Fire. It fascinates us. Think of nights you’ve spent huddled around a
camp fire, or staring up at the stars, those huge bundles of fire that we can
see from so far away. Fire warms us, lights
up our world, cooks our food, fascinates us and attracts our gaze.
Friends:
look up. Literally, please do it now:
look up. Because those of us who are
baptized (and if you’re not, let us know and we’ll see if we can do something
about that) have been gifted with God’s own dignity and life, through water and
the Spirit and resting on us are tongues as of fire, descended from above, just
as they did on those disciples on the first Christian Pentecost. For those of us who are confirmed (and again,
if you’re not, talk to us), those tongues are strengthened. It’s a blazing fire, which tenderly laps the
tops of our heads, and it should capture our gaze, because that draws us up, to
the full stature God created us to have, to gaze with longing at the heavens
for which God has claimed us, by making us mature, confident, heads-held-high,
missionary disciples, gaze captured by the delightful fire of the Spirit.
Ninety-six
days ago, we were marked with ashes on our foreheads and remembered that we are
dust. We lamented that sometimes that’s
all people can see when they look at us, the leftovers, the remnants of God’s
fiery passion in which we each have been embraced, because a fire in which what
grabs your attention first is the ashes isn’t much of a fire. But there are no ashes without flames. There is lamenting to be done for each of us
and for all of us, but not today. No,
today, we celebrate. We have lamented
and sought to grow in grace and virtue through our Lenten fasting, prayer and
almsgiving; we have celebrated Easter, we’ve set alight the new fire, and
watched our Paschal candle burn throughout these fifty days of Easter. And now, we celebrate, that God has gifted us
with His own fire. It does rest on us. It is pulling us up and, however far we have
to go, we will blaze triumphant with him forever.
We
celebrate this, not ignoring all that needs to be lamented in the world, but
because we know that it’s that fire, that Spirit, that new dignity we discover
in ourselves and in all whom we meet which will lead us on to do something about
it. As Paul said to the Corinthians, we’re given gifts of the Spirit for some
benefit, for service, to declare what God is doing in the world. The gift isn’t
meant to just make us feel warm and fuzzy, but to transform us.
I’m
guessing at least some of you watched the royal wedding yesterday. If you didn’t,
I really would recommend finding online Bishop Curry’s sermon. I guarantee it’s
the best preaching you’ll hear this weekend. For those of you who heard it, I’m
going to bring up a couple of images he used, that can kind of serve as a ‘reminder
ad’ for that sermon, and for those who haven’t yet, treat these as a sample of
coming attractions. Towards the end, he drew out an image from Jesuit priest
and scientist Teilhard de Chardin. He talked about fire. He talked about the
invention or discovery or whatever you call it when humans realized they could use
fire, that we could direct its energy. Chardin called that the most
revolutionary event in the history of human technology. Without that, there’d
have been no bronze age, no iron age, no cooked food, no industrial revolution.
There’d have been no plane to fly him to the wedding, no cars to drive the
guests, no internet for me to watch it on. The human discovery of fire changed
to world. The only thing that would change it more, he said, is if we finally
discovered love.
Love is
more fiery than fire. The Spirit is more fiery than fire. We are set ablaze.
And like the dough that rises or the engine that drives the wheels, we are set
in motion by that. We are sent, as missionary disciples with a gospel to
proclaim. We have a gospel to proclaim, we have good news.
And what
does that look like? Here’s where I’d like to end with another of Bishop Curry’s
images. His whole sermon was a passionate meditation on the statement “there is
power in love,” (a reference to Dr. King’s, “we must discover the power of love”)
and as well as the image of fire, he had another image that contrasted with
that one and helped bring out another face of that power. He referred to an old
spiritual, and he brought us back to the antebellum South, to the slave house,
where some of his ancestors had been, where they kept their faith alive by
singing, “There is a balm in Gilead.” A balm, that cools, that sooths, that
heals their all too broken bodies, our sin-sick soul, draws us up to our full
stature. And there’s a verse of that spiritual that sings of how that balm is
as much a commission as the fire is: If you cannot preach like Peter [join in
if you know it], if you cannot pray like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus
and say he died for all.
Fire. Balm. Love. Spirit. Licking our heads. Sending us forth.
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