Rex McKee

“Is Not My Word Like Fire?”

Risking Everything for Truth in a Broken World

 

In the name of the Holy One, who plants with love, speaks with fire, and calls to us again and again. Amen.

Remembering this day the 60^th anniversary on August 20^th the assassination of Jonathan Daniels, third year Episcopal seminarian attending Harvard Divinity School, by a part time sheriff KKK member in Hayneville Alabama. Jonathan was there to engage voter registration and stepped in front of Black Activist Ruby Sales to save her life. The assassin was acquitted by an all-white jury.

Let us begin where we often hesitate to dwell at the smoldering edge of God’s lament.

Isaiah shares a love song in today’s reading, although one with a bitter refrain. A vineyard planted in fertile soil. Cleared, protected, nurtured. Yet, despite best intentions yields only wild, sour grapes. As Billie Holiday sings, a strange fruit.

Isaiah’s poetic metaphor here is clear: God expected justice and received bloodshed. God desired righteousness and instead heard the cries of the oppressed.

I suggest that Isaiah’s prophecy is not the tantrum of an angry god—it is the lament of a heartbroken one.

In Jeremiah 23, divine lament takes another turn. False prophets are spinning dreams of comfort, offering sugar-coated visions that sedate rather than awaken.

Jeremiah, speaking in first person for God proclaims:

I have heard the prophets prophesying lies in my name. They claim, “I’ve had a dream; I’ve had a dream!”  How long will deceitful prophecies dominate the minds of the prophets? Those prophets are treacherous.

They scheme to make my people forget me by their dreams that people tell each other, Isn’t my word like fire and like a hammer that shatters rock?

 

God’s word is fire and like a hammer…

In today’s Gospel from Luke, Jesus echo’s with great urgency the divine impatience and frustration:

“I came to bring fire to the earth—and how I wish it were already kindled!”
“Do you think I have come to bring peace? No, I tell you, but division.”

To be sure, this is not the gospel we want to hear in these tumultuous times.

These are not rejections of God’s covenant of shalom. Rather, they are rejections of false peace, a pseudo peace that hides injustice, cushions the powerful, calls silence a virtue when truth needs to be spoken.

To grasp fully the weight of Jesus’ words today, we should understand that this firestorm has been building through the 12^th chapter of Luke.

Jesus draws his followers into a vision of life that is free from fear and grasping. He warns of the emptiness of greed through the parable of the rich fool, reminding us that life’s worth is not found in our possessions but in being “rich toward God.”

He invites us to release our anxious striving, to trust in the God who feeds the ravens and clothes the lilies, and to believe that our deepest needs will be met in the abundance of God’s reign.

And he calls us to live as watchful servants, ready at all times for the inbreaking of God’s kingdom—remaining faithful, compassionate, and accountable in the everyday work of love and justice. As John noted last week, look busy Jesus is coming.

And then today’s Gospel, Jesus’s language is harsh, unsettling, and brutally painful: following Jesus will not preserve harmony at all costs. It is not Minnesota nice.

It will set households against each other. It calls us to speak words of fire instead of calm. Judgement, not comfort.

And so we ask: Are we willing to have courage and mercy to risk everything to speak Holy liberation truth into a broken world?

The temptation to be silenced is strong particularly in a culture that confuses niceness with holiness, and civility with faithfulness.

Scripture is clear: silence in the face of injustice is not peace. It is complicity.

These are not tales of triumphalism. These are stories of a people called to commit to a relationship with God, who laments, following the way of love, committed to more than their own security. We are called to follow in their footsteps.

We live in a time when many are peddling hallucinations, as John noted from Marx, opiate dreams of cheap grace, of sanitized history and banned books, of Christian nationalism masquerading as Gospel.

Prophets warn that God’s word will not be used to prop up lies. It is fire. It is a hammer.  And it is love.

Divine fire is for refining, so that something honest, holy, and liberating might rise.

It burns away illusions of peace, corrupted comfort, the exaggeration of fear calmed with illusions of safety.

We who deeply follow Jesus are not called to extinguish that fire, but to carry it—humbly, fiercely, lovingly. To extend mercy with courage and action. To speak when it is hard. To act when it costs. To lament when the vineyard we are entrusted with yields wild grapes. And to believe, with our ancestors in faith, that something better still lies ahead.

Too frequently we have mistaken Christian nationalism for the Gospel.  We have confused Pentecostal fire with patriotic fervor, as if the Creator of the cosmos were merely the sponsor of our nation’s current agenda.

Let me be clear with my understanding of scripture, God is not about saving the United States or any other state or empire. God is about growing the reign of heaven on earth. The cross, the way of love, The Paschal Mystery, Jesus’s suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, always comes before the flag of any nation. Always!

God’s covenant with us is not about discovery or manifest destiny, but rather the manifestation of justice, mercy, and love across all peoples and lands. Our misguided notion that this nation was divinely chosen for dominion has led us beyond the brink of moral collapse. It has fueled a religiosity of conquest instead of compassion, exclusion instead of embrace, silence instead of truth.

We find ourselves in crisis—not because God has abandoned us, but because we have traded God’s reign of heaven for a golden throne of our own making.

 

However, we have been here before: The people grew restless. Moses had been gone far too long up on the sacred mountain, caught up in prayer and mystery. The people below grew bored, their restless anxiety overwhelmed them.

They turned to Aaron. “Make us gods,” they said. “Make us something we can see, something to lead us forward.

This Moses who brought us out of Egypt? We don’t even know if he’s coming back.”

Aaron caved. He gathered their gold trinkets, 401k’s, earrings, adornments of empire and he melted them down. From the fire he shaped a calf, an idol of their own making.

And when it stood glittering in the sun, imagine the bronze bull on wall street in the shadow of Trinity Episcopal Church, they declared, “These are your gods, O Israel the ones who brought you up out of Egypt.”

When Moses came down from the mountain and saw what they had done the calf, the dancing, the idolatry, his fury erupted. The tablets of the covenant, etched by the very hand of God, shattered at his feet. Moses took the golden idol, burned it, crushed it into dust, scattered it on the water, and made the people drink it. A bitter fruit.

Will we be the prophetic voices that call out to cast down empires golden idols in our lives?

Do we have the courage and mercy to speak God’s truth in a broken world? To speak out at grocery stores and border crossings, in churches and classrooms, in protests and prayer circles?

We have warnings from two modern prophets that were clear about the evil of silence and who bore the cost of truth in their own bodies and ministries:
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

These are not hypothetical evils. They are born in confessions carved from prison walls and protests, from pulpits overshadowed by Christian nationalism, from ICE raids and deportation of innocents to foreign lands, from the military takeover of our capital city, all well outside the limits of our constitutionally shared values.

May we speak out surrounded by the cloud of witnesses and prophets who faithfully refused to be silent.

Let us keep our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the journey set before him endured the cross, rose from the dead, scorning its shame, and igniting a movement of love and liberation.

May we carry the fire of sacred resistance with mercy, courage, and determined love in action.  Be busy, Jesus is here among us.  Amen

10am Service