Texts: Acts of the Apostles 8:14-17, Psalm 29, Luke 3:15-22
There is a reason Whole Foods has the nickname “whole paycheck.†Healthy eating can be expensive. We still live in an age when processed food is often cheaper, when urban and minority communities still find themselves in food deserts where there are fast food chains and bodegas but no full-service grocery stores with fresh produce, and when the locavore movement hasn’t quite figured out how I can get bananas and bell peppers in Blue Hill in January. Alas, I am unwilling to live on a winter ration of potatoes, cabbage, and venison jerky.
The most mindful among us walk a daily tightrope between aspirational eating and the practical, might consider the carbon footprint of those bell peppers from another continent, the tremendous water cost for that glass of almond milk, and how much is left in our bank account after a trip to the health food store. Eating is complicated enough, and then we face the heated debates over evolution and paleo-this and raw-that, one fad diet after another.
The science and often pseudoscience around evolution and diet is interesting. The transition from Australopithecus to Hominid, and we humans are hominids, coincides with two developments in diet, an increased consumption of meat, and the development of cooking.
This latter, cooking, is of such import that some scientists argue convincingly that it is what allowed humans to become humans. Raw food advocates claim that cooking destroys plant enzymes, which is technically true, but we are not plants, don’t have two stomachs, and those enzymes are broken down in the acid oven of our digestive system anyways.
Cooking makes food more appealing, and experiments have proven that other primates never prefer raw food over cooked food. Cooking acts as a catalyst, changing the molecular structure of food, sometimes creating completely new structures, and always breaking things down into smaller and more accessible components. And this is the evolutionary key. Animals that eat raw food spend a tremendous amount of time and energy eating and digesting that food.
The increased dietary efficiency produced by cooking food allowed us to evolve these huge brains, for brains are incredibly energy expensive organs.
There are, of course, other benefits to cooking, not least killing food-born pathogens which can drain energy and even kill.
Cooking, so central to daily life, shows up in scripture, the deception of Rachel and Jacob as they serve the blind Isaac savory food and steal Esau’s blessing, the unleavened bread and roasted lamb of the Passover and the mana on the journey, the covenant meal on the mountain at Sinai, the miraculous plenty when Elijah takes shelter with the widow and her son, Jesus with loaves and fishes, and of course, that last meal, the remembrance, this is my body.
It is easy to forget in the microwave age, but cooking requires heat, and for most of human history, that meant fire, that powerful and frightful thing that burns away the chaff, that thing that will be our baptism, at least according to that locust and honey-eating man, the prophet with the shirt of camel hair, preaching repentance down by the River Jordan.
“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 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.â€
And this isn’t the only thing jarring about Luke’s account, for if text reflects chronology, Herod has had John the Baptizer arrested before we hear about the baptism of Jesus, and we know that John will be beheaded by that same despot.
Mark, the first of the synoptics, gives us an exchange between Jesus and John, as does Matthew, which uses Mark as a source, and the gospel attributed to John the disciple, not to be confused with the baptizer. Only Luke removes that verbal exchange. We see no interaction between Jesus and John, though we know Luke had Mark at hand as he was writing. If, as seems likely, Luke’s copy of Mark had John the Baptizer baptizing Jesus, then we are left to ask why he removed it.
While Luke is unique in neglecting John the Baptizer as the one who baptizes Jesus, Matthew and Luke do share something absent in Mark and John, this idea of fire. We can reasonably conclude, then, that baptism by fire is found in Q, the lost gospel source shared by Matthew and Luke.
Further complicating this is the complete absence of accounts of Jesus himself baptizing anyone. We have that post-resurrection command to go baptize all nations, but that feels like a late addition to the text, even if you take the Easter to Ascension appearances literally. But we have this water baptism of Jesus in all four gospels, and we have the Jesus community performing water baptisms almost immediately after his death, Philip and the eunuch, for example.
Even here, with Philip’s water baptism of the eunuch, one who would be unclean and excluded under Hebrew practice, there are complications, for just a few lines earlier in the Acts of the Apostles, in today’s first reading, Luke reports that Peter and John the disciple went down to Samaria to pray that the converts there might receive the Holy Spirit. The critical line in our system of verse numbers is sixteen, placed in parentheses in the New Revised Standard Version. It reads “(for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus).â€
Of course, you can’t baptize with fire, despite the powerful image, but even with two millennia of debate about infant baptism and adult baptism and who can baptize, and limbo and hell, we still haven’t quite addressed this notion that baptism in the name of Jesus, presumably with water, is not the same as receiving the Holy Spirit, maybe the baptism by fire. That whole claim in Matthew and Luke is just left hanging out there, one of those texts we dodge and ignore. I baptize with water. He’ll baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.
