For a time, everything in
the firehouse in Tasley, a small settlement in rural Accomack County,
Virginia, stayed still and quiet. It was the twelfth day of March
2013. The day had worn on. Evening had come. And then not just
evening, but bona fide night. At 9:26, things were still and quiet.
But at 9:27, the sleepy stillness was split as a call came in. Not
just any call, but the one they'd been dreading, the one they knew
was coming. And in an instant, the still, quiet firehouse sprang
into immediate action. Not a hundred seconds had passed before,
untangling themselves from every other preoccupation, they were ready
to roll – and on the scene in minutes.
For months, a serial
arsonist had been on the loose in Accomack County, torching structure
after structure. All had begun in mid-November the prior year. As
the realization dawned of what was going on, it set the entire
community on edge, especially as attacks grew more frequent. Their
home was a heavily rural district, not the bustling region it had
once been, so the landscape was littered with abandoned buildings
ripe for targeting. The residents began keeping lights on at night,
afraid the arsonist might mistake their darkened home for a vacant
one. Sensing that no stranger would bother tormenting them so,
members of the community grew suspicious and wary around each other.
But at the same time, they drew closer together in supporting the law
enforcement and emergency response efforts with massive outpourings
of gifts and baked goods.
The whole ordeal was a
drain on the firefighters of the Tasley Volunteer Fire Company. When
the arsons began, they had just twenty-six active members in their
department. And yet, with so few personnel, for a time they dealt
with a fire nearly every night, one after another, in scarcely
relenting succession. Matters had gotten so bad that the volunteers
on duty, mainly younger men in their mid-twenties, had chosen to
sacrifice their private lives and just move into the firehouse
itself. It was a narrow building, an older, smaller house; what
might in theory have passed for a bunk room was in shape a crawl
space and in practice a closet, so they laid out their sleeping bags
on the floor of the main meeting space. A stash of movies and video
games kept them occupied during the stretches of waiting. They
arrived as a family, lived as a family, slept as a family, ate as a
family.
And now the most dreaded
call had come. Whispering Pines, just half a mile down the road from
the firehouse, was a defunct motel in lengthy decay, decades closed,
symbol of a prosperous but dead past. Not too many in the area would
particularly miss the creepy old building by the side of the road.
But to others, it was history, pure and simple. More important for
the living, the roof of every house nearby was weighed down by a
layer of dry pine needles, and Whispering Pines, the arsonist's
latest target, was throwing off softball-sized embers with panache
and enthusiasm. It was, without a doubt, the largest of all the
arson fires that had plagued the county. To passersby, the whole
area looked like hell's invasion of earth. Fire leapt seemingly from
every clod of dirt. The night air was orange and red and black. All
visible things had been devilishly transfigured into ghastly,
infernal parodies of themselves.
The buildings on the
property were all too decayed to send personnel into to fight from
within. And so, for over five exhausting hours, with a multiplicity
of tankers and engines on scene – all that the Tasley Volunteer
Fire Company could provide, and several of the closest other fire
departments as well – the Tasley company took lead around the
premises, spraying everything they could muster, endeavoring, if
nothing else, to contain and mute the blaze. And then watching,
waiting, watching, waiting. Sustained by McDonald's deliveries
through the long haul, the men were tired when, just a few minutes
shy of three in the morning, their chief, Jeff Beall, gave the order
to shut things down.
Surely, they hoped, this
greatest building would be the pièce
de résistance – the final stroke in the arsonist's mad handiwork. But their
pagers went off the next night, too. Thankfully, a couple weeks
later, they caught their serial arsonist. Imagine their surprise
when the arsonist turned out to be arsonists – a couple –
boyfriend and girlfriend. Imagine their surprise to find out the man
was a former volunteer, known to absolutely everyone, and whose own
brother was one of the active members fighting these fires from first
to last. Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick, whose story is intertwined
with that of the investigation in journalist Monica Hesse's book
American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land,
had a dysfunctional relationship, one they'd hoped to salvage somehow
through this exciting activity. Is that love? Infatuation,
certainly. Romance, maybe. But ask those who lived in fear as arson
scourged the land, ask those betrayed by the revelation: Was that
love? Does love burn down the world? Is real love an arsonist?
