A portion of the Communion of Saints tapestry at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles.
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“Any [fool] can burn down a barn.”
This is a line from a movie, a quarter century ago. “Any fool can burn down a barn,” says a presidential candidate in the film, “Primary Colors,” a fictional take on a national election, nineteen-nineties-style. (Elections were different back then… but also not all that different.)
I have often recalled this movie line in the past few weeks and months. We’re on the brink of another critically important national election, another civic event with countless innocent lives hanging in the balance. In this time of polarization and catastrophic warfare, it’s easy to conclude that there are two kinds of people, two ways of being, two basic human natures. You can either be a wise person who builds barns, or you can be a fool who burns the barn down.
Now, of course, I want us all to be barn builders. But it’s much more complicated than a good/bad, wise/foolish, angel/devil binary: Each of us has the capacity for both: We all know how to build things up; we all know how to burn things down. Our behaviors and choices are usually a confusing, confounding mix. There is a battle raging inside each one of us: our essential human nature, made in God’s image, wants to build things up, but our broken, self-centered, ‘shadow’ self wants to burn things down. And our spiritual lives often determine who prevails.
This basic idea has often been expressed with a different, well-known metaphor, attributed to a Native American tradition, perhaps from the Cherokee: that within each of us live two wolves, a wolf that strives to be good, compassionate, and constructive; and a wolf that encourages evil, selfishness, and violence. Who wins? That’s easy: the wolf you feed.
But before we casually (or piously) reject the life path of burning down barns (or feeding our inner evil wolves), let’s consider the upside. Indulging your inner barn burner — letting yourself be a Big Bad Wolf — this comes with a pretty attractive upside.
If you prefer burning down barns and then choose to run for public office, it’ll be your race to lose. Sixty or so hours from now, most of us will be refreshing our screens anxiously, hoping to learn who will prevail in the political sphere. I want the builders of barns to win, of course: the optimists, the conscientious ones, the morally awake ones, those who make their share of mistakes but try to learn from those mistakes, those who really want to improve the state of the world and save innocent lives, even if they don’t always succeed.
But I know that if someone tries to build things up rather than burn things down, they’ll probably be the underdog. Constructive, restorative victories are all too rare in this burning world. For one thing, the choice to build is daunting. Builders have to do serious, difficult work. They’re held to higher standards. It can be hard to inspire people to do the right thing. (Many of our forebears in the faith whom we honor today were martyred for their trouble.) And — real talk — it’s also hard to resist giving in to your inner barn burner, your inner bad wolf. Sometimes the so-called “good guys” will feed that wolf, despite their essential good nature.
We human beings generally have a much easier time cutting things down, dropping things, burning things, than we do improving things, taking care of things, building things. I’m reminded of something a friend once told me. He was quoting his grad-school professor, the microbiologist Dara Wegman-Geedey, who said, “Entropy never sleeps.” Entropy never sleeps. Over time, everything — everyone — inevitably degrades, decomposes, falls apart. (“Heaven and earth will pass away” — that’s how Jesus puts it.) Tearing down, or just letting things collapse, is always easier than building up. Falling down — entropy — is an inherent quality of the physical universe we live in.
This means, of course, that choosing the honorable path is not just hard; it’s also not reliably fun. If you’re a “burn it all down” kind of person, then you’ve got fun on your side. It’s thrilling to be a heedless iconoclast. Nobody expects you to behave well. As a barn burner, you’re free to do whatever you like, whatever the consequences. If you want to burn it all down, you’re likely looking forward to the electoral chaos coming our way.
And yet we persist: we try to be builders. We gather here to praise one particular builder: Jesus of Nazareth. Scripture tells us that Jesus was the son of a carpenter or stonemason, making him literally an expert in the building trade! Faced with the untimely death of his friend, Jesus restores life: he builds; he pushes against entropy. Lazarus comes out of the tomb. Now, admittedly, Lazarus is still wearing his burial clothing, a sign that death will still come for him (“Entropy never sleeps”), in contrast to the risen Jesus, whose burial shroud is found neatly folded, back in his empty tomb. But even though death still lurks in his future, Lazarus is raised and restored. Jesus builds him up.
But the raising of Lazarus isn’t ultimately about the resuscitation of a corpse. It is a sign of our shared identity as members of the Body of Christ. We are builders. We practice being constructive. We choose the life-restoring path. And we have a word for those who are noteworthy in this shared effort. Now, every single human person is made in the image of God, and every single baptized Christian is a fully qualified member of Christ’s Body. And, we have a word for those among us who, well, are kind of crushing it: we call our best builders saints.
