 So, we're actually going to be talking for the next hour on the same topic, really, that Jeff was addressing us on, which is God's love and God's suffering, and the biblical image for God's nature frequently is fire, and the fire of God's holiness. And as I was working through this and preparing this talk, I just was overwhelmed by how dominant this image is when you start getting into it, start looking for it and tracing the pattern through scripture, this image of God's holiness as fire. Of course, holiness is the word that we use to describe what is unique about God's nature. And so, to a certain extent, we can try to get at a definition of holiness, but it always remains elusive because it's sort of a process of elimination and theology. They call that the apophatic process. God is so inexpressible, you have to often say what he is not. So we say things like, God is infinite. That means not finite, right? We can't really directly express what the infinite is. You can just say it's not limited, and we say he is without boundary in these other areas as well. He's omnipotent, he's all potent and all powerful and all present, so there's no limitation to his presence, no limitation to his power just without limit in those areas. So it's hard to express the essence of God, but this word holiness is what we use for that, and as I said, the biblical image of this is fire, but we also know that God is love. As St. John the Apostle teaches us, and we know that God is self-gift, he is always giving of himself a circle of self-giving love among the persons of the Trinity. And of course, when we're taken up into that circle of self-giving love, it causes us pain because we, unlike God, are not infinite. We are finite, and so there's a limit to what we can give, and when we reach that limit, that's where suffering comes in. And so we experience suffering when we're caught up into the cycle and the circle of our God who is always self-giving, which never causes him pain, so to speak, because there's no end to himself to give. So let's pray and we'll get into it, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, we give you thanks this morning for this opportunity to meditate on your word, and we pray that indeed, as we do so, you would send down upon us the power of your Holy Spirit, the flame of your Holy Spirit, to illumine our minds with light and to heat our hearts with your divine warmth. We ask this through Christ our Lord, amen, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. So we know that this image of fire is important in Scripture. We're probably familiar, for example, with the description of God's appearance to the people of Israel at Mount Sinai, which is really a defining moment in salvation history for God's self-revelation, this public unveiling of God's nature to this mass of, according to the biblical figures, 600,000 people at the feet of Mount Sinai, and it says, now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain, the Hebrew's dramatic, eish ohelech. It's the fire that eats the eating fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. And that was God's self-revelation at Sinai, and 40 years later, near the end of his life in Deuteronomy, Moses is recapping and recapitulating the sacred history, and God's travels with his people from Egypt to the plains of Moab, and he looks back at this event and says, the Lord, your God, is a devouring fire, which is echoed, of course, in Hebrews 12, 29, by traditionally Saint Paul. As the author of Hebrews quoting from Deuteronomy, our God is a consuming fire. So what does that mean? And I don't think that these images that our Lord uses of himself, that God uses of himself, like in certain instances, water for the Holy Spirit and other cases, fire, as we're discussing today, these are not accidental. These are part of God's plan from the very beginning, because the same God that created this world is also our Redeemer. The Creator and the Redeemer are the same, and the creation was designed with the redemption in mind. And so there's properties of fire, and there's properties of water that communicate something about God's presence, and it's not accidental or capricious that he uses these images for himself. So let's meditate on fire for a moment. What is true about fire? Well, one of the properties of fire is that it consumes things, I don't know if I have its things, I don't know, during this late at night. Fire consumes its fuel, that's what it was, I had its fuels and I changed it to, anyway, okay. You know, fire burns things, right? And in the process, it consumes them and it transforms things into itself. So you put a log in the fireplace, the fire takes on the log, the fire consumes the log and the fire transforms the log into fire, into itself. And that's one of the truths about God. God takes up others and transforms them into himself, and this is actually what the church father's called theosis or divinization, that we become partakers of the divine nature. That's one of the truths about fire and one of the reasons why God likens himself to it. But there are other qualities of fire, all of which are important. So fire purifies things, fire cleanses, fire sterilizes. You know, if you need to, you know, inject something into your body, one of the ways that you can