Refining Fire | Rev. T. J. FitzGerald | 01.07.23

In this annual ritual, we let go of those things which do not serve us anymore.

Sermon Transcript

Here we are. How are you feeling this new year? Wow, it’s quiet. It’s good. Sounds about right for some of us. It’s been a rough start for some. I’ve seen a few people post as early as January 4th that they were ready to say goodbye to 2024. They made it a whole four days.

The miraculous nature of life supported by the sun

Myself over the break I did a little traveling and I had the chance actually on a plane to watch part of the BBC documentary Universe. I only watched the first episode, The Sun. And y’all, we’re made of fire. Did you know this?

I mean, part of me kind of knew that, too. I’m sure as some of you said you did. But when you hear a young, perky British, super optimistic scientist bouncing around with his Dorothy Hamill ‘do. That’s for older generations. When you hear them say that it’s only the sheerest of happy accidents that a giant ball of consistently combusting gases got itself fixed in space just far enough to feed plants through the miracle of photosynthesis. And it is only by this miracle that anyone of us is alive today, it was like hearing it for the first time. Maybe some of you are hearing that for the first time now, even if you already knew it.

And it was beautiful to imagine our bodies just burning constantly the food that we ingest and given life by this one sun lighting up the pathways of our neurons to get placed to place. And while we’re going there to think about why we want to go there and remember with the searing intensity of the life-giving sun itself, anyone who ever got in our way getting there. Oh, maybe that’s just me thinking about that.

Yes, this is only possible with the sun because we are made of fire. As children of the sun, as children of fire, what is it only right and fitting that we should do? Burn things. There was a lot of enthusiasm from one of our young members in the 9:30 over this. Today we’re going to make use of this fire that we have to rid ourself of things that don’t serve us anymore, to set aside or to set down a burden we have been carrying, to relinquish any hold that an event, a person, a feeling, a system, or any other thing may have on our soul. And we will do it together.

Now, hearing what we’re going to do, just what came to your mind? And don’t say it out loud. It’s not that kind of service. Just notice it and see it in your mind’s eye. And then there put it on a shelf for now. We’re going to come back to it. Is it there? Okay.

Activating Your Spiritual Life

This is the first Sunday of our commonly shared calendar year, and it’s also the first Sunday in our worship series, Activating Your Spiritual Life as I already showed you this. So if you haven’t gotten your game board yet, there are some online, there’s some around the church. It’s okay. You can also go to our website.

We’re moving from Rituals That Ground Us that ended the year to Activating Your Spiritual Life here in the new year. And it strikes me looking at the year ahead of us, what’s going on right now, and also decisions that a nation will face that enacting one of this community’s favorite rituals on this day with fire might just be perfect because it might just take a bunch of spiritual pyromaniacs to light this world on fire. With faith. With faith.

Using fire to rid ourselves of things that no longer serve us

See, sometimes metaphors and symbolism can get a little muddy, a little confusing. And that’s okay because burning something we hold in our hands as we’ll do today isn’t just a mere symbol. You are made a fire. In a short while from now, you will set something on fire. There will be something written on it and that might have meaning for you, but it’s not merely symbolic. It’s a habit practiced by our very body to stay alive, practiced by ancestors to keep other ancestors alive, burning things into fuel, activating the life-giving life-saving force that we will train today on a piece of paper.

And this is the first warning about this. It is sticky, sticky paper. Okay? You’re going to get some other warnings as we go. So you’re going to light it on fire and drop it in the sand. Okay.

Now, we’ll use this same force on this paper and something on that paper, this same force that animates almost every bit of life we know on this planet.

Acknowledging the lingering presence of what we burn

One of the attributes of fire for all you beautiful pyromaniacs out there is that it does not actually make things disappear. Naomi Shihab Nye tells us plainly “only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies.” The things I didn’t do, what I left undone. The fire will make the fumes we smell and the ash we see, mingled with the sturdy graphite or shriveled crisping ink and lay discarded, desiccated, the neatly laid fibers of the paper disrupted, disturbed by the fire, yes, but not gone. No.

We will loose the reaction on what we want gone, the resentment against a loved one, the inattention to horrors by a world seemingly going mad, the fear of our own bodies working against us at times, the personal slights we hold, the quickness of detachment, the convenience of ignorance. I’ve got a lot of these. I’m sure you’ve got some too, and they just get a little more abstract as I go, so I’ll stop right there.

There’s a lot to be rid of, things we’re holding onto. But some part of what we carry when burned stays and crackles here, and that is just the truth of things. We may let something go, but we remember that we held it or that it held us.