But, with respect, I want to clarify the idea of “saints.” Let’s be careful about this. Again, there are not simply builders and burners, saints and sinners. Each one of us carries both saint and sinner within ourselves. When we revere saints, we’re simply appreciating that though they are just like everybody else, a saint summons their better self more reliably than most of us. A saint directs most of what they say or do toward God. That’s all.
In the Godly Play liturgy, our children hear a definition of prophets that might work for all the saints: a prophet is someone who “came so close to God, and God came so close to them, that they understood what God wanted them to say or do.” So: you can be a saint. You are a saint! You have power within you, power given by God, power to build. Isaiah is singing to you, to all of us, when he says that God prepares a feast on the mountain, a feast that will swallow up death forever. That mountaintop feast is not dinner at an exclusive country club.
This morning, God will add yet another saint/sinner to our number, another being who houses two wolves, another builder and a fallible human who could choose to burn it all down. His name is Malcolm James, and he is two months old today. Hidden deep inside little Malcolm is immense capacity, massive potential. And before we baptize him in the name of the Holy Three, we will take responsibility for this powerful being, at the early dawn of his life.
We will promise to raise Malcolm together, even as his parents remain at the center, building a home to feed, clothe, and nurture him. (Ian and Jenny surely are notable, praiseworthy builders of barns. Saints, that is.) Malcolm will turn to them, but also turn to all of us, and learn from all of us, about both the builder and the burner within himself. He will need our guidance about which wolf to feed. And we will meet this need by feeding Malcolm from this mountaintop Table, where God only serves food that the good wolf finds appetizing and nutritious, and the bad wolf finds poisonous and disgusting. “My flesh is food indeed,” Jesus says, but that food nourishes only our best selves.
But it's complicated, this inner battle we’re fighting, individually and together. Our duty to Malcolm James is not only joyful, but also daunting and difficult. Again I say, even in a healthy community of faith, there aren’t just good guys and bad guys, saints and sinners. It’s messy.
And this messy but joyful struggle brings me back to Tuesday’s election. I feel strong hopes and fears about what will happen, much like everyone else. But I confess this, too: In recent weeks, I have often nursed a fantasy that if my favorite candidates win, I will yell in triumph at the TV. “Ha ha!” I will shout. In the fantasy I even gloat a bit: I call the vanquished politicians “losers.”
But if I indulge this fantasy, I will, alas, be feeding the bad wolf. Gloating is not what my best self does, even if I tell myself that my winner’s high is felt on behalf of the last and least, those who stand a better chance of surviving when the builders of barns prevail. We always have all we need to cultivate our inner saint, our true self who sees the good in even the most atrocious human being; and yet we always feel the temptation to tear down, to burn down, to destroy. Sometimes that destructive, retributive impulse feels so good, we can hardly believe it is the wrong path.
This inner struggle we share is expressed well by two characters in a mystery series I love. Mercifully, in the final week of this seemingly endless political season, Louise Penny published her nineteenth mystery novel, distracting me from doom-scrolling when I needed her the most. And two of her characters took up this very topic: the saint and sinner within, the two wolves battling it out. And here is what they said about how difficult and confusing this battle can be. (Again, note well: the good wolves flourish when we’re surrounded by our companions in the faith!)
The two characters, French-Canadian homicide detectives named Armand and Jean-Guy, are talking about a villainous criminal they need to find, and in their conversation, they reflect on the complexity of human morality, in this conflict-ridden world:
“‘We need to find [the bad wolf]. We need to stop him,’ said Jean-Guy. ‘Or her,’ said Armand, even as he [felt] his own [inner bad] wolf lift its head. ‘But there’s also a [good] wolf,’ [Armand continued.] ‘We need to find him too.’ Jean-Guy considered before saying what he was thinking. But finally, he spoke. ‘Are we so sure which [wolf] is which?’”
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Notes
The actual word in the film, Primary Colors, is not “fool” but “jackass,” which I judged to be over the line for a sermon.
In the original text in the novel, The Grey Wolf, by Louise Penny, Armand “saw” his own wolf. In a sermon in which the quotation is taken out of its context and received aurally by a congregation, I judged “felt” to better communicate the author’s meaning.
In Penny’s novel, the two wolves are described as grey (good) and black (evil). In a sermon preached to a congregation that hasn’t read the book, I don’t want to identify the color black with evil: this is a controversial image, and could distract listeners who worry that this metaphor is racist, whether or not the writer was conscious of this problem, and whatever the writer’s motive. (I am entirely certain that Penny does not equate the Black racial identity with evil!) To use this quote in a sermon, I needed to modify it in this way to prevent any misunderstanding.
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Preached on All Saints’ Sunday (Year B), November 3, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44