Using the Fire You Have

It has been many years now since I was a pastor to three small churches in rural South Dakota.  Some things you never forget, though, like the evening I was dozing on the sofa when I heard a knock on the door.

It was the youngest daughter of one of my parish members, who was part of the town's volunteer fire department, the only female member.

"My mom wants to know if you wanted to come and see the fire," she said.  "It's almost out, but there's still something to look at."

The house closest to mine had been deserted for some time.  The fire there was not an accident.  The fire department itself set the house on fire.  They did this sometimes, if they could get permission from whoever still owned the house.  The fire department would burn down the house, and then come and make sure that it burned down safely.  It was good practice.

You might wonder a little about the town I lived in.  This was not the only deserted house in the neighborhood.  It was a tiny town with a Lutheran church, a post office and a large grain elevator.  There was a deserted gas station across the street from the parsonage.  About a century ago, the town had been a lively place.  Two trains passed through.  There were four churches then.  There were parties every Saturday night.  The town had been declining for a long time, but they were not dead.

So, sometimes the fire department burned down one of the deserted houses in town.  Tonight, I was being invited to see the fire.  Always up for a little adventure, I said "sure," and went to get my coat.

By the time I got there, it wasn't much of a fire any more.  A few of the firefighters were still there, my friend, her children, a couple of other children.  My friend apologized and said she had tried to call earlier, when the fire was really roaring.  Now it was almost done, but some bright embers still burned.

"So, you want to roast marshmallows?" she asked me.  I did.

She had sticks, and they had marshmallows, graham crackers and chocolate bars in the car.  They were prepared.

So we stood over the ruins of this burning house, and roasted marshmallows, and ate s'mores.  I am not sure if I remember correctly, but it is possible that we even sang some camp songs, too.  Maybe we had a little "Pass it On" action.

Maybe that's how we survive, residents of dying towns, members of dying institutions, people in creaky old bodies.  We are declining, but we are not dead, not yet, maybe not for a long time.  There are still some bright embers left.  So we use whatever fire we have, roast marshmallows, sing songs, invite the neighbors in, share what we have.  We keep warm in the dark cold night.

We hold hope, and we taste its sweetness in our mouths.

The Meaning of the Light

We're coming up on Pentecost Sunday, and I am thinking of light.

More specifically, I am thinking of a particular light (or is it fire?) -- the light coming from the Paschal candle, the large festival candle that we light the seven Sundays of Easter up through Pentecost.

On Sunday, we will light the Paschal Candle one last time.  Then we will not light it again (except for funerals and baptisms) until we light the new fire in the darkness before Easter morning.

What does it mean?  Do we notice the light of the small fire while it is present?  Do we notice its absence in the sanctuary during the rest of the year?  I wonder.

We used to extinguish the candle on "Ascension Sunday", when Jesus meets his disciples on the mountain one last time.  He gives them instructions.  He tells them to wait for the Spirit.  And then he ascends.  He goes up.  He disappears from their sight.  And in that moment when Jesus disappears from their sight, we paused for a moment, and we extinguished the paschal candle.  The flame, like Jesus, disappeared.  And just like the disciples, now we do not see Jesus any more.  For forty days after his resurrection, he appeared to them, talked to them, taught them, showed them his hands.  And then… he disappeared.

Is that what it means, then?  The light of this candle?  It means the visible presence of the resurrected Jesus. We light it on Easter, and for seven Sundays afterwards.  But after Pentecost, we don't light it any more.  Because Jesus doesn't appear to us.

The light is the flame of his life.  Is that it?  But why do we only light it for seven Sundays of the year?  Sometimes I wonder.

I arrived at my first parish in the middle of the summer.  One of the first questions I was asked, at the little country church, was "When do we stop lighting the candle?"  The instructions they read said that they were supposed to light it through Pentecost, and as far as they could tell, it was still Pentecost.   It was mid-July, and they were still lighting the candle every Sunday.

Was that so wrong?

Anyway, we don't extinguish the candle when Jesus ascends any more.  We keep it lit until Pentecost.  We keep it lit until the tongues of fire dance on the disciples heads.  But then we stop.

What does it mean?  What does it mean that we light the candle, but then we stop lighting it?  Do we notice its presence, and do we notice its absence?  Perhaps if there were more darkness, the light of the candle, the fire that dances for seven Sundays up until today, would stand out more.

