Poem for Sunday, August 17, 2025

A Poem based on Jeremiah 23:23-29 & Luke 12 about considering fire.

Your Word is Fire
Inspired by Jeremiah 23:23-29 & Luke 12:49-56

When I discovered
Your word is fire,
nothing remained the same.

I had thought You would allow me
to live in the comfort of straw illusions.

I thought—
quite conveniently—
You were a rumor,
a word with no weight,
aloof and absent,
if anything.

But then—
a spark without warning,
quiet as a flower in bloom—
set my dry existence
ablaze.

Now I know
Your word is fire.
And fire is utterly significant.



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If you’re writing a sermon this week—or simply reading along with the lectionary—you might be wondering, “What do I do with all this fire?” Or perhaps, “What am I supposed to think about all this fire?”

The truth is, your sermon this week might not be your best. And honestly, you might not walk away with a life-changing reflection on any of these texts. That’s okay. Someone once described the life of reading scripture and reflecting on it as a long, ongoing conversation—not one with neat beginnings and endings.

In recent weeks, the scriptures have hinted at something in the background, and now it has stepped fully into view. The simplest—though perhaps least helpful—way to say it is this: in this week’s lectionary, we encounter a God who is God.

That might not preach well. But it’s worth remembering that the goal of a sermon—or of reading the Bible—is not always to come away with understanding or comfort on our terms. Sometimes, the biblical writers, and certainly Jesus, aim to disturb us. To unsettle us from the illusions we live in, in order to invite us into something more real, more truthful: a God who is God. Not a god of our own making or imagination, but the living God, unshaped by our preferences or designs.

When we begin to realize this (and it’s a realization that never fully arrives), we see how easily worship, sermons, reflections, and even our images of God can drift into idolatry. Not intentionally, but inevitably—we tend to imagine God through the limits of our own daily experiences and familiar categories. Yet God is other. God is transcendent. The descriptions we reach for may point toward God, but they can never contain God.

In the poem I shared above, I tried to put words to my own undoing when facing this God-who-is-God. It was not easy. But perhaps one of the holiest tasks of faith is to exchange the God we want for the God who truly is—for fire. For mystery. For something vast, uncontrollable, and infinitely more real than anything we could fashion ourselves.

If you’d like to explore ideas like this further, Rabbi Shai Held discusses related themes in his podcast episode on negative theology from a Jewish perspective. You can listen to it: God Has No Attributes