Fire
Preached 8/16/2020 at SouthWest UU in N. Royalton OH
By Rev. Meg Mathieson
Two weeks ago, we talked about the element of water and I blessed our water here. Last week, the guest speaker preached about environmentalism, the earth, and we had the chance to reflect on the holy element of earth. What is more mysterious than the holy element of fire?
For our meditation, we heard a passionate original poem by my friend Chynaah, where she built to a crescendo of declaring herself to be the fire. For we all are. We are made of the elements, and perhaps we are literally, chemically mostly water, but everything that fire represents, we embody.
I’d like to begin this sermon by turning towards our holy flame and offering it a blessing, and in return, dear sacred fire, I ask you to bless us, the community of seekers and stragglers that call ourselves SouthWest Unitarian Universalist Church.
Element of fire, mysterious, beautiful, and most powerful. From your source, our sacred sun comes all life. You both create and destroy. May you bless us this morning with the fire that burns deep in the soul. It is the flame of the human spirit touched into being by the mystery of life. the fire of reason; the fire of compassion; the fire of community; the fire of justice; the fire of faith. It is the fire of love burning deep in the human heart; the divine glow in every life.
Fire is alive in a way that we do not understand. We speak of fire living and dying. We say that it consumes. The pain a mother at the end of labor feels is called a ring of fire, and of course Johnny Cash used that phrase to describe heartache. A burning ring of fire.
Fire is alive in a way that the other elements are not. If you want a fire to burn, you must tend to it, feed it. You must watch it as closely as one would watch an infant.
Humans all over the world through all ages have worshipped fire, and we generally assume that the human discovery of fire, and how to control fire, was so significant that it marked the beginning of our evolution into being the modern creatures that we are today.
According to UU minister Elizabeth Harding People have always known that fire was special. Long, long ago, before people made matches or candles or even made houses, people knew that fire was special. There was the great fire in the sky, the sun, which made the earth warm and made night into day. And there were the smaller fires that people made, fires that cooked their food, and kept them warm, and brought them light.
People honored the fires, because fire was special. Fire was more than human. Fire has power: it can create and it can destroy. It can bring light and it can burn. Fire can be wonderful, and fire can be terrible. We have to be careful with fire.
And so, people thought that fire was something sacred and holy. Some people even worshiped fire, and said that fire was a deity, like a goddess or a god. Other people said fire wasn’t actually the deity, but just meant that the deity was there.
No matter what they believed, people all over the world gave fire a special place in their religions. They had fires in their homes, of course, to cook food and keep warm, and they also had sacred fires in their temples. They set sacred lamps on their altars. They lit sacred bonfires outside on the hilltops and in the groves. They placed sacred torches near the graves of those who died.
We still do this today. In Washington, DC, near the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, burns an eternal flame that never goes out. In churches at Christmas time, many Christians light four candles on an Advent wreath. During the eight days of Hanukkah, Jews light the eight candles of the menorah. At Diwali, Hindus set small lamps all around the house.
And when Unitarian Universalists gather, we light a chalice. This is our sacred fire.
Fire was considered sacred to the early Christians as the story goes, they witnessed burning tongues of fire alight on believer’s heads on Pentecost. Here is a poem by Jan Richardson about that event, titled “What the Fire Gives.”
You had thought that fire
only consumed,
only devoured,
only took for itself,
leaving merely ash
and memory
of something
you had believed,
if not permanent,
would be long enough,
enduring enough,
to be nearly
eternal.
So when you felt
the scorch on your lips,
the searing in your heart,
you could not
at first believe
that flame could be
so generous,
that when it came to you--
you, in your sackcloth
and sorrow--
it did not come
to consume,
to take still more
than everything.
What surprised you most
were not the syllables
that spilled from
your scalded,
astonished mouth--
though that was miracle
enough,
to have words
burn through
what had been numb,
to find your tongue
aflame with a language
you did not know
you knew--
no, what came
as greatest gift
was to be so heard
in the place
of your deepest
silence,
to be so seen
within the blazing,
to be met
with such completeness
by what the fire gives.
