January 10, 2010 First Sunday after Epiphany, Baptism of Christ
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 29; Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-22
The phrase “baptized by fire” means becoming initiated in new knowledge
through a challenging experience, like a soldier under fire for the first time, or a
student teacher standing up before a class of fifth graders for the first time, or
parents responding to new developments every day of their parenting career.
There are so many things in life that no training or book learning can prepare us
for, and the result is often painful, but once we get through one of them to the
other side, once we are initiated into the new knowledge, we are stronger and
wiser and better people for it—we hope. That is, if it doesn’t kill us and we don’t
give up.
It is interesting that one thing we do not think of as a baptism by fire is
baptism. Maybe that is because we think of baptism as a one-time, self-
contained event, and we do not think through what it really means to be baptized
into the community and way of Christ.
The truth is that to be on the spiritual journey that Christ asks of us—to try
to love as he loved and serve and lay down our life for others as he did; to try to
be pure in heart and be peacemakers and merciful and all the other qualities of
the Beatitudes that he blesses; to try to resist temptations to be selfish or mean; to
try to overcome our addictions and bad habits; to try to avoid falling into despair
when we are sick or suffering hardship or loss or when we watch as others we
love suffer around us; to try to stand up for justice when the greed of the
powerful leads to war and poverty and environmental decay—to be on this life
journey trying to follow Christ is to be baptized by fire every day, many times a
day.
We may tend to think of the struggle as separate from the way of Christ.
We may think that we are struggling and going through the fire now because we
are not quite where we should be spiritually, and that once we get back in the
sacred way, once we really master the spiritual life, the fire will be over. The day
may indeed come when we feel the fire is over, but until then, it is important to
know that going through the fire is every bit as much being in Christ and on
Christ’s way. This is not just a theological fine point. This can be extremely
helpful to our enduring the fire when we pass through it. God is present in our
worst moments and trials, as much as in our moments of peace and joy. They are
part of the faithful path.
The Jewish people of Isaiah’s day had literally passed through fire. They
had seen their homes, their olive groves, their livelihoods, their beloved city of
Jerusalem, even their sacred temple, the most holy of holies, burned by invading
enemies. Some had seen their children or parents dying in those flames. The
suffering is unimaginable. Then the people had been carried off to Babylon in
captivity, which is where Isaiah spoke to them.
In the verses before today’s passage he chastised the people saying that
they had brought the flames on themselves because they did not walk in God’s
ways, and that even after all that suffering, they still had not learned from the fire
and heeded God’s call to them. “But now,” Isaiah goes on in today’s passage,
“thus says the God who created you…O Israel: do not fear, for I have redeemed
you; I have called you by name, you are mine. 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.”
It must have helped the people to hear that message of hope. Though they
were suffering and still failing to walk in God’s ways, even then, God was
walking with them, redeeming them, calling them by name, protecting them. God
was transforming them by water and fire, but not overwhelming or consuming
them.
The psalm we read responsively describes the violent power of that water
and fire as seen in a thunderstorm coming in off of the Mediterranean Sea. But a
recurring word in the psalm is “glory,” and the last word is “peace.” The lightning
and wind and earthshaking voice of thunder are parts of the mysterious ways of
God, but the purpose they serve is to lead to glory and increased strength and
peace.
In our Thursday meditation group, Prayer of the Heart we practice
spiritual disciplines designed to help us follow Christ’s way more closely in our
everyday life. It is true that such spiritual disciplines can connect us to the
source of glory and strength and peace, but they also connect us to lightning and
thunder and violent winds. Thomas Keating is the most prominent co-founder
and teacher of one of those disciplines, called Centering Prayer. One time a new
student was thanking Keating for the peaceful feeling, the calming of anxiety that
came through the very first session of Centering Prayer. Keating advised the
student, wait a few months, and then you will feel more anxiety than you have
ever felt in your life.
The reason for this is that growing closer to God through contemplative
prayer and related spiritual practices is an ongoing process of baptism by fire. It
is a process of personal transformation, a refiner’s fire, where we are letting our
old self with all that is false about it go up in smoke, and letting God heal us and
lead us into our truest, God-created self. Thomas Keating describes this process
as the unloading of the unconscious, the shedding of a lifetime of accumulated
psychological and spiritual scar tissue that old wounds have left behind. Another
American contemplative master, Thomas Merton, wrote, “The difficult ascent
from falsity toward truth is accomplished not through pleasant advances in
wisdom and insight, but through the painful unlayering of levels of falsehood,
untruths deeply embedded in our unconscious, lies which cling more tightly than
a second skin.”