A friend who’s in recovery from addiction said to me once that everything she’d ever let go of had claw marks in it. And I understand that. Some of what we carry, what we hold makes up a lot of who we are. What we’ve carried has been the cause of decisions we’ve made, hours we’ve spent, maybe tears that we’ve shed. And there is a fear that if we let them go, if we burn them up, who will we be? What will we have? Where will we go?

Is this making sense at all? Okay, I see people, yeah. These things might’ve defined us is what I’m saying, but don’t fear.

Remember what a perky British scientist would tell you. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. It is transformed. Ideas about matter and its permanence can be destroyed. In fact, every single idea about permanence of matter’s form will be destroyed, not on the atomic or subatomic level. I know some of you are like uh-uh, uh-uh. In the end, we are all left with the inevitability of transformation.

Connecting faith to the concept of transformation and change

Activating a spiritual life is choosing that transformation, not just allowing it to happen, activating and enlivening transformation in our lives. Just being here in the sanctuary or online with us today, I know many of you have already let go of so much that did not serve you. We hear the stories as your ministers of your upbringings where faith was used as a tool of control, where the power of words and people over others, that is what formed the basis of a community. And you’re not alone.

For centuries, our forebears in faith named heretics and heathens by their worlds and their times from the forest villages of Transylvania, the powerful halls of Rome, the town square of Geneva, the Khasi Hills of India, the farmland of the Philippines even and from any other, many other places and times, they spoke their truth to enormous power. They let go of those things, those ideas, those structures that did not serve them.

But more than that, those things, those ideas, those structures could not hold back the power of human imagining for a community founded in mutual love and respect. Those things, those ideas, those structures could no longer contain the dreams of freedom, of thought, desire for exchange of beloved community and the relinquishment at long ever loving last of the power of fear of a final punishing fate held over every free choice they made in life. Leaving these behind as part of a former faith for many here was not easy, but it had to be done.

Faith is made not so much by proving what we can take but by what we refuse to take anymore. That’s right. Our ancestors found that the correctness of belief alone could not form a faith. They found hate of others was no basis for faith. They found fear of others and what is to come would be their faith no more. They took their families, their sacred connections in their hands and strode toward the light of a free faith that shines for all of us now.

The chalice as a symbol of transformation

The chalice represents that light for some. But for me it’s not only a guiding light to freedom. It’s a reminder for me at least of a kind of crucible, a place where energy grows and grows with the warmth of our compassion and burns not with anger, not with rage, not with wrath, but with the golden glow of a refining love.

Here we together mix and meld ideas. We forge stronger bonds with the powerful alloy of love and reason. And with this, we transform ourselves and transform our community. A refining faith like this is a transformative faith.

I know so many hearts are troubled and breaking here. I see like all of us, what in the name of faith and belief and difference is being wrought around the world. And I cry for all our siblings whose very lives, whose children’s lives are made the wages of these wars.

And through years of wonder and plenty of despair, I have found that for me, all faith needs to be in the leanest hours of the darkest night is something as thin as a slip of paper between what I am seeing and experiencing and the final crush of despair. Any distance between my experience and giving up the warm hand on the shoulder, a drawing by a child that makes no sense, a bouncy haired British scientist praising the power of the sun. Just the width of paper is the only distance I need to hold onto.

The ritual of writing and burning

I hold my slip of paper now. I feel its dryness and I see its tiny little form, its seeming lack of power.

So take out your own paper now, and if you don’t have one, just raise your hand. The ushers will come help you out. Let’s pause and really hold and feel this paper together. Now you may know exactly what you want gone. I get it. And I bless that. But let’s also take a moment and quiet together feel the fibers, maybe the foil, the strands that hold this paper together and draw to your mind now what you want to give to the fire. Feel it in your body what you want gone.

Remember, you had a thought at the beginning of this talk that I asked you to put on the shelf. Maybe you want to take that down or maybe you’ve changed your mind, but we’re going to take a minute now together and reflect on what you want to go, what you want to transform. So let’s just take a minute now.

And now is the time to write, friends. But imagine the weight of what you are letting go, moving from you to the paper. There should be pencils around. Those at home please write as well. Locate a good way to burn what you’re writing in a safe way. And transmit that feeling, that weight that you’re holding to the paper now. So let’s all write together. Share pencils and pens as needed.

Before you come forward, hear these words. A faith is real when it chooses and decides. A faith is active when you can let go and pick up. I pray you feel how real your faith is today and the weight of the burden you bring before your faith. I pray you feel the heat of your faith fire in you today and that you experience the power of letting your faith hold you as we forge new and a deeper faith from this refining fire.