[Sermon] The Fire That Transforms

Rev. Salvador Cosio

August 17, 2025 + Tenth Sunday after Pentecost / Lectionary 20

In today’s gospel, Jesus speaks of fire, division, and urgency—words that unsettle rather than comfort. Rev. Salvador Cosio explores how this fire is not about destruction but about transformation: reshaping our identity in baptism, gathering us into true belonging in Christ’s body, and sending us into the world with purpose. To follow Jesus means clashing with the world’s false forms of belonging, and sometimes even with family or friends, but the Spirit’s fire keeps refining us. We are called to scatter love and justice as freely as the sower scatters seeds, trusting God’s power to bring growth where we least expect it. The peace Christ offers is not passive, but active—a costly peace of truth, reconciliation, and liberation. With bold witness we join Mary Magdalene’s cry: “I have seen the Lord.”

Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.

A little bit about me—and it’s not about me, but it’s about the context of what I’m preaching today. I grew up in Tijuana, Mexico. I grew up in the Baptist church, in a Baptist family. My grandparents were the pastors. Um, they were helping, they were planting.

But as I was growing up, I realized that I was—and I’m not saying that this is bad, I’m just saying it was different—I realized that I was in an independent, fundamentalist Baptist church. We didn’t speak to other Baptists, because we were the only ones going to heaven. (That was a joke.)

But growing up, I cared for friends who were in different conditions than me. Uh, I had the blessing to have both of my parents and a big, big, big, big family. My mother—on my mother’s side—was the second of thirteen. And I have a huge, an industrial amount of cousins. My dad only had a twin sister, and I have two cousins over there.

But I grew up in an apartment complex where I used to hang out with tons and tons of friends. There were different contexts over there—different types of families, different situations—and sometimes, trying to care for them and praying for them was not the best way to care for them. Why? Because they didn’t understand God in the way that I was exposed to.

And thinking over the years, this fire that Jesus is talking about has refined me over and over—sometimes extra crispy. I’m not saying that God is done with me, but I’m saying that I found a different way to love my friends and my neighbors, in a way that the gospel didn’t hurt them.

So, growing up, when I was in that youth group, I asked my parents if I could just change churches, because one of my friends invited me to their youth group in a big non-denominational church. And I loved the way they spoke to the youth. I loved the way that they were serving.

And what—I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the theology—but what engaged me was that every Friday, that youth group would go out to the red-light district of Tijuana and serve and play with the homeless kids and youth, from six years old all the way to seventeen. So I loved that. I loved that.

And there were three—two other—friends that I connected with a lot, and we were serving there. Until today, the three of us are pastors.

After that, I got in contact with a pastor in the Foursquare church in Mexico. What took me there to serve with him was that he was serving meals for a really poor community. So—service, service. And we thought that making them—and I’m not saying this is wrong, it was just different—we thought that leading them to make the sinner’s prayer was the thing they most needed. And then we focused on serving meals.

After walking many years in that, I had some doubts. I had some questions. I saw that doing the gospel was hurting people more than helping, in the way that we thought we were helping. And it took me to start walking in a different path.

One day, I was invited to translate for a missionary group that was going to visit our orphanage for a week in Tijuana. And this group was Lutheran, from a Lutheran church. I didn’t know anything about Lutherans. But what brought my attention was the way that they were serving. They didn’t care—they were doing projects, but the main thing was not the project. It was being relational.

This relational ministry caught my attention, and I said, “Oh, they’re serving in a different way.” So I started digging a little bit deeper, deeper, deeper. And every year, for the next eight years, I tried to be the translator, to be there, to connect with them. We made good friendships—until, until they hired me to serve here. That group was from Grace Lutheran Church.

But in this path, in the Lutheran church—serving, being open to meet God in my own way—I have seen and I have reflected, and people have lovingly re-entered me, to check and to realize how many times we have been through this fire.

Last week, we spent seven days—I think seven days—at summer camp. We were 76 people in total. It was a great week. It was a loving week. And I was trying to reflect, to write the sermon that I was going to preach today.

And a few of the kiddos, without noticing, helped me. They were putting some examples. One of them said, “Hey, Pastor Salvador, when I don’t understand something, I try to put it in an easy way, something that I understand—and maybe everyone else will understand.”

So, with your permission, today’s gospel I will adapt a little bit with the sower parable.