cleanse the needle is with a match, right? You've done that in your growing up, et cetera, knowing that that sterilizes the needle. So fire purifies, it sterilizes, it removes impurities. We see this reflected in the Pentateuch, where when God gives his laws for his people, he allows them to cleanse things either by fire or by water. Everything that can stand the fire, you shall pass through the fire and it shall be clean. So that's preferable for objects that can withstand the heat. It's a preferable way to sterilize and to cleanse according to the Old Testament law. So fire is that image of purity, it's that image of cleansing. And then also fire produces light which guides us, which illumines our path and enables us to gain knowledge and to make headway and to travel. So in Exodus 1321, the Lord in his mercy comes down to his people during the Exodus and he guides them as a pillar of cloud along the way, but by night he is a pillar of fire to give them light that they might travel by day and by night to illuminate the path that's ahead of them. Of course, the famous verse from Psalm 119, Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light to my path. And so we talk about the light that's given by the Holy Spirit, which is the fire of God. But then also fire gives off warmth and enables us to stay alive in the midst of the cold and the darkness as Isaiah 44 speaks of using a piece of wood for fuel and a man takes a part of it and warms himself and kindles a fire. And so the fire of God provides that warmth in what can often be experienced as a universe and environment of cold and darkness. And we gravitate to the life giving warmth of the divine presence. And that same warmth, that same fire can transform that which is inedible into food which can nourish our bodies. And so this is the miracle of cooking, which is one of the foundations of human culture. Fire is able to cook food, transforming something that you couldn't chew, that you couldn't digest, something that might have even been poisonous to you. And through that heat and through the exposure to fire, it becomes nourishment for your body, it becomes digestible, becomes something that's not only not toxic but is even pleasant to our taste and it becomes food for us. And also of course there's the negative aspect of fire, which is that same warmth can turn out to be lethal. And so fire is dangerous and so we tell our children, don't play with fire. We know what it can do and fire is frequently used in the scriptures as a sign for divine judgment as Isaiah says, for by fire will the Lord execute judgment and by his sword upon all flesh. And so when we experience fire it has both those attractive qualities, it gives us warmth, it gives us light, it can be a source of life to us, it can be a source of guidance to us and yet it also has that dangerous aspect that if we get too close or we miss handle it, it can also be to us a source of death. And so that's very similar to what Dr. Hahn has described, you know, coming from Rudolph Otto of the Mysterium Tremendum at Fasinans, that both the attractive and the frightening mystery of God. So we tremble in God's presence because God's presence can be lethal as fire can be. But we're also attracted, like a moth to flame, to the light, the warmth, the beauty, etc. And so God uses fire as an image of himself and like I said, I believe this is written into creation and just for five minutes I want to make an aside and like a unfamiliarize ourselves with fire and come back at it with a new perspective. You know, first of all, do we realize that we're on the only planet in the universe where you can start a fire? At least the only known location in the entire cosmos. Do you realize you can't start a fire on any other planet in the solar system? Not even on Mars. There's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere of Mars for anything to burn and even if there was enough oxygen in Mars's atmosphere, there's no fuel. Have you looked around on the surface of Mars? From all those, you know, what do you see? Rocks and more rocks. So we keep sending rovers back to look at the rocks. Okay. I don't know what it is, like, oh, another rock. There's no wood, okay? And what is what you need? What is a great fuel? Look at our planet, okay? Our planet has just the right amount of oxygen and it's got to be a balance. It's one of those things that scientists called a Goldilocks parameter, okay? You can't have too much oxygen because that's like, that's why you can't light up a cigarette when you're in a fighter plane, right? Boop. Okay. Can't do that when you've got too much oxygen. Everything will incinerate, you know, more or less instantaneously. So we can't have too much oxygen in our atmosphere and everything would burn up spontaneously and we can't have too little or you wouldn't even be able to start a fire. So we got the Goldilocks amount of oxygen in the air that we have on this planet and therefore this planet is the only known place that we can see in all of the universe where you can actually start a fire. Have we really pondered that? And where would it be without fire? Well, we'll talk about that in a minute. Another wonderful thing about our planet is we got all these trees, okay? And wood is an un-excelled source of fuel and if