"God's Fire Is A Powerful Catalyst" | Liz Harlan Ferlo | May 12, 2024

Happy Ascension Day! We don't usually get to celebrate this on a Sunday.

And happy Mother's Day, wherever you are in your journey of mothering or being mothered.

And happy lesser-known holiday: the end of Teacher Appreciation Week. As many of you know, I have spent my career working in school settings as a school chaplain and a teacher, and in every school I've taught in, a week in May is usually designated as Teacher Appreciation. By no coincidence, this always seems to fall around the time that I thought I would fully lose my mind and patience and never make it to the end of the year. I have always treasured those kind notes from students and families– I still have them in a file– but somehow the boxes of donuts and pizza that would show up in the break room felt a little condescending.

I have a lot of thoughts about the ways we should be appreciating teachers on a policy level, but I will save those for another time.

Teacher Appreciation Week precedes what one teacher friend of mine used to call "Bridge-Burning Season." This is the time near the end of the year when students, especially high school students, begin to realize that school is really ending, for better or for worse. This place where they work and learn and grow, the place where their friends are, is not going to be available to them for a certain amount of time. They're getting close to the end of the school year, but not so close that there isn't still time to self-sabotage. Especially for high school seniors, the culmination of 12 years of school life is coming to an end, and while there is great joy, there is also great fear. When I leave here, will people remember me? Who will carry on what I began? Do I matter in this community? There's grief in this leave-taking and knowing that next year seniors are already getting ready to take their place. For some, the thought is, "If I have to leave, I can avoid the pain of that complicated grief by creating, uh, distraction." The vibe is "you can't fire me, I fire you first."

So we imagine burning bridges as a violent act, but in biblical symbology, the bright light of fire is often a sign of God's presence. The fire of pillar and cloud that leads the people in Exodus, for example, and the unconsumed burning bush out of which God speaks.

God uses fire to focus attention on divine presence, and then gives instruction.

If we, like Moses, can figure out how to listen.

When I was in my bridge burning stage as a teenager, my family lived in a rectory in New York City. This was a row house built in the 19th century with high ceilings and a party wall between us and the next house over. The front windows looked out on a busy street in lower Manhattan, and between the windows hung a painting of Jesus. It was impressionistic, with Jesus and the two figures below him in large smudges of brush strokes, and as I remember it, the angle was of Jesus straight on or almost above, as if the viewer were rising with Jesus and leaving the others behind.

For years, I assumed it was a painting of the Transfiguration, but I was mistaken: it was the Ascension. And you too might be forgiven for confusing these moments. After all, both are of Jesus floating above incredulous disciples.

In the Transfiguration, though, Jesus comes back, and in the Transfiguration, he is accompanied by two important figures: Moses on one side and Elijah on the other. These figures, Elijah especially, are understood by early listeners to be the forerunners of the Messiah.

Now, Elijah's own story is useful for us to consider in comparison with the one we heard today. His story, Elijah's, is directly about succession, about making space for someone else to take over. When that moment finally comes, the two men, Elijah and Elisha, are divided from each other by fire, and then a whirlwind takes Elijah into the sky, and Elisha cries out with grief, and when he can see his mentor no longer, he tears his clothes. Then he gets up and he picks up the mantle that Elijah has dropped. He is the new Prophet.

Elisha knew that moment was coming, and still he grieved so deeply.

That grief, even in the knowledge of what's coming, reminds me of another succession moment, one significantly less biblical. It's when Logan Roy, the fictional terrible millionaire from the show "Succession," dies suddenly. Now, of course the whole show has revolved around who is going to assume power when he goes, but when his death happens, his scheming children are still caught flat-footed, both in and by their own grief. One reverts back to a sudden juvenile warmth, one persists in denial. As much as they had mixed feelings about the man who was their father, they do not want him to leave them behind. The capitalism of the Roy family is likely our country's most popular religion, but many religions have faced succession challenges. The Buddha designated no human successor, with the hopes of leaving all monks equal– perhaps forgetting that all monks were still human and not interested in being equal. And even now, Tibetan Buddhists scramble to control their lineage from the Chinese government.

Sikhism, a mix of Hinduism and Islam, eventually moved to the privacy of the text after the lineage of gurus became complicated.

And after the death of Muhammad, a succession battle divided his followers into a sectarian split which we now know as Sunni and Shia.

Jesus always told us he was going to leave. After explaining to the disciples the pattern of his fulfillment of scripture as we hear in the gospel, after promising that he will still be with them, he disappears in light. And the grief of this second loss must have burned for the disciples. How to follow Jesus if Jesus is not here to be followed? And in fact, the oldest biblical texts we have are the ones like we heard today from Ephesians, where we have Jesus's followers, with Paul's advice, trying to figure that out.

Once again, Jesus refuses to behave like an earthly king. He has commandments for us, sure, but they are about love. And he leaves us to build the infrastructure ourselves and to fix it when it breaks. It is up to us to choose the kind of leadership that reflects the ethics of Christ.

Succession can feel destabilizing, especially when we are the ones who are being succeeded. It's hard to leave when it's time to go, to trust what will come after, and it's hard to be separated from those we have loved and trusted– especially when we are separated by what feels like fire.

Now fire, again, we often think of as destructive, and we might think that some of the ways that young people are responding right now to the world, we might see that as bridge burning.

But those of us who live here in the forest of Western Oregon know that fire is not always what it seems. That the frequent low intensity fires that were common before the 20th century, that were often intentionally practiced by native inhabitants, kept the forest flourishing. Forest scientists say that these fires created mosaic-type communities, where small- to moderate-sized burned areas allowed fire-adapted species to sprout or recruit in and mix with existing vegetation, allowing for more varied wildlife habitat.

If Jesus had remained, the whole church might have been structured around who had the most proximity to Jesus himself, rather than his teachings. It wouldn't have left room for the mosaic that has come into being, the ways of trying and self-correcting that we have unfolded over the past thousands of years.

We followers of Jesus are a fire-adapted species, and God's fire is a powerful catalyst. Just ask the disciples who next week meet together and find themselves bursting out with the good news.

Just ask the lodgepole pine, whose cones are coated in resin. Fire melts the resin and bursts the cones. This spreads the seeds, renews the ground for growth– even in the midst of seeming destruction, even as the world is irrevocably changed. Amen.