Carrying the fire
There is a well-known story of when Eugene Peterson asks one of his grown children how the new pastor is at is their church is doing. The child responds that he has not found his sermon yet. Eugene was initially thrown off by this but comes around to accepting pastors find their one sermon and it becomes a theme of their preaching and call. This is a story about mine that I will continue to write about here.
The night before Easter Sunday this past year I went to bed thinking I had finished the sermon, prepared for the next day. But as I laid down my mind was captured by a 'carrying the fire' phrase from the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It had been a while since I had read the book, but it possibly came to mind as we were planning a bonfire for the morning before church. But the phrase captured what I had been trying to say can happen to us as we come to this empty tomb that proclaims an absence before it proclaims a presence. It also happened the Easter text was from Luke which continues to the road to Emmaus Easter evening in which the disciples on the road say, “were not our hearts burning within us.”
World we are in
To consider what it would mean to ‘carry the fire’ I had to think of the challenges the church faces today, both from within our walls and outside. As I could not sleep my I kept returning to this quote from Pope Benedict
The Church, too, as we have already said, will assume different forms. She will be less identified with the great societies, more a minority Church; she will live in small, vital circles of really convinced believers who live their faith. But precisely in this way she will, biblically speaking, become the salt of the earth again. In this upheaval, constancy — keeping what is essential to man from being destroyed — is once again more important, and the powers of preservation that can sustain him in his humanity are even more necessary.
There are many different ways to describe and lament the late modern world we live in. While some may seem more fanciful, or fear driven than others, one needs only to be awake to see how things are being pulled apart. Above Pope Benedict see what we are living through as 'upheaval' and how the mission of this smaller vital church would be keeping what is essential to us from being destroyed. For much of the last century it seemed the call of the church was to go out and build something and change the world. But what if now is the time we retain something, to continue to remember something, to conserve something.
The Road
As the father and son travel the road a phrase that is essential to the son is that he his father 'Carry the fire.' It is one way they know they are the 'good guys.' As one conversation makes clear the darkness of the world they live:
We would not ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we are the good guys.
Yes.
And we are carrying the fire.
And we are carrying the fire.
Yes.
Okay.
As an image there are several things that have aided me but here are two. The first is we are not the fire. The fire is something that can be kindled and carried but it does not form inside of us naturally nor is it our genius that makes it. It is rather something received from outside. The second, is it gives knowledge of when we do not carry it. The church, and I, will be full of moments where we will confess, we failed to carry the fire in those places. This is not a reason for despair but an awareness of the challenges and times through which we are living.
To be witnesses
My one sermon would be an attempt to articulate what Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard says clearly here,
“To be a witness of God does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”
Being a witness the benefits of a scriptural and theological history. But if we are willing to read The Road hear its despair as a parable of our world and its despair and emptiness, we come out the other side with a hope that has seen darkness yet still clings to the light. More than rules of life or missions or calls for reenchantment or podcasts and bible reading plans will fall flat. That the church needs now is an existentialism that calls forth to us to live lives that do not make sense if God does not exist.