we did not have wood, which will burn at a high temperature, we could not melt metal. We couldn't have furnaces and we couldn't develop human civilization. So imagine this. Imagine we didn't have the right amount of oxygen or imagine we didn't have trees to provide fuel, then we would be without fire. And if we didn't have fire, what would we have? No cooked food, okay? Some bachelors out there like, well, I put up with that already. But no cooked food, no metal tools because you can't melt and form metal, can't shape metal without the heat that fire provides, which would mean no cars, no planes, no appliances, no electronics. Of course, there's some people like, yeah, it's not the great world, I'm part of the Greens. No, we don't really want to do that. No telecommunications. We couldn't have this conference. We couldn't have these screens. There would be basically no human civilization. We would be restricted to living only in a few places in the planet where we could eat fruit and nuts all the time and that's about all we would be able to do. So we really need to be grateful for this literally miracle of fire which God designed our planet for and even designed our bodies for because have you ever pondered this? We are the only species that can manipulate fire. You ever wondered why cats never developed a world dominant civilization? I mean, they're clever and all and they know how to sleep, but a cat can't manipulate anything to start a fire and if cats could start a fire, they don't have anything that they could hold the fire with that wouldn't burn them. They could bite the torch or whatever, but it would singe them. You ever wonder why dolphins never created a world dominant civilization? Well, they're in the water and you can't start a fire down there and thus you cannot work metal. You can't make a metal based civilization. So they may be super smart, but hey, they're just going to be surfing and eating fish, you know, good life, but you can't make a civilization. So in order to manipulate fire, you've got to be a terrestrial species. You have to live on the land. You got to be out in the air and then you have to have limbs. Think about the wonder of our arms. Our arms enable us to start a fire far away from our bodies and then get something that's on fire and hold it away from us. So we can use its warmth and its light for guidance and its life-giving properties without being burned by it. There's studies that have been done about this by front-ranked scientists. I recommend this video. You can get it off of Amazon called Firemaker, which is all about how our planet and our human bodies are designed to be able to make use of fire. And this was in the mind of God from the beginning, I believe. And the fathers, you know, see this, you think like, birds might get off the science and get back to scripture. But the church fathers, when they meditate on creation, they go into lengthy digressions about how different animals and different features of what was made by God in the six days represent different properties and virtues and are revelatory of God himself. And this is very much in the keeping with the theology of Saint Bonaventure, the great intellectual of the Franciscan tradition, which we stand in here at Franciscan University. Saint Bonaventure, who saw every creature as a sign of God and that you could begin by the meditation on any creature and use that creature as a pathway for the mind to travel into God. That's the theology of Saint Bonaventure. So let's go back to the scriptures now appreciating what a miracle this reality that we call fire is and how appropriate it is in so many ways to be used as a sign of God's presence. The first time that fire is mentioned in the Bible, here's a little fact for all those who like to play biblical trivial pursuit here, okay? First time we get the word ash, fire in Scripture is actually when the covenant is made with Abraham for the first time in Genesis 1517. We know this when the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. We're of course talking about the first time that God made a covenant with Abraham. We get this reading in the third Sunday of Lent in year C. As a matter of fact, year C during Lent goes through salvation history and this was a momentous time. You remember how Abraham went out and looked at the heavens and God told him your descendants are going to be as numerous as the stars. And Abraham said, well, Lord, how can I know this because I don't have any children and my heir is going to be Eleazar of Damascus, my steward. And God tells him to take these animals and cut their bodies in half and lay the animals side by side. And then Abraham does that and darkness falls and when darkness falls, these two images of the divine presence appear, the smoking fire pot and the flaming torch and they move between the pieces of the animals. And this is an ancient covenant making ritual. God condescends to make a covenant with Abraham using a human ritual and in the ancient times when you would walk between the pieces of the bisected animals, what you were saying was if I don't keep this commitment that I'm making, may I become like these animals. In other words, may I die. May I be killed. And so God himself takes upon himself a curse of death to assure Abraham of the truth