Proper 15 Year C, 17 August 2025
May I speak to you in the Name of the living God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Before I begin, let me just say what a joy it is to be back in Wellfleet this morning. I had the honor of preaching here several years ago, on a quiet June Sunday, and I’m really grateful to Tracey for the invitation to be back with you this morning. Of course, I might not have said yes if I’d looked at that Gospel first… But still, it’s a treat to be here. Thank you.
Speaking of that Gospel…. Jesus is bringing the heat this morning. If you’ve been in church much this summer, then you know it’s not been a Jesus gentle-meek-and- mild kind of a summer.
Two weeks ago, we heard the parable of the rich fool who stored up treasure for himself but was not rich toward God. “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you,” Jesus warns. This incredible life we’ve been given? It’s not simply up to us to decide what to do with it.
Last week, Jesus told us to be dressed for action, our lamps lit, “for the Son of Man will come at an unexpected hour.” “If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into,” Jesus warns.
There’s a sense of building urgency to Jesus’s message over these past weeks. A warning about complacency. And boy-oh-boy, that Gospel we just heard? That’s what we get, loud and clear. Jesus’s sense of urgency has reached a fever-pitch. He’s a little hot under the collar.
“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!
Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”
Jesus knows that his teaching, His proclamation of a kingdom where the poor are lifted up, and the marginalized are brought to the center, a kingdom where the hungry are fed, the sick are healed, and the guilty and shame-ridden are set free? He knows that that message has divided people. Some have accepted it, and see God at work in it. Others have not.
He knows that people are going to have to make up their minds about him. Is he who he says he is, or not?
The Jesus we meet today is no peace-monger. He will not sacrifice truth on the altar of niceness. He knows (as our wonderful Catechism reminds us) that while God’s purposes are to reconcile all things to one another and to God through Christ:
While unity — real unity — is the goal… He also knows that unity must be built on truth. Real unity comes when all things are in right relationship with God and one another, and God knows that things are not yet in right relationship – Not in Jesus’s day, not in our own.
And so, like Jeremiah and the prophets before him, Jesus speaks of God‘s Word as a kind of refining fire, clearing out the forest floor. A fire that both purges and renews, transforming what is into what should be, into what shall be.
Now the thing about fire, which any good Boy Scout knows, is that it’s hard to control. And while we may understand it, we never cease to marvel at the mystery of it. It’s an apt metaphor for God’s Holy Spirit – that Spirit of Truth, that Spirit of Empowerment that came down on the disciples on the Day of Pentecost like tongues of fire.
When Jesus speaks of God’s transforming fire coming down on the earth,He’s reminding us that the fire belongs to God. It’s God’s fire, not ours. God’s the center of this story. God’s the subject of this sentence.
I say that, in part, because it can be sooooooo tempting in times as divisive as ours to want to be the ones to call down fire on other people. I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I rarely get through the NY Times in the morning without having fantasies along those lines. And I bet I’m not alone.
Like James and John, Jesus’s over-eager disciples who once wanted to call fire down on villagers who didn’t properly welcome Jesus, it’s so easy to fall into that trap. It’s so easy to think we know where the fire should go, who the fire should cleanse, what the fire should consume and create space for. But what if the fire is meant for us too? What if God is just as eager to transform us too?
You see, I think at the heart of Jesus’s urgency in today’s Gospel — the reason for his frustration — is that God longs for the transformation of all creation, Us and “them”, Whoever “they” are. God longs for us all to be conformed to the image of his Son, to lay aside the weight of sin that clings so close, and run with perseverance the race set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.
Until we grow up into the full stature of Christ,
Until we truly learn to live and love like Jesus,
Until we let his vision of that kingdom for all shape the way we live, and move, and have our being,
The fire of transformation and renewal is coming for us all.
I thought of that truth this week as the church remembered Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a young seminarian from New Hampshire who was shot and killed in Alabama, a martyr of the American civil rights movement. Daniels has become something of a hero in the Episcopal Church these days, and each summer there’s now a pilgrimage to Hayneville, Alabama, the small, one-stoplight town where Daniels died defending a young black teenager named Ruby Sales. In fact, our former Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, was there just a few days ago.
But I thought of Daniels in the context of today’s Gospel because Daniels’ spiritual journey in Alabama is an instructive one. You see, while he knew that the Lord had sent him there to make no peace with injustice, to act on behalf of the defenseless and the marginalized, he also came to realize his own need for transformation in the process. I came across a quote of his recently in which he said:
I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly desires and by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance! The point is simply, of course, that one’s motives are usually mixed, and one had better know it….
I lost fear…when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.
Daniels knew that the fire of transformation had to fall on the blood-soaked fields of Alabama. But he also knew it needed to convert his own heart. He knew, like John the Baptist, that he must decrease so Christ might increase. Recognizing that his life was hid with Christ in God, that his baptism had already freed him in every way that mattered, he was able to live the life of costly discipleship to which we are each called.
Friends, we live in a time at least as contested and contentious as Daniels did. We, too, are called to let Jesus’s urgency for truth, unity, and righteousness become our own. But, like Daniels, let’s remember that the only real, lasting transformation out there, will happen when we let it happen in here. When we allow God’s transforming Holy Spirit to form us, more and more, into the image and likeness of Christ, who came that it might be on earth as it is in heaven.
May we always pray and act that it might be so, with the fierce, fiery urgency of the One who loves us into life, Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
The Rev. Ryan Fleenor
St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet