A Word for the Church: Lighting the Wrong Fire

Fire and I have a fraught relationship. My brother showed me early on how you could pass your finger through a candle flame without hurting yourself, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I tried it and accidentally knocked over the candle on the table. I spilled hot wax on myself, which hurt, and I didn't do it again.

Once, our woodstove kicked out a large, flaming ember through its open vent, which landed on the carpet and immediately began to kindle next to my leg where I sat with my homework. Rather than heroically saving my family by stomping out the ember or removing it from danger, I fled from the room... and the house, out to the mailbox where our family "meeting place" was in case of fire. My family remained inside while my dad calmly took care of the ember and the burned spot on the carpet.

Once during a Christmas dinner made festive by candles and decorations on the table, my mom leaned over to place a casserole dish on a trivet, and got too close to the flame, catching her dress. I saw the fire rise from the material, and I shrieked and fled out the door to that same silly mailbox. 

I don't have time to mention the bacon-grease fire that nearly caught our cabinets, or the spark that sank through the air mattress and essentially "exploded" it, the (many) times I knocked over lit candles onto paper plates (you'd think we'd have learned never to keep candles in our house), or both times I watched a gas fire singe my mom's eyebrows and hair when the gas stove wasn't working properly and burn a hole through the tent -- behind her head -- where she was trying to cook a meal.

When I became a camp counselor at Spruce Lake Wilderness Camp in Pennsylvania during the summer of 2001, I learned a lot about the construction of fire. We counselors were required to cook breakfast for our campers morning in and morning out, and I learned the importance of dry kindling, oxygen at the root of the fire, the best ways to lay a fire, and how to keep a fire going even in the middle of a downpour. 

What we didn't learn, and I'd gladly have done without the lesson -- but I do see its importance -- is the destructive and powerful danger of uncontrollable fire. 

Fast-forward a few years. My husband, perhaps imagining the awful consequences of our children thinking it'd be fun to toss gasoline on a fire to "see what happened," decided to show the kids the results of this in a controlled environment, so they could understand that you never ever ever ever ever ever play with gasoline.

So my husband laid a fire in our backyard fire pit. He ran out the hose and put some buckets of water nearby, too -- just in case. He laid a small fire in the pit, but didn't light it as yet. He poured a little gasoline over it and then dribbled a long trail from the fire pit in an extended line through the yard so that he could "safely" light the fire from a distance. He put the gas can back in the shed and called the kids and me out for the demonstration.

"This, kids, is something you don't ever take for granted. Never mess with gasoline and fire." And he took the lighter in hand.

We all expected a trail of fire to run rapidly through the grass, hit the fire pit and billow into a decent campfire. None of us, my husband included, expected the explosive force of spark to gasoline. It knocked my husband backward from the launch point and threw him several feet. The fire moved so fast, we almost didn't see its progress, and the fire didn't just billow when it hit the firepit -- it mushroomed above our shed. A bare-earth, blackened trail ran from where my husband had lit the gasoline all the way across the yard to the firepit.

Freaked us all out, and our lesson was learned. Gasoline is a big nope. A big nope, nope, nope. 

The funny thing was, that "lesson" took place several years ago. That trail leftover from the fire that burned through the grass still hasn't completely grown back. It left its scar for far, far longer than we ever foresaw.

Okay, yesterday, I managed to get through James 3:1-2, intending to go through James 3:1-12. It didn't happen, but I got there today. James is talking about the tongue, that little gadget that sits in our mouths and flippety-flaps all day long, right? Yesterday I talked about active listening; today, it's the other side of listening. Now we're at the talking.

Talking, though, more than simply the vocal cords moving and sound waves vibrating when we open our mouths. We wield a lot of power when we let words come out. Voltaire once said (and you may have heard the same from a more recent source if you watch Marvel movies): "With great power comes great responsibility." 

James uses quite a few metaphors here: A horse moves in accordance with a tiny (in comparison with the animal) metal bit shoved into his mouth. A massive ship sails through the waters, steered by a small rudder. An entire forest burns up by the strength of one single, little spark. 

