A sermon on Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 & Isaiah 43:1-7 by Nathan Nettleton

I seem to have acquired a bit of a reputation for my disaster sermons, and after a horror week of bush fires around the country which looks set to get worse in the week to come, you may be expecting another one. And perhaps when you heard the first reading with its line about “when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you,” you thought, “Yep, another Nathan disaster sermon coming, for sure.” Well, it’s tempting, but although I do intend to tackle some of the obvious questions that that verse raises in the wake of the fires, tonight’s sermon is not going to be in that sort of random poetry approach that I’ve often employed for my post-disaster sermons. So, sorry if you were looking forward to one of those.

This passage from Isaiah will have been read in churches all over the country today, any many people, certainly many preachers, will probably wish it wasn’t because it raises some pretty awkward questions this week, doesn’t it? If you had just lost your house and all your belongings in one of the fires, or perhaps you had even been injured, or had a loved one killed, how would you hear those words? “When you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”

At best it would probably sound like wishful thinking or very selective application. At worst it could sound like cruel mockery. On the face of it, the passage does seem to include a promise that those who belong to God and are beloved of God, will be specially protected in the face of disaster. And every time there is a disaster like this, there are amazing survival stories. Some people lose their belongings but they and their loved ones manage to escape to safety. Other people don’t even lose anything. The flukey nature of fires is such that some houses just seem to get jumped over while the ones either side of them are burnt to the ground. And of course, if you’re one of the lucky ones, then naturally you feel blessed and you want to celebrate your escape and give thanks to God and to anyone else who might have helped. But sometimes in our enthusiasm, we can say some reckless and unhelpful things. There will no doubt be people standing up in churches this weekend and next weekend giving thanks to God for remarkable escapes, which is all good, but a few of them will go on to suggest that their remarkable escapes were because of a special intervention by God, who singled them out for special help. And of course, passages like this one from Isaiah will readily give them the biblical support to suggest that God does play favourites, and that if you are sufficiently in the good books with God, then God will intervene to ensure that even though you pass through raging floods, they will not overwhelm you, and “when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”

And it is no wonder that we are ready to think that, because of course, that’s what we desperately want to believe. In the face of the seemingly escalating cycles of catastrophic bush fires and cyclones and earthquakes and floods, not to mention bombings and mass shootings, we desperately want to believe that if we just play our cards right, we can earn God’s special protection and know that we and our loved ones will come out unscathed. We desperately want to be able to do something that will ensure that we are safe, that we will have divine protection when these perils come. But desperately wanting it doesn’t make it true, and when ever one of us stands up after such a disaster and claims that we survived because God protected us, the rather troubling implication is that there were a whole bunch of other people who God could have protected, but God chose not to protect them and let them burn, or get drowned or crushed or shot or whatever it was. And when taken as a whole, the evidence never seems to support the theory that God protects good righteous Christians and leaves corrupt, unpleasant, godless people to their fates. There were some excellent faithful Christians among the dead on Black Saturday three years ago, and the miraculous survival stories showed no evidence of religious, political or moral bias. Generally, when taken as a whole, the evidence tends rather more to support the words of Jesus when he said that God allows the sun to shine and the rain to fall on good and evil alike.

Nowadays, even those of us who want to claim that God specially protects us baulk at actually saying “and God abandons everyone else to the whims of the fire”. We often still want to be able to see ourselves as God’s favourites, but we are reluctant to follow through and express the logical implication that if God favours us, then favouring us is at the expense of others, and those others have names and faces and addresses, including addresses in bush fire zones. Many of our ancient forebears had no such qualms and were quite comfortable with naming those God was willing to abandon in favour of us, his favourites. Listen to the next two verses from our same reading from Isaiah. “I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. Because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you, I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life.” It’s quite clear isn’t it? Israel is God’s favourite and will be rescued by God, but God considers Egypt, Ethiopia and Seba to be expendable, and God would willingly sacrifice them to rescue Israel, the favourite one.

When we come to the time of John the Baptiser, in our gospel reading, this same kind of expectation is front and centre. As we saw a few weeks ago when we had a first look at this passage, John was well aware that people were coming for baptism with a kind of insurance policy religion mindset. They saw baptism as a way of getting their names transferred on to the list of God’s favoured and protected ones. And John himself uses this image of fire as the way God sorts out the good from the bad. John says the messiah will be greater than himself because “I only baptise you with water, but he will baptise you with Holy Spirit and fire, the unquenchable fire that burns the chaff after the wheat is gathered safely into the barn.” Which explains why John later became so uncertain about Jesus. “Are you the one we were to expect, or should we wait for another. Where’s the fire, man?!!” Jesus disappointed a lot of Israelites like that because he kept failing to stick to the script that said that they were God’s favourites and everyone else could burn.