of God's promises to him, which is very mysterious and connects in a deep way to the death of Christ on the cross. So that would take us many turns and twists to trace that all out. The point here is that God is making the covenant with Abraham for the first time and in particular the imagery here of the smoke and the fire and the torch is anticipating when God will make the covenant for the first time with Abraham's descendants. It's already looking forward to Mount Sinai and the imagery at Mount Sinai is going to be the same. It's going to be fire, it's going to be smoke, it's going to be torches, torches in the sky, which is how the Hebrews described lightning which was present in Exodus 19 at Sinai. So this covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, the first time that fire is mentioned in Scripture is already looking forward to that definitive moment when God reveals himself as the great fire atop the mountain of Sinai to his people when that covenant is made much later. And the next time that we find fire in the Bible is in judgment raining down on Sodom and Gomorrah. This is the deadly aspect of fire, which is always in the background. And God's fire being revealed from heaven against the wickedness of men. And so fire is dangerous, both attractive and yet fearful. And Moses experiences both those dimensions of fire centuries later when the time is growing near for the fulfillment of God's promises to Abraham through Abraham's descendants. Remember how God promised to Abraham that his descendants would become a great nation. But when God calls Moses for the mission of going into Egypt and bringing out the people of Israel and forming them into a nation by giving them law and land, God appears to Moses as fire. We read in Exodus 3.2, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush and he looked and lo, the bush was burning yet it was not consumed. And so the bush seems to be sharing in the divine nature because only God's nature can burn continually and yet never be consumed. And why is that? It's because God is infinite. It's without limit. He can continually be consumed and never reach the end of himself. And so this burning bush is a sign of God's nature and of God's presence. And Moses turns aside to see this remarkable reality of the burning bush and he's commanded of course by God to take off his shoes because he is standing on holy ground. And then of course the Lord commissions Moses to go into Egypt and to return with the people of Israel out to Mount Sinai. And as Moses is leading the people out into the desert to go to the holy mountain, again God in his kindness comes down to lead the people himself. And so we read in Exodus 13 that the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light that they might travel by day and by night. The pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people. So the God who revealed himself in fire in the bush is now revealing himself to the people of Israel as the pillar of fire, leading them out to the mountain where God reveals himself in fire at the top of the mountain. Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln and the whole mountain quaked greatly. Here the imagery that was already anticipated back in Genesis 15 when God made that covenant with Abraham accompanies God's presence here where the covenant between God and his people is about to be formed in Exodus 24. And of course we know that after the covenant was formed in Exodus 24, there was just a brief 40-day honeymoon before the people got impatient and bored and decided to go back to good old foot-stomp and snake-handling Egyptian bowl worship, right? Which is what they had been used to for 400 years in Egypt. Yeah, that's our true religion. Oh yeah, I love that bowl, love that bowl, love that bowl, woo hoo, yeah. It's like old times, a festival of praise around the bowl and we know how to hold an incident. So they go back to idolatry but then God's nature of judgment is revealed again as fire is employed to judge the people and to judge the bowl in the aftermath of the idolatry. Moses comes down, takes the calf which they had made and burnt it with fire, grounded into powder, scattered upon the water, made the people of Israel drink it. So they consume this false divinity that they had made and it is consumed itself in the flames of fire, the consuming fire of judgment. And after the calf is destroyed, God of course provides for his continued presence to be with his people in the tabernacle. Within the tabernacle in the holy place, there was several signs of God's presence but one of the signs of God's presence was of course the burning menorah where God's presence as fire was made known but in a peaceful way in terms of casting light so that the priests could do their duties within the holy place and burn the incense before the veil, the veil that covered the most holy place which was in fact in darkness. And so Moses commands the craftsmen to make the lampstand of pure gold and the base and the shaft of the lampstand were hammered work, cups, capitals and flowers all of one piece. This lampstand is one of the signs of indeed the Holy Spirit but more broadly of God's nature who God is in himself. And then not only was there the lampstand within the tabernacle as the tabernacle moved