“Faith won’t just go up in smoke” A Reflection on Frank X Walker’s Poem “Fireproof”
Frank X Walker is a Kentucky poet, professor, and author of Affrilachia, a poetry collection. Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” to highlight the contributions of African Americans in Appalachia.
In the poem “Fireproof,” Walker first alludes to a church fire that has forever altered a Christian community. He doesn’t spend too much time describing this disaster but merely mentions its reality. Then he continues in the poem:
“but church people
Are like fire ants
As soon as the smoke clears
They’ll be stirring up cement
Testing new extinguishers
Installing a smoke alarm”
He concludes the poem, which began with tragedy, with this stunning stanza:
“church people
are fireproof
and Faith
won’t just go up
in smoke.”
I must admit that the world can sometimes seem on fire when I look around.
Threats to people’s dignity and thriving surround us on every side. I don’t need to list them all for you today; we carry them in our hearts and bodies. We’ve been talking about them on this campus. My faculty colleague Amy Plantinga Pauw recently explored disability as a topic worthy of theological reflection so we could begin our list with ableism before moving on to homophobia and transphobia.
But since I look the way I do, and since I live in the state of Kentucky, I want to name a particular fire I see burning in our current moment: White Christian Nationalism. PRRI’s recent polling of religious Americans tells us that “Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%)."
But perhaps, like Walker, I need not spend too much time noting the existence of fire. We are aware of it.
My charge today is more about the response to the fire.
What are we going to do to create that better world? To dream it into reality.
What I find so compelling about Walker’s poem is its description of “church people” – "fire ants," he calls them. And their response to the evil around them:
Stirring up cement
Testing new extinguishers
Installing a smoke alarm
I charge us to become cement stirrers, smoke alarm installers, and fire extinguisher testers.
Let us become a community that starts stirring up cement, rebuilding and repairing damages, pouring new foundations of equity—not the old foundations of Whiteness and patriarchy. New cement, please! If we are going to build something that might reasonably be called Christian or faithful, we are going to need metric tons of justice, truckloads of compassion, and shipments of dignity.
Let us become a community that installs smoke alarms to alert us to the suffering of those around us. Alarms so we know the location of the harm. May we use the tools of theological education, tools like ethical readings of Scripture, to install these alarms in our neighborhoods and our churches so that when the smoke of racism appears, we know how to respond. Let this place and the education here tune our hearts to wake up and become lifesavers, alerting people to the dangers around them.
Let us become a community that tests new fire extinguishers, readying ourselves to put out the next fire, to diminish the flames. To name White Christian Nationalism as a dangerous and distorted moral vision, to name the recent Dobbs Supreme Court decision as the codification of a policy to maintain White supremacy. Or as my faculty colleague, Shannon Craigo-Snell said better in her recent article: “people who can become pregnant are now being required to sacrifice themselves, not for the possible individual embryo or fetus they might carry, but rather for the nation. They are conscripted into service of a particular vision of the United States as a white nation,” truncating the status of women, rendering them less than fully human. “
We are not settling for less than fully human.
I charge us to become cement stirrers, smoke alarm installers, and fire extinguisher testers.
In a world ablaze, O God, O God, make us fire ants.
Make us Fireproof.
Make us a faith community “that won’t just go up in smoke.”
Amen.
A Benediction (Or Miscellaneous Thoughts)
- If you know someone who might like to read this newsletter, forward this email to them.
- If you would like to subscribe to this newsletter, click here.