Overwhelmed

Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

The prophet Isaiah says in the name of God: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you; when you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”

The promise of God is good news: You may find yourself in waters over your head, but you will not be overwhelmed. You may find yourself in a world where everything seems to be on fire, but you will not be burned. That sounds like good news; maybe I could just stop the sermon right there. How can I improve on that promise from God?

The problem, though, is that if you’ve experienced a bit of life, you know it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes there are literal floods that do overwhelm; sometime there are literal fires that destroy and kill. And if you’ve lost your home or a loved one in a flood or a fire, in a tornado or to a virus, you can be forgiven for asking why God didn’t come through on that promise.

And in the metaphorical sense, we all sometimes feel that life is overwhelming. I know I do. Sometimes it’s all a bit too much. And sometimes you trust and things go wrong and you get burned. We do everything right, and yet bad things happen we don’t control.

And the problem with Scripture texts like this one from Isaiah today is that many people will hear them at the moment that they are stinging in pain from being burned by someone they trusted, or when they are feeling lost in the deep waters. And they think – I’m not supposed to feel this way; if I had enough faith I wouldn’t feel this way, And so since I do feel overwhelmed or burned, there must be something wrong with me. Or they think that if I was one of the ones God loves, this wouldn’t be happening to me – so therefore God must have something against me. And so what was Isaiah intended as good news comes across as very bad news indeed.

This is the problem with reading individual verses of Scripture as if each and every verse, by itself, carries with it the full weight of a word from God that is equally valid and applicable in every situation. I think it is much healthier to think of the Bible as a whole as a story of God’s interaction with people, a story that is told by multiple voices at different times, a story filled with metaphors and allusions and variations on common themes, in which every verse is important because it has its place in the story – but the full meaning comes from the story as a whole.

So when Isaiah talks about passing through the waters, he’s not talking in a vacuum about water and floods in general. He is recalling the many Scriptural stories about passing through water. Probably the best known is the crossing of the Red Sea. God has heard the cries of the people enslaved in Egypt and has come to set them free. Through signs and wonders and against all odds, even when they themselves thought it could never happen, they have escaped – but now they are cornered, the Red Sea ahead of them and the pursuing army of their slave masters right behind them. It looks like the freedom and the salvation that God has promised them are totally lost – that there is no hope that anything God has promised them can possibly be real. And then – in a way that no one could have predicted or foreseen – the immovable obstacle of the Red Sea turns out to be no obstacle at all. Somehow, God makes a way where there is no way. Freedom and a good life in the promised land are possible after all.

The Old Testament is full of stories like this – God calls the people, or a prophet, to a particular place, to a particular mission, to a particular blessing. But water is in the way – water is an obstacle to God’s call that seems impossible to overcome. It’s not just the Red Sea. When the people are ready to enter the Promised Land, there is the Jordan River to cross. When Elijah has to complete his mission before being taken up to heaven, a river blocks him from fulfilling his last task. When Jonah is called to proclaim repentance to Nineveh, he gets thrown overboard from a ship into the middle of the Mediterranean. In every case water is an apparently insurmountable barrier to the fulfillment of God’s plan, and every time God’s purpose is not thwarted.

And I could go on talking all day about more stories from the Scripture about water and shipwreck. Of fire burning a bush but does not consume it, fires that reveal and purify without destroying. But suffice it to say that every story is about a God who overcomes all obstacles to accomplish what God sets out to do. And that is to rescue and restore all of God’s beloved children.

Isaiah, too, speaks about the waters that will not overwhelm us in the context of a promise. A promise that God will gather together all of God’s children. From the four winds – from north and south and east and west – God will pull together all those who have been divided and separated and bring them together as one people united in God’s beloved community.

And on the way back, there may be obstacles, and rivers and seas to cross. On the way back we may go through fire and storm. On the way to God’s good kingdom we may encounter impossible obstacles and painful passages. And I think Isaiah is not telling us that we will never feel overwhelmed, or that we will never get burned. But Isaiah is promising us that God will not be deterred or held back by any of those things.

Even if in a moment, we do feel overwhelmed – even if, in a moment, we are terrified. Even if in a moment we are crushed and in pain. Well, our ancestors in faith were also overwhelmed, as they looked out at the Red Sea ahead of them, and behind them a pursuing army. Our ancestors in faith also felt cornered and saw no human way out. And yet God made a way.

Isaiah’s promise is that God’s desire and love is such that all people will be gathered together. By all people, Isaiah means, everybody. “Everyone who is called by my name,” he says at the end of today’s passage. “Everyone whom I created for my glory, everyone whom I formed and made” – that’s everybody. Everybody will be gathered in from the four winds and be made together as one people who live together in mutual love and harmony.

Now how is God going to bring people together like this? I mean, have you seen the news lately? How do we get from the divisions and the obstacles that are between us and that community God promises we will be drawn into? There are huge obstacles in the way. It’s hard to see how God can make it happen. But, Isaiah says: Remember the story. Remember what God has already done. Remember that God makes a way where there is no way.

In Jesus, the epiphany of the birth of Jesus, the epiphany of the baptism of Jesus, the epiphany of the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus is that God is not overwhelmed by the obstacles that we have put in the way of the achievement of God’s promises. But in Jesus God comes to share those obstacles with us. In Jesus God goes into the water with us. God goes through the fire with us.

John the Baptist preached that the Messiah would come with fire. Perhaps what he didn’t expect was that the fire wouldn’t be for the bad people over there – because the bad people over there are included in the people whom God created for God’s glory, whom God formed and made who are being gathered together. Rather, the fire that is coming is the fire that the Messiah will go through, that the Messiah will be burned by, will be scarred by. The Christ will be overwhelmed by the waters; the Christ will die.

The Messiah’s fire – the all-powerful fire of God that burns and cannot be extinguished yet does not destroy – this fire is for God. Enduring this fire with us is how God brings all people together. And it is the gospel that provokes this conversion. Later in the story we read that one day James and John got very angry with a town in Samaria that wouldn’t welcome Jesus as he was passing through, and they asked Jesus for permission to call down fire from heaven to destroy them. Jesus told them no. And then in the Acts of the Apostles today, we read how the apostles have been changed by Jesus and they go to Samaria to call down fire – but this time not the fire that destroys and punishes, but the fire of the Holy Spirit.

When we know that God has passed through the waters, when we know that God has endured the fire of the Spirit, then we know that we can do it too. That we get to go with Jesus in our own baptism – to pass through water, to receive our own unquenchable fire. Because we know that Jesus came to do it with us, we can know that God’s enduring promise to bring all people together will be fulfilled.