Bound
together by crime, their infatuation scorched the world around them,
unconcerned for the damage in their wake, even as they hypocritically
made the pretense of grieving with their neighbors. Divided from
each other on their apprehension, their bonds fractured. They turned
on each other. Testified against each other. Blamed each other.
Moved on from each other. By the time Tonya came to trial, she had a
new boyfriend, and she and Charlie would scarcely look at each other
in the courtroom. The fires hadn't reignited enduring passion;
they'd exposed the brokenness and unhappiness that they'd felt
lurking beneath the surface. And because, all throughout, their
insular romance lacked real love, agape
love, the law had to restrain them. And now they have to pay a
'debt' to society in their imprisonment. That's the grim necessity
of the world we're living in.
Paul
envisions a different sort of world. As he pens this letter we've
been reading from, he knows that Roman Jews and Roman Gentiles alike
live in worlds obsessed with law – the Torah, the Law of Moses, for
the one; the imperial and senatorial edicts of Rome, for the other.
And he knows that both Roman Jews and Roman Gentiles struggle at
times with this mess of laws that breed like rabbits. He knows that
his hearers, then and now, are so prone to get tangled up in the red
tape of eight billion obligations. But that's not how we were meant
to live, this vast bureaucratic disorder, this ball of red tape and
regulation, this never-ending cycle of debt, this tiresome dance.
“Owe no one anything,”
Paul cries out (Romans 13:8a). That's the idea.
But
Paul knows that law is necessary in the kind of world we have, the
kind of world we've made for ourselves. Law is necessary for a world
in debt. Law is necessary for a world on fire. See, in a world on
fire, Paul notices, in a tinderbox cosmos and a tinderbox society, we
need to be told not to light fires all around us, fires that risk
burning the floor out from under our neighbors – which not only
wrongs them, but weakens the decaying planks where we stand, too.
It's a world on fire. A world on fire is a world badly in need of
law.
In
a world on fire, we cast smoldering lustful glances, we reach out
with sizzling lustful touches – the news is full of it, our
neighborhoods are scarred by it, our lives at times bear the heat of
it – and so the law tells us, “You shall not commit
adultery” (Romans 13:9a; cf.
Deuteronomy 5:18). In a world on fire, we nurse resentment in our
hearts toward our brothers and neighbors; we let anger smoke and
smolder; we let our pride get inflamed; we lash out in words and
actions that scald and burn each other. So the law tells us, the law
has to tell us, “You shall not murder”
(Romans 13:9b; cf. Deuteronomy 5:17). In a world on fire, we try to
grab control, like the games of tug-of-war you see at the fair. We
want to control, possess, claim ownership of each other's property,
each other's identity, each other's decision-making, each other's
reputation. We hack and slash and plunder in so many ways. And so
the law has to tell us, “You shall not steal”
(Romans 13:9c; cf. Deuteronomy 5:19). In a world on fire, we burn
with desire, we look askance in envy on the blessings of others, we
want to stand tall by scorching what's around us with the heat of our
desire. And so the law has to tell us, “You shall not
covet” (Romans 13:9d; cf.
Deuteronomy 5:21). Whether with our deeds or with our words, we are
tempted toward the arson that the law is dedicated to reining in –
for the Bible calls even just your tongue “a fire...,
setting on fire the entire course of life, and [itself] set on fire
by hell” (James 3:6). No
wonder it's a world on fire.
But
there's one thing the Apostle Paul sees, even in a world on fire,
even in a world in debt, even in a world set to burn and hogtied with
red tape: “The one who loves the other has fulfilled the
law” (Romans 13:8b). All the
commandments for a tinderbox world, any law you can devise to
restrain the arsonists who'd damage it in this way or that... those
commandments, those laws, those regulations – they multiply out of
control, they get out of hand, they tangle up our lives in ways we at
times need but find so complicated and so frustrating. But you could
slice the Gordian knot, the big ball of red tape, and tame the
furiously procreative laws by summing them up under a single
capstone. And Paul hauls it out of his Bible and puts it on a big
banner and hangs it up for all to see. And here's the one: “You
shall love your neighbor as yourself”
(Romans 13:9e; cf. Leviticus 19:18).
Hit
that target, and all the rest is bundled in with it. The law all
along has been begging for us not to wrong our neighbors, not to burn
out the floor from under them, not to cast the world into smoky
perplexity and blazing chaos. That's all the law ultimately wants.
