By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan

“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.”

These comforting words from God were carried by the prophet Isaiah to a people in exile, a people who badly needed a final push of inspiration and courage. As scholar Patricia Tull writes, “just as the possibility of returning to the broken city of Jerusalem is reopening, Second Isaiah soars with inviting poetry of hope, offering to pave the way homeward with confidence and expectancy.”

I have to say that these words hit extra hard this morning, when we have been temporarily derailed from our homeward path, from our trajectory of reopening and returning, and are perhaps feeling like we are once again a people in exile, our own broken city of Jerusalem shutting its gates on us. I hope that it’s not quite that bad, that watching church on your iPad while sitting at home with a cup of coffee, maybe still in your PJ’s, isn’t exactly parallel to the Babylonian exile, but I do truly understand that this current wave of COVID is unsettling and disruptive.

More than the inconvenience of so many things shutting down again, there is the undercurrent of worry and seemingly endless anxiety. When will we be done with variants, with surges and spikes, with constant testing and long lines and supply-chain disruptions and all the rest? Deeper even than that is the quiet dread, the fear that this time we won’t be spared, that I or someone I love will end up very sick or that the unimaginable, the unspeakable, will happen.

When the Bible wants to get at that very deep current of dread and fear, when it wants to put a name to the unspeakable, it often uses the images of water and fire. These elemental forces were reminders of chaos; they were largely uncontrollable, even unmanageable, at that time. And in fact these days we are being reminded, through rotating seasons of floods and wildfires, that in many ways they remain forces we cannot always reliably control. Both fire and water are potentially sources of creation and of destruction, forces with a power far beyond human strength, lying well outside the realms of our influence, which is why it means so much when God promises to harness them. These images are central to God’s covenantal relationship with Israel, as well as to our own sacrament of Baptism, which is also sealed with a covenant.

When God tells Israel that they will not be alone as they pass through the rivers, assuring them that the waters will not overwhelm them, that would not have felt like an abstract or hypothetical promise to them. Their ancestors had literally walked through water to get to freedom, escaping from slavery by crossing the Red Sea unharmed.

And protection from fire, too, would have reminded them of their past, of the burning bush through which God spoke to Moses, set ablaze but not consumed by the flames, and of the pillar of fire that led the people through their long nights in the wilderness.

It was only their God, Yahweh, who could have that much control over the elements, subduing the deep, bringing order out of chaos, life out of nothingness. And that same God was now promising to be with them through whatever might come, to redeem them, and to call them by name.

The way Luke narrates the Baptism of Jesus, the presence of this same all-powerful God of Israel is evident all through the story. John shows an absolute trust in God when he plunges himself and others into the water, the water that was understood to be such a terrifying and chaotic force. The word baptism literally means to be submerged or immersed. I have a feeling that when John baptized people, it would have felt more like a near-death experience than like a nice, calm ritual bath.

And yet when the gathered people are impressed by his display of faith and courage, John scoffs. “This?” he says. “This is nothing. Just wait until you see the real thing, the baptism that not only tosses you into the deep end but brings along fire and the Holy Spirit as well.” That should have scared people off, but it didn’t. As undoubtedly terrifying as John’s fiery prophecies were, as close to the brink of drowning as he seemed to bring them, more and more people chose to be baptized, including Jesus himself.

Notice that in this version of events it is only when all the people are baptized that the Holy Spirit appears and the voice from heaven speaks. This is different than Matthew’s account of the Baptism, which has Jesus still coming up out of the water when the great dove appears and God proclaims him to be the Beloved. It is interesting that in Luke God is more personal, speaking directly to Jesus, calling him by name, if you will, and also that baptism is clearly a communal event, something that binds people together in solidarity and a new form of kinship.

This is not unlike our own baptism, the sacrament that uses water, fire, and anointing with oil to remind us tangibly of our own covenantal relationship with God. It is both deeply personal and also a communal ritual that binds us to one another. Through Baptism, God makes these same promises to us that God made to Israel. God will be with us, is with us, through whatever comes. When we renew our Baptismal Covenant, we always start with an affirmation of the Trinity, the very God who created us, who redeemed us, and who will never leave us.

Baptism connects us to God, but also to everyone that God created. That is why we promise, with God’s help, to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to respect the dignity of every human being. That is what Jesus would do, and as long as we bear his name, as long as we stand in that place of Belovedness, we must strive to do it also.

Maybe baptisms have become too tame, too separate from the raw elemental power they are meant to invoke. Maybe it is good to be reminded of our baptisms precisely at times like these, times when we feel that we might easily be overwhelmed by darkness, by distance, by doubt. God’s promises and our covenant with God stand strong across all time and in the face of all challenges, bringing us up out of whatever threatens to submerge us. Today, as we renew our baptismal covenant, let us say the words, “I will, with God’s help,” out loud. Let us say them together, even if we are far apart. They are words that connect us to one another, to our church family, past, present, and future. They remind us, too, that God’s promise still stands.

Do not fear.
God has redeemed us.
God has called us by name
and we are God’s own beloved children.
Amen.