How often do we encounter fire in our everyday lives? Of course since the invention of the electric light bulb, the electric stove, we have distanced ourselves from fire in day-to-day life. In many ways this is for the best! In earlier times, folks had to worry about the constant threat of fire, as well as the threat of no fire, or the fire going out. Losing a building to fire was a common enough occurrence that this is where the idea of an endowment originally comes from. Universities and churches would set aside large sums of money that were not to be touched, and this was in case of fire. We don’t look at our finances that way anymore - endowments these days are still for a rainy day, but thank goodness fire is not such an immediate threat anymore.
Except when it is. If you can do a little exercise with me and try to stretch your mind all the way back to the beginning of this calendar year. Back when we were meeting in person, before COVID-19 had so powerfully changed our lives. In early February there were terrible fires across Australia. 27 million acres burned. That’s roughly the size of Ohio. Right now it is wildfire season in California. While hundreds of thousands of acres of fire has been contained, 70 thousand acres are currently on fire as we speak. That’s over a hundred square miles. That are currently on fire, uncontained. To put that in perspective, because it’s hard! 100 square miles sounds like a lot, but what does it mean? The entire Emerald Necklace - all of the Cleveland Metroparks together - cover 35 square miles total. So the amount of beautiful wildlife being lost in California right now is equal to about triple our beloved Emerald Necklace.
When I spoke about water, I brought up Flint Michigan, and how there hasn’t been clean drinkable water there since 2014. Each of the four sacred elements, water, earth, fire and air, suffer when we humans hurt our dear mother Gaia. And the people who suffer most from this damage are often, usually, the people who can least afford to move on. Thousands of people have been displaced in California. And this is simply a fact of life, just like the water issue in Michigan. We shrug and say, this is life in the United States. People can’t drink the water. People lose their homes and loved ones to fires.
This is not normal! How many countries can you name where this is normal to just accept? We watch post-apocalyptic movies about burned-out landscapes forgetting that we are living in post-apocalyptic times. We are numb because the bombs were dropped so very long ago. Before I was born. 75 Years ago this month, nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is post-apocalypse, folks. And you and I are the wealthy, privileged few who get to pretend it isn’t happening. Not in my America.
And this is, again, how environmentalism and social justice are absolutely inextricably linked. We care about Mother Gaia, but not just because we are kind, selfless folks who care about the Earth, we care because the Earth’s future is our future. Because poisoned water and unchecked fire and death and pandemic diseases are what affects people when our dear Mother Gaia is suffering.
We are the lucky ones. But the reality is that we are all utterly connected, and when our siblings in Michigan don’t have clean water, we too are poisoned. And when our dear loved ones in California are losing their lives in unchecked fires, we, too, are scorched.
According to UU minister Scott Alexander: There is a wonderful Hasidic tale, told by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, which I feel makes the reality and importance of our human connectedness with one another come to life. The story goes that, "A young man in Jerusalem wanted to visit Rome, (which was then the ruling capital of Western Civilization...a very strange and different place from Jewish Jerusalem). His mother protested (as worrying mothers are wont to do) and asked him ‘How will you eat? Where will you sleep?’ He didn’t have any answers, yet he still wanted to go on his adventure to Rome. His Mother finally relented but said, ‘I’m sure you will find food, but for sleep, for sleep you must take this pillow. At night, go outside the walls of Rome and put your head on this pillow, and you will have rest.’ The son did as she asked, and each night, after enjoying the sights, the sounds, the carnivals of Rome, he would leave that city and take his pillow and find sleep in the countryside. But one night, right before falling asleep, his pillow caught fire! Why? Because that night the temple in Jerusalem burned.”
