Today is Pentecost Sunday, often called the birth of the Church. It is the one day that is focused on the Holy Spirit. A dove is the common imagery used for the Holy Spirit. But today, the imagery is fire. Fire is a tricky thing. Our first thoughts usually, and rightly, turn to danger and destruction. Fire wrecks property, lives, and certainly kills.
We have an easy time appreciating a roaring fire in a fireplace on a cold night or contained in a firepit surrounded by friends and family. Those are fires that warm us physically and warm our souls.
In the past few years, images of burning dumpster fires have popped up on social media usually with comments referencing the current situation in our country or the world that feels like just that…a dumpster fire. Chances are you have seen or heard something similar. If you are not familiar with the dumpster fire image, maybe you are more familiar with the phrase “sh*t show” that has also been popular lately. Watching the news some days, it does feel like the world is a dumpster fire…the war in Ukraine, daily mass shootings, formula shortages, rising prices, COVID still hanging on, refugees, climate change…what did I forget?
Right now it feels like the Church is also a dumpster fire what with recent stories about sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Church, the Roman Catholic Church in this country threatening to withhold the eucharist from pro-choice members, the American United Methodist Churches looking to split from the global United Methodist Church because of differences over LGBTQIA issues within the church, and a synod in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in tatters as a result of racist actions taken at the synodical leadership level and which has voices across the ELCA being raised over racism within the denomination as a whole.
It’s all a bit much right now. The dumpster fire imagery seems pretty accurate some days. Unfortunately, an overwhelming amount of heavy events piled on top of 2+ years of COVID is making a lot of us numb. Which I get; because it’s all so exhausting. But what bothers me about our communal responses to our dumpster fires, is the lack of anger, the lack of passion over any of these big issues with the biggest disappointment probably being our response over the daily mass shootings. We know what needs to be done, other countries have done it and have brought down their numbers of gun deaths to near zero. WE KNOW WHAT WE NEED TO DO!
But we wring our hands over our dumpster fires, hoping they will go away. That won’t happen if we are numb, if our spirits aren’t stirred up, if our hearts can’t completely break because they are as hard as a piece of marble. We need to wake up from our stupors and find that fire in our bellies. As a society, we have no such burning fire in our national soul. None. Two years ago we had a summer of protests over racial police brutality sparked by the death of George Floyd. But it was a sprint and needed to be a marathon. Has that energy, that fire and passion moved to behind the scenes work or has the fire just died out?
These dumpster fires should be igniting fires in us, stirring up in us a calling to wake up, pay attention, and move us to action. That isn’t to say that we need to drop everything and jump head first into every issue, but we need to find our inner fires and use that energy in some way for the good of the world. Fire has a cleansing, refining, and purging effect. These dumpster fires can be turned around to clean out what is rotten, overgrown, or bearing no fruit; resulting in new life, in healthier lives and societies.
The Holy Spirit arrived on Pentecost in the form of a violent wind and fire. We need that wind to stir whatever embers of fire we have left, to wake us up, and rekindle those fires in our bellies ablaze with passion and courage to go out and meet the needs of the world. Veni Sancte Spiritus!
Leave a Reply