I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 12, 2025, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 3:15-17, 21-22.
I’ve shared with you in the past how, when you live in California, you become acquainted with the risk of wildfire. You make an uneasy peace with it. Much of the year it’s in the back of your mind and then, when the risk level is high, you look nervously towards the hills, wondering if and when something might spark.
But because you never really know, most days you go about your business and go to work and do the dishes and pay the bills, carving out a sense of normalcy and telling yourself that, if it does happen, if the fire does come, somehow you will manage. Or maybe, in your less noble moments, you just figure it will happen to somebody else.
But the fires do come, in their own cruel time and manner, and it is hard to be prepared when they do. As we’ve seen this week in Los Angeles—as some of you know intimately well through the impact on friends and family members—the fires come without much warning, and they blaze and they creep up upon the homes and lives of people without much regard for their wealth or background or virtues or vulnerabilities.
They come, these fires, and they do what fires do—they consume. We know already this week of Episcopal churches and whole communities consumed by this most recent set of wildfires. We also know that we are living in a time when human-impacted climate conditions will only continue to increase the likelihood and intensity of such events. The unquenchable fires have come.
And maybe it’s just me, maybe when you grow up with this threat of flame and smoke, it has a formative effect..but I have to say that, as evocative as it is, I find little that’s romantic or alluring about most of the fire imagery in Scripture. I’m circumspect about declarations, like the one that John the Baptist makes in this morning’s text, about how God will come and burn and consume things for some divine purpose. There is nothing pretty or transcendent about that. Not when you have seen or known what fire can actually do, what it can take.
And yet that imagery is there for us to contend with. John, admonishing the crowds before Jesus’ appearance, warns of a Messiah who will come bearing unquenchable fire to burn up all that is wicked and unworthy. And I get it, he is angered by injustice and wants the people to look a bit nervously toward the hillsides, wondering when their reckoning will come. As prophets often do, he wants them to experience an uneasy peace with the world as they know it. He assumes that God will save the world through a display of vengeance and power, in billows of smoke and flame.
He is not alone in that, even today. I found a number of news articles this week in which people described the Los Angeles wildfires as “biblical” and “apocalyptic” and as being like a scene from “the battle of Armageddon.” Still, still, even if we don’t want to, we imagine and speak of God working through destructive forces, raining down judgment upon us like ashes, threatening at any moment to take away all that we know, or, in our less noble moments, to come and take from somebody else.
I wish we could loosen our grip on that fiery imagery somehow. Because I will tell you that so much of why I am Christian, why I was able to give my life over to the way of Jesus, is because of what actually happens in today’s Gospel after John’s dire predictions.
And it is this: that Jesus, the Son of God, appears in Galilee, the Incarnate Deity appears at last, coming over the hills…but the fire never comes. Not in the way that anyone expected anyway (and Pentecost is a story for another day).
No, on this day Jesus appears and it is not as a vengeful blaze cresting the ridge, but as a man ready to get down into the water like everyone else. A man ready to come alongside all of us in the uneasy peace we have negotiated with this life. A man who wants us hope for something more than mere escape and to believe in something more than just survival.
And truly, thank God for that. Because I will tell you, my friends, I am tired of fires, and of people who blithely traffic in the language of fire when talking about God and our common life. I am sick of “burn it down” and “let it burn” and of fire & brimstone theologies that devour human dignity in the name of purgation. I am sick of destruction—of bodies and landscapes and souls—and how they are cast as part of God’s saving mission.
I don’t want to settle for an uneasy peace anymore. I want the peace that the world cannot give, the peace born of water and Spirit. And today we see where it comes from—from the God who stands in solidarity with us in the River Jordan, whose only fire is the one burning in his heart with love.
Because John, for all his Spirit-inspired wisdom, got this part wrong, and it’s important that we don’t just read past his mistake. There’s a reason, in other versions of the story, that he is actually somewhat dismayed Jesus wants to be baptized with water. There is a reason, later from prison, John asks, are you the one we have been waiting for?
Because John himself is also discovering, as we must, that the true Messiah, the Christ, is not an inferno coming to gobble up everything we’ve tried to build; God is the one strengthening us and helping us to carry those buckets of water– all that blessed baptismal water–to put out all the fires we ourselves have started on this earth.
And yes, God will help us separate the wheat from the chaff within ourselves and in our world, but God will do so not through devastation but by the devastating power of his mercy and kindness.
And the thing is, we already know this. We already know, if we stop to reflect on it, where and how God shows up in the world. We know that God is not the one burning the hillsides of Los Angeles or blessing the gunfire in war zones. We know that God is instead with the firefighters and the first responders and the widows and the orphans and the volunteers and the communities of people who are sheltering each other and guiding each other into safety.
We know that Christ asks us to do the same for each other no matter what landscape we live in or what disasters befall us. We know this, because it is what Jesus demonstrated and proved the value of in his life, death, and resurrection. And we can’t let anyone distort this truth.
No matter what we must navigate in our time and in times to come, no matter how many times the fire looms at the edge of the horizon, we are still, and will always be, the people who proclaim the good news of the one fire that never came—that so-called fiery, angry God who instead appeared in the water, like a falling dove, like a gentle Word, stooping down from the misty heavens to scoop up our fears in his hands and bless them and say,
Peace. I am here. You don’t have to be afraid anymore, you who have been uneasy for so long. Step down into the water with me, where the flames cannot reach.
Drench yourself in love, and let us begin again.
By Another Road 