If the House Burns Down Tonight--October 21, 2021

If the House Burns Down Tonight--October 21, 2021

"At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, 'Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.' This phrase, 'Yet once more,' indicates the removal of what is shaken--that is, creating things--so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe. For indeed our God is a consuming fire." [Hebrews 12:26-29]

There's a tune by the band Switchfoot playing in my head as I write--a song that comes back to me when I read these words from Hebrews.  The opening lyric goes, "Ashes from the flame, the truth is what remains..." And then in the heart of the song, lead singer Jon Foreman belts out, "There's a fire coming that we all go through--you possess your possessions or they possess you. And if the house burns down tonight--I've got everything I need when I've got you by my side.... and let the rest burn."

Sometimes it takes the loss of everything you didn't need, in order to find out what you couldn't live with out.  And in those times, maybe the thing that makes us let go of the baggage turns out to be a good and necessary--if also difficult and even painful--reality.  Sometimes we need our foundations to be shaken to remind us of what we shouldn't have been treating as load-bearing in the first place.  Sometimes we need the disruption of our old routines to wake us up and make us pay attention to what matters.  Sometimes, we find ourselves agreeing with that line of Marilynne Robinson's narrator in Gilead, who says, "Grace is a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials."

I think that's what the Switchfoot song and the writer of Hebrews have in common here--they can look ahead to the event that shake us to our core, not with fear, but with a sense of purpose.  When God says that the heavens and the earth need to be shaken, the writer of Hebrews doesn't see that as a punishment so much as the gift of clarity--a way of removing the rubble that we shouldn't have been trying to build our lives on.  Maybe we need that more than we realize.

In so many ways, it feels like the last year and a half in the time of COVID have done some of that shaking to our lives in a smaller scale.  As hard has it has been, and as wearying as it still is to live in this limping emergence from a pandemic, it has shaken things that maybe needed to be shaken in us.  Things, events, and people that we had been taking for granted have been missed, and it has forced us to decide how and where--and with whom--we most truly desire to spend our energy and lives.  There has been a difficult, but maybe necessary, clarity in our lives as we've seen some people head in different directions from our paths, and others get closer to us in these days.  We've had to decide what are the core activities, causes, needs, and commitments we would find a way to keep doing... and which were the ones we had been doing on autopilot with little real investment.  

Maybe the unrest of the last year and a half of our histories has also forced us to see where we have let our faith in Jesus become one more bit of kindling in our lives, ready to go up in smoke, and where we need to let our faith lead us in bolder and more daring directions that go to the heart of who we are.  Maybe we have had to look at the places we have settled for just being "admirers" of Jesus or "fans" of his, but not "disciples."  Maybe we've been forced to see that adolescent complaining about "me and my rights" pales in comparison to the non-negotiable call for us to love our neighbors and seek their good above our own convenience or comfort.  And maybe--even if it's uncomfortable for the preacher to say it--we have needed someone to come along and shake us out of our complacency... and all the things we've been trying to build on that just couldn't bear the weight of what we need to endure.

Going through times like ours is never easy--and we may wish, like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, that difficult things not have happened in our times.  But maybe we can see in the difficult--and sometimes fire-like winnowing--times we have been given to live through, the gift of clarity to decide what is worth spending our lives on, and what isn't.  Maybe the fire that burns the house down helps you to see that you have all you really need in the person who loves you and takes you by the hand out to safety.  Maybe the earthquake that shakes the very creation to the ground shows us not to have put our trust in the Almighty Dollar, the notion of eternal abundance on the shelves at the store, or the powers of the day in the first place.  Maybe we have needed all along to lose or let go of them all... so that we could find ourselves surely in the grip of an unfailing, unshakable God.

It turns out, I do believe, that being in the hands of such a God is the best possible place for us to be anyway.

Lord God, let us rest in your goodness, and then let the rest be shaken as it needs to be.