"The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person (not just the mouth), sets the whole course of his life on fire (not just that moment in time), and is itself set on fire by hell (the enemy uses even Christians for his purposes if we let him)" (James 3:6).

James isn't pulling punches here; he's got all sorts of wallops in this passage. "No man can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil, full of deadly poison." Your words are like a gasoline fire; the effect they have surprises even you.

Once, my brother and I were arguing (when we were kids). As these things go, our tempers escalated, and our words followed suit, until -- in a single moment, I snapped, "I wish I'd had my other brother instead of you" (referring to a miscarriage my mother had had before I was born. Ironically, if that baby had lived, I would never have existed, because timing).

... 

Can you feel the awful weight of those words? I still can. I hear them ringing in my head even now. As soon as they slipped out of my mouth, I felt awful, but the words were out, and out of my control. There was this silence that was sickening, and I could see and feel the hurt in my brother's face. I still cringe. I might have been eight or nine when I spoke those words. I'm forty-one now, and I remember the gross poisonous silence like I'd just said them.

I apologized later. It wasn't a mumbled "sorry." I really did mean it. But the damage I'd inflicted was still there, and the thing was -- those words hadn't damaged just my brother. They'd damaged me, too. I'd lit the spark, but the resulting fire had thrown us both backward, and burned each of us.

Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12, warns the church in Corinth about the tongue and its dangers. "I fear that there may be quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, factions, slander, gossip, arrogance, and disorder" (2 Corinthians 12:20), he says -- to the church.

Did you get that? Paul says that he fears that he will find quarreling, outbursts of anger, factions, slander, gossip, arrogance, and disorder -- among the people of God. Among the same people instructed to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

James says: "With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be! Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My brothers, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water."

He lines his thoughts up with what he's been preaching in the whole chapter before this: faith with feet. Not that we won't ever make mistakes, not that we won't ever allow a blistering word to slip from between our lips -- but if we, the people who claim to follow God -- are quarreling with one another, being jealous of each other, throwing temper tantrums, dividing and taking sides, talking behind one another's backs, claiming "I'm right and you're not," and generally causing disorder among our ranks...

We've lit the gas fire, and all of us are thrown back, because it is out of our control.

...

For consideration: The church is not supposed to fight like the world does. I'm not talking military. I'm not talking NATO or UN or DHS or anything like that. I'm talking about Facebook. I'm talking about Twitter. I'm talking about Instagram and comment sections below articles.

Ouch. Because most of us (most) won't fight face to face. Nope. We sit behind our keyboards or our phones; we stand at a distance and toss our sparks at the end of the trail of gasoline, waaay too often forgetting that gasoline is a force to be reckoned with, and we're not prepared for the fallout.

Here's what Paul has to say about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, comment sections, and keyboard warriors in the church (despite the fact that he knew nothing at all about social media): "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we [that's us, church] fight with are not weapons of the world. On the contrary, they [the weapons we fight with] have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

This is the word the Holy Spirit gave me this morning to give to the church: Don't fight the wrong battle. Don't light the wrong fire. Don't use "arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God" to fight against the exact same thing. Our battle is a higher battle. It's a battle that we can't see with our physical eyes but is just as real and more deadly than the annihilation that happens in the comment threads of social media.

We should not toss our matches at a gasoline pit in our anger. Instead lets turn our attention and our energy and our focus toward that "taking captive every thought," watching every time we open our lips and get that flippety-flap muscle in the center of our mouths ready to speak, centering our hands over our keyboards and typing out a response to Commenter X, Y, or Z. 

Who has struggled with this? I know I have. And sometimes, I've lost the battle. I've deleted, but internet never forgets, y'all. There's still a burned line tracing through the memories of some people where I've tossed the match without consideration.

Here's the fire we the church must pay attention to: "Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our "God is a consuming fire!" (Hebrews 12:28-29).

Here's a flashback to the 90's. Thanks, Third Day. :)