This morning’s word is The Fire Passes.
The anchor verses are 1 John 2:6 and Jeremiah 20:9.
Yesterday I rode in the Steve Dickow 911 Run, across five towns in the Driftless, with a cadre of motorcyclists and their passengers. The run honors a man who spent his life serving his community, and it raises money for Small Town Heroes, a nonprofit in DeSoto that supports the people who answer the call. The firefighters, the EMTs, the police, the dispatchers, the tow operators. The ones who run toward what the rest of us run from.
One of the leaders said something I have not been able to set down. She said, today is not about making money. It is about honoring a man who spent his entire life serving his community. And then she said they built the prizes for the day on purpose to give back to the businesses we visited.
Sit with that. A ride that was not built to take, but to give, in every direction at once. We honored a man by serving the towns he served. We rode together to lift the people who serve together. Nobody on that ride was the hero. We were carrying something that came to us from a man most of the riders never met.
That is the picture this morning. The work that honors a life is not a monument. It is a continuation. You take what someone carried, and you carry it forward.
Peyton Jones, in the Discipology step on walking with others, says the mission was never meant for one set of shoulders. In HIS darkest hour in the garden, Jesus turned to three friends and said stay here and keep watch with me. The Son of GOD, who could have summoned legions, wanted friends beside HIM. The riders yesterday knew that without being told. You do not run toward the fire alone. You run with your people.
But here is the part that goes deeper. Jones says the love that drives the work is not your love. He is honest about it. Left to himself, he says, he is not very good at loving people. The drive Paul talks about is not something we generate. It is Christ’s love rising up inside a person made new. You begin to feel GOD loving others through you. The strength to serve was never your strength.
Listen to Jeremiah say the same thing from the other side of exhaustion. He tried to quit. He was tired of the cost, tired of the mockery, ready to put the whole calling down. And he found he could not. He said GOD’s word was in his heart like a fire, a fire shut up in his bones, and he was weary of holding it in, and he could not. He reached for the latch and the door would not open. The fire was not his to start and not his to put out. It belonged to the One who lit it.
That is what the riders were carrying yesterday, whether they would say it that way or not. The fire to serve, the drive to give back, the willingness to run toward the call. None of it begins in us. Ignatius of Antioch, the second-century bishop and martyr who wrote seven letters to early churches on his way to Rome and execution, said the believer is a branch on the cross, drawing life that does not rot from the One it is joined to. The branch does not make its own sap. It receives it.
The man being honored yesterday is gone, and the work he carried is not. It passed to a cadre of riders, and to a nonprofit buying training books and CPR manikins for the responders coming next. The fire moved from his hand to other hands, and it is still burning.
That is how it always works. You did not start the work you are doing. You received it from people who carried it before you, and one day you will hand it on. The farmer plants a tree he will never sit under. The volunteer answers the pager at three in the morning for neighbors who will never thank him. The fire passes from hand to hand, and the One who lit it keeps it burning, long after any of us has set it down.
You are tired sometimes. That is honest, and it is allowed. The strength to carry the fire was never meant to come from you. You walk as HE walked because HE walks in you. You carry the fire because it is HIS fire. The work is HIS, and HE is not going anywhere.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
This Sunday’s Marc My Sabbath homily, The Fire You Cannot Put Down, carries this word further. Read it here.