Fire-and-Brimstone
Preaching
John the Baptizer does not mince words. He addresses his audience as a “brood of vipers!” (3:7). He warns them about “the wrath to come” (3:7). He talks about a mysterious ax and unfruitful trees being cut down and thrown into the fire (3:9). Later he talks about the messiah carrying a “winnowing fork,” separating wheat from chaff and burning the chaff with “unquenchable fire” (3:17).
Is John the Baptizer the father of fire-and-brimstone preaching? I wonder. The tradition of fire-and-brimstone preaching revolves around fear, which can be a powerful motivator. If your audience is faced with the threat of a fiery torment, they will likely be willing to do whatever you say. Perhaps fear is the reason that the crowds are willing to change. Perhaps it is why they ask John, “What then should we do?”
Fast-forward two thousand years, and we now have an ample amount of data to study the effects of fire-and-brimstone, fear-based preaching. We can ask, “So, how’s that been working out for us?” For a long time, it worked well enough, institutionally speaking. It kept bottoms in pews. But one of its side effects is what we might call “moralism”—a tendency to see the world in good and bad, right and wrong, so that we can ensure that we are on the right side of the divide and out of the fiery flames.
But as Jesuit priest Greg Boyle observes, moralism hasn’t actually kept us moral. It’s only kept us apart. It doesn’t result in a genuine transformation of character, but rather leaves us jittery with judgement toward others and shame toward ourselves. Fire-and-brimstone, fear-based preaching is to our faith what sugar is to our body—an immediate rush of energy, followed by a crash; an unhealthy diet, an unsustainable way of living.
Is Fire Part of the
Equation?
So I’m inclined to think there’s more going on in John the Baptizer’s wilderness escapades than simply fire-and-brimstone preaching. To be sure, his message of repentance is meant to deliver a shock to the system. But perhaps the shock isn’t what we, through centuries of fire-and-brimstone preaching, have been conditioned to hear. The whole point of fire-and-brimstone theology as we know it is to avoid the fire. But John the Baptizer says that the messiah will baptize with “the Holy Spirit and fire,” which to me sounds like saying that fire is part of the equation, a part of what it means to be baptized in the Holy Spirit.
What would it mean for fire to be part of the equation? Let me offer up a parable to explore the possibility that fire is not damnation but part of salvation. Like John the Baptizer’s preaching in the wilderness, this parable—which was originally crafted by Peter Rollins, a Northern Irish theologian—may be a bit of a shock. My hope is that, like John the Baptizer’s preaching, the shock might be constructive.
A Parable: Finding
Faith
Once upon a time, there lived a fiery preacher. Early in his ministry, he discovered that he had a “powerful but unusual gift.” Whenever he prayed for someone, they would lose their faith. The preacher quickly learned to delegate the task of praying to others, lest he cause his parishioners to lose their faith.
One day, the preacher was flying across the country to attend a conference. The man beside him in the airplane struck up a conversation. The preacher learned that his neighbor was a businessman, “a very powerful and ruthless merchant banker.”[1] When the businessman noticed a Bible in the preacher’s hands, he shared that he was a Christian himself. “‘The world of business is a cold one,’ he confided to the preacher, ‘and in my line of work I find myself in situations that challenge my Christian convictions. But I try, as much as possible, to remain true to my faith. Indeed, I attend a local church every Sunday, participate in a prayer circle, engage in some youth work, and contribute to a weekly Bible study. These activities help to remind me of who I really am.’”[2]
“After listening carefully to the businessman’s story, the preacher began to realize the purpose of his unseemly gift. So he turned to the businessman and said, ‘Would you allow me to pray a blessing into your life?’”[3] The businessman nodded enthusiastically and bowed his head. The preacher prayed a short prayer as the plane landed, and the two men parted ways.
