“After Easter Comes Holy Fire”
Prayer of the Day
Breathe life into our bones; Spirit brings truth; send the Spirit, transform us by your truth, give us language to proclaim the gospel.
Gospel acclamation
“Alleluia. Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in us the fire of your love. Alleluia.”
Reflection
“After Easter.” These words seem to me to have become a bit of a mantra at our little church, Messiah Lutheran in Mountain Iron, an RIC and Ecofaith-committed congregation, with much to do while time quickly flies. “After Easter.”
Chronological time flies in a linear fashion, while the Church lectionary year revolves, rotating in three-year cycles. Combine linear motion with circular motion and what do you get? Well at worst, it could be a sense of going around in circles while the timeline of life passes us by. I know I do sometimes feel that way about my own soul’s journey into God, as well as the Church’s journey.
Then I wonder, does it have to be that way? Or, perhaps, “after Easter,” in the Spirit of Pentecost that we could name “Holy Fire,” we could see an interconnection of the linear time force with and the rotational lectionary force, combining them into a powerful, spiraling, gyroscopic motion forward, with each day fully a new beginning, daily and yearly unto eternity. Consider the past Church Year: it seemed so compressed as Advent went galloping into Christmas into Epiphany into Lent into Easter, all the way to Pentecost, and thereafter we stumble into “Ordinary Time!” It happens so fast it can make a person feel breathless. Yet here and now. “After Easter.” Here we are back at Pentecost. One cannot help but wonder: so, exactly where are we now? Who are we now? What is any different than last year or the one before?
The story of Pentecost is to be sure a remarkably interesting, mysterious, strange, almost “unbelievable” and formative event in the early history of the church. We know it in our minds, we note it on the calendar, year after year after year. We intentional members of the Body of Christ will worship reverently and ardently as we share word and sacrament on this day. Nonetheless, what is any different, how are we moved, how might this day move us forward on our journey? And if I am not moving forward, what good really is Pentecost to me, today?
Yes, we can this year remember the historical Pentecost, we can worship our Lord on this day, but there is more we must do: we must, Romans 8, by grace show up; we must step out in action, and we must move on down the road, advancing God’s plan for us, which means to advance God’s plan for one another and for all Creation. How do we do that? Let us look through the lens of the imagery of “fire.”
How about a campfire? You feel close to nature and to the Creator when looking into a campfire. We all do. A campfire is always continuously unique, always changing, always flickering; and yet at the same time it is always all-consuming, pulling the burning elements into itself, into the univocity, the one-ness of its One Flame. Encompassing uniqueness and oneness in the same moment. If I am a unique and beautiful iteration of the Lord’s boundless Creation, as we all must claim to be in Christ, for me, say a cute little piece of dry wood (how about maybe jack pine, whose cones need fire to open its seeds), with a little bit of the Lord’s fuel, the Lord’s divine life within me, some BTUs waiting to contribute, what joy and peace could there be to flicker into the oneness, the becoming of part of the One-Great-Flame of God’s Univocal Character showing forth as flickers of sedeq, sedekah, hesed, emet, and ultimately the unifying flame of shalom?
Are we not, each and every one of us, called as members of All Creation, the One-Great-True-Body-Of-Christ; am I not, today, called to respond to the Spirit’s groaning: to welcome, to invite, to accompany the Lord’s call through the Spirit, to allow my own little pilot light deep within my soul to be lit up as prayed in the Gospel Acclamation, “kindle in us the fire of your love?”
Am I not called to say “yes” to the Divine Blacksmith’s ardent desire for me to allow the Lord’s bellows’ blast to turn my soul’s journey into one of the Holy Fire of Pentecostal Passion, in service of my Lord’s desire to renew all of the combined totality of each and every unique iteration of the Lord’s Creation? And is this not by grace manifestly an entirely distinct experience than merely acknowledging the historicity, and worthily worshiping the celebration of the event of Pentecost?