Wiesel goes on to explain that in his tradition, no member of the widely scattered Jewish community lives in isolation. On a very real mystical level, what happens to one Jew happens to all Jews, for they are spiritually and mystically bound together in one being, one indissoluble community. It was the precious bonds of human community and connectedness which set fire to the boy’s pillow, and kept him awake and alive to that which troubled his brothers and sisters back in Jerusalem.
I want my religion, I want my Unitarian Universalist faith, to call upon me to ever enlarge the capacity of my heart, to challenge me toward goodness and mercy even when it comes at great personal cost. I want a faith which teaches my soul to organically feel the joy and sorrow of others, which reminds me of my inescapable responsibility to love and serve my far-flung, often-difficult family. I want a church which refuses to let me morally and spiritually separate myself from the trials and tribulations of my global brothers and sisters wherever and however I find them. I want a faith, if you will, that burns the pillow of my heart and keeps me awake, by God, whenever there is as much as one human being somewhere in need of my compassion or care.
So may your pillow catch fire, dear Unitarian Universalist friends, when the evening news flashes into your living rooms the images of the hundreds of thousands dying from COVID-19; then may your pillow catch fire! May your pillow catch fire whenever our police uses deadly force against innocent people; then may your pillow catch fire! May your pillow catch fire every time a young mother cries because her children are hungry; then may your pillow catch fire! May your pillow catch fire every time a our dear mother Earth suffers at the hands of our people; then may your pillow catch fire! May your pillow catch fire every time there is some simple human kindness waiting for you (yes, you )—no one else, you to bring forth. May the pillows of your pulsating hearts evermore catch fire, for it is ever and always as Universalist poet Carl Sandburg sang at the very end of his collected poems:
There is only one horse on the earth,
and his name is All Horses.
There is only one bird in the air,
and her name is All Wings.
There is only one fish in the sea,
and the fish’s name is All Fins.
There is only man in the world,
and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world,
and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world,
and the child’s name is All Children.
There is only one maker in the world,
and that maker’s children cover the earth,
and they are named All God’s Children.
That’s us, dear friends, that’s us!
Amen.
Preached 8/16/2020 at SouthWest UU in N. Royalton OH
By Rev. Meg Mathieson
Two weeks ago, we talked about the element of water and I blessed our water here. Last week, the guest speaker preached about environmentalism, the earth, and we had the chance to reflect on the holy element of earth. What is more mysterious than the holy element of fire?
For our meditation, we heard a passionate original poem by my friend Chynaah, where she built to a crescendo of declaring herself to be the fire. For we all are. We are made of the elements, and perhaps we are literally, chemically mostly water, but everything that fire represents, we embody.
I’d like to begin this sermon by turning towards our holy flame and offering it a blessing, and in return, dear sacred fire, I ask you to bless us, the community of seekers and stragglers that call ourselves SouthWest Unitarian Universalist Church.
Element of fire, mysterious, beautiful, and most powerful. From your source, our sacred sun comes all life. You both create and destroy. May you bless us this morning with the fire that burns deep in the soul. It is the flame of the human spirit touched into being by the mystery of life. the fire of reason; the fire of compassion; the fire of community; the fire of justice; the fire of faith. It is the fire of love burning deep in the human heart; the divine glow in every life.
Fire is alive in a way that we do not understand. We speak of fire living and dying. We say that it consumes. The pain a mother at the end of labor feels is called a ring of fire, and of course Johnny Cash used that phrase to describe heartache. A burning ring of fire.
Fire is alive in a way that the other elements are not. If you want a fire to burn, you must tend to it, feed it. You must watch it as closely as one would watch an infant.
Humans all over the world through all ages have worshipped fire, and we generally assume that the human discovery of fire, and how to control fire, was so significant that it marked the beginning of our evolution into being the modern creatures that we are today.
According to UU minister Elizabeth Harding People have always known that fire was special. Long, long ago, before people made matches or candles or even made houses, people knew that fire was special. There was the great fire in the sky, the sun, which made the earth warm and made night into day. And there were the smaller fires that people made, fires that cooked their food, and kept them warm, and brought them light.