with the people as a sign of presence but the fire, the fire that had previously moved along with the people as cloud descended and engulfed the tabernacle at the end of the book of Exodus as a sign of God dwelling within this tent which God had commanded Moses to make so that he could live and move and be in the midst of his people. So throughout all their journeys, it says in Exodus 40, 38, the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day and the fire was in it by night in the sight of all Israel. And so it went for the rest of the Pentateuch and we could trace that theme forward. We remember and Dr. Hahn mentioned this last night about how Nadav and Abihu, the sons of Aaron offered unholy fire before the Lord, unauthorized fire and it says that fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them. And this actually happens multiple times, frequently during the rebellious wilderness wanderings where from Numbers 11 through Numbers 25, 10 times in the wilderness the people rebel against God. Frequently the punishment of that is fire that comes forth from the presence of God striking down those who offend against the holiness of God. So all through the wilderness wandering there is the presence of fire coming from God, signs of fire as God's presence and that at the end of the wilderness wanderings when they are on the plains of Moab only days before the death of Moses. Moses in his great valedictory which is essentially the book of Deuteronomy, his great farewell speech or his farewell sermon. You thought your pastor preached for a long time. What? Because he goes over 10 minutes. There's 34 chapters of Deuteronomy. That's Moses's homily. Okay, so anyway Deuteronomy 5, 22, Moses is looking back over the course of the wilderness wanderings and Moses recalls and he recites for the second generation that grew up in the wilderness and is about to enter the land. He recalls what their parents saw at Sinai but Moses uses a little preacher's technique and he describes it as if you were there. Okay, so he addresses the children who are not but Moses says you were there. Okay, and I used to have back in South Bend in the parish that I joined when I became Catholic. I had one of the pastors there who used this technique. He would always describe our congregation as we good Catholics. We good Catholics pray every day with the family around the dinner table. We good Catholics pray the rosary daily. We good Catholics are aware of what our politicians are supporting in Congress. How many of the people really here are doing daily prayer with the kids? But anyway, it's this projection, right? Okay, so you were there. You are these people and Moses uses this technique and what does he say? He says these words the Lord spoke at the mountain out of the midst of the fire with a loud voice and when you heard the voice of the midst of the darkness and its appearance but it's this kind of sacramental realism. Okay, as we say, as it's said in Judaism, every Jew must regard himself as personally having participated in the Exodus. Okay, that's one of the, one of the, you might call it almost a dogma of Judaism, right? With loud voice, when you heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness while the mountain was burning with fire, you came near to me and said, behold, we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire. We have this day seen God speak with man and man still live. Now therefore, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us. If we hear the voice of the Lord our God anymore, we shall die. For who is there that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of fire as we have and has still lived? And so the people of Israel were so fearful at God's fiery presence, the fire of God's holiness at the foot of Sinai that they begged Moses to speak to them rather than to hear the words of God because of the terror that it struck in them because this is the problem of the holiness of God. We're attracted to it, we desire it, and yet it can be lethal to us, especially in our sinfulness. And so the dilemma of the human condition is how can we enter into the presence of God, which is a source of all light and life, but how can we enter into that presence without ourselves being consumed by it? Because of course we are finite. God himself is not consumed by the fire of his love and the fire of his holiness because he is infinite fuel, so to speak. There is no end of God. But how do we in our finitude and indeed, especially in our sins, come into the presence of a holy God without being consumed? This in a sense is the dilemma of salvation history. And how is God going to solve this in order to draw a people to himself that can participate in his nature without being destroyed by contact with his nature? And so we're going to take a big jump all the way into the new covenant era that comes to replace the old covenant established by Moses, the old covenant in which the solution to the dilemma was to remove God's people from his direct presence and put in place various mediators, namely Moses and the Levites and the High Priest, et cetera, at a remove to keep the people close and yet not intimate with the presence of God so they're not consumed. But how do we close that gap and come to a better covenant where we can