This year On Fire was over booked. You have been exclusively privileged to be here when other people got turned away.
Exclusive [say slowly and excitedly]
Sounds positive doesn’t it.
But listen to the word carefully.
Exclusive - I feel part of the in crowd because you are ex-cluded, because you are not in, you are shut out.
It doesn’t take long for a clique to appear in the bible.
Arguably not even the first clique in the bible appears in Genesis chapter 11 - the Tower of babel.
Imagine a tower getting higher and higher. Brick walls to keep people in and keep people out. Taller than Big Ben. Taller than the Eifel Tower. Taller than the Empire State building. Taller than the new World Trade Centre. Taller than the tallest building in the world.
Hewn bricks seen by many commentators as a sign of humanities pride. Brick walls to keep people in and keep people out. Keeping everyone one in except the one person it shuts out - God. But these enormously high walls shutting God out come crumbling down. In slow motion watch the tower fall, crumbling down like a collapsing pile of Jenga. And watch the people who began by excluding God move on to excluding each other …. scattered over the earth, divided by dress, accent, language and lack of understanding.
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Our reading today from Isaiah 56 - comes from a time when God’s people have spent decades as unwilling immigrants in Babylon, today’s Iraq. For those of you who don’t know - the book of Isaiah is more a compendium than a single book. The first part, chapters one to 39 are written in the eighth century BC around 740 BC. Isaiah prophesies that a terrible disaster will happen if people continue abandoning God. That disaster does happen. Israel is conquered by the ruthless babylonian empire, and tens perhaps hundreds of thousands of its citizens are carted off into exile, into slave labour, across the syrian desert, on the opposite side of the Empire by those wretched waters of Babylon. But God does not abandon his people. A second Isaiah takes up the first Isaiah’s pen and through her or him God speaks Hope.
In chapter 40 onwards God promises he will comfort, comfort my people, that he will make straight a path in the desert and bring the people home.
And so we come to our reading in chapter 56 verses 1 to 8.
Having promised hope to his people, God speaks to those who still feel on the outside.
Eunuchs. Those of you who watch Sky Atlantic’s Game of thrones will know about Eunuchs.
Some Eunuchs are like Varys in Game of Thrones, like Potiphar in the story of Joseph, or the Ethiopian Eunuch in the book of Acts. These are powerful people … but they have had to make a terrible sacrifice to achieve their power. Like today’s workaholic who sacrifices time with his or her family or perhaps even the chance of a family to achieve success in a career, but at what terrible cost. This may have been a lifestyle choice, but now they look back and feel like “a dry tree”.
Other Eunuchs may have had no choice in the matter. Like the unsullied in Game of thrones, or the Castrati in mediaeval Europe, they were taken as child slaves and had their bits cut off so their cruel masters could profit from their suffering. They didn’t even have a choice in the matter, yet Deuteronomy and Leviticus appear to say that they have no place within God’s house.
Then there are the foreigners. Israelites are not the only forced immigrants in Babylon, and others who have lost their own roots look enviously at the close knit Israelite community with its God of love who stays with them in their time of exile when these other slaves feel their gods abandoned them in Moab, phrygia, Media, Assyria or whatever was the land of their ancestors. Yet doesn’t the Torah seem quite clear too that foreigners have no place within God’s house?
As God uses second Isaiah to preach hope, is it a hope only for the in crowd, only for the lucky few, or are all people to be allowed to come into that hope?
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Are all people to be allowed to come? That is a question Lutheran priest, the Revd Nadia Bolz-Webber faced, but not in the way most of us might think. Pastor Nadia runs a rather unusual lutheran church in Denver, Colorado, “The House of All Sinners and Saints”. It is perhaps unusual because she is a rather unusual priest. Tatoo-covered, she is a recovering alcoholic, who when she speaks at church events, has to be given a “parental guidance warning” because of the explicit language she uses. Nadia’s church was unusual too - firstly because it was full of young people. Not your well groomed middle class twentysomethings holding down jobs in the city. A different sort of young. Trannies at various stages of their sex change. Lesbians and gays rejected by the parents and families they had grown up with. Ex-alcoholics and ex-junkies - and those, well, who are still alcoholics and still junkies. “The House of All Sinners and Saints” is a church where those who are usually unwelcome can feel genuinely very welcome.
And then something happened. Pastor Nadia got in the city wide news. She was interviewed. People read it. And on a single Sunday, the church doubled in size. The only problem was, it was the wrong sort of people.
Lawyers. Teachers. Middle aged white people, The sort of people who might be your mum or your dad. Respectable people.
“It’s all very well, I am sure they are very nice people” thought Nadia. “but they are not our sort of people. What are we going to do about these people who are so different who are flooding our church.”
An emergency meeting of the church was called to discuss what to do with the “problem people”.
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A meeting of a very different sort in April 1906 is widely regarded as the birth of the Pentacostal and charismatic movements around the world. You are here at On Fire, an Anglo Catholic Charismatic event. But we are just a small part of a massive outpouring of the Holy Spirit that has taken place across the last century. Charismatic Roman Catholics, Charismatic Anglo Catholics, Charismatic Evangelicals, house churches, Pentecostal churches, and many more, At least 500 million Christians worldwide, a quarter of the total number of Christians worldwide, would describe themselves as charismatic or Pentecostal. And this enormous wave of Christians of which you are a part, goes back to an initially very small meeting that took place in 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles California.
We need to understand the setting of this event. Even today in America 10 am on a Sunday morning is described as the most racially segregated hour of the week with whites and blacks going to very different churches. But this was 1906. It was only a generation after the civil war. Many afro Americans were the children of slaves. This was six decades before the civil rights movement. This was a decade before women in America were given the vote.
and in this setting a black holiness preacher, himself the son of slaves, called William Seymour, began doing a bible study with a small group of other Christians on the book of Acts. They read about the first Christians speaking in tongues and about people being healed and miracles happening. And they started praying.
and that was when something weird started to happen.
