"STAYING CLOSE TO THE FIRE"

 “STAYING CLOSE TO THE FIRE”

When I was growing up in small town Arkansas, our house did not have central heating.  The house was heated by a big gas space heater in the living room/dining room area.  It was located where the coal chute and coal fired heater previously was.  It heated the house unevenly, and on cold winter days and nights, we would back up to the heater to get enough warmth built up in order to go into the other parts of the house.  To this day, I still feel much warmer when I can back up to a source of heat.

I sometimes think of the Christmas season as this metaphor of fire and heat for our lives.  It is a story of a central location of love in our lives, and during this time, we are invited to come close to the fire of God’s love, so that we can get warmed up enough in order to go through the remainder of the year, seeking to live with love at the center of our lives.  As the calendar year goes on, and life gets complicated, we long to get back close to the source of the fire.  The idea of Christmas as a time of renewal takes root here.

There is another part of the metaphor of fire that burns in these Christmas stories:  John the Baptizer.  Luke’s version of the birth of Jesus begins not with Jesus but with the backstory for the birth of John the Baptizer.  John’s conception is not quite as stunning as Jesus’ conception, but it is miraculous nonetheless.  The mothers of John and Jesus are cousins, and they become cousins, some scholars arguing that Jesus becomes a disciple of John the Baptizer.  Other Gospel accounts, like John’s, portray them as rivals, but whatever their relationship, all four Gospels see John as the precursor for Jesus, as one who prepares the way for Jesus.

John the Baptizer was a man on fire.  He took the warmth of the love of God and channeled it into a burning call for repentance and justice and equity.  He challenged the Temple as a site of renewal and religious sanctity.  He offered the idea of baptism in the river as a source of renewal and repentance.  By “repentance,” he didn’t mean only the ceasing of doing bad things – he meant a complete re-orientation of our will and imaginations, a re-orientation towards God and not towards the powers of the world.  It was here, in this idea of death and rebirth that is part of the ritual of baptism, that people could find the fire to renew their lives.

John not only used fire as image of renewal – he used it also as an image of consequences and punishment.  His sermon went like this in Luke 3, as he chastised the religious leaders who came out to hear him:  “You children of snakes!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?......Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees;  every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  When the leaders and the people asked him what they could do to escape this kind of fire, he told them to share food and clothes with the poor, to refrain from cheating people and to stop robbing people.  For John, the warmth of God’s love was a fire that burned for justice and for equity.

    Later on in his own ministry, Jesus would pick up this image of John’s fire, as seen in Luke 12: “I came to set the earth on fire, and would that it were already burning.”  John is remembered as being more fiery than Jesus, but both of them were executed by the state, though they burned for justice in different ways.  

    “Stay close to the fire” is a central meaning of Christmas.  One of its meanings is what we saw at the beginning, like that space heater of my youth:  radiating God’s love to sustain us through the coldness of the year.  A second meaning, however, mitigates against our tendency to make Christmas s sentimental and sweet season, when we forget all the troubles of the world and seek to make nice for awhile.  This second meaning reminds us that Christmas is a fire that burns for justice, that the story itself is offensive in so many ways:  a teenager pregnant before marriage, subject to the death penalty;  a male asked to move from the center of life to the margins; a baby born on the streets; the Holy Family forced to flee as refugees to another country in order to escape political persecution and execution.  

    As we gather (even remotely) for this Christmas holiday, let us remember these aspects of the Christmas fire:  warmth and burning for justice.  As I write this, I am waiting for the results of the Electoral College vote, and that political weight tempts me to move towards the warmth of the Christmas fire.  Yet, this very political day reminds me of the need to stay close to the fiery nature of the Christmas fire, to Mary’s Magnificat.  As Rory Cooney put it in the words to the great Christmas song “Canticle of the Turning”:  “My heart shall sing of the day you bring, let the fires of your justice burn.  Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn.”  Stay close to the Christmas fire.