I wonder whether the questioning didn’t start right here in the baptism story. I mean here is John talking about baptism with Holy Spirit and fire, and burning the chaff and all that, and then Jesus is baptised and down comes the Holy Spirit in bodily form, as a … what? As a roaring wind and tongues of fire? As a fiery angel with a flashing sword and sparks shooting off in all directions? As one of the awesome fiery winged creatures from the visions of Isaiah or Daniel? Or perhaps as that most terrifying creature of all… the dove! Pretty scary guys those pigeons. Not! So I wonder whether even in this baptism story, we have pointer to the conflict that lies ahead between those who want an affirmation that they are chosen for special protection but that God will gladly burn their enemies, and Jesus who right from the start of his public ministry is getting in trouble for saying that God loves you doesn’t mean that God hates the people you hate. Right from the start, Jesus publicly takes issue with the passages like this one from Isaiah that portray God as one who chooses favourites and gladly sacrifices the rest. And you see, we’ve already been introduced to doves in this very gospel. When Jesus was forty days old and his parents went to the Temple to offer a sacrifice, somewhat unusually, we were given the details of the sacrifice they had to offer: “a pair of doves or two young pigeons.” So instead of the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus in the form of sacrificial fire, ready to burn up those who do not enjoy God’s favoured protection, the Holy Spirit comes in the image of one who is commonly sacrificed, a victim who might be abandoned to the sacrificial fire. And Jesus is soon explicitly linking his baptism with his impending death at the hands of an angry mob who think they are chosen to purge the world of God’s enemies. “Can you be baptised with the baptism into which I am soon to be baptised?” he asks his bewildered disciples.

And do you know what the gospel writer Luke goes on to do with the image of fire in relation to baptism? Does it ever return as an image of fiery judgement dividing the wheat from the chaff and destroying all but God’s favourites? No it does not. But it does return. For on the Day of Pentecost when the disciples are baptised with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit does indeed come as a roaring wind and tongues of fire, but far from being fires of sacrifice and judgement, these tongues of fires unleash the disciples’ tongues so that they can speak God’s message of love even to those nations Isaiah thought God was ready to sacrifice in return for his favourites. So the baptism with fire becomes the sign of the great reconciliation, of the end of a god of favourites, and the joyous discovery of a God whose love spills across every boundary or border we set up in our desperate desire to be the favoured ones. And, of course, we see that theme continued in our reading from Acts tonight (8:14-17) where God seemingly allows something to go wrong with the baptism of some Samaritan believers so that the Apostles have to come down to Samaria and finish the job, and who are the Samaritans if not the sworn enemies of the Jews? So the great reconciliation continues in the Holy Spirit’s baptismal work bringing the two together.

All of which, unfortunately leaves us none the wiser about why fires take out the ones on the right and left and leave one in the middle with nothing but singed paint work. And it also leaves us none the wiser about what on earth we might be trying to say when, in our closing hymn tonight, we sing those words from Isaiah about walking unharmed through the flames because God is with us. So let me try to say something useful before I close. Given that much of the Bible is a sustained debate over whether bad things only happen to those who deserve them or to those who are not among God’s chosen, any simple answer I might give would almost certainly be as dangerous and wrong as those who blithely imply that they escaped because God protected them and left others to burn.

What I will say, unequivocally is that if you’ve come to Jesus looking for a divine insurance policy so that you’ll be better protected than others when disasters come, I’m sorry, but someone has led you astray. Jesus does not offer that. In fact he goes pretty close to saying the opposite: follow me and people will hate you and treat you badly. And the other thing I will say is that if you are willing to follow Jesus anyway, and to follow him even when he walks into the flames of hostility and hatred and passes through the deep waters of death and burial, and if you are willing to allow him to teach you how even suffering and death can be offered up as a redemptive gift for the healing and liberation and transformation of the world, then the truth will begin to emerge. For although Isaiah got a lot wrong about God in these words, and Jesus had to take issue with him and struggle against all odds to get us back on track; even despite all that, Isaiah was onto something here, and though he couldn’t yet break it loose from his nationalistic and racial biases, and even though I can’t do any better at unravelling it, yet, when we have walked with Jesus all the way to the cross and into the depths of hell and out the other side into the promised land of resurrection life, we will then comprehend what it was Isaiah was grasping for when he said, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” And as we lay, exhausted but exhilarated on that far shore, and cough the water out of our lungs and rub the balm of Gilead into our third degree burns, we will say “Yes. God did not fail us, and the waves and the flames did not have the last word, and God’s love has overcome everything, and God’s love is for everyone.Alleluia! Alleluia!”