Stretching south for hundreds of miles from Glacier National Park lies a majestic mixture of valleys, rushing streams, and gargantuan mountains called the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Backpackers have hiked there for decades looking for elk, grizzlies and golden eagles. Fortunately the grizzlies stay up in the high country, but a golden eagle may be spotted and the elusive wolverine may be tracked.
The Bob Marshall Wilderness hosts some 90,000 packers and hikers each year, most of them in the months of July and August. They must come in either by foot or horseback. No motorized vehicles are allowed. The forests on those rugged mountain slopes are thick with Lodgepole Pine, a tough, hardy tree with cones so thick that only extreme heat can burst forth the seeds. That's where fire comes in. For thousands -- oh, millions of years -- lightning has cracked the big sky out there down to the forests below. (Often the lightning will hit the Douglas Firs, less rugged than the Lodgepole Pines, and a forest fire will begin.) For years, of course, the United States Forest Service fought furiously to put out these fires. More recently, they have adopted a policy of managed fires. They have learned these fires have a purpose. Without them the seeds of the Lodgepole Pines are never released. Without them much of the underbrush and plant life there does not regenerate. The earth needs a fire cast on it or it will die.
Jesus, speaking to Peter, that blustery, Lodgepole Pine kind of a man, said, "Peter, I have a fire to cast over the earth, and how I am constrained until it be kindled!" What did Jesus mean? He knew that Peter, like all of his disciples, was a wilderness that needed fire or he would die. Peter needed the fire of God's Word to keep his heart from freezing over and to keep the passion of his soul from cooling down.
Peter had left his fishing business on the Sea of Galilee. That was the first time the fire of God's Word had invaded his life. He was growing cool in that job -- cool and bored, casting the same nets each day and each night. A man tends to cool down in boredom. So Jesus came along. "Come, follow me," he said. "Come, let the Word of God heat you up, for you are beginning to cool down."
Not long afterwards Peter returned with Jesus to his mother-in-law's house for dinner. She didn't care much for this Nazarene Rabbi. Feeling chilled, she put out the fire on her hearth and went to bed. Jesus came in and touched her -- the word in Greek means he lit her flame -- and rekindled her heart. Suddenly she was not so hostile to him any more. God's Word had come to her, reassured her, touched her. And she got up, rekindled the hearth in her home and served Jesus a meal.
Once more, as Jesus and his disciples neared Caesarea Philippi, Peter found his faith and loyalty to Jesus growing cold. The opposition from the scribes and the Pharisees had cast a frost on their little band. Jesus knew they were all cooling down. So he spent a night in prayer. Then he asked them, "Who do men say that I am?" Peter, always ready for the lightning to set his forest ablaze, cried out, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Jesus answered, lest Peter be confused about whence that lightning strike came, "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to thee, but my father who is in heaven."
So it is with us all. We all have those cool down moments, those times when the fires of love grow frosty and the ice of boredom replaces the fire of passion. The chill of ambivalence often caps over loyalty and devotion.
This is part of the human condition. It is quite natural to cool down. It is quite natural to have ice form on our loyalties and friendships. But it is quite beyond nature to have a burning need for the word of God.
The prophet Jeremiah had it. To the people of his time, living their cool lies and dreams, Jeremiah called out, "Hear the word of the Lord! 'Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has my Word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat. Is not my Word like a fire?' says the Lord. 'And like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces?' "
Before Jeremiah, when the prophet Isaiah was lit to action by God, he saw the seraphim come to him with a burning coal, touch his lips and then say, "Who will serve me?" Only after God's fire touched him could Isaiah say, "Here am I, Lord, here am I."
Like the Lodgepole Pine, we all need the fire of God's Word in our lives, or we will grow cold. We will be ice-capped. Our job will cease. Our friendships will cease. Our marriages will cease. Our very lives will cease, because human nature is so prone to the freeze, so susceptible to an ice cap on the heart.
God knows this. That's why he sends his lightning to strike into our lives lest we stop and regenerate no more. Did not God say to his people as he led them out of the icy slavery of Egypt, "For your Lord God is a devouring fire and a jealous God"?
One time Elijah was called to stand in a test of fire with the prophets of Jezebel's God, Baal. Baal's 450 prophets set up their altar with a sacrificial bull. They danced, shouted incantations and even lacerated themselves until the blood flowed. No fire came from heaven to consume their sacrifice. Then Elijah stepped forward, pouring water over everything. He drenched it all and then he prayed. That's all. No wild cries, no limping dances around the altar, no self lacerations. "O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel," he prayed, "let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant and that I have done all these things at thy Word. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that thou, O Lord, art God, and that thou hast turned their hearts back."
The Bible tells us that then the fire of the Lord fell, it consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. This was the fire of God's Word.
Martin Luther knew that the ice of human nature had frozen things over in his day, most especially he thought, in the heart and mind of a man named Erasmus. To that Dutch humanist Luther wrote the Word of God always puts the world in a state of tumult because it comes like fire cast on the earth. "For the Word of God comes, whenever it comes, to change and renew the world." 1
Nowhere does the fire of God's Word burn off the ice and cause tumult more than in the differences between generations, in the relationships between father and son and mother and daughter. These relationships tend to freeze over into a cool placidity where mother thinks her daughter must be just as she is, or son thinks he must be a carbon copy of dad. Not so, says the gospel. There will not be agreement between mother and daughter or father and son so much as there will be distinction; each will have a proper share of the kingdom of God. God's Word burns off the ice of mutual identification and kindles the fire of proper identity over and over again.
No, it is not peace in the sense of placidity or tranquility that God's Word brings. It is fire: the fire of each person's identity and each person's proper share of the kingdom of God.
Thus, set ablaze by God's Word, we fan the flames for one another and keep God's love burning in our hearts.
1. Luther's Works, 33 (Fortress, 1972) p. 52.