Sermon: Black Fire, White Fire

Texts: Proverbs 8:1-12, 22, 23; John 15:26-16:15

Date: May 30, 2010

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

            Have you ever tried to make yourself heard in a very noisy place?  Ever found yourself raising your voice just about to the screaming point in order to get someone’s attention in the midst of horns honking, music blaring, machines grinding, brakes squealing, children wailing?  Frustrating, isn’t it? 

            Don’t you feel for Lady Wisdom, depicted in Proverbs 8 standing at the noisiest place in the city?  There she is alongside the busy street, at the crossroads, at the gates in front of the town, calling out to the passers-by that they should listen to what she has to say.  She is raising her voice, the text says.  Well, she had better raise it if she wants to make herself heard in such a frenzied environment.  Wisdom had better turn up the volume or she will simply be drowned out by the ambient noise of humans going about their raucous business. 

            If Lady Wisdom had to raise her voice amongst the ox-carts and dusty foot traffic of a couple of millennia ago, imagine how she must have to shout now amidst jet engines, leaf blowers, diesel buses, cell phones and those  ubiquitous ear buds wired to 24 hour music, commercials, news, and opinion that passes for news.  It boggles the imagination, how Wisdom can possibly make herself heard in our day and age of deafening sound and unceasing distraction.  Do you think Lady Wisdom has given it up?  Has she left the crossroads in disgust, having hollered herself hoarse at a world that seems more interested in wisecracks than wisdom? 

            You or I might have thrown in the towel long ago if it were our task to bring wisdom to humankind.  But when Wisdom is personified in the Hebrew scriptures she is characterized as patient and accessible.  A verse from one of the intertestamental books, The Wisdom of Solomon, assures the reader, “Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her.  She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her…she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought.” [6:12-13, 16]  Wisdom personified is always depicted as a being committed to sharing herself with people who may be struggling but who are earnestly seeking a wise way to live.  This is a benevolent spirit, one who sincerely wants to reach out and help hapless humans.

            A similar concept is at play in the gospel when Jesus promises to send an Advocate, a Comforter, a Spirit who will continue to teach the disciples.  He acknowledges that the disciples will be sad when he leaves this world, but he is not going to leave them in the lurch.  He is sending the Spirit of truth, who will guide Jesus’ disciples into all the truth.  The Spirit of truth will testify on Christ’s behalf, revealing things Jesus would have them know into the future.  Both Lady Wisdom and the Spirit of Truth have a will to help us figure things out.  They may well be different metaphors for the same divine impulse—to help us find our way through the chaotic morass in which we live to a wise, unflustered, godly life. 

            While Lady Wisdom is pictured as hailing people from busy street corners, Jesus isn’t very specific about how the Spirit of Truth will intersect with people.  He’s rather vague.  When he speaks about this Spirit, it sounds to me as if it works like intuition, subtly giving insight about the way things are and the way they ought to be.  But there’s no particular clue here about how we are to go about hearing what the Spirit of Truth has to teach.  How will we know, for instance, when insight is coming from a God-inspired dream versus a dream that is fueled by a late-night pepperoni pizza?  How can we distinguish from the voice in the head that is holy wisdom versus the one that is sparked by a chemical imbalance in the brain?  Are not our minds themselves like the hectic crossroads where Lady Wisdom is pictured raising her voice to be heard above the noise and haste?  Mine sure is.  I can’t help noticing that whenever I try to quiet down.  It’s like Times Square in the space between my ears.  The Spirit of Truth trying to break into my consciousness is in the same boat as Lady Wisdom trying make herself heard at the city gates.

            So how will Truth and Wisdom manage to make themselves known to us, dwelling  as we do in the clamor of modern life and the clatter of fidgety minds?  God ponders that question in a parable written by Edward Hays.  God sits down with the Review Board in heaven to kick around some ideas.  The Review Board is a committee of angels God convenes from time to time to review the activities of creation and present new ideas for evaluation .  Whenever God starts out saying that a new idea has come to him, the more conservative angels get nervous and start shifting around in their chairs, especially when God smiles, because in their experience, the larger the smile, the more outlandish the idea.  God tells the Review Board one day that she would like to speak more directly to her children on earth.   Up to this point, God has been speaking in the form of rainbows, floods,  fires, and quiet whispers in the hearts of a few; but now God feels they need to hear more directly from him the feelings of his heart, his dreams, and ideas on how to correct the problems the folks on earth always seem to be getting themselves into.  God grins and says she has decided to come to earth in human form, as one of the people. 

