“Playing with Fire”

A Sermon by

The Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 11 May 2008

Let me just add my congratulations and blessing to all the mothers on this Mother’s Day and all of those who are as mother. There are many ways to be mother in our culture today. If you’re like me this morning and your mother is living at a distance from you, and you haven’t made your call yet, [Laughter], I’ll just share with you a little advice. It’s been my experience that I’ve got about 45 minutes from the time the second church service ends, to get home and make that call; otherwise I’m considered late with my Mother’s Day greeting. So, have lunch with us in Pierce Hall and then hurry home and make that call if you haven’t already done so.

Our reading this morning is from the book of Acts, Chapter 2, Verses 1 through 13. This is a text that Christian congregations across the world will be reading this morning. It’s the story of Pentecost.

When the day of Pentecost came, Jesus’ followers were all together in one place. Suddenly, a sound like the rush of a violent

wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting, and divided tongues of fire appeared among them

and a tongue rested on each one. They were all filled with the holy spirit and began to talk in other languages as the spirit

enabled them to speak. There were devout Jews living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven and when they heard this

sound a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed,

they asked, “Are not all these men Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language?” Amazed

and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

One of the things that I like about the Pentecost story is that it reminds us that when we gather together on Sunday mornings and invoke the name of the spirit, sometimes unpredictable things can happen. I am pretty sure that when the disciples gathered on that Pentecost day, many years ago, they had no inkling of what awaited them. The resurrected Jesus had just left them again, leaving them alone and aimless and wandering and they gathered together, and who would have thought that the wind and the fire would come rushing into the room and that the holy spirit would be present in the room among them? Who could have imagined that the spirit would be so unpredictable, so volatile, so explosive?

The author, one of my favorite authors – Annie Dillard – laments that we churchgoers seem to have lost sight of this volatility of the spirit. In her book, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” she asks, “Why do we people in church seem like cheerful tourists on a packaged tour of the holy? Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children,” she said, “playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church. We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares. They should lash us to our pews for the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

All of this talk of tongues of fire and TNT reminds me of a memorable Sunday right here at All Souls Church. A few years back, some of you may remember. It was the holiday season and I had just preached a sermon on Hanukah. I told the story of the Maccabees and the miracle of the oil, the oil that was sufficient for only one night but nonetheless lasted eight long nights. When the sermon was over, we sang our closing hymn; the choir was singing down here in front. But as we sang, it became apparent to all that something was horribly amiss for a thick black cloud of smoke began to rise up over the heads of the choir members as they were singing. I quickly gave my benediction; the choir scattered from the front of the sanctuary, revealing what had happened which was that all of the candles of joys and concern had somehow melted down and burned together in one great, treacherous flame.

Now, in seminary, ministers receive a broad training in the arts of ministry. And among those are the pyrotechnic arts. [Laughter] You may have noticed that a lot of what ministers do is play with fire. We light candles and we bless babies with them. We march around with flaming chalices. All in all, ministers are pretty skilled with a matchbook. But I had clearly missed the class on how to put a fire out because when I saw the large flame here, the burning wax on Sunday morning, I immediately grabbed a glass of water and threw it on the burning wax. It spattered and flamed all over the front of the sanctuary and the congregation shrieked in fear. You know, I wish you could have seen yourselves at that moment because I turned around and saw you all as you were shrieking. It was as if time had frozen you in this tableau of surprised and frightened faces, like Medusa had petrified you with her gaze.

Eventually the fire was extinguished and disaster averted. But this is probably as good a time as any to remind you that, in the unlikely event of a fire emergency, there are four exits in this sanctuary, two in the back of the sanctuary and two up front. Okay? [Laughter]

Now I can neither confirm nor deny the role of the holy spirit in our fire that morning. Though it does seem a strange coincidence, doesn’t it, that it erupted just after we’d told the story of the miracle of the Hanukah oil. But it dawns on me that that morning was probably the closest we’ll ever get to understanding what it was like for the disciples on the day of Pentecost. The sense of fear and the sense of confusion, and the tongues of fire. And I can’t help but believe that if Annie Dillard had been here that Sunday, she would have had a wry smile on her face, a smile that said, “I told you so. You are playing with fire.”

Playing with fire. Here’s what I want to say to you this morning. The spirit can visit us cloaked in many forms. Sometimes spirit comes as a still, small voice, a whisper, the call of conscience nudging us toward the good. Sometimes spirit comes cloaked in the love of a stranger or friend. Other times, we encounter spirit in the sublime presence of the earth. But sometimes, sometimes spirit comes to us clothed in fire. And then, watch out, because a spirit that comes in fire is an unpredictable and volatile spirit, a spirit likely to upend our lives and disrupt the present order of things. It’s like that great spiritual sage said once – Betty Davis. She said “Fasten your seatbelts; we’re in for a bumpy night.” That’s what happens when the spirit clothed in fire comes to visit us.

Now I want ot check in here for a second and ask you, do you know what I’m talking about right here? Sometimes when I take a little mystical turn on you I feel like I’m getting some looks from the congregation like “I don’t know what he’s talking about.” [Laughter] So let me just use an illustration from my own life and see if it doesn’t help. Fifteen years ago, if you had told me that today I would be standing in front of a congregation as a minister, preaching from the pulpit, I would have told you that you were crazy. Fifteen years ago, I was just about to graduate from college and I was a straight, white, Ivy League-educated guy who was just finishing up a degree in political science and, like everyone else in my degree, was about to go on to law school and then graduate from law school and become a lawyer and . . . well, you know the path after that. It was all planned out for me, just like my father before me, in fact.

