Kindling the Fire of Love

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Tenth Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

Maybe it’s because I wandered away to a distant land (well, upstate New York) to seek God as a young twenty something with my earthly belongings in a hockey bag, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Abram and Sarai. Our passage from The Letter to the Hebrews appointed for this day is actually the culmination of a long, long litany of how faith–stepping out, letting go, not-knowing and opening to the love of God and our life as it is–is operative in and through the people of God throughout the entirety of Holy Scripture. “By faith,” is a constant refrain chapter 11 of The Letter to the Hebrews. Today, we hear that “by faith the people passed through the Red Sea… by faith the walls of Jericho fell… by faith Rahab did not perish.” But leading up to this piling on of example after example is the story of Abram and Sarai, who, “by faith…set out not knowing where they were going” (11:8). They leave the safety and security of a kind of settled, yet barren, comfortability to follow where the living God is calling. They leave the dwelling that they have made for themselves, in favor of living in tents in a foreign land in order to dwell finally and forever in what the author of The Letter to the Hebrews calls, “the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” You might even hear Peter’s riff on this “city built by God” theme faintly in the background–“like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5).

God’s the builder, we are the stones, and the task of human life is to be built up by God in Christ through the Holy Spirit to be a tent of meeting, of transformative encounter so that everything that is not love “that clings so closely”--our attachments and aversions, our requirements and demands–might be laid aside, might fall away, so that the joy that is set before us might come to live in us, through us, for others. The trouble, of course, is that we think we are the builders most of the time. It might be useful, especially in Utah, to recall that Jesus (not some human being) is the pioneer. Our “Go West young man,” American ethos likes to suppose that it is we who are in charge and in control, the doer, the actor, the builder. But The Letter to the Hebrews tells us something markedly different. It is in realizing the paucity of efforts to do it all alone, that we find ourselves supported, loved, cared for, provisioned, and companioned in startling and unexpected ways.

Sometimes, just hearing that God is present and active and working always and everywhere in each and every moment of our life is enough to shift people’s perspective. Sometimes. More often, it’s through the experience of what David Tracy calls a “limit-situation,” that we open to the rich fecundity of God’s love for us symbolized in Isaiah by the figure of the vineyard–the fertile hill planted with luscious vines replete with a brand spanking new Watchtower and Wine Vat. I imagine the God-intoxicated Isaiah as an expert realtor–skilled at staging this beautiful house God is building–trying to convince the buyers that not only can they all have it (there are no bidding wars in God’s graced economy of gift), but that all they have to do is stop trying to erect their own barns. The free gift is always already given–a good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over and plopped right our laps. The love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Done. Finished. Accomplished. And yet… and yet.

And yet we live largely in ignorance this fact until circumstances draw us up short. We might lose a spouse or parent. We might not be able to make the rent. Our health might fail. Our business might hit a rough patch. A project we worked hard on falls completely to pieces and our good name is in shambles. Chance and change intrude on our neat, orderly lives with ourselves as the builders, and we’re suddenly at a loss for how to proceed or even take the next step. Most of the time we panic, redouble our efforts, and try whatever strategy we’ve always tried in the vain hope that we’ll wiggle our way out of this one. And sometimes we do. But sometimes, no matter how hard we throw ourselves against the locked door of the situation, it just doesn’t budge. And if we keep throwing ourselves at the door, all we get is a sore shoulder.

Difficulty, loss, illness, failure can be invitations to a deeper surrender–a surrender to love with God as the builder, us as the living stones and Christ’s boundary crossing love as the fire kindled in the heart burning away all that is not love. Since we’ve come to self-conscious awareness without an experience of God’s unconditional love for us, we seek outwardly in what Thomas Keating calls “programs for happiness” for the peace, security, and joy that we already possess as beloved children of God created in God’s image and likeness. We’re a little bit like those two young fish who swim past another, older, fish one morning who quips, “Good Morning! Isn’t the water lovely today!” “Water?” says one of the younger fish, “What the heck is water?” Prodigals that we are, we search in that far country for the vineyard/watchtower/wine vat that is right at hand. We build, build, build. I know, bigger barns! That’s the ticket!