John the Baptist said of Jesus, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear
his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will
burn with unquenchable fire.” Many people think this means that Jesus will burn
sinners in hell, but they forget the context. John is talking about baptism. He has
just said that Jesus will baptize “with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
The unquenchable fire is a fire of transformation, not punishment. It is
burning away the chaff within us, all that is false and not fruitful, all that gets in
the way of our connection to the divine creative energy of God flowing through
us that we call the Holy Spirit. Christ baptizes us with fire and the Holy Spirit,
and they work together. In any life struggle, in any time of suffering, both are at
work. The fire is teaching us to let go, to surrender, to allow all that is transitory
to pass away; the Holy Spirit is teaching us how to let eternal life fill us and flow
through us.
The result of the fire is a clearing away of all that blocks our growth
toward bearing the fruit, the gifts that God has given us each to serve to the
world. Our gifts include all the ways in which we help others, from the most
mundane acts of hospitality or neighborliness to the most elevated acts of
creativity. We each have our own particular fruit to bear in our particular
location in life. But there are other gifts we all can yield. The Apostle Paul wrote
in his letter to the Galatians, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Another of the
Spirit’s gifts is fire—symbolized by the fire coming upon the people at Pentecost.
Fire is part of God’s work, and so it is part of our work, not only in our souls, but
in the world. The result of the fire is a clearing away of all that blocks God’s
love; the result of the Holy Spirit is a pouring forth of all that serves God’s love.
Far from being about punishment, what Christ’s baptism by fire is really
about is God’s love. How could it be otherwise? Love is everything to Jesus.
Love is all Jesus taught us and showed us. Love is the life of Christ, the light of
Christ, the fire of Christ. The gifts of love are what Christ offers us when we
suffer.
The other day a regular member of Prayer of the Heart faced a life crisis
that threw him into a terrifyingly dark pit of suffering. He felt paralyzed. He
tried several of the tools of mindfulness he had learned in Prayer of the Heart,
but nothing was helping. Finally, he tried Centering Prayer itself, which is a
prayer of consent to God’s loving presence and transforming action. Centering
Prayer encourages the use of a sacred word that we choose to symbolize our
consent, a word that we repeat when we feel ourselves distracted or separated
from God.
As the person tried to do this in the midst of his suffering, a totally
unexpected thing happened to him. He found himself saying thank you. He had
no idea where it came from, certainly not from any enjoyment of what he was
going through, but suddenly he was saying and sincerely meaning, thank you for
letting me go through this suffering. On some level deeper than intellect, he was
able to understand the value of his baptism by fire and feel it as a gift of love. He
was able to surrender to what was happening, and in doing so he found the
Spirit’s fruit of patience, faithfulness and peace.
Jesus surrendered himself to the baptism of John in the River Jordan. He
went down into its darkness, felt its current take hold of him, and then rose to
meet whatever change would come. What came was the heavens opening, the
Holy Spirit descending upon him like a dove, and a voice coming from heaven
saying, “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.”
And then the very next thing that happened was that the Holy Spirit drove
him into the wilderness where he suffered terrible temptations and trials. He
went from baptism by water and the Holy Spirit straight into baptism by fire. But
beyond it, angels came to him and comforted him, and the Holy Spirit filled him
with wisdom and a power of love the like of which no one had ever seen, a power
that is still pouring through us to do the works of mercy and justice and healing
that Jesus began.
Whatever baptism by fire you face at the moment, I hope it will help if you
think of it not as a punishment or test or abandonment by God, but as part of the
transforming process that began when you first chose the spiritual life of Christ’s
way. Not that God is inflicting the suffering on you, but that God is offering you
the chance to be transformed by it. Once on this path of Christ, suffering is not
just suffering, suffering is meaningful, suffering is redemptive, suffering is
transformative. The Holy Spirit works through the change in you that suffering
brings. Greater capacity for compassion and loving service grow out of its ashes.
New life comes from whatever form of death the baptism of fire may lead us
through. Christ’s way reveals to us that all aspects of life, the struggles as much
as the joys, are permeated with the divine, creative energy of love, working to
change us into ever-greater bearers of that love to the world.
Let us pray in silence, consenting to follow Christ into whatever baptism
by the Holy Spirit and fire is before us…
Sermon 01/10/2010