Fire and Breath, by Jan Richardson
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Who are you?
There are lots of tools available for you to figure out who you are.
Do you prefer introvert or extravert, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving? If you sort all those out with the MBTI instrument, you could discover that you are one of sixteen kinds of people.
Or maybe there are only nine kinds of people – reformers, helpers, and achievers; artists, explorers, and loyalists; enthusiasts, protectors, and peacemakers – and you can turn the nine-pointed star of the enneagram in your hands to discern who you are.
Or there are six kinds of friends, and you can use a sitcom from the 1990s to discover whether you’re Ross, Rachel, Joey, Phoebe, Chandler, or Monica. (In this instrument, I come out as Monica, always and forever, with no nuance or ambivalence.)
Or perhaps you are a lion, or a beaver, or an otter, or a golden retriever. Or you are a color: red, green, blue, or yellow.
Or you can be sorted into one of the Hogwarts houses of Hufflepuff, Slytherin, Gryffindor, or Ravenclaw. I wanted to be in Gryffindor but the Sorting Hat placed me – ambivalently, tentatively – in Ravenclaw. I can live with that. “Not Hufflepuff or Slytherin,” I said to the Hat. “Not Hufflepuff or Slytherin.” That much we agreed on.
Or maybe you are something dynamic in our natural world: you are earth, water, air, or fire.
All of these typologies are out there on the internet as ways to understand yourself. Some have legitimacy, others have charm. Few have both. But that last one – earth, water, air, fire – that has some value for me when I reflect on spirituality, spiritual work, what it means to be a person of faith, and what it means to be a church. Earth, water, air, fire.
Is Grace Church an earth congregation? If so, we love the literal earth, and all that grows in it. We are grounded. We are like a sturdy table bearing delicious food, with enough chairs for all. We are practical, methodical, reliable. Most of the time, things make sense around here. But if we are earth, we may sometimes be a little myopic, failing to grasp the bigger picture. We could also be stubborn, turned downward from the sky, stuck in earth’s mud.
Or we are a water congregation. If so, we are flexible and open-ended, emotional and intuitive. We go with the flow, and we love the free movement of a spiritual life with few rules. But if we are water, we may sometimes be a little chaotic, buffeted by heavy currents of feelings. Our waters could even get treacherous. The beasts of the sea can be lethal. We could drown.
So … what about air? Is Grace Church an air congregation? If so, we enjoy flights of fancy, dreamy exploration, and intellectual pursuits. But if we are air, we may sometimes get lost in our heads, confusing our favorite theories for the wisdom of God. We may experience the dizzying vertigo of a community that has no foundation, or as William Butler Yeats would say it, “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”
And finally, there’s fire: is Grace Church a fire congregation? If so, we are brave, bright, daring, and dauntless. We are warm but also hot – even sweltering – with God’s passion. If we are fire, one of our favorite “love languages” is a vigorous argument, and we have a gift for searing insight and prophetic discernment. But if we are fire, we sometimes can burn too brightly. We can hurt people. We can become violently destructive, even cruel.
Perhaps we want the best of all four: we want the groundedness of earth, the emotional fluency of water, the intellectual rigor of air, and the brave righteousness of fire. Great! Except we should be warned: it will be hard to avoid the four shadows. We may also be stubborn, chaotic, impractical, and temperamental.
Today Jesus doesn’t tell us what kind of congregation to be. He responsibly uses “I statements,” speaking only for himself. But he is aware that he is our exemplar, and so the implication is clear: we, like Jesus, should – at least sometimes – be set on fire, and be setting fires. Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”
God as Fire. Church as Fire. And not the fires of home and hearth, or at least not those first. Fire does give off good light and snug warmth, but the Fire Jesus speaks of is searing; it is wild and unsafe; it is divisive and painful, and it is even, when necessary, destructive.
The Fire of Jesus rips through an individual soul, severing us as individuals from our lesser selves, from our blinkered perspectives, from our self-centered and anxious agendas. This Fire of Pentecost is seen dancing on the heads of the apostles, and we can even imagine it on our heads, but it is not a calm and gentle flicker. This Fire blows our minds, so that we can think new thoughts and imagine new possibilities. This fire forces us to part company with some of our most treasured beliefs.
The Fire of Jesus tears through relationships, too. I am your pastor and priest, and I truly and prayerfully love you, but the Fire burns away any casual friendship we might have had, and it even burns away casual friendship between parishioners here. We are friends, yes! But that friendship is tempered and refined by the Fire of Jesus. Our friendships go through God’s crucible. They are burned into a shared mission. The Fire of Jesus then sends us out of here to “shape the world to fitness,” as an old Advent hymn sings it. We are to do hard things, take scary risks, and confront people (and sometimes confront each other) with God’s red-hot vision for the world. Our hearts are aflame with passion and purpose.
Sometimes people say church is the place where God comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. That cliché sometimes feels a little too neat, but it gets at the truth. Luke the evangelist portrays Jesus full of fire, afflicting his comfortable friends with a hard message. This can seem to be new, a twist in Luke’s story that began with pregnant women rejoicing together and Mary singing her song of joyous triumph. And yet if we listen carefully to Mary’s song, one of several songs that open Luke’s Gospel, we can feel the Fire. We can see it blazing upward, with dangerous sparks and loud bangs. The rich will be sent away empty, Mary sings. The powerful will be shoved off their thrones. Jesus brings reversal to the earth: the rich become poor; the poor become rich. He does this by sending us his fiery Spirit, the Spirit of the dancing flames, the Spirit who splits us open, sets us on Fire, and sends us out.
And so if we are on Fire, our lives are not our own. We must do acts of justice. We must proclaim God’s peace — not a peace marked by calm quietude, but a brave, brash peace, the kind of peace Archbishop Tutu proclaimed when he led South Africa into the Fire of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This Commission forced everyone to name what happened during Apartheid in all its horror. Victims named what happened in excruciating detail, and they did this in the hearing of their oppressors, so that everyone could genuinely offer and receive forgiveness, and the nation could be rebuilt in God’s peace.
If we are on Fire, we need to do our part to burn down the systems of oppression, to strive with heat and light to right the manifold wrongs that corrupt our society. If we are on Fire, some things are more important than friendships, more important than family, more important than the warmth and comfort of a calm and contented community of faith.
And then, after we have been seared and burned, after we have been driven out to do God’s work of justice and peace, then the Fire of Jesus can warm and soothe us, and warm and soothe our neighbor. By its glow we can all see each other, and sing songs of glad thanksgiving, and rest together in God’s embrace.
Jesus is on Fire today, and he means to set us on Fire, too. Maybe you’d prefer God as Water, because you’re a water person, a Slytherin, a Phoebe: if so, come back next week to watch as Holy Baptism drowns and then raises to life three souls in our midst. But note well: the drowning happens before the raising; whether God is Fire, Water, Earth, or Air, God challenges before God comforts.
I close with this saying from one of the earliest Christian communities, from some of the first people to be set on Fire by Jesus:
“Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can say, I do my little office, I read my psalms, I fast a little bit, I pray and I meditate, I live in peace with others as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. Tell me, Father, what else, what more can I do?’ Then the old man, Abba Joseph, stood up, stretched out his hands toward heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire, and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’”
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Preached on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 15C), August 14, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56