And love will never set fire to a neighbor's home. Love will never
set fire to a neighbor's family. Love will never set fire to a
neighbor's livelihood. Love will never set fire to a neighbor's
reputation. Love will never set fire to a neighbor's prosperity.
For “love does no wrong to a neighbor”
(Romans 13:10a). Note well, I don't say romanticism – that can do
wrong to a neighbor, as Charlie and Tonya made clear. I don't say
sentimentalism – that can do wrong to a neighbor. But love,
authentic love, the sort of love Paul means – that
does no wrong to a neighbor. See, to love your neighbor as yourself
is incompatible with – it's a preventative measure against –
being an arsonist of the moral fabric of your community. That's the
sort of fire prevention we need. What we need is this “love”
that, in the freedom it gives us, is so far from lawlessness that it
amounts, Paul says, to “the fulfilling of the law”
(Romans 13:10b).
What
does a love like that look like? Certainly we don't see it on
display by the arsonists. I dare say we catch a better glimpse by
casting our vision more toward that Tasley firehouse. In the time of
trial, they came together – they moved in together, undertook all
their actions as a unit. They temporarily gave up their own homes,
their own private privileges, to share a common life. They ate at
the same time, traveled everywhere together, so that, should the call
suddenly come in, none could be left behind. While enjoying their
amusements – the movies, the video games – they held them
loosely, ready to sprint away at a moment's notice, refusing to let
their amusements be their distraction from the call of need around
them. Petty squabbles couldn't be allowed to get in the way of the
task at hand when the time came. Each saw him- or herself as serving
the others and serving their community. They were vigilant. They
were active. They were devoted. They were diligent. And they
needed to be. There are plenty of structures out there that are
vulnerable to catching fire, and plenty of people out there in need
of rescue and assistance in every strain of emergency: fires,
crashes, health crises. For such things, we have firefighters and
other first responders in this world – and thank God for that.
But
we live in a world on fire in bigger ways. Your life may be on fire
in ways that your smoke detector will never pick up. A cosmic
arsonist stalks the darkness like a pestilence, an arsonist of the
whole soul, breathing out spiritual smallpox and maddened to
incinerate all creation with his fiery darts. And we are all, to one
extent or another, his accomplices. That's what Paul means when he
talks about 'sin.' A simple word, a short word, for being an active
accomplice to this cosmic arsonist. Sin, especially against one
another, so frequently amounts to spiritual arson – and if you play
with fire, you're going to get burned yourself.
The
only solution to the arsonists of Accomack County, Virginia, or –
God forbid – to any similar crimes that should come to Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania, would be – where? A firehouse. A company
peopled by those bound together by devotion who follow their chief's
lead in responding to the needs around them. And so, too, the only
ultimate solution to a cosmic arsonist, and his plethora of
accomplices in our neighborhood, is the church of God, where dwell
the people of love. A company peopled by those bound together by
devotion, who follow the lead of local lieutenants and chiefs,
responding to the needs around them, but commissioned by the Holy
Fire Commissioner sent down from heaven, Jesus Christ, who himself
braved the fiery trial of the cross, who let himself be burned by the
sum total of human moral arson, but who walked safely and healthily
out of the blaze in the beauty of resurrection. Living and
fireproof, he's got the cosmic arsonist's number. The cosmic
arsonist won't get away with it. He doesn't stand a chance.
Jesus
promises, in the end, to douse the inferno and regrow bounty and
beauty from every ash-heap. And in the meantime, he has poured out
his Spirit, a river of living water welling up in and flowing from
each believer's heart (cf. John 7:38), to flood each assembly with
mutual love that overflows to all the world and does far more than
the law could ever ask or imagine. Keep tapped into the Holy Spirit,
who proceeds from “the LORD,
the fountain of living water”
(Jeremiah 17:13), and the fire-hose of his love will never fail
against the fires of this world. With that in mind, Jesus, Giver of
the Spirit, has indeed commissioned a people to gather here on duty,
diligent and vigilant, to train and be ready to respond to every call
that comes through. It's no wonder that, in describing the saints
whose faith made the biblical headlines, the Bible depicts them as
those who “quenched the power of fire”
(Hebrews 11:34). May that be us. May we here, each one of you, each
one of us, answer the one debt left: to quench a world on fire with a
love that fulfills and overspills the law, in Jesus' name. Amen.