Would You Prefer Fire Or Ice?
Good Morning Friends,
My wife and I just got back from a two-week vacation hiking about 70 miles in the Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks and visiting Dinosaur National Monument, State Parks and National Forests as well. We travelled through parts of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana. We flew into Denver and car camped… a road less travelled. And for the most part, we tented in places with spectacular vistas that had temperature swings of fifty degrees. We were blessed or lucky or both, time and time again getting the last parking place and best and last tent site and more than once, birds would fly into our picture frames just as we snapped a shot of nature. We saw deer, elk, bison, bear and moose. We saw the head waters of the Colorado River and camped on the Sinks River that disappeared into the earth only to rise a quarter mile away in a pool filled with eight to ten-pound trout. We hiked to picture spots having listened to the shattered water and its misty din in a fitful sleep the night before. We avoided the consuming flames destroying the forests to the south and yet could not avoid the hail and strong Wyoming winds and hairy clouds that came low with twisted locks and forced us into a Lodge for one night. We saw an Episcopal Church in the Grand Tetons and a Catholic Church once visited by Pope John Paul in the Rocky Mountain National Park. And these churches, I think, served as places that witness to the power of nature from glaciers to volcanos with a harsh reminder that it is God not nature we must worship. For people who live at sea level and yet visit places with over two-mile-high elevations it, in more ways than one, took our breath away. But on a deeper level was a reminder of how fragile life is and that eventually there is an end to some things as witnessed by the wall of dinosaur bone fossils we saw in a Utah mountain side. The anxiety of facing an aggressive male bison on a collision course for our hiking trail and to be sure enough to pause and then go on living with faith sums it up. It is with that experience as evidence we ask today’s question which was once posed by Robert Frost. Would You Prefer Fire Or Ice?
Scripture: The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.’ So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.
Jeremiah 18:1-6 (NRSV)
‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered, ‘Yes.’ And he said to them, ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’ When Jesus had finished these parables, he left that place.
Mathew 13:47-53 (NRSV)
Then Moses stretched out his staff towards heaven, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and fire came down on the earth. And the Lord rained hail on the land of Egypt;
Exodus 9:23 (NRSV)
By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen fast.
Job 37:10 (NRSV)
Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!
Psalm 148: 7-8 (NRSV)
Message: The apocalypse has always been a phenomenon to capture the minds of people perhaps because ominous forces lurk within and without. And whether the end is with fire, as in Revelation or with a cold freeze, the dying of the light, it is still death. To prepare us God molds us much like His creation has been molded. God uses real fire and ice… water and rocks to form the landscape and the metaphor of fire and ice in scripture as well to help form us. Fire can be literal but also a symbol for the Spirit with strong, consuming emotions such as desire. In a candle or a fireplace, fire shows a person the way. It is warmth and light. The thing is that small desires are no trouble at all and can guide a person to the things we want in life. But on a large scale, however, fire consumes and destroys, only to later bring forth life in abundance…and so too perhaps is the nature of our desires. We may not be able to understand it all, but we can enjoy it as best we can be hoping on hope and believing in faith that God will eventually make it all clear. And so, we are molded by the oscillation of our faith and willingness to love. We are molded by both fire and ice and if we truly believe in God and not just the nature of God perhaps we will realize that we have little authority over what will be and so must submit to God.
Pray we observe the power of God in our lives. Pray we are an expression of hope acceptable in God’s sight. Pray we follow the Spirit in ways that are reflected in the matter of life and matter in terms of the Spirit. Pray we realize that every aspect of nature reveals some aspect of divine providence. Pray we listen for God in the wind in the trees and ripples of a lake water against the shore yet realize that this foretaste of what is to come is not God. Pray still in our acquaints with the cold nights and the warm days that we believe that the design of the universe is itself an argument for God’s existence. Pray we find grounding and clarity and solace in the Word molded by the Spirit and formed into what God would have us to be.
Blessings,
John Lawson
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