So, saying that, I have a question: how many of you do your garden? How many of you just do your garden? And how many of you take it really seriously?

I—I just do the garden because it is on my contract, or the landlord will hire someone and I will pay the expenses. My wife puts a lot of love into it, and it requires a lot of patience. But I have seen people from the congregation, and some neighbors, who plant the seeds by hand.

Growing up, I used to have an aunt who had a farm that planted tomatoes. I didn’t spend a lot of time there, but I was there a couple of days one summer, and I saw the way they were planting the seeds—under the sun, on a hot day.

My neighbors prepare the soil just right. But in Jesus’ times, there was a way of sowing called—in Spanish, al voleo—the broadcast sowing. The sower would just throw the seeds everywhere, without worrying if the ground was perfect. Some would land on rocky paths, some among the thorns, some on good soil. It looks wasteful. It looks reckless.

But the point was simple: you sow generously, and you trust God to bring the growth where you least expect it. You sow generously, and you trust the germinating power of God’s Word to grow where you least expect it.

[Applause]

Jesus, in today’s gospel, sounds a lot like that kind of sower. He says, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” He talks about division, urgency, and reading the signs of the times.

This is not Jesus bringing us calm, predictable religion. This is Jesus sowing fire—scattering seeds of the kingdom everywhere, even in places that look barren. Following Jesus isn’t about living in a cozy bubble of peace. It’s about encountering the risen Christ—the one Mary Magdalene proclaimed with trembling joy: “I have seen the Lord.”

It is in that encounter that the fire Jesus brings purifies, burns away illusions, and reveals truth. That fire shapes us with a new identity in baptism, belonging in God’s community, and purpose in love for our neighbors.

So, I’m going to—don’t worry, I only have three points. Don’t worry about it—we will go out on time.

Number one: Jesus sows fire that gives us identity.

Jesus says he came to bring fire—not destruction, but purification, passion, new life. Fire reshapes everything it touches. And that’s what Jesus does with our identities. In baptism, God marks us with the cross of Christ forever. The fire of the Spirit claims us, names us, and declares that nothing—nothing: failure, sin, or the judgment of the world—can take away who we are in Christ.

So remember today: you are a beloved child of God. It doesn’t matter what the world says today. In a culture that says identity is something we must earn, build, or prove, God—through our baptism—says, “You already belong to me. You are sealed with the Spirit. You are beloved.”

So don’t forget that. Or try to remember when you are feeling weak, like seeds thrown on every type of soil. God’s baptismal grace doesn’t discriminate. It lands on all of us.

Some of us feel like rocky ground in certain times of our life. Other times, we feel like thorny soil. Some of us wonder if anything can grow in us at all. But the fire of Christ’s baptismal love reminds us: our identity doesn’t depend on the soil. It depends on the seed that God plants in us.

When we cry out, “I have seen the Lord,” it’s not just a memory of Easter morning. It’s our baptismal testimony. Christ is alive in us. His fire is still purifying us and shaping who we are.

Number two: belonging.

The cost of belonging. Jesus doesn’t sugarcoat it. He says his baptism—his suffering, his cross—is weighing on him. And he says his message will divide families: father against son, daughter against mother. That doesn’t sound like peace, but it makes sense if we remember that true belonging to Jesus will sometimes clash with false belonging in the world.

I went to seminary in Mexico. It was not a Baptist one. And at that moment, I had to sit in front of all my family and say, “Hey, I’m taking this direction.”

When I was hired at Grace, Pastor Andy G, Pastor Chad Johnson, Pastor Rachel Swinson—they asked me if I wanted to go to a Lutheran seminary. And they asked me if I wanted credit for whatever I could, to fast-forward my pace at seminary. And I said, “Nope. I would like to start from scratch, because I really don’t know a lot about Lutheranism and theology.”

I sat with my parents—not to ask permission, but just to let them know the path I was taking. At one point, because my parents grew up Baptist (and they are still Baptists), for them it looked like I was just going the Catholic way. Which is not wrong. But if you grow up independent, fundamental Baptist, it can sound like that is not the right direction.

And for a while, there was a division there. There was no lack of love, but there was a division of opinions. It was a path that we had to walk with more caution, so as not to hurt anyone. But that fire—that fire, after a time—reshaped me and reshaped my parents. Thankfully, that path is a good path now.