enter in and even indeed abandon ourselves into the nature of God? Well, it begins with John the Baptist, a great prophet, a prophet who stands in the prophetic tradition going back to Moses. Moses and John the Baptist are almost bookends around the whole prophetic succession of the old covenant and John comes and John discusses fire. As he stands in the waters of the Jordan preaching to the people of Israel, he tells them, look, I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire and his winnowing fork is in his hand and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. So John the Baptist's original Hellfire brimstone preacher. I just got to love John the Baptist, guys all sunburnt from being out in the elements. He's covered with bee stings from tearing into those beehives to get the honey. He's wearing a hair garment with a leather girdle and his winning fork is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. I got the honey and a grasshopper leg dripping down his beard. Oh, I repent, I repent. No TV back then. The best show in town. But notice something interesting about this, brothers and sisters. We have two groups here. We have those who are going to receive baptism from the Messiah when he comes who's going to baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. That's talking about Christian baptism. Those are those who receive, that's the grain. The grain is going to receive the Holy Spirit and fire, but the chaff is going to receive unquenchable fire. So actually both the grain and the chaff are going to experience fire. So the fate of both the grain and the chaff in a profound sense is the same. They are both going to experience the fire of God. The fundamental difference, though, is that the grain is not going to be consumed by exposure to the fire of God, whereas the chaff is going to be consumed by it. And what is John the Baptist looking forward to? What is he anticipating when he talks about the baptism with Holy Spirit and with fire? Well, he's looking forward, of course, to Pentecost, among other things. And we read in Acts 2, after the resurrection of our Lord and in the birth of the church, his body, when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all gathered in one place and suddenly a sound came from heaven, like the rush of a mighty wind. And it filled all the house where they were sitting. So we're on a mountain, a mountain called Zion. And we have God's presence on that mountain top and we have fire and we have wind and we have burning there. Huh, when did we see this before? I'm having a kind of deja vu experience, a mountain of God's presence burning with fire and shaken by wind. Why this, of course, is Mount Sinai, except that the fire of God's presence at Mount Sinai was fear inducing. And the fire of God's presence here on Mount Zion is attractive and draws people towards itself. But there's a deep connection of the two because, of course, Pentecost was and is a Jewish holiday before it is a Christian holiday. You ever wonder about that? Acts 2, 1, when the day of Pentecost came, I used to read that when I was 13 years old, my mother made me start reading the Bible through in a year when I was 12. So every year I come around to this passage of Acts and I'm like, wait a second, the church hasn't up and running yet. So how are they observing Pentecost? How do they know to count to Pentecost? Well, what I didn't realize was, again, Pentecost was and is a Jewish holy day. It remains the only holy day in both the Jewish liturgical calendar and the Christian liturgical calendar that we have in common. So Pentecost was also called the Feast of Weeks, and I'll be talking about this in my breakout session later this afternoon. And so they counted seven weeks from Passover, really from the day after Passover. And then on the seven weeks is 49 days. And then on the 50th day, that was the Feast of Pentecost. And Passover celebrated the beginning of the grain harvest with the first of the barley, which was the first grain to ripen. And Pentecost celebrated the end of the grain harvest with the last of the wheat, which was the last to ripen over a course of a 50 day harvest season. And so at Pentecost, it celebrated the incoming of the wheat. But if you count in the Pentateuch, it is also 50 days from when the people of Israel leave Egypt at the Passover until they arrive at the foot of Mount Sinai in Exodus 19. And God reveals himself and they have the covenant, the covenant is made. And so Pentecost was the Feast of the Jews, where they gathered in Jerusalem, and they celebrated the giving of the law, the giving of the 10 commandments when God spoke the 10 words out of the fire that was burning on the top of the mountain. So you see how all the imagery converges. And so now on the day of Pentecost, we're having the giving of the new law of the new covenant, because as St. Thomas Aquinas says, the new law of the new covenant is nothing other than the grace of the Holy Spirit. So the gift of the Holy Spirit is going to replace God's law written on tablets of stone. And God's Holy Spirit is fiery. And the nature of the spirit is revealed to the visible eye here, as the 12 apostles become like a living human menorah in the Holy Place, each of them like a candle illuminated and lit up with the fire