Sermon Archive
To Burn but not to be Consumed
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 1 September 2002
Exodus 3 1-15; Romans 12 9-21; Matthew 16 21-28
Mike Gill from Southampton has invented an inflatable church. It has five inflatable pews, an inflatable altar, candles, cross and even an inflatable organ. He wants to hire it out for weddings. This summons up images of the happy couple bouncing whilst making their vows - rather like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's sketch about the leaping nuns of Norwich. However, I fear that an inflatable church is never likely evoke a sense of mystery and holiness.
Rabbi Hillel reckoned that the process of receiving our daily bread is more miraculous than the crossing of the Red Sea. His point being that if we learn to see miracle in everything then we discover that everything, not just the parting of the waters or, for that matter, the burning bush reveals God to us. And, indeed, a miracle that feeds everyone each day is far more significant than one that merely happens once, however spectacular.
In this way, God is seen to be revealed in the everyday, the familiar, the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. We might therefore ask ourselves how many times we have passed a bush and failed to notice that it was burning, perhaps precisely because it was not consumed by the fire. Who is to say, then, that an inflatable church may not speak in its own way of the awe-inspiring mystery of God - burning but not melting? And let's face it, that idea is no more incongruous than seeing God in a bush in the desert.
Or take our art exhibition in the chapel. A woman phoned me yesterday. She didn't give her name but she did give her opinion. 'It is utterly disgusting,' she said, 'to hang paintings like that in a place dedicated to the worship of God.' 'Why?' I asked. 'Well if you, a so-called minister, don't know then there's no point in me telling you.' Shortly after that she hung up. (I don't think I handled the conversation very well.) She particularly objected to the painting placed by the altar. She felt that it was obscene to present a picture of a nude woman (and a not conventionally beautiful one - 'droopy and misshapen' she called it) in what we take to be a holy place.
She rang off before I could suggest that she was missing the point of the exhibition. The exhibition, by the artist Joyce Gunn Cairns, is called: 'Where beauty lies.' Clearly there is a pun here. Female beauty, as popularly presented, is deceitful (it lies) in that it presents an impossible ideal of the body. It is at best fantasy at worst a tyranny that enslaves and corrupts. The picture in question does not deceive in this way. More than that it asks us to look beyond the surface to find where beauty really resides.
If we were to explore the whole exhibition we would find there representations of the Christian story, Mary, Joseph and so on, presented not through idealized images but through the ordinary. The miraculous is evident in ordinary people, people just like us, people as ordinary as the desert bush that burned, but was not consumed by the flames.
For in truth there is another kind of beauty, a deeper kind of beauty, in which the body is not an end in itself but the medium of the soul. There are times when suffering bestows a special kind of beauty. Or, just occasionally at a death bed you realise that you are on holy ground and, figuratively speaking, you remove your shoes.
Intimations of the divine. But only intimations. For though God is in the burning bush yet we learn nothing of him, or virtually nothing. When Moses asks for his name he receives the almost evasive answer, 'I am who I am', 'I am known only to myself.' This is tantamount to saying, 'Mind your own business.' We are always ready to encapsulate mystery in words. Yet the moment we do so somehow we lose the mystery we sought to describe in the first place and instead create something like an idol. How often have Christians through the ages used words, definitions, dogmas, orthodoxies as a way of judging others, limiting others, beating them into submission. The God of the burning bush refuses to be abused in this way, to become a means of domination for one person over another.
Remember, the bush burns but it is not consumed by the fire. Does this not describe a wonderful truth about the way God meets us? God comes, engulfs us but does not destroy us. God possesses us, rages through us, yet in so doing far from consuming and denying our essence this fire reveals what we are, fulfils what we are to become. Isn't this partly what Jesus means when he tells us that those who lose their life for his sake will find it?
But there is a challenge in this too. That we should welcome the fire of God yet resist the urge to be consumed by a conflagration that can spread out of control like a forest fire - trapping some, destroying others. Let me offer some examples.
Take September 11th and its aftermath. It lit a terrible fire of outrage, anger and hatred. That the fire should burn is inevitable but the challenge is to let it spur us on to action that heals rather than destroys ourselves and others. To burn but not be consumed.
Or the Earth Summit that has been taking place last week and this, where leaders and officials from many governments have met to plan for a credible future for our world and its peoples. For some this represents a passionate cry for justice, for others it is a threat to economic dominance and electoral success. But can those who burn with the determination at last to find progress towards sustainable development yet keep enough of a hold on their idealism to accept also the demands of real politik? To burn but not to be consumed.
Or the tragic story of Holly and Jessica. Again we rightly burn with anger and with compassion but there are other emotions at work causing the fires to rage out of control. The ugly demand for vengeance, the ghoulish sentiment that sends busloads of tourists to Soham. Are we alight with a clear-headed determination to make our community a better, safer place for children, or are we consumed by something less attractive?
The challenge, I suppose is to make the ground we walk on holy ground. And speaking for myself the world is transfigured, it glows with a divine light when people deeply wronged learn to forgive - when people deeply hurt can yet greet the sunrise with joy. I think this is what St Paul is getting at when he tells us to feed our enemies and give them something to drink. 'By so doing we will heap burning coals on their heads.' That is, we shall cause them to burn up with a sense of shame. Again, a fire that does not destroy but brings them perhaps to a deeper sense of their own humanity.
Here is that uncomfortable strand of non-resistance, which we find also in the Sermon on the Mount and that has been called 'the most creative element in Christian ethics.'[C H Dodd] Or perhaps we should call it 'passive resistance' for Paul exhorts us not to be overcome by evil but to outdo evil with good. Sometimes, I suspect, our world forgets how potent forgiveness, temperance, forbearance can be as a means to a better world and, conversely, how far our present troubles are rooted in the fear that these virtues make us look weak.
In the end, it is the task of the church to reveal divinity. To share with others our encounter with the God who makes the most ordinary things gleam with new light. More than this to be those who know the flame of God at the heart of their own lives, burning, inspiring but not destroying. And so to do God's will.
The burning bush was not an intimate private moment between Moses and God, it was a moment of fierce revelation. It was the experience that sent him off to liberate others. The fire of our faith has the same purpose and the same possibility. Not to enslave but to liberate. Not to limit but to uncover the limitless possibilities that life in its fullness promises for us all.
This is the fire we must share with others, as we encourage them to discover the holiness of God in the innocuous and the unexpected. So that they might encounter God at their own burning bush, or burning inflatable church for that matter, and be sent onwards smouldering with both a new sense of identity and purpose and also a realisation of the awesome mystery of the God who is beyond us yet beside us.
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