People honored the fires, because fire was special. Fire was more than human. Fire has power: it can create and it can destroy. It can bring light and it can burn. Fire can be wonderful, and fire can be terrible. We have to be careful with fire.
And so, people thought that fire was something sacred and holy. Some people even worshiped fire, and said that fire was a deity, like a goddess or a god. Other people said fire wasn’t actually the deity, but just meant that the deity was there.
No matter what they believed, people all over the world gave fire a special place in their religions. They had fires in their homes, of course, to cook food and keep warm, and they also had sacred fires in their temples. They set sacred lamps on their altars. They lit sacred bonfires outside on the hilltops and in the groves. They placed sacred torches near the graves of those who died.
We still do this today. In Washington, DC, near the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, burns an eternal flame that never goes out. In churches at Christmas time, many Christians light four candles on an Advent wreath. During the eight days of Hanukkah, Jews light the eight candles of the menorah. At Diwali, Hindus set small lamps all around the house.
And when Unitarian Universalists gather, we light a chalice. This is our sacred fire.
Fire was considered sacred to the early Christians as the story goes, they witnessed burning tongues of fire alight on believer’s heads on Pentecost. Here is a poem by Jan Richardson about that event, titled “What the Fire Gives.”
You had thought that fire
only consumed,
only devoured,
only took for itself,
leaving merely ash
and memory
of something
you had believed,
if not permanent,
would be long enough,
enduring enough,
to be nearly
eternal.
So when you felt
the scorch on your lips,
the searing in your heart,
you could not
at first believe
that flame could be
so generous,
that when it came to you--
you, in your sackcloth
and sorrow--
it did not come
to consume,
to take still more
than everything.
What surprised you most
were not the syllables
that spilled from
your scalded,
astonished mouth--
though that was miracle
enough,
to have words
burn through
what had been numb,
to find your tongue
aflame with a language
you did not know
you knew--
no, what came
as greatest gift
was to be so heard
in the place
of your deepest
silence,
to be so seen
within the blazing,
to be met
with such completeness
by what the fire gives.
How often do we encounter fire in our everyday lives? Of course since the invention of the electric light bulb, the electric stove, we have distanced ourselves from fire in day-to-day life. In many ways this is for the best! In earlier times, folks had to worry about the constant threat of fire, as well as the threat of no fire, or the fire going out. Losing a building to fire was a common enough occurrence that this is where the idea of an endowment originally comes from. Universities and churches would set aside large sums of money that were not to be touched, and this was in case of fire. We don’t look at our finances that way anymore - endowments these days are still for a rainy day, but thank goodness fire is not such an immediate threat anymore.
Except when it is. If you can do a little exercise with me and try to stretch your mind all the way back to the beginning of this calendar year. Back when we were meeting in person, before COVID-19 had so powerfully changed our lives. In early February there were terrible fires across Australia. 27 million acres burned. That’s roughly the size of Ohio. Right now it is wildfire season in California. While hundreds of thousands of acres of fire has been contained, 70 thousand acres are currently on fire as we speak. That’s over a hundred square miles. That are currently on fire, uncontained. To put that in perspective, because it’s hard! 100 square miles sounds like a lot, but what does it mean? The entire Emerald Necklace - all of the Cleveland Metroparks together - cover 35 square miles total. So the amount of beautiful wildlife being lost in California right now is equal to about triple our beloved Emerald Necklace.
When I spoke about water, I brought up Flint Michigan, and how there hasn’t been clean drinkable water there since 2014. Each of the four sacred elements, water, earth, fire and air, suffer when we humans hurt our dear mother Gaia. And the people who suffer most from this damage are often, usually, the people who can least afford to move on. Thousands of people have been displaced in California. And this is simply a fact of life, just like the water issue in Michigan. We shrug and say, this is life in the United States. People can’t drink the water. People lose their homes and loved ones to fires.