of the Holy Spirit. And so a mighty wind came filled the whole house where they were sitting and they appeared to them tongues as a fire distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. This is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the 12 on the day of Pentecost. We know how this how this played out. Peter preaches under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They are cut to the heart in Acts 237. They say, brethren, what must we do to be saved? Peter says to them, repent and be baptized. Every one of you and you shall receive the gift of the Holy for the forgiveness of your sins and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So what's happening here is God's fire, his nature, the Holy Spirit is being shared with the apostles. They are burning with the fire of the Holy Spirit, but they are not being consumed. And why are they not being consumed? It's because the Holy Spirit is like the hydrant, you know, the inexhaustible hydrant of God's nature. You know, when when I several of my kids are first responders, and you know, one of my daughters is a fireman, my son-in-law is a fireman. They go to a fire. If they have to hook up to their tanker truck, they know they've got about 15 minutes of water in that tanker truck. And then they're going to be out. And so if they're dependent on their trucks, to put out a structure fire, that is not a likely proposition. And so what do they look for? They look for that hydrant, because they have to have an inexhaustible supply that they can keep giving, keep pouring out, you know. And so the Holy Spirit within us is that river that Jesus speaks about in John 737, that river of life that he also spoke to the woman at the well, and that connection, that interior connection, that interior hydrant, if you will, of the fuel of God's nature, the Holy Spirit that keeps pouring out. And so we can stay lit and never be extinguished and not be consumed. God is sharing His nature. This is the answer to the dilemma. How can each one of us be like the burning bush? How can we participate in God's nature? How can we experience, indeed, how can we be bathed in the burning fires of God's love? How can we be a torch of the fire of God's love, warming and illuminating our homes and our parishes and our workplaces without our cells being consumed? It's by the inexhaustible supply of the Holy Spirit who keeps sharing God's nature with us. As Peter says in 2 Peter 1.4, we become partakers of the divine nature. So our God is a consuming fire, a fire of love, a fire of love that indeed causes suffering because in our finitude and in our sinfulness, when we become those living torches, that fire burns away our selfishness. It burns away our sin. It burns away that within us, which is not consecrated to God, that which in us is not united to God himself. And that can be a painful process. And that was what Jeff was talking about us, talking to us about. So movingly in the last talk, here we're meditating upon that, that fire of God's love, which is also his holiness, which can cause us pain, but which purifies us. That is his nature. And we are all going to experience it, right? We're either going to be baptized with the Holy Spirit of fire, or we're going to be burned up in the unquenchable flame. And so I think we need to grasp this, there is no way out. Every human being is going to experience the fire of God in one form or another. The answer then is how can we endure God's fire? Well, for those who go to hell, okay, those who are sent to hell are those for whom the fires of God are painful. Remember, fire can be different depending on what the material is. If you stick an object of high quality into a fire, it starts to glow like say an object of titanium or some other very pure and high quality metal, you stick into the fire and after a while, that metal takes on the nature of fire. This is an analogy that the church fathers used. And so that metal itself becomes hot and it glows and it takes on the color of the flames. And that's an image of the saints who take on the divine nature when they're plunged into the divine nature but are not destroyed by the divine nature. On the other hand, if you stick an old dry stick into the furnace, it's consumed because it cannot endure the flames of God. And so at the final judgment, those who are destined for hell are going to find God's presence very painful. People who are set against God do not like to be in God's presence. I saw this in a very visceral way when I was a Protestant pastor and I did a lot of evangelism. One of the things I noticed was that a lot of people that were like dead set against the church or had really kind of quite consciously turned their back on God. They did not even like to be around a church. The thing we used to say is he wouldn't darken the door of a church, right? But they were literally uncomfortable, right, to come into a holy place or anything else that mediated or radiated the presence of God. That made them uncomfortable and they would avoid that. And so at the final judgment, when we're all exposed to the direct presence of God, there's many people that are going to be very uncomfortable in the flaming fires of God's love. And so God in his mercy is going to cast those people as far away from himself