newstalk

Two readings and a meditation.

Hebrews 12:26-29, NLT:

bq. When God spoke from Mount Sinai his voice shook the earth, but now he makes another promise: “Once again I will shake not only the earth but the heavens also.” This means that the things on earth will be shaken, so that only eternal things will be left. Since we are receiving a Kingdom that cannot be destroyed, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe. For our God is a consuming fire.

I John 1:5-7, NLT:

bq. This is the message he has given us to announce to you: God is light and there is no darkness in him at all. So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness. We are not living in the truth. But if we are living in the light of God’s presence, just as Christ is, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from every sin.

Our Christian faith, I think, is like a living room. We spend a lot of time choosing the drapes, arranging the furniture, decorating the mantle. These can be important choices worthy of our consideration. But there are two elements in this scene compared to which all else is secondary.

First, there must be a fire in the fireplace which produces heat to warm the room and its occupant(s). Being a phenomenon which we toy with at our own peril, fire plays a strange role in this domestic scene. We are as dependent upon its barely tameable exuberance as upon water, air, shelter. If the flame blazes too hot, we perish as chaff. If the flame is quenched, we perish as cold stone. This fire in this fireplace is one that, capturing all that is transcendent, light and heat and all the fury of life and the surface of the sun, this earth’s life giver, takes it and places it in a merely human context, where utility and pleasure often obscure the grand and the golden. Yet, take away the drapes and the furniture, let everyone sit on milk crates, and the fire must remain. Take away the mantelpiece, take away even the living room itself, fireplace and all, and the fire must remain to lead us through these earthly nights and to keep us warm.

Second, to fulfil this scene, there must be the people gathered around the fire. Be they old British gentlemen in smoking coats sitting on red velour, or American housewives in Woolite and cotton throwing a Tupperware party around the coffee table, or newlyweds sitting on packing boxes, roasting chestnuts deep into a winter’s evening, or even a young poet sitting by himself, staring into the flames. Whoever they are, they are ourselves and our neighbors, and we must gather to argue, to fellowship, to love, to dream. But here is both the challenge and the mystery: as we do these things with each other, the fire is in our midst and partakes with us and we with it, and because of this we will never be the same again.

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