            The angels talk God out of this idea, telling him incarnation is too limited and too exclusive—having to choose one gender, one race, one time will leave too many people out, and the people probably aren’t ready for such a visitation anyway.  It will cause untold theological problems, the angels assert.  God is disappointed but agrees her idea may be a bit premature.  After a period of silence, one  angel suggests that God could come to the people in the form of writing.  The Egyptians and the Chinese were, at that time, perfecting the art of hieroglyphics and alphabets—God could go to earth as letters of the alphabet.  God thinks that’s a marvelous idea until another angel points out that God will still be limited when he chooses which alphabet to go in.  Perhaps it would be best for the Lord to stick to rainbows and floods and fire since they are so much more universal.

            More silence.  God’s toe taps underneath the table while she sits with closed eyes, deep in thought.  Finally he opens one eye, then the other, and looks at the angel who proposed the alphabet idea, who is now nervously chewing the end of a yellow pencil.  “You say that this invention of writing has great potential?” asks God.  “Can we rightly foresee that they will continue to improve on their earlier experiments and that someday everyone will be able to read?  And that by means of written words they will be able to understand the most abstract of ideas?”  The angel agrees that this is so.  Then God, wearing a wide, expansive grin, announces that she has decided to come into the world as Ink.  “Ink?” the angels gasp.  “Yes, Ink!” God declares.  “Then I can reside in the alphabets of the Egyptians and the Hebrews, in Chinese and Sanskrit, in Greek and Latin, in Russian and…well, the possibilities are unlimited…unlimited!”  And that is what God did.  And the people of the earth recognized the Divine Presence in the Hebrew Letters of the Torah, in the Sanskrit of the Vedic books of India, and in the Chinese characters of the Tao Te Ching.  With reverence they bowed before the Arabic letters of the Koran and illuminated the Greek and Latin of the Gospels with gold leaf.[1]

            I enjoy that little story because I have so often heard the voice of wisdom and experienced the Spirit of Truth in the written word.  And this is especially true of the Bible.  I do not worship the Bible—there is such a thing as Bible-olatry, and I do not intend to participate in it.  However, I do believe that God still speaks to us through these ancient texts.  The Bible (and other scriptures) are one of the significant means through which God seeks to meet us and give us some much-needed guidance in how to live a wise, unflustered, godly life.  Wilfred Cantwell Smith suggests in his excellent book What is Scripture? that throughout human history we can see God “using scriptures more or less successfully in the divine on-going endeavor to salvage human beings from sin and despair and to invite us to higher realms, of truth and love.”  One has to say “more or less successfully” because there are myriad instances when scripture “has in fact served as a symbol for starkly limited vision, or for nastiness.”[2]  Nevertheless, it has been invaluable in human culture to mediate the transcendent and help us rise to our highest aspirations and values.   

            As you know, the Bible has been a best-seller for many generations, ever since it was translated into the language of the people and made available to them.  If a household (particularly in the West) has only one book, it’s highly likely that that one book will be the Bible.  Its popularity, however, does not necessarily prove its familiarity.  John Thomas said in an address on taking the Bible seriously that the Bible is in danger of becoming America’s best selling coffee table book.  Most of our coffee table books don’t receive regular attention; they are there for show.  Many Bibles have a place of honor in a home but aren’t often read, mainly, I suppose, because it is a difficult book.

            This theological book I’ve just finished, What is Scripture?, speaks of scripture in some cultural contexts as being an object to revere without any particular expectation it will be read.  Just to have it on the family altar is enough.  But in our tradition, we generally think it is a good idea to honor the Bible by reading it.  And more than merely reading it, engaging with it.  One of the things I took away from Smith’s book is a fresh understanding that what makes scripture scripture is not a quality in a text that makes it stand out in and of itself, but the fact that there is a community of people who are deeply engaged in a relationship with the text.  People make a text into scripture or keep it scripture, by treating it a certain way.  “Scripture is a human activity.” [3]  That is, “for a work to be scripture means that it participates in the movement of the spiritual life of those for whom it is so.  At times they [the people that wrote what became scripture] poured into it, but also then they got out of it, the highest, best, fullest to which their mind or imagination or heart could rise.”[4]  Scripture, Smith asserts, points to a trilateral engagement among humans, the transcendent, and a text.  If one is not drawn in to the Bible, if one is not in a relationship with it, for that person or household it may have ceased to be scripture.  That’s not a judgment; it’s an observation.

