited Mann Gulch a few days after this historic fire. The sight never left him. Himself a Montana-native, woodsman, firefighter, scholar, teacher, writer and son of a preacher – McLean was perhaps singularly poised to be its storyteller. Decades later, he spent the last fourteen years of his life penetrating this fire – interviewing, reading, researching, reflecting – countless individuals and documents, including scientists, the Forest Service, the parents of the dead, and Mann Gulch itself whose steep slopes he climbed in his eighties. His acclaimed account, Young Men and Fire, is not meant for the squeamish. He writes, "Burning to death on a mountainside is dying at least three times ... first, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and your legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes.”(1)
McLean looked straight into the fire. And he did not lie. In these young Smokejumpers he found the heartbreaking strength and panache with which they tackled every fire. He also found that their great skills in keeping all little fires little were completely unfitting for dealing with a big fire.
After August ‘49 and in the face of enormous questions, the Forest Service also took a searching look at fire. Two of their discoveries were startling, profound and changed forest fire management throughout the world. The first was that fire is beneficial to most forest ecosystems. The second was that not all fires need to be fought. This was a radical shift from the long-held conviction that forest fires are always gravely dangerous and thoroughly destructive. These young men had been sent into a fire that was never meant to be fought.
Fire – such a powerful, unpredictable, mysterious force. It seems so fitting that when Luke recounts the events of the coming of the Holy Spirit, symbols tell the story and the symbols are fire and wind. When the Spirit came on Pentecost, it struck like lightning. That is, nothing Luke tells us before that prepares us for such a fiery strike. Things had been orderly! Peter had replaced Judas in a community-agreed-upon decision. Then the apostles joined other believers in Jerusalem and established an orderly and secluded community-life, centered on prayer. Everything was proceeding in that kind of orderly way.
But then the lightning strike. And chaos quickly breaks out. Tongues of fire reach out and seize people. The sound of their speech spills out into the room. Soon the walls can’t contain the people, the sound, or the fiery Spirit that moves them. They’re thrust out onto the streets, proclaiming God’s mighty acts in full public view. And after that, the image of order is over. Now we have a fire.
~ ~ ~ ~
As we sit here listening to this now, it’s all a little peculiar. This wild tale of this fiery Spirit seizing people to speak in foreign tongues is almost harder to believe than the resurrection story. Yes, we can have a birthday cake for the church because whatever happened that day, Luke says it was the first time they called themselves Christians. But otherwise? – well, let’s move on. Now if we do keep the story, then we’d like to control the Spirit’s fire, right? We don’t want it to run our lives or our church. I mean, what would that look like? That said, we do like parts of it. We like the idea that the Spirit can pour out moving sermons in church or prophetic speech in the public square; we like that people from different backgrounds can understand one another. What we’d really like is to pack the Spirit’s roar and fire and extraordinary speech into a box that we can open when it’s useful for us – our church or our nation or our world.
But just let it loose? Just let it burn? Don’t try to control it? That is a hard thing to choose because we all know that fire – whether natural or spiritual – is the sort of thing that can easily get out of control. It could consume us. ‘Spare us a big fire O Lord, for we don’t want to sink in prayer as the Spirit overtakes us. Send us little spiritual fires that we can keep little.’
Well, good luck with that because the story of Luke-Acts shows it doesn’t really work that way as the Holy Spirit proves to be an unruly character. It brooded over the waters of creation. It tilted the axis of the universe with the coming of Christ. It turned Saul the persecutor into Paul the greatest missionary. And then just as he enjoyed missionary success and was unfolding his map for the next stop, the Spirit reverses and stops him. And then in the next centuries, the Spirit spread the Gospel, yes, like a wildfire. Someone described it like this: It went from home to home, city to city, crossing oceans, and nation to nation. See a prairie fire in your mind, blazing across vast, parched fields. It was like a forest fire rushing up the Cascade Mountain range. Can you see a forest fire, driven by mighty wind? That’s the way it was in the first centuries of Christian expansion.(2)
The Spirit is given to its own thing, not particularly amenable to our directing it. As Jesus says of the Spirit, "The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8-9)
Pentecost, we see, is not an event to be wished for … lightly. To participate in the Spirit of God’s will and work requires a kind of giving over, a high tolerance for lack of control, an ease with unpredictability. When it has you, you don’t know what will happen, you don’t know how God might change you, you don’t know what gulf the Spirit might jump and where it might land you. That’s hard for us – really hard. It’s hard to watch a fire blaze … and not fight it.
And yet, over and over, scripture says this is a fire that is not meant to be fought. And the truth is we do pray still for this Spirit, just as those first followers did. Each Sunday, we pray that we shall receive the Spirit and the kingdom and power, because we know we need it still. That prayer is the deepest act of humility and courage – the church’s humble acknowledgement that only God can give what the church desperately needs; and the church’s courage to dare let such a thing come on and not fight it. For what are we without it?
Ten days ago I had an odd dream. I’d been working on a very different Pentecost sermon, nothing about the fire – until the dream that put it in my gaze. I saw a large, low ground-fire blazing the land. At safe distance and yet near enough to see, I was mesmerized by its beauty – orange-yellow flames crawling over the land. In the dream, my son was eight years old. I went to fetch him, to prepare him and most of all to show him. ‘I want you to see this vision; it may come only once in a lifetime.’ And the boy saw the fire too. From there, I prepared us – to get ahead or behind the fire’s sweep. Simple boxcars carried us and carried many others – neighbors, friends, and church family. There was more to the dream, but this was the odd part: it seemed as if we were running from the fire of the Spirit, but as I looked straight at the dream, this was not so. It was the fire, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, that had led us, that directed our path. There were losses and new missions – for all of us. And that of course is what we pray for –
that we will not fight a fire that was never meant to be fought,
that we will let it renew the land of our mission,
that we will be in sweep of the Spirit’s work, humbly … and with courage.
Pray on it. Amen.
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References
1) Young Men and Fire, Norman McLean, page 7.
2) Nothing But Fire Kindles, Edward Markquart
[Corrected version, 7/23/2009]
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