This is not normal! How many countries can you name where this is normal to just accept? We watch post-apocalyptic movies about burned-out landscapes forgetting that we are living in post-apocalyptic times. We are numb because the bombs were dropped so very long ago. Before I was born. 75 Years ago this month, nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is post-apocalypse, folks. And you and I are the wealthy, privileged few who get to pretend it isn’t happening. Not in my America.
And this is, again, how environmentalism and social justice are absolutely inextricably linked. We care about Mother Gaia, but not just because we are kind, selfless folks who care about the Earth, we care because the Earth’s future is our future. Because poisoned water and unchecked fire and death and pandemic diseases are what affects people when our dear Mother Gaia is suffering.
We are the lucky ones. But the reality is that we are all utterly connected, and when our siblings in Michigan don’t have clean water, we too are poisoned. And when our dear loved ones in California are losing their lives in unchecked fires, we, too, are scorched.
According to UU minister Scott Alexander: There is a wonderful Hasidic tale, told by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, which I feel makes the reality and importance of our human connectedness with one another come to life. The story goes that, "A young man in Jerusalem wanted to visit Rome, (which was then the ruling capital of Western Civilization...a very strange and different place from Jewish Jerusalem). His mother protested (as worrying mothers are wont to do) and asked him ‘How will you eat? Where will you sleep?’ He didn’t have any answers, yet he still wanted to go on his adventure to Rome. His Mother finally relented but said, ‘I’m sure you will find food, but for sleep, for sleep you must take this pillow. At night, go outside the walls of Rome and put your head on this pillow, and you will have rest.’ The son did as she asked, and each night, after enjoying the sights, the sounds, the carnivals of Rome, he would leave that city and take his pillow and find sleep in the countryside. But one night, right before falling asleep, his pillow caught fire! Why? Because that night the temple in Jerusalem burned.”
Wiesel goes on to explain that in his tradition, no member of the widely scattered Jewish community lives in isolation. On a very real mystical level, what happens to one Jew happens to all Jews, for they are spiritually and mystically bound together in one being, one indissoluble community. It was the precious bonds of human community and connectedness which set fire to the boy’s pillow, and kept him awake and alive to that which troubled his brothers and sisters back in Jerusalem.
I want my religion, I want my Unitarian Universalist faith, to call upon me to ever enlarge the capacity of my heart, to challenge me toward goodness and mercy even when it comes at great personal cost. I want a faith which teaches my soul to organically feel the joy and sorrow of others, which reminds me of my inescapable responsibility to love and serve my far-flung, often-difficult family. I want a church which refuses to let me morally and spiritually separate myself from the trials and tribulations of my global brothers and sisters wherever and however I find them. I want a faith, if you will, that burns the pillow of my heart and keeps me awake, by God, whenever there is as much as one human being somewhere in need of my compassion or care.
So may your pillow catch fire, dear Unitarian Universalist friends, when the evening news flashes into your living rooms the images of the hundreds of thousands dying from COVID-19; then may your pillow catch fire! May your pillow catch fire whenever our police uses deadly force against innocent people; then may your pillow catch fire! May your pillow catch fire every time a young mother cries because her children are hungry; then may your pillow catch fire! May your pillow catch fire every time a our dear mother Earth suffers at the hands of our people; then may your pillow catch fire! May your pillow catch fire every time there is some simple human kindness waiting for you (yes, you )—no one else, you to bring forth. May the pillows of your pulsating hearts evermore catch fire, for it is ever and always as Universalist poet Carl Sandburg sang at the very end of his collected poems:
There is only one horse on the earth,
and his name is All Horses.
There is only one bird in the air,
and her name is All Wings.
There is only one fish in the sea,
and the fish’s name is All Fins.
There is only man in the world,
and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world,
and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world,
and the child’s name is All Children.
There is only one maker in the world,
and that maker’s children cover the earth,
and they are named All God’s Children.
That’s us, dear friends, that’s us!
Amen.