During Advent, John the Baptist seems like the guest you’re sorry you invited to your holiday party, who has the magic gift of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to everyone. Here we are, trying to find some peace and quiet during our holiday preparations, or maybe to get some inspiration or a little of the Christmas spirit. But John the Baptist is talking about fire. And we get the impression that the fire he’s talking about is not this peaceful fire at the top of the Advent wreath, or a nice Christmas fire in the fireplace. This is a forest fire kind of fire, a fire with a purpose, a fire that is there to destroy something. What does this have to do with life eight days before Christmas?
No one likes to think that one of the reasons God comes into our lives is to bring fire into them, a little spark of inspiration we might want, maybe, but not a destructive, burning fire. We don’t need God for that, we think, we need God to comfort us and reinforce us. But today let’s remember that even many of our favorite, heartwarming Christmas stories, all those stories of repentance and reunion and rebirth, all come with some element of real fear near the end of them.
Think about Ebenezer Scrooge collapsing and trembling at the sight of his own neglected grave, it’s the last shock that finally enables him to be reborn. Or even George Bailey, back in It’s a Wonderful Life, who had to get terrified back to life by the sight of a world that didn’t know him, there is real fear and a complete loss of control in all of these stories. The love that we want so much isn’t something that we can get by our own hard work, although we can try. If we want to give ourselves to the love the God has for us sometimes that only comes by having something burned away, just taken right out of us, a process that we are frightened of starting even though there is only good at the end of it. That is the kind of fire that John the Baptist is talking about, a fire that only leaves the love in us behind, and burns away everything that keeps us from love.
What is it that we want to have burned away? We all have a different answer to that question. Maybe it is some self-destructive habit in our relationships, some inner belief that your life is over and hasn’t turned out the way you want, some sense of guilt for something you didn’t do or did do, some hostility or anger or suspicion or selfishness that leaks into all your interactions with the outside world. Only you know what is keeping you from the love that God is trying to surround us with.
Whatever it is, these things do not leave us easily, we hate them and yet we are attached to them. We think that they are part of who we are — to the point where it’s hard to think of our lives without that anger or sadness or suspicion. And if you think you can’t change it by yourself, you’re right, but in Advent we don’t change ourselves, God is willing to do it, if we stop bracing ourselves and protecting ourselves, distracting ourselves and turning in on ourselves. Only some kind of fire can help us to get rid of them, that is the fire God brings, sometimes with our asking, sometimes without asking, burning away the underbrush that is keeping us from living the way God created us to live..
How does this happen? People tell different stories, a life-changing experience, a shock to the system, a sudden realization that we have more to give away than we thought we did. None of it sounds very appealing, does it, having some part of you burned away, even the self-destructive parts. All you can say in favor of it, is that those people who have experienced it seem to be the better off for it, they seem lighter on their feet, down to the essentials in life, less bound up by their own past, seemingly able to see God more clearly, able to give without counting very closely whether it’s too much. You know people like that, people who seem free of everything that weighs the rest of us down, that’s what burning away everything else can do. God wants to give us that sense of having been reborn without anything keeping us away from love. It might not happen in the next nine days, but what can happen is that we can see the fire around us and ask for it for ourselves.