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weird stuff... is that what happens at On Fire.?
Some are new. This is your first time at On Fire. You see old lags joyfully gathering in this rather strange house… (conference hall?) of prayer, bringing their offerings of praise to this altar. And how do you feel? This is your first night. You may feel excited… but you may also feel a bit different. Many of us on our first night on our first time here felt a bit like “what is going on here
You wouldn’t be the first person on their first night here not to feel a bit on the outside, not a part of things.
You may see strange goings on, people being prayed for and their bodies react to the presence of the Spirit by relaxing and flopping to the ground "resting in the spirit", or hear people speaking or singing tongues. Or that may all be familiar to you but you may never have encountered incense or the strange robes that Sister Helen Julian and myself and the servers are wearing. Like the foreigner moving to ancient Israel you might feel "what is this weird stuff, what is going on"
Or perhaps you see people who have come to On Fire for years and no one another so well and they are like a close knit family. And like the eunuch in ancient Israel who looks at other people with their families and feels like an outsider, you feel like the one who is not part of the family.
But the Lord says to eunuchs who feel like dry trees (vs3) that they shall have a place within God’s house and walls (vs5) , and for you he says this close knit On Fire family is your family too. And the Lord says to foreigners who feel separated from God’s people (vs3) that their offerings will be accepted on his altar (vs7), and for you who are new he says he shall make you joyful in this house (conference hall) of prayer. For God’s will is always “to gather others [too] besides those already gathered” (vs8)
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And so it was in Azusa street that William Seymour and his friends started praying. And something weird started happening. People began speaking out strange sounds, sometimes recognised by others as from other languages that the speaker did not know, speaking in tongues they called it. Some people when they were prayed for fell gently to the ground, resting in the Spirit. Some people were healed of all sorts of afflictions, even accounts of lame people walking, the blind having their sight restored. No wonder people flocked from all over to find out what was happening, no wonder people went out taking this Pentecostal blessing that they had received in Azusa street and sharing it, no wonder a world wide movement was founded
But that was not the truly weird stuff. Here six decades before the civil rights movement, barely after the end of slavery white Christians and black Christians worshipped together as equals. Here a decade before women in America were given the vote, women held in an almost unheard of way held positions of leadership.
The Holy Spirit fell, God moved in great power, miracles happened, and boundaries were crossed. Here there was no Jew or Greek, slave or free, because all are one in Christ Jesus.
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Move 100 years later to modern day Denver, and pastor Nadia calls her church meeting. She is so uncomfortable with having to tell these respectable newcomers, these soccer moms and middle-aged executives that they are not welcome in her church for misfits.
And then one of House for all Sinners and Saints regulars stands up. The regular describes emotionally how her own parents rejected her because she had been through a sex change operation. How she hasn’t seen them since they kicked her out of the house. And then she says “and today I see new people coming into this church, who dress like my Mom and dad, who could be my Mom and dad. But you come here because you don’t reject me. Here in church, it is as if I am given new Moms and dads who can love me, to stand in for my real mom and dad who can’t yet love me”.
And as one speech witnessed to the power of prejudice overcome, Nadia realised how prejudiced she had been.
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Prejudice is something that God confronts in Isaiah 56 verses 1 to 8.
my prejudice. Your prejudice, but particularly the prejudice of his first hearers, those exiled children of Israel.
The Israelites longed for God’s “salvation to come and [his] deliverance to be revealed” [vs1]. They loved it when through second Isaiah God spoke comfort to his people Israel, and promised a return from the exile by those pitiless waters of babylon, but they wanted to pull up the ladder behind them.
This passage provides a bigger vision.
Those who still feel excluded. The eunuch - “I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be … cut off”. If you are trying not to snigger when you hear those words “cut off”, that is exactly the connotation Isaiah intends you to have. These people with their fat tummies and high voices whose bits have been cut off shall no longer be cut off from God’s people.
And those foreigners, those dirty unclean gentiles, who even if they went through the whole ‘painful’ (raise eyebrows) process of converting to Judaism, were always left at arm’s length,
they shall feel truly included, joyful in God’s house of prayer, free to offer their sacrifices as equal citizens at God’ altar. “once you were far off, but now you have been brought near… no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” Ephesians 2:11 &19)
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Our sermon began at the beginning of the bible with the Tower of Babel crashing to the ground. The rubble of that exclusive tower lying scattered across the plains as people are scattered over the earth, divided by dress, accent, language and lack of understanding. The story of the bible ends with the undoing of Babel. The rubble of that tower being rebuilt. Nine O’clock one Jerusalem morning on the feast of Shavuot, Pentecost. A crowd as diverse as those scattered at Babel - “Parthians, Medes, ELamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphilia, Egypt and the parts of Lybia belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs, in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:9-11).
And so the wreck of Babel is undone. And those hewn but damaged bricks - rebuilt just as you or I might rebuilt a set of Jenga. In slow motion watch the bricks coming back together. But they come back together not as a tower but a city, A city full of people of every tribe, race and nation, a city wider than London, wider than Paris, wider than New York, wider than the widest city in the world, a city getting wider and wider, shutting nobody out, drawing everybody in.
Where I am in, because you are in
Inclusive [say slowly and excitedly]
listen to that beautiful word.
Inclusive
That is why On Fire Mission must be more than just a hundred and fifty people gathered in a conference hall, because a conference hall has walls, shutting people out, but God calls you and me as On Fire to be a movement, part of an inclusive spread of God’s power, God’s community and God’s love in your church, in your region, across this land and beyond.