Sometimes I do wish we could light it all the time.  Why not?  But there is something necessary about lighting a candle for a time, and then not lighting it again.  There is something true about it, too.  The light does shine in the darkness, but we do not always notice it.  The light does shine in the darkness, but there are times when Jesus feels absent to us.

As for me, I wish we would notice.  I wish we were more able to notice the small things, the light coming from the single candle, and how suddenly, after today, there will no longer be a visible flame.  But there's something else too, something else.

I wish we would notice the presence…. the presence of the flame, the flame dancing in each and every one of us, every broken bruised one of us, bearing the light of His life, now.  After Pentecost, I pray that we will notice that the light still shines.  Only now, the light shines in us, bruised reeds and dimly burning wicks, failures and successes, God's only plan for spreading of love and grace and freedom and hope in the world.

A Particular Story

A year ago last June, my husband and I traveled to South Dakota to help celebrate the Centennial of one of the three churches I pastored back in the 1990s.

I had not been back in 14 years, though I had thought about them often since leaving.  They were a good parish, a farming community out on a prairie unfamiliar to me.  It was a gracious place to begin ministry, though sometimes I had critiqued myself, thinking that I had not done enough "big" things while I was there.

I wondered what it would be like, to see them again.  I wondered what the community would be like as well.  It's not so easy for rural communities these days:  with farms getting larger, towns get smaller.  I remembered the many funerals, the handful of new members and baptisms, and wondered what it would be like when I returned.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this church, still small, but teeming with children.  Some of them were the children of my former confirmation students.  Some were faces I didn't know.  There was a sense of hope and vitality, a sense of health.  Later on, someone told me that in this small congregation (membership is just under 200) there are 57 children in Sunday School this year.  The church attracts:  particularly young families.

Ever since that summer day, I've been thinking about this congregation, and about the sense of vitality that I found there.  I've been thinking about what makes a congregation resilient, able to bounce back when their are challenges rather than continue to contract.  I have also been considering that growing congregations are not all necessarily large:  there are growing congregations in every size.  I wondered if it was DNA or habits, or something else that mattered.

Here is what I came up with.

1.  This congregation sees each of their pastors as uniquely gifted, and uses each pastor's particular gifts.  Even mine.  So someone came up to me on the Sunday I visited and showed me a copy of a contemporary worship service I wrote while I was there.  They wanted me to know that they still use that service, although they had added to and expanded to what I first put together.  Every year they purchase a couple more copyrights to favorite songs.  Every year the book gets a little thicker.  They took the gift I offered them, and they made it their own.

2.  This congregation has necessarily become lay driven.  This reality is borne out of the challenge that they often got new and first-call pastors who did not stay very many years.  But because of that, they have become a lay-driven congregation.  I never had all of the ideas.  I was just one of the leaders, adding my vegetables to the soup.  I had the idea that we should help serve a meal to hungry people at "The Banquet", but there were plenty of other things that happened that had very little to do with me.

3.  This congregation is inter-generational by nature.  There is no nursery.  The children belong to the congregation, and everyone supported and looked out after them.  The largest service of the year was always Easter Sunrise, which the youth group planned and executed every year (no sermon).  I was also impressed when the leadership board decided that they should cash in some savings in order to build a lift.  They wanted their church basement to be handicap accessible.  The impetus for this move?  a child in the congregation who had Muscular Dystrophy.

And, most important....

4.  This congregation has a Particular Story.  Well, I suppose that every congregation has a Particular Story, a story that makes them who they are, whether everyone in the congregation even knows it or not.

I didn't learn the story for a long time, and I didn't learn it all at once.  I learned first about the cemetery four miles west of the church.  Then I would hear references to "The Pleasant Church."  Finally I learned that there had once been two churches -- the one in town that I knew, and a beautiful, old country church west of town, founded by Norwegian immigrants.

One terrible day the country church burned to the ground.  I don't know if there is anyone alive yet who remembers the story of the fire, but there were some people who remembered it still when I was pastor.  Their voices fell still when they told the story of the fire at their beloved church.

Both churches were still lively and bustling at the time; yet even so, the congregation made the decision not to rebuild, but to create a whole new congregation, together with the people of the church in town. The town church was re-named to reflect the belief that they were now a new community.

My telling does not do justice to the Particular Story of this congregation:  the hard work, the hope, the persistence, the joy.  It is a story of death and resurrection.  It is a story of what happens when the worst thing you can imagine happens -- and you find out that it is the not the worst thing that can happen to you.