But it doesn’t sound like peace.

For us, belonging is not an individual project. For us Lutherans, it is not an individual project. It is God gathering us in the body of Christ. In Holy Communion, we are knit together as one community around Christ’s table. That belonging often puts us at odds with the world’s divisions and boundaries.

Belonging to Christ means sometimes we won’t fit in. The fire of the kingdom doesn’t let us stay silent in the face of injustice. It doesn’t let us stay neutral when others are hurting. Sometimes, even family or friends won’t understand why we forgive, why we serve, why we welcome people who don’t look or think like us.

In today’s context, that fire is still burning. Jesus’ fire is exposing a lot of things in this world. It’s exposing how the gospel sometimes is used as a tool to control rather than to liberate, to protect privilege rather than uplift the oppressed. When the good news is twisted into manipulation, Jesus’ fire reveals the truth.

To belong to him is to refute counterfeit belonging, and instead embrace the costly peace of truth-telling, justice-seeking, and reconciliation—for the oppressed and for the oppressor.

This is why Jesus says he’s coming to bring division. But notice this: division is not the goal. It is the result of the fire of truth. That’s why it’s such a red flag when people say it’s “divisive” to talk about racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, and any other topic that hurts our siblings.

The only people standing against liberation are the ones who benefit from oppression.

And sometimes we see it on big levels. But I can tell you this: all of us, in one way or another, we have privilege. I can just sit down—after seminary, I can tell you that many of my classmates, my Latino classmates, had fewer opportunities than me.

I will not sit down in my privilege just because I was hired here. I have the privilege of being in a loving congregation. I have the opportunity and the privilege to be here, right in front of you. But that doesn’t mean I cannot speak for my siblings who are not getting the same opportunities—to preach, to lead, or to be heard.

Transformation. Transformation after the fire—that happens after the encounter with the risen Christ. We are no longer who we were. We are a community called not just to survive, but to flourish together. Baptism doesn’t just name us individually—it joins us into a Spirit-filled people who live differently in the world.

Number three: discerning the time and living with purpose.

At this camp—we were on Lake Crescent, in the Olympic Peninsula—two of our members of the congregation gladly brought their boats to help the kids go tubing or skiing. But I remember one of them, he got up really early. It was around 5:30 a.m. He grabbed his coffee, looked out the window toward the lake, and he said: “We’re not going into the lake today. The wind is going to make the lake a little bit choppy.”

How could he just know that, by the wind? It’s the experience, right? It’s the experience of doing it many times. They paid attention, because it mattered for the activity they were going to do. It mattered, because it put in danger the lives they were responsible for in that moment.

How can we practice love? How can we love our neighbor? How can we speak truth for justice? How can we feed the one who is hungry? So many times, we can recognize the right way only through practice, practice, practice.

In the same way that the sower was generously scattering the seeds—just throwing them everywhere—let’s throw love in every direction, and the germinating power of God’s love will do the rest.

Sometimes we say, “Oh, when things calm down, then I’ll pray more. When life slows down, then I’ll serve.” We wait for the perfect season, the perfect soil. But the broadcast sower doesn’t wait. He scatters now. And Jesus tells us: the time is now.

Our purpose is clear. We are freed in Christ for the sake of our neighbor. Baptism sets us free from needing to earn God’s approval—so that we can live for others: loving, serving, and sowing seeds of justice and mercy wherever we go.

To say “I have seen the Lord” is to live as witnesses in our own time—announcing that Christ is alive not only in church sanctuaries, but in broken systems, fractured communities, and hurting hearts. Our calling is to join Jesus in the world, sowing abundantly—even recklessly—because his fire is already kindled.

Jesus didn’t come to bring easy peace. He came to kindle fire in this world—to transform. He came to scatter seeds that grow into a kingdom bigger than anything we can imagine.

So let’s live like the broadcast sower, scattering seeds of grace wherever we go: living our baptismal identity as God’s beloved children; finding belonging in God’s community, not in the world’s approval; living with a purpose of loving our neighbor today, not waiting for tomorrow.

Because when we scatter with faith, we too can join Mary’s bold testimony: “I have seen the Lord.” And that encounter with the risen Christ will keep purifying us, guiding us, and setting us on fire for the truth—so that we can lead everyone in the world to find identity, belonging, and purpose in God’s kingdom.

And God’s people say, “Amen.”