The Fire of Love
11 May 2008
I HAVEN’T YET taken up ‘googling’ as a hobby: you know, the way that people used to pass the time learning railway timetables off by heart, reading the telephone directory, or working their way through the Oxford Dictionary. But, sitting down to write a sermon on ‘The Fire of Love’, I thought ‘googling’ not a bad way to start. I already had a passing acquaintance with Richard Rolle, the fourteenth century mystic. I must warn you: he is not a good example to Oxford undergraduates: he broke off his studies in Oxford at the age of 18 and went off to become a hermit. His Incendium Amoris – ‘The Fire of Love’ – is possibly what the Principal had in mind when he drew up the themes for this term’s preachers.
Keep ‘googling’ and you discover that ‘Fire of Love’ is also the title of a collection of modern worship songs by Margaret Rizza. Not quite the Pusey House style: Margaret Rizza was an opera singer who has more recently devoted her life to producing simple, accessible music. I don’t imagine the Principal having a Margaret Rizza CD playing in the background when he drew up the term card.
You can ‘google’ too far and, if you do, you’ll find that ‘Fire of Love’ was also the debut of Gun Club in the 1980s, the band of a reggae enthusiast and heroin addict who died prematurely in 1997. If the Principal was listening to Gun Club’s ‘Fire of Love’, he’d have been sitting through tracks like ‘Sex beat’, ‘She’s like heroin to me’ and ‘For the love of Ivy‘. Can’t imagine it…. As I said, you can take ‘googling’ too far….
But, today we celebrate Pentecost, and the gift of the Holy Spirit as ‘tongues as of fire’ – the ‘Fire of Love’ - and it seems to me that my little bit of ‘googling’ does give us a clue to the kind of choices we must make when we resolve to serve Jesus Christ as Master and Lord. ‘No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit’, today’s reading from 1 Corinthians 12 tells us, so the gift of the Spirit, the Fire of Love, is not a piece of warm, subjective devotion (though Richard Rolle was sometimes accused of that as, no doubt, Margaret Rizza often is) but a covenantal, contractual relationship with the living Lord. Today is a good day for Baptism and Confirmation not just because of the quintessentially paschal nature of these sacraments, not just because – as on the Day of Pentecost – the Holy Spirit descends upon those who wait upon him, but because Pentecost is a new covenant between God and those who respond to his call, those who, through the Holy Spirit, say ‘Jesus is Lord’.
Most obviously – and we can hereby leave our ‘googling’ behind – we are turning away from fallen and debased concepts of love: ‘Sex beat’, ‘She’s like heroin to me’ and ‘For the love of Ivy‘. Love, as a sentimentalisation of infatuation, lust or casual encounter, is what we leave behind when we commit our lives to Christ. That kind of love is centred on me, on what I can score, what I can get high on, what can do something for me. One of the most poignant texts in the Bible is the text in Joshua 24:15 – not the most fashionable of books - ‘choose this day whom you will serve’. Those who are choosing for Christ today are saying, with Joshua, ‘as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord’. That reference to ‘me and my house’ – however overlaid with the baggage of the ancient world – menservants and maidservants, oxen and asses – is a reminder of the importance of the family, the community, mutual interdependence and solidarity, at home and gathered as the Lord’s household round his table. The one kind of love, peddled by the world and its gun clubs, is about addiction, fragmentation, gratification, self – and leads to death. The love of God, shown in Christ and profusely poured out upon us, is about family, freedom, fulfilment. It’s about God and neighbour and not about me – and leads to life in all its abundance, here and throughout eternity. ‘Choose this day whom you will serve’.
I was at an ecumenical meeting of bishops this week and, though I am still grappling with some of the new ideas I was encountering, one or two of the phrases remain with me. They were phrases from papal documents which I wasn’t familiar with – and it was fascinating hearing Catholic and Anglican bishops comparing insights, balancing the nuances of moral and philosophical theology with, for us, the more familiar territory of biblical texts. But if I share some of this with you, it might illuminate what choosing to serve the Lord Jesus Christ, inspired by the mighty wind of the Holy Spirit, ought to mean. Pope John Paul II, in Centissimum annum (1991), as usual, was a prophet way ahead of his times when he talked about the need for a fusion between what he called ‘human ecology’ and ‘environmental ecology’. ‘Human ecology’: there’s a phrase. Much earlier in his second encyclical, Dives et misericordiae (1980) the Pope said this:
“The word and the concept of ‘mercy’ seem to cause uneasiness in man, who, thanks to the enormous development of science and technology, never before known in history, has become the master of the earth and has subdued and dominated it. This dominion over the earth, sometimes understood in a one - sided and superficial way, seems to have no room for mercy.”
I don’t want to go on too much about popes and encyclicals in this traditionally Anglican place of study – at least at this stage – but I was immensely stimulated this week by the notion of drawing together the longing of people of goodwill to reduce the carbon footprint, get back into a proper relationship with the natural world – what we Christians would call God’s creation – and the ecology of human existence, the family, our relationships with one another, what it might mean to live life in all its abundance empowered by the Holy Spirit. I was moved by the notion of us learning not just dominion over but, in God’s name, mercy – divine mercy, you might say - towards the natural order. Christian ecology: the economy of God, human and environmental.
All of this is there in Pentecost: Ezekiel’s dry bones coming to life (Ezekiel 37), the prophet Joel with the pouring out of God’s spirit on all flesh, so that ‘old men shall dream dreams, and…young men…see visions’ (Joel 2), creation groaning with labour pains as St Paul puts it (Romans 8) and rivers of living water flowing out of the heart of Jesus, as he himself proclaimed on the Jewish feast of Pentecost (John 7), the festival of the first-fruits (that is, Christ) of the corn-harvest (who is, for us, the Bread of Life).
Having mercy on the natural world, living in prophetic community, watching in prayer during the midwifery of the new creation, irrigating and being irrigated by the waters of life, feeding on the Bread which comes down from heaven: a long way from – the very antithesis of - the isolation, death and destruction of Gun Club.
The Gospel sums all this up in one word: ‘Shalom’. Peace. Wholeness. Perfection. The Risen Christ, when he greets his disciples gathered in the Cenacle, just two days after his death, and barely three since he broke the bread and poured out the wine as the prototype of the eucharistic rite which sums up the whole paschal mystery of meal, sacrifice and transformation, says ‘Shalom: Peace be with you’. This Shalom – this wholeness – this Easter Eucharist - is where all is reconciled. It is nothing less than the ‘Fire of Love’, the vision of God glimpsed throughout the ages, by mystics such as Richard Rolle, and glimpsed now, by us, as we celebrate this Eucharist, the foretaste of the banquet of heaven.
When we are gathered up into the perfection of Shalom, we are caught up into the very life of the Holy Trinity in which, as St Hilary says,* ‘nothing will be found lacking’ for ‘in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, there is the infinity of the eternal, the vision of the image, the enjoyment of the gift’. Gift? ‘There is one Spirit, the Gift in all things’. God the Holy Trinity gathers us into his life and gives us these gifts as we celebrate Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist. Until recent times the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity was the octave day of Pentecost, the summing up the fullness of our Faith. The Father has revealed himself to us in the Son. The Son has prayed the Father for the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter. As our Faith in the Triune God is proclaimed and celebrated in these three sacraments, God the Holy Spirit comes upon us ‘like the rush of a mighty wind’. We can almost glimpse ‘the tongues as of fire.’ Pray that we are ‘all filled with the Holy Spirit’ so that we can tell in our own tongue ‘the mighty works of God’. Alleluia!
The Rt Revd Andrew Burnham Bishop of Ebbsfleet