It’s not our fault. It’s simply the human condition. Say we grow up in an abusive, unpredictable environment where the best way to survive is to keep your head down, work hard, do as you’re told. And say that mostly works most of the time. Pretty soon, that adaptive strategy for how to navigate a chaotic  world becomes the only way we know how to do things. Keeping your head down, working hard, and doing as you’re told works until it doesn’t. Either one gets resentful about never being permitted to have opinions of one’s own, or one gets sick and can’t work hard anymore. Or life doesn’t seem worth living if one just does someone else’s bidding all the time. That program for happiness–that hammer you’ve applied to every situation—nail or not–gets frustrated. And usually when our main program for happiness is frustrated we get angry. But the gift in that situation is that in the very frustration is an invitation to do, to be, something different. Like Abram and Sarai who by faith leave for that unknown country, we turn around, we change the direction we are looking for happiness from “out there” in strategies of power/control, affection/esteem, safety/security, to in here–to that full measure pressed down and overflowing. We come home. We return to the love that’s been there all along and learn to navigate from that spacious, expansive place where it’s no longer “me” doing the building but God building us all up together in Christ.

By faith, I can trust that every circumstance in my life is actually an opportunity to become, by grace, a little more free, a little more loving, a little more giving and forgiving. By faith I can see that when Tyler’s favorite strategy of doubling down and working harder stops working and all seems lost, there is something new that God is up to, some deeper healing that’s taking place, a freedom I can’t imagine available if I’ll just step out into that place of unknowing and vulnerability, that place of welcoming and receiving life as it is, that place of being built, instead of being the builder.

But that’s scary, isn’t it? I know for myself over-functioning is what comes most naturally. If I’m busy, I’m not open to attack. If I’m busy and productive I know I’m enough. That’s not to say that good stuff doesn’t come from hard work, but it’s the motivation that’s askew. It’s coming from a place of lack and fear. The work is a strategy for fending off perceived threat rather than a natural expression, a fruit, of the love that is at the very center of my being waiting to to recognized, embraced, lived.

When Jesus says, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were kindled!” I wonder if what he’s come to set alight is my unacknowledged program for happiness pursued in the perceived absence of God’s love. I wonder if what goes up the flue is that whisper of not enough, of picturing life through frantic doing and not graced being. I wonder if what’s being kindled in me, day after unremarkable day, daily office after daily office, prayer time after prayer time, commute after commute, Sunday after Sunday, is a gradual recognition of God as builder. I wonder if the flame of love–God’s unconditional love for me just as I am whether I’m sick or well, productive or unproductive, busy as a bee or flopped out–I wonder if that is what Jesus wishes were already kindled in me, in you, in us. Because the truth is, there are some values inherited from our families that need to go up in smoke. If productivity and busyness are the only measure of our worth, there will come a time when we aren’t able to be busy or productive, and then what? If maintenance of image and propriety are our sole reason for existing, who are we when we mess up? The flame of love that’s kindled in us burns up every fleeting substitute through which we seek for the happiness that is found, or finds us, in God and God alone—The One Who doesn’t come and go.

There’s a very real sense, actually, in which learning to surrender to the unconditional love of God, has set me against many of the values I inherited from my family. Nothing wrong with being active, polite, competent, hard-working and all the rest, but when those are embraced as ends in themselves, when the flame of unconditional love has yet to kindled, or smolders away unrecognized, the result is a life of quiet desperation with me and my little efforts to be the builder at center of everything. No fun, no way to live, and not what God intends. So kindle away, I say. Become all flame. The living flame of love burns not to punish or terrorize, but only to heal and make whole, only to clear away all that is not love in us that we can kindle it in others. And out of smoldering rubble… what is that I spy with my little eye? A vineyard? A watchtower? A wine vat? Got any grapes?