A few years later, the preacher was taking the same flight across the country to a conference when—lo and behold!—the businessman was sitting beside him. As soon as they recognized each other, the businessman broke into a story of how his last few years had gone. “You won’t believe it, but when you prayed for me, I lost my belief in the Bible, church, and even God. Suddenly, the rest of my life became incredibly unpleasant—like being enclosed in a hot, stuffy room without a fan or air conditioning or anything cold to drink. Without religion to make me feel good about myself, to assure me of salvation when I died, I had to face the reality that I was a hard-nosed and cruel businessman working in a corrupt business. I began to despise what I did. Within months, I had a breakdown. I resigned from my job, gave all the money I’d made to the poor, and began to use my expertise to help others.” He paused, and tears began to fall down his face. “I have to thank you, dear friend—for helping me discover my faith.”
A Refining Fire
The word religion comes from a Latin root that means “to bind.” In one sense, religion is the glue that keeps our world together, the center of gravity that holds everything in place. This can become problematic, though, when God is trying to change things as they are, to make all things new. “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’” (3:8), John the Baptizer tells his Jewish audience, perhaps because their heritage as God’s chosen people has led them to settle and become comfortable in a status quo that serves neither them nor the wider world to whom they are meant to be a blessing. In a similar way, the promise of eternal salvation held everything together for the businessman from our parable. Only when his original beliefs went up in flames and he no longer had that promise to hold everything together, could he become honest enough about reality to make some real changes. The parable is left open-ended, but I choose to interpret that the businessman has actually returned to church and reading the Bible and praying to God. Only now, he does all of this in a different way. He no longer lives for the afterlife. He lives for the present life. He trusts that God’s kingdom is in his midst and that he is called to receive it by learning from the gentle and humble heart of Jesus. He changes his way of living so that he might enter the kingdom of God now, rather than later.
When John the Baptist talks about fire, about unfruitful trees being cut down and burned, about chaff being separated from the wheat and burned, perhaps he is not telling the crowds to avoid the fire, but rather to welcome it. Perhaps the fire is part of his way of describing repentance (and how it sometimes feels). Perhaps he is describing how God’s salvation works. We are baptized, he says, not only with the Holy Spirit but also with fire. There is a rich tradition elsewhere in scripture of fire as an image of refinement. The Hebrew prophets occasionally spoke of God as a consuming fire that refines us as fire refines precious metals.
Some of our prayers in today’s service have borrowed words and images from a poem-prayer of pastor Ted Loder (which I’ve printed extra copies of and left in the fellowship hall).[4] It is a challenging prayer, but one worth wrestling with. Loder acknowledges a host of difficult or negative experiences, such as hurt and fear and confusion and shame, and he finds God’s grace in each experience. Which is to say, he finds God’s refining fire in each experience. This does not mean that God causes these experiences, but only that God calls to us through them. God uses them. They become instruments of grace, axes lying at the root of unfruitful trees, winnowing forks separating wheat from chaff—inviting us to let go of perfection and grand expectations; inviting us to drop our masks and share more vulnerably with each other; inviting us to surrender our designs on the future (and our regrets for the past) and instead to find God in the present moment.
Fear-based religion and moralism hasn’t kept us moral. It’s only kept us apart. It hasn’t changed us, it’s only entrenched us in judgment and shame. As we hear John the Baptizer’s preaching today, maybe this time we can hear something a little different. Not the threats of a fire to avoid, but the encouragement to welcome the full baptism of our Lord, which includes fire. Maybe instead of running away from the pain in our lives, we can go through it, as precious metal passes through flames, as a baptized person passes through the waves.
Maybe…it’s only a suggestion. As always, you can take what rings true in all that I’ve said, and you can leave the rest.
Prayer
Whose love refreshes like water
Even as it burns like fire—
With the assurance that we are your children,
Beloved and pleasing in your eyes,
May we be encouraged and empowered
To welcome the fiery side of baptism,
To find your presence in the flames.
…
Help us to change and grow
In the manner that Jesus grew in wisdom and grace,
Not through gritted teeth and white knuckles,
But through a gentle and humble heart.
In Christ, who reveals God with us: Amen.
[1] Peter Rollins, The
Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales (Brewster, MA: Paraclete,
2009), 57-58.
[2] Rollins, The Orthodox
Heretic, 57-58.
[3] Rollins, The Orthodox
Heretic, 57-58.
[4] Ted Loder, “Pry Me Off Dead
Center,” in Guerillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle (Minneapolis:
Augsburg, 1981), 102-103.
