Minister’s Message
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Rev. Brennan Hurley
Associate Pastor, First United Methodist Church in Taylorville
Pastor, Stonington United Methodist Church
When I lived in North Carolina, a sweet old lady from my new church took my wife and me to lunch a couple days after we’d moved in. One of the first questions she asked was, “Now, are you a Republican or a Democrat?” Oof. These days, that’s about as direct and consequential a question as “are you pregnant?” My answer was “I’m not prepared to answer that question at this time. Let’s have that conversation on a different day.” Well, that’s a lie. I was all of 21 with only a year of pastoring under my belt, and I think I said something to the effect of “uhh…er…um…where is the waitress?”
The truth is that I’m not really either, though I am a little bit of a closet political junkie. Some people listen to music when they exercise. I listen to SiriusXM political talk radio. Anyway, on one of those unnamed shows, I heard a political consultant from one side of the aisle say “we need to fight fire with fire” suggesting her side needed to get as angry and rhetorically pugilistic as she perceived the other side to be.
That phrase – “fighting fire with fire” – doesn’t really make sense, if you think about it. According to my ten seconds of Google searching, its origins probably have to do with strategic burning of plants or gunfire in a battle. In any case, that political consultant was correct in one respect: the world around us seems fiery. Turn on CSPAN for ten seconds, and you’ll see more name calling than hand shaking in Congres. Just say the word “immigration” at the dinner table, and you might end up with mashed potatoes thrown at you. Head on over to Newsmax or FOX or MSNBC or CNN, and you’ll hear all about how bad the other side is, and how our country is going to hell in a handbasket if things don’t change soon. The fire seems dire.
We are tempted by two choices. In the fiery and chaotic tumult of the world in which we live, we can either get out our flamethrowers and fight fire with fire, stooping down to the name-calling, the alarmism, and the vitriol, or we can let the fire consume us, becoming jaded and convinced that the world is all bad, and there is nothing worthwhile that can come of it.
But, as with many things, there is a third way, if only we’d look. I’m no expert on pyro-philosophy, but it occurs to me that the best way to fight fire is with water. Water cleans. It cools. It extinguishes. It calms. It is an essential ingredient for growth. People in the church often talk about relevance. That conversation usually leads to discussions about smoke machines, the right kind of music, and enough programs for kids. I tend to think that to be relevant takes things like authenticity, honesty, humility, and most of all, love. Not just mushy-gushy love, but unconditional love for all people, regardless of their demographic or life circumstance. And that’s hard. But love is the key to beginning to extinguish the fires around us. Jesus calls us not to pick up our flamethrowers, but to pick up someone who has fallen. Jesus calls us not to become resigned to the badness of the world, but to look for the goodness in our divine image bearing neighbors. Jesus calls us to find, in the worlds of the late Frederick Buechner, “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” to wrap the unincluded and the hopeless in the warm embrace of love. In other words, he calls us to fight fire with the cool, cleansing waters of love.