As we intentionally practice creation care, let us be mindful of the combined uniqueness of each part of creation, along with the oneness of our Lord’s love for all of it. Psalm 104:30: “When you [the Lord] send forth your spirit [Ruach], they [God’s works] are created, and you renew the face of the earth.” The psalmist is addressing our Lord, the One whose Holy Fire can touch the mountains and they smoke, Ps.104:32, the One who desires to “kindle in us the fire of the Lord’s love.” The Word of the Lord is full of fire. The Hebrew, “esh” occurs over 300 times in the Old Testament.
In the Lord’s Great Commandment, the Shema, that we shall love the Lord with all of our beings, does it not follow as Jesus taught, that we must love each and every unique part of creation, as our neighbor, our sister, our brother, in the same manner as we love the unique part of the creation that we are ourselves?
In our little church in Mountain Iron, we hold this command to be equally true as we accompany our queer sisters and brothers through RIC; as it is when as an Eco-faith community we accompany our sister and brother butterflies, honeybees and jack pines, our rivers, lakes, and springs.
I cannot be loving and also at the same time be judging or dominating. If we are called to love all of Creation, how can we judge any other part of creation as worthy or not? If we are called to love all of Creation, how can we dominate any other part? We who can do nothing apart from our Lord, we intentional members of the Body of Christ, we most certainly must allow our own little pilot lights to burst into the Flame of Holy Fire that the Spirit of Pentecost so earnestly desires for us as God’s plan, God’s unique and univocal plan for each of us.
In this year’s spiraling celebration of Pentecost, may it be powerfully so. Amen.
Quotation Notes and Notable Quotes
1. “God and I, we are one. I accept God into me in knowing; I go into God in loving…. The fire changes anything into itself that is put into it, and this takes on fire’s own nature. The wood does not change the fire into itself, but the fire changes the wood into itself. So are we changed into God, that we shall know God as God is.” Meister Eckhart, 13th Century.
2. “What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago if I don’t give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture?” Meister Eckhart, 13th Century.
3. “Ask grace not instruction, desire not understanding, the groaning of prayer not diligent reading, the Spouse not the teacher, God not [people], darkness not clarity, not light but the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections. This fire is God, and [God’s] furnace is in Jerusalem; and Christ enkindles it in the heat of his burning passion.” Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God
4. “Oh, if you could feel in some way the quality and intensity of that fire sent from heaven, the refreshing coolness that accompanied it, the consolation it imparted; if you could realize the great exaltation of the Virgin Mother,… then I am sure you would sing in sweet tones with the Blessed Virgin that sacred hymn: My soul [proclaims your greatness, O my God,]….” Bonaventure, The Tree of Life
5. “Oh God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You…. Oh God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly… we love You with our whole being… our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love and let us be bound together with love….” Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal
6. “The sweetness of the Holy Spirit is boundless and swift to encompass all creatures in grace…. Its path is a torrent, and streams of sanctity flow… for the Holy Spirit itself is a burning and shining serenity, which cannot be nullified, and which enkindles ardent virtue so as to put all darkness to flight.” Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias
7. “We must love one another or die. ‘Defenseless under the night our world in stupor lies. Yet dotted everywhere Ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages. May I, composed like them of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same negation and despair Show an affirming flame. -By W. H. Auden’….The moral universe encompasses even more than we hominids. It includes the whole community of life…. We need each other to reignite the fire of justice burning in our bones, for each person, for all the earth.” Reverend Pastor Kristin Foster
8. “Throughout my life, through my life, the world has little by little caught fire in my sight until, aflame all around me, it has become almost completely luminous from within.” Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu
David Ackerson
Certified Spiritual Director
Messiah Lutheran Church, Mountain Iron, Minnesota
David Ackerson is a member of Messiah Lutheran Church, Mountain Iron, Minnesota where Rev. Kristin Foster was his pastor for many years. He has been a commissioned lay leader, certified spiritual director, and occasional preacher. He is from Hibbing, heart of the Iron Range, and has lived in or near there most of his life. He is a former Minnesota Judge of District Court chambered in Hibbing for over 36 years.