Well, the straight thing was the first thing to go. [Laughter] But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Pretty soon I found myself throwing away the law school brochure, then driving out to Oregon to go build homes with Habitat for Humanity. And then three years later, I found myself plopped down, literally, in the middle of the jungle of Guatemala, working with a community of refugees. And then I came back and I started studying, not law, but religion. And then seven years ago this month, the whale spit me up like Jonah on the front steps of this church and I can hardly tell you how I got here. [Congregant: Thank God you did.] Amen. [Laughter and applause]

But maybe some of you can relate to a story like that. Maybe some of you have had your lives upended, had things go not quite as planned and later kind of felt the presence of a mysterious spirit working in those upended plans. Who among us hasn’t been touched by fire? I want to remind us of this dimension of the spiritual life this morning because I think that we have a tendency to discount it or even avoid it. I think we do it because of this: We live in a very chaotic, anxious and rapidly-changing world. Any many of us seek out church and the spiritual life for a place of peace, almost like a refuge, a calm port in the storm to get away from it all and try to make sense out of all the chaos of the world. But we have such a need for this sense of peace that sometimes we shut out and don’t make space for the spirit that comes as fire, the spirit that comes not to create order but to bring chaos into out lives. You know, in the book of Genesis, God creates the world by bringing order out of chaos. But in Pentecost, the spirit brings chaos out of order. Turns the tables right over and upends things.

In our hymn this morning – I love that hymn, all the great lyrics of that opening hymn – one of them was “Spinner of chaos, pulling and twisting, freeing the fibers of pattern and form.” Sometimes we get too comfortable in our patterns. Sometimes we become too well adjusted to the present order of things. And we need the spirit to come and to make us maladjusted to the present order. Remember what Dr. King said? “There are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted,” he said. We should be maladjusted to a five-year-old war that was started under false pretenses, that has taken thousands of lives and that is being waged on the back of the poor. [Applause] We should be maladjusted to a way of life that destroys our earth. We should be maladjusted to the fact that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America. [Applause]

“Human salvation,” said Dr. King, “lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” And it is the spirit that comes as fire that gives us that creative maladjustment that hel0ps us to overturn the established patterns and the established order, that brings a little chaos into the world so that a new pattern can emerge, more just and righteous than the one that we have now. But only if we make room for the spirit, only if we let go of our fear and invite that spirit, clothed as fire into our lives.

Moncure Conway, the minister of All Souls Church back in the 1850s used to tell a story about the power of that spirit who comes as fire. It is the story about two of his colleagues in the abolitionist movement – William Lloyd Garrison, whom we all know and the Reverend Samuel May, a Unitarian minister and abolitionist preacher in upstate New York. Now while Garrison and May both were abolitionists and Unitarians, they were different in some ways and most of that can be summed up that they were kind of different in their temperament. Garrison was a fiery and impatient man; he was ready for slavery to end, now! May, on the other hand, was, how shall I . . . May was a gentleman. Decorum and propriety was very important to the Reverend May. He wanted slavery to end, but if it could happen without rocking the boat, well that would be just fine for Mr. May. Well, the story goes that one day these two crusaders shared a platform at a large abolition rally and Garrison spoke first and gave a passionate speech that inflamed the audience and they leapt to their feet, enchanted, and applauded. When Garrison was done he sat back down next to Mr. May and Mr. May leaned over to him on the pulpit and, in a disapproving tone, he said, “Mr. Garrison, you were on fire.” And Garrison turned on May and he said, “Mr. May, I have need to be on fire. I have icebergs to melt.”

And friends, we have icebergs to melt today. Icebergs of violence and greed; icebergs of injustice and oppression. And the spirit that comes as fire gives us the strength and the light and the warmth to melt those icebergs. Which is not a reference to global warming, by the way. [Laughter] I’m going to change that metaphor the next time I preach this, but it worked in the 19^th Century.

Earlier in our service, we blessed four children. And among other things, we blessed them with fire. As we did, we invited them into a relationship with the spark of divinity that dwells within them. In Spanish, the word for spark is chispa. I like “chispa” better than “spark” because it has a little more kick to it, a little more oomph. In Spanish, if you have chispa, it means that you have a special charisma, a special kind of get-up-and-go to your personality. In our service this morning, we invited our children into a relationship with the divine “Get-up-and-Go.” Chispa. The goal for all of us is to take that spark, that chispa, and to fan it into a flame so that it might fill our entire lives, so that it doesn’t just remain a small spark, a small spark, but that it grows and fills our lives with love and with prophesy.

I want to close with an old story that some of you have heard me tell before that I think illustrates what it means to live with that flame burning bright within us. It’s a story from the old Desert Fathers, the band of monks that lived out in the desert of North Africa, back in the 3^rd and 4^th Centuries. One day, Brother Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said “Father, according as I am able, I have kept to my task, to my rule; I have kept to my prayer and meditation and to my contemplative silence. And, as I am able, I have striven to cleanse my heart of all unnecessary desires. But Father, I still haven’t come to know God. Father, what more can I do?” And Abbot Joseph, the elder, rose up in reply, and he stretched his hands to the heavens and his fingers became like ten burning lamps and he said, “Brother, why not be totally changed into fire?” Why not, indeed?

Friends, let us be consumed. Let us be used up. Let us be maladjusted. Let us welcome into our lives the spirit in all its forms and dimensions, so that we might be totally changed into fire. May it be so. Amen [Applause]