Spirit Ablaze

Rev. Douglas Taylor

12-15-24

Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/tWcWKxFP1ZQ

I recall reading somewhere years ago, but could not put my finger on the quote this week, a small story of a rabbi kissing his spouse and children goodbye earnestly each sabbath before going to lead prayers for the congregation; for who could know what might happen between the moment we invoke the name of the holy and moment immediately following when we offer suitable supplication.

I step into this topic knowing full well I preach unto a community that consists largely of atheists and agnostics; and of those remaining who do believe in God, most do not believe in a God like that. A god of arbitrary smiting and wrath. I know this. Truth be told (and I trust this is not surprising), I don’t believe in a God like that either. And yet I bring this topic before us all the same and will make suitable effort to translate in such a way as I hope will still be edifying to the full range of belief among us.

Here we are, each Sunday. And like that hapless rabbi kissing his family goodbye, I invite the holy each week to abide among us as we worship together.

In her book about prayer, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard frames the question this way:

“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 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 someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” (Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk.)

Do we? Do know what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Annie Dillard is a poet and author; her writing is a blend of naturalism, mysticism, and self-reflection. I discovered her work while in seminary and it had a profound impact on my view of the world. Her theology does not line up perfectly with mine, but there is enough overlap for me to find resonance.

When she cites our audacity to blithely invoke the holy, for example, I don’t quite resonate with the suggestion that an angry father God might strike us all down. But I do find it compelling to read her passionate plea as if to declare – this is real, you know, all this ritual and gathering we do! It’s not just a bit of pomp or fluff. It’s real. I like that part.

I am reminded of a description from Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd’s book After the Good News that came out just before the pandemic. It is a book about the future of Unitarian Universalism. In it, she writes:

A universalist God for a tragic era is not a gauzy, hymn-singing force of personal devotion that draws us endlessly toward itself, but a fierce and compelling power that grips us by the collar amid our rebellious descent and calls us to choose the will to mutuality all over again, even when that choice is so risky that it could utterly remake us.

And that, my friends, is the risk Dillard is referring to when she suggests we wear crash helmets and issue life jackets in place of orders of service each week. The risk is that the holy we are invoking each week may remake us. We risk actually becoming compassionate toward the vulnerable; we risk acting on those ideals we mention each Sunday.

There is a joke bouncing around social media lately about how some conservative Christian pastors are warning their people against watching the new Wicked movie lest it lure them into evil ways. The tongue-in-cheek response is, “you’re worried about the influence of a 2-hour movie on your parishioner’s morals, yet weekly worship has not made your people more compassionate and Christ-like.”

The risk is we might invoke the holy together and be changed by the encounter. Or I can say – we risk invoking our deepest values and find ourselves compelled to realign our behavior to match our values. Or I can say – we risk inviting God to be with us and discover God accepted the request.

This thing we are doing every Sunday morning, there is some contradiction built into it. As Unitarian Universalists in particular, we are several steps off the beaten path in terms of religion and belief; and yet our Sunday morning practice looks a lot like the usual beaten path! We attract people who are seeking an alternative to organized religion and we jokingly say we are very disorganized – and yet, we are an organized religion. It’s just we have organized around something radically different than what most other religious communities gather around. We gather around values and a promise to be with each other across our differences.

We Unitarian Universalists live in the religious realm of individualism and freedom of conscience; and we carry an abiding distrust of authority. One result of that is the way we compensate and push ourselves to be community-focused, to lean into the concepts of covenant and accountability and liberation. Another result is an undercurrent in which we keep faith at arm’s length. We intellectualize our experiences; we talk about things and learn about things. That is in important aspect of how we create community together.

The trick here is not to stop doing that, but to balance it with more trust. We need to allow ourselves to be impacted and changed by the experiences we create together, by experiences of the holy. Our shared experiences on Sunday morning can be transformative; they can impact our living and our behaviors. We can risk growing and changing, risk being transformed, healed, or as Rev. McDonald Ladd put it – remade.

I am not suggesting we swing wildly into the over-trusting end of this conversation. Dillard offers a deep warning against that as well. She warns us not only against faking it, against being tourists in religion. And she offers a warning for when we take it seriously and we do experience the transformative power of love; that we not lose ourselves in the light we seek. Let me spend a minute in this extreme with you.

Her 1977 book, Holy the Firm, is a thin little text exploring a three-day time span of events on an island in the Puget Sound where she was writing. The crash of a small plane and a seven-year-old girl burned in the accident become a focus for Dillard to talk about beauty and cruelty, faith and suffering, and a moth caught in a candle flame.

It is that last bit that so captivated me when I read the book as part of theology class in seminary. Dillard describes how she would often read by candle light every night. Moths were constantly fluttering around her flame, many suffering the clichéd result.

“One night,” she writes early in the book, “a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second.” (p16)

Dillard goes on to describe the event in vivid detail for several more sentences. Quite poetic, quite horrifying.

After, she writes,

“And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax roses in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side.” (p17)

I don’t bring this story to say – don’t succumb to burn-out friends. We can have that message in the workshop immediately after the service today. Instead, the message her is a spiritual warning. When you find the light, when you find your calling, when you are alive and afire with a passion for something life-giving – be mindful of what ese is happening in your life around you as you burn with your passion.

This is a bit like the proverbial question for the dog always chasing cars. What would they do with it if they ever caught one? What would you do if you ever did set your spirit ablaze?

There is a lot going on around us these days, my friends. There are calls for us to step up and live our values out loud, to be visible allies for the vulnerable and the marginalized. And this is not just a call to do justice – it is a call to live our spiritual values together in community.

Much of it will come out as a call to do justice – Who is taking care of our trans siblings? How are the undocumented in our community? Where are unhoused people sleeping tonight? When can we feed the hungry again? A lot of this will sound like a call for justice. But deeper down it is a call to faith, a call to trust that the holy to go with you on the call.

If we gather on Sunday mornings like this, invite the holy to show up, and experience growth and change in ourselves – the spirit will call us into places where we will need our communities around us and … and we will need faith to trust that God is with us in the work. Or, to trust that our values are true.

If we invoke the holy here and feel Love grab us by the collar and utterly remake us – we do well to trust that Love and not try to be our own wick and flame. We must trust Love to travel with us where we are called. To trust God, to trust our values as true, to trust the holy. If you feel a change, a growth, a call – don’t fall for the idea that you must be the moth and burn yourself up in response.

Instead, grab you crash helmet and heed to spirit. Let love be your guide in the days to come. Dare to respond, take a risk to reach out and live your values more boldly, trusting that Love will travel with you as you go. Let love be the burning wick. Your work is show up with that love, and to trust that love will travel with you as you go.

In a world without end

May it be so.