Isaiah 43:1-7 and Acts 8:14-17 and Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
God’s
primary concern, as revealed in scripture from start to finish, is the
creation, the formation, of a people for his glory. A community who will
reflect God’s nature—loving justice and mercy—who may enjoy God’s presence with
them, and through whom many other peoples might be blessed. Though God calls
men and women by name, it is never into a private, individualistic,
relationship; but to be part of a people, called by his name.
‘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.’ (Isaiah
43:2) So the word of the Lord comes to us through the prophet Isaiah. We tend
to hear these words, if at all, as metaphors for the things that are sent to
try us, as promise between God and me that whatever I face, he is with me. But
this is, at best, secondary meaning. The word of the Lord is addressed to the
people of God, a particular people with a particular history and
frame-of-reference in relation to waters and fire, rivers and flame.
First,
when you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers,
they shall not overwhelm you. This to a people whose world is framed by this
experience. The people God brought out of four-hundred-years of slavery passing
through the Red Sea. The people God brought into the fulness of salvation,
Abraham’s inheritance, passing through the river Jordan. Into the long-Promised
Land, a territory that symbolically stretched from the Great Sea to the River;
that is, from the Mediterranean—from where the Philistines had come, contesting
the land—to the Euphrates—from where the Babylonians contested the land. As I
was with your forefathers, so I will be with you; you shall not be overwhelmed.
Even when you are swept away by the current, carried off into exile, even to
the ends of the earth: I will bring you back.
Then,
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not
consume you. These words call to mind Genesis
22, a story of Abraham and Isaac. Now, here a technical interlude is required.
We should note that the Hebrew word translated upper-case ‘God’—elohim—is plural in form, and also
translated lower-case gods. The Hebrew scriptures do not present monotheism—the
claim that there is only one God—so much as distinguish between one Creator
God—‘maker of all that is, seen and unseen’ as the Nicene Creed puts it—and
created spiritual beings; and call people from idolatry to monolatry, from the
worship of creatures to the worship of the Creator. The created gods have
names, such as the Canaanite god Moloch. The Creator God also has a name,
revealed to Moses as Yahweh.
Long
after Abraham and Isaac, when Moses told their descendants their story he did
so like this: when Abraham was sojourning in the land Yahweh had promised to
give to his descendants, a land in which the Canaanites lived, elohim told
Abraham to take his son—the one through whom the promise would be fulfilled—and
offer him as a burnt sacrifice on a mountaintop; but when the altar was made,
and the boy bound, and the knife raised (for Abraham would not burn Isaac
alive), the angel of Yahweh called out, intervened, provided a ram in Isaac’s
place. Here, Yahweh discovered that Abraham trusted him more than he feared the
gods. Here, Abraham learnt that Yahweh will provide. Here, the angel of Yahweh
calls out a second time, to affirm and extend the earlier promises: Abraham’s
offspring, as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore, shall
possess the gates of their enemies, and by them all the nations of the earth
shall gain blessing.
Though
it is highly unlikely that he wrote it down, at least in its final form, Moses
taught this story to the offspring of Abraham, numerous as the stars in the
desert sky, to prepare them to live lives faithful to Yahweh in the territory
of Moloch, the god to whom the Canaanites sacrificed their first-born sons and daughters
as burnt offerings, to plead his provision.
Such
Canaanite practice sounds primitive and cruel to our ears. But many a son and
daughter today are sacrificed to the gods of parental career or other
fulfilment or of a toxic masculinity that refuses to embrace fatherhood; and
we, too, need to be formed to live from a different imagination in the midst of
such a society.
Cousin
John declared that he baptised with water, but that Jesus would baptise with
the Holy Spirit and with fire. In baptism we pass through the waters, without
being overwhelmed, and flame, without being consumed. We offer ourselves up to
God—or, in the case of many of us, we are offered up to God by our parents—only
to be given back. No longer as an individual, but as part of a people. In other
words, not only are we changed in this moment, but the whole community of the
people of God is changed every time a baptism takes place. In this community-founding
event, God continues to create, to form, to make; to re-create us, re-form us, re-make
us.
As
the candidate emerges from the baptismal font, these words are declared over
them:
May God, who has
received you by baptism into his Church,
pour upon you
the riches of his grace,
that within the
company of Christ’s pilgrim people
you may daily be
renewed by his anointing Spirit,
and come to the
inheritance of the saints in glory.
Amen.
It
is all there: baptism into the people of God; who, together and down the
millennia, experience God’s provision; follow the moving tabernacle of Christ’s
presence in our midst; are made new day after day after day by the work of the
Holy Spirit; and share a common inheritance, the very glory of God.
Water
comes first, then fire. First, freedom from captivity (Red Sea) and freedom to
be a blessing (river Jordan); then, the necessary provision to prove God
faithful in every circumstance.
It
is far more than a naming-ceremony to make granny happy. It is even more than
the impulse to want God to bless your child, good though that is. Baptism changes everything. And though our baptism is a once-in-a-lifetime
event, every baptism concerns us, plunges us once again through water and fire,
emerging on the other side unharmed but utterly transformed, discovering again
as for the first time that we are precious in God’s sight, and honoured, and
loved.
Which
begs the question, why do so many of our baptisms in the Church of England
nowadays take place after the service, after the congregation have gone home?
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