Texts: Exodus 3.1-12; Psalm 46.4-11; 2 Peter 3.3-16; John 8.12, 28-30, 54-59
As we wind our way toward the conclusion of this ‘Season of Creation’ next Sunday, with its celebration of Saints Clare and Francis of Assisi, the resources provided by the Uniting Church and, indeed, the global church, go missing in action. There are no specific liturgical resources provided for today, and no suggestions for a theme. That being so, I’ve decided to lead you on a pathway that begins and ends with fire.
Perhaps the oldest story still in human memory is not from the bible, but from the songlines of multiple Aboriginal nations, stretching from the Yupan-guthi on Cape York to the Whadjuk in Perth. It is the saga of seven beautiful sisters who come to earth from the stars and are chased by a mischievous ancestral spirit from the very moment of their arrival. To evade the mischievous spirit, they use the magic of fire—the essence of their creative power—to create hiding places and shelters all over the continent of Gondwana. Their flight forms much of the landscape we know as the Great Dividing Range and both the southern and western deserts. Eventually the sisters turn back into the pure flame of their true forms and return to sky as a constellation of stars. There they are still pursued by the mischievous spirit, the morning star, across the night sky.
It is not at all surprising, then, that the divine appears to the ancestors of the Jewish people as fire, also. The call of Moses, as we read it just now in the book of Exodus, begins when he strays onto the mount of God and sees a bush that is burning but without being consumed. From these flames a voice is heard, identifying this fire as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a God who has heard the cries of God’s people under the enslavement of the Pharoahs and has ‘come down’ to deliver them to a wide and spacious land, filled with milk and honey. Here we learn, amongst other things, that the God of the Hebrews, as with the seven sisters of primordial dreaming, is a fire who both draws people to Godself and also transforms them by giving them a mission and a purpose in the world. God is the Holy Fire who provides us a home. God is also the fire that leads us out to share that sense of home and freedom with many others.
Of course, the road to freedom is not entirely straight forward. There are many dangers along the way, many enemies who would prevent us from becoming the free people God would call us to be. That is why the Psalm for today imagines God as one who must sometimes become a fierce and consuming fire in order to protect the people of God. One might imagine, here, that fire is transformed into a weapon of war, as it is transformed in a thousand and one Hollywood epics retelling the terrible deeds of both ancient and modern worlds. But no. That is not what the Psalmist imagines. For him, God is a fire who actually burns the weapons of war so that they can no longer to do harm. Here wars are ended not by using fire as a weapon against other weapons, as in your standard arms race, but as the substance which makes war impossible in the first place. God as a consuming fire, a fire which transforms violence and abuse into nothing. God as a still-point around which we are called to be still, ourselves. To stop our bickering, to deescalate our violent ambitions and share, instead, the gift of our common home in God. Oh, that the warriors of our world would learn this lesson. Oh, that our politicians might learn to be still and wonder at the consuming fire of divine love, that would have us surrender our weapons and look at each other with joy and welcome.
Which brings us to the story of Jesus, whom the evangelist John calls the ‘light’ or the ‘glory’ of the divine amongst us, here in the midst of our communities and our world. For when the enemies of Jesus seek to cut him down to size, he claims to have been around since well before the patriarch Abraham. He claims to be divine, the very same ‘I am’ who addressed Moses as fire in the burning bush and led the people through the wilderness as the ‘Shekinah’, or glory, of the pillar of fire. For Christians, Jesus is indeed our light. He is the campfire in our midst who holds the darkness as bay. He is the glory who lights our way through the wilderness our lives. Who helps us to find shelter, a home and hearth, that is warm and nourishing and welcoming for everyone. He is fire who consumes in us all that is false and untrue and sets us free to be real and genuine. He is the great transformer, the fire of alchemy that can turn us from being afraid into being comfortable with who we are and what we are called to do in the world. He can turn our mourning into dancing and our spears into pruning hooks. He can make all that is dead alive and fresh once more.
With this capacity for alchemy and transformation, Jesus remind us Aboriginal people of the Old People who made our world and gave us the law. We recognise him as an ancestral spirit, like the seven sisters, who visits the world with the gift of divine fire. So, Jesus is as much a friend to us Aboriginal people, as he is to you settlers. A gift from the heavens for warmth, and for home, and for light when all the other lights of the world appear to be going out. Let us look to him and his ways for wisdom when we can find none of our own.
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