Last fall, a house two blocks from my current congregation burned to the ground.  Almost everything was lost.  Our faith community, along with others,  took a door offering for the woman and her family.  When I talked to her on the phone, she said the fire was, "the worst blessing."  It was an odd thing to say, but I think I know what she meant.

A particular story.  That is what this congregation has.  It has a particular story of "the worst blessing."  It has a story that tells them that when the worst happens to them, it is not the worst that can happen to them.  It is a story of death by fire.  And it is a story of life from God.

"Under a Flaming Sky", by Daniel James Brown -- a book review of sorts

I have driven by the sign for almost my entire life.  "Hinckley Fire Museum," it reads.

We stop for gas and a bite to eat on our way up to the resort and retreat areas of the North Shore.  Again, I see the sign.  But I don't go into the museum.  After all, Hinckley is a small town.  What kind of a museum could it be?

One of my college classmates was from Hinckley.  He talked about the Fire Museum some.  He talked about the fire a little too, but it didn't make much of an impression on me.  So every year we see the sign and we don't go into the museum.

This year, though, I was reading the book "Under a Flaming Sky" for my church's book club.  I wasn't at the meeting where we chose it, so I don't know the reasoning.  But I decided to bring the book along on vacation and read it while we were away.

I ended up finishing it on the drive home, as we were driving past Hinckley again.

"Under a Flaming Sky" is a harrowing book.  Brown sets the scene for the tragedy, describing life in the booming little town of Hinckley, describing the weather conditions and the logging practices of the day and the lives of several of the families whose lives would be irretrievably changed on the day.  He describes in detail the harrowing journeys of the two trains that left Hinckley that afternoon:  the northbound to Duluth, and the Southbound train bound for Pine City.  The northbound train with its bedraggled passengers stopped in Sandstone and in Partridge, and those aboard urged the townspeople to flee, but almost no one got on the train.  They just didn't believe that the fire would come there, even with witnesses attesting to its power.  The Southbound train left later and did not fare as well; even so, there were people on that train who survived the fire because of the dangerous journey it made.

One of those families included the author's great-grandmother, grandfather and his two sisters.  Brown's great-grandfather died in the fire; his great-grandmother Marie never got over it.  This book is, in part, borne out of Brown's desire to understand as much as he could about his own family, his own history, forged in the fire.

Logging practices and fire-fighting practices have changed, at least in part because of the Hinckley fire, and others like it.   While some fires are necessary and are a part of the natural order for the forest, so much of what was happening at the time had to do with a lethal combination of weather and carelessness.  I suppose there is some comfort in that, although I can't erase the thought of all of the children who were lost, who could not escape.   And it haunts me to think that, even after Hinckley and Peshtigo and Sandstone and a few other places, it still took several years to convince the logging interests that it was in their best interests to find safer logging practices.

So after reading the book, I am preparing a sermon for this Sunday.  This Sunday's readings contain difficult pronouncements by Jesus of division rather than peace,  the fire that he longs to bring to the earth, the 'signs of the times' that it seems that no one is heeding.  This Sunday's readings contain warnings by Jeremiah about false prophets and their dreams, lists of bedraggled patriarchs and prophets who live by faith in a world that mostly doesn't listen to them.  This Sunday's readings are all about suffering and struggle and division, and it appears that there is very little good news, just as there is very little good news in the book about the flaming sky.

I'm thinking about the sign that I never pay attention to as I drive past Hinckley.  What will make me stop and listen now?  I'm thinking about the people in Sandstone who would not take the train to safety, even with all of the voices urging them, the clouds of witnesses.  I'm thinking about how we can tell the false prophets from the true ones.  I'm thinking that it isn't easy, never hast been easy, to tell.  But one thing I can think about:  false prophets will tell me what I want to hear, whatever that is.  A true prophet will tell the truth, even if it's difficult to bear.

In his time, the people thought the prophet Jeremiah was a traitor.  But he loved Jerusalem as much as everyone else.  It's just that he saw the signs:  the signs of judgment, the signs of destruction.  He saw that the people were on a collision course with their own greed and idolatry.

I've always thought about the clouds of witnesses in Hebrews as those inspiring people from our past who trusted God and lived grace-filled lives. "Keep going," they are saying.  "Keep running." But now I have added another image:  the people on the train from Hinckley.  They are witnesses too, prophets of a sort, telling me that the life of a disciple of Jesus is hard, and fraught with danger.