If there is a lively engagement, however, Scripture can be a meeting place between us and the transcendent being we call God.  We don’t have to consider it to be magic or perfect in order for it to be a place where we can be attentive to the Spirit of Truth of which Jesus speaks.  The aura of “magic” in connection with scripture may have been handed down to us.  For instance, many of the world’s scriptures come with a story that describes how the texts were handed down to humans from a higher plane.  The Old Testament for us has that story, when God gave Moses the law on stone tablets while they were meeting together on Mount Sinai.  Rather than taking that literally, think about what it says metaphorically.  It says that God wants to give us something of value to help us find our way.  It says that there is Wisdom here that rises above the sum of its parts, its human authors.  It is a meeting place, a place of engagement for humans and the Holy One beyond us.  It can be a quiet place where we go to retreat for a time from the din of the world and try to attend to the Wisdom that seeks us out. 

            Our scripture describes the word of God at one point as being “living and active.” [Hebrews 4:12]  It breathes and moves when we go to scripture with a lively expectation that the Spirit may meet us there.  One of our important forbears in the UCC, Pilgrim minister John Robinson, once famously said that he was very confident that the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth from God’s Word.  He thought it was a sign of great arrogance for any person to think they had “sounded the Word of God to the bottom.”  Perhaps he was meditating on our text from John’s gospel when he wrote these things.  It is intriguing, isn’t it, this statement from John’s Jesus: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all truth…”  It has been my experience that no matter how many times I engage with the scripture, some new light and truth is likely to emerge.  Sometimes the truth that comes to light for me is something I could not have understood at an earlier stage of my spiritual development.  It is so encouraging to find in our very own holy book an indication that the Spirit of Truth continues to work with us, drawing us deeper, teaching us Truth as we are ready for it. 

            I wonder if more people would be drawn to read the Bible, to engage it like scripture, if they saw it less as a static text and more as a forum for an evolving relationship with God.  I am fascinated by a Jewish concept they bring to reading their scripture, the Torah.  The ancient rabbis spoke of Torah as “black fire on white fire.”  The black fire refers to the printed letters, the white fire to the spaces between and around the letters.  Both fires are to be read and interpreted.  One reads the black fire by asking, “What does Torah say?”  One reads the white fire by asking, “What does Torah mean?”  Contemporary rabbis teach various notions about the black fire and white fire: The black fire of the letters is the revelation of God’s message into the realm of language.  The white fire corresponds to the realm of thought and contemplation.  Or, the black fire is the thoughts that are intellectual in nature while the white fire represents that which goes beyond the world of the intellect: the story, the song, the silence.  Or, the black fire is the literal meaning of the text, and the white fire refers to the ideas we bring to the text when we interact with it.  In studying Torah, it is not only acceptable but encouraged to read between the lines.

            The truth, it seems to me, the Spirit of Truth, dances between the black fire of our holy texts and the white fire of our engagement with them and our contemplation of the light and truth that shine from them.  The holy Wisdom that seeks us out meets us on the corner of black fire and white fire.  God still has many things to say to us, even through this creaky antique, opaque library we call the Bible.  Listen to these wise words from John Thomas, former UCC General Minister and President, and theologian Frederich Buechner:

Those who take the Bible seriously have grown acquainted with it, befriended it and like any good friend, look for it to tell them the truth, the hard truth, the whole truth, astonishing truth, the Gospel truth. The friend is not there to be used, manipulated or wielded like a set of tools or an armory of weapons. Nor is the friend there to lock the present into a comfortable and secure past. This “friend,” this text is there to be heard, listened to, attended, embraced. Buechner, in his Beecher lectures at Yale, speaks of the prophet-preachers of the Bible. “What do they say?” he asks.

“They say things that are relevant, lacerating, profound, beautiful, spine-chilling, and more besides. They put words to both the wonder and the horror of the world, and the words can be looked up in the dictionary or the biblical commentary and can be interpreted, passed on, understood, but because these words are poetry, are image and symbol as well as meaning, are sound and rhythm, maybe above all are passion, they set echoes going the way a choir in a great cathedral does, only it is we who become the cathedral and in us that the words echo.” [5]

[1] Hays, Edward  St. George and the Dragon and the Quest for the Holy Grail  Eason, KS: Forest of Peace Books, 1986, p. 44-49

[2] Smith, Wilfed Cantwell  What is Scripture?  London: SCM Press LTD, 1993, p. 241

[3] Ibid. p. 18

[4] Ibid. p. 36

[5] Thomas, John “Taking the Bible Seriously” http://www.ucc.org/beliefs/theology/john-thomas.html)