as possible, which is described in the Gospel of Matthew as outer darkness. And I really regard hell as a kind of mercy of God because those who experience God's presence as pain, God has mercy on them and says because you experience my presence as pain, I'm going to cast you as far from me as possible so that you have the least experience of my presence. But even that minimal experience of their presence that they have in hell, because God cannot completely withdraw his presence, because his presence is what keeps us in being and he can't annihilate us because to annihilate us would be to deny his love for us. And God cannot deny his love for his creatures. And so even in hell, there is this minimal presence of God that supplies being to those who are in hell and even that minimal presence of God causes pain to those who are in hell. And indeed in hell there is self hatred because we cannot avoid the fact that we are made in God's image. And so even that in that that unerasable that irradicable image of God that's within us becomes a source of pain for those who reject God and turn their back on him intentionally. And that causes the sufferings that are described as the fires of hell, even though God is mercy has removed them as far from himself. And so that's one fate. And another fate of course is purgatory, which is only temporary. But that is we're drawn to the presence of God. And yet we did not embrace the sufferings that were sent to us in this life that Jeff was talking to us about. We resisted them, we rejected them, we tried to flee from them, etc. and don't embrace them and allow them to do their work. And thus when we reach the end of our temporal life, there's still work that needs to be done. And so God in his mercy, it's always God's mercy. Hell is mercy purgatory is mercy God and his mercy doesn't cast us away but allows the fire of his love to continue its work and to purify us. And then of course, the best fate that we all desire is heaven. When we are purified like that fine titanium or that that fine high quality gemstone or whatever you might liken it to that can be plunged into the fire and just takes the nature of fire, absorb the light and begins to glow and begins like God because we share in God's presence. These are the saints. These are this is Saint Teresa of Calcutta. This is Saint Catherine of Santa. These are the saints that are burning with the fire of God and not consumed because they partake in the nature of God. So fire consumes the fuel, changes it into itself. God is going to change us into himself in heaven. And so the path to salvation is to be transformed into God's nature now as Saint Peter says, partakers of the divine nature. And how do we do that? Well, we open ourselves up into the to the presence of God. You're doing that by coming to this conference to hear the words of God spoken from the fire rather than running from them as the people of Israel did on the mountain. You came from wherever you live all the way to Stewardville to hear the words coming forth from the fire. You've gathered to be inflamed by that fire. So you're making that step to expose yourself to God and to God's word into the sacraments. Remember how the burning coal from the altar in Isaiah six was understood by the fathers as an image of the Eucharist that brings forth that fire of God that touches our lips, that purifies. Remember we talked about how fire purifies, cleanses, sterilizes, purifies us from a sin. It sets our hearts in fire, did our hearts not burn within us when he spoke God's word. So meditation on God's word, opening our lives up to prayer, making time for God on a daily basis in prayer, setting aside those holy times which we've been so bad at and I'm going to talk about that in my breakout session, exposing ourselves to God in the sacred time, the Lord's Day and the other great feast days of the church. And then also, especially as Jeff was speaking to us, embracing those sufferings which are the purifying fires of God's love, learning to understand that they are given to us out of signs of God's love, the reversals, the difficulties within our family, difficulties with children, difficulties with spouses, financial reverses, a sadness over the state of our homes, our families, our communities, our parish, the nation as a whole, the worldwide church, all those sorrows, all those challenges, allow them to do God's work, allow them to burn away from you all that which is not God, so that you put your hope in nothing else but in God himself, that you seek no sustenance except that which comes from the Holy Spirit, that you don't reach out to wine for inebriation, but you enter into the Holy Spirit to be inebriated by the Holy Spirit, the fires of God's love which will sustain you. This is what we seek in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, we give you thanks this day for drawing us into your presence and transforming us into yourself. Lord, help us, help us in this high calling. Help us to comprehend what you're calling us to soften our wills, warm our wills by your gentle warmth so that we can say yes to you and grow in strength until we can withstand the fire of your love. We ask this through Christ our Lord, amen. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. Thank you very much.