The late Gordon Kaufman, a pioneer in the field of Constructive Theology, once told me that there is a certain elegance in the fact that the mark of membership in the Christian church is something that dries up and is gone, making Christians indistinguishable from their non-Christian neighbors. And the New Testament makes clear that Christians will be made known not by exterior signs like circumcision, but by their love, and by the way they bear fruit, which brings us back to the Spirit and that problem of fire.
We’ve got fire and water, re-birth and transformation, and it is not as if this one is the water gospel and that one is the fire gospel. This isn’t Pokémon with Squirtle Jesus and Charmander Jesus, this is one Jesus and we are meant or at least left to hold multiple images in tension, to make of this ancient story and our deep tradition what we will.
Reform Protestantism, the branch on which we find ourselves, only recognizes two sacraments, baptism and communion. For many, baptism is the more important, the mark of entry, while for some, and I am among this latter group, coming together at the open table is most important, the question basically whether the community is closed, as was John’s repentance baptism movement, or radically open, as was Jesus’ actual life and ministry, his table fellowship. The one-and-done of baptism, especially infant baptism as social ritual without any actual faith commitment, does far less to transform and nourish than the radical act of simply coming together to remember a man who was executed by the state at the request of those with religious authority. Do this in remembrance of me.
But maybe there is something in the confusing mix of fire and water, of transformation and table fellowship. Maybe we are meant to be baked, for baking requires fire and water and crushing. It is the coming together of elements and forces and captured sunlight and prior life in the soil and life captured in grain and transformed. Cooking makes good things into better things, things that nourish more efficiently, things that allow humans to be what humans are. In bread-eating countries, we might measure great achievements in loaf-lives. How many fields of grain, how many logs burning in an oven, how many kneading hands, how many loaves does it take to give us a Mona Lisa, a Brandenburg concerto, a polio vaccine?
Christianity is about transformation. It is about change. Jesus calls on people to change their lives, actively changes lives himself with healing and with call, announces a new way of understanding God. The changes he announces are so very very threatening… Behold, I make all things new! The loaf, the coming together of disparate things, subjected to fire, is something new, something nourishing, something appealing, a little crusty miracle of re-creation.
How did we turn this radical movement of Spirit and fire into this frozen thing, resistant to change?
Christianity, true Christianity, is no place for the self-satisfied and the self-righteous, for it is the realm of the Spirit and of fire and that means change. Christianity is a place for longing, for restlessness, a place we bring our questions and our fears and the God-shaped hole in our souls, to be filled by what is always around us, but that we rarely directly experience in the chaos and hunger of life. We come to be fed in the thin place of worship, in the thin place where we encounter one another authentically, vulnerable, like that babe sleeping in a manger in Bethlehem.
The people sitting around you, this morning, if you really get to know them, if you pray with them and let them walk with you in your illness and in your grief and walk with them in their illness and in their grief, they will change you. They will change you, too, when you laugh together and when you play together, when you dance together and when you dare together.
He will baptize with fire. Peter and John went down to them, for they had been baptized, but they did not have the Spirit.
And when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him… At his death he will seemingly return that spirit: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.â€
Here the Spirit as a dove, though the Spirit will be fire on Pentecost, just as God spoke from the fire of a bush that was not consumed, and Jesus may get a dove but John tells us he will bring the fire, that he will burn off the chaff with unquenchable fire.
Fire, destroying, cleansing, refining, transforming, burning bush and burning star above the city of David and an oven filled with bread and that smell, that lovely smell… and here’s the thing… we learned to cook, but we consume what we cook, we transform it and it transforms us, and all is temporary and timeless.
I don’t know how to baptize with fire. I don’t know the answer to the riddle posed by John’s words in Luke, by Luke’s account in Acts. But I am willing to be baked, to be transformed, so that I might nourish others. I am willing to be changed, in all of my big-brained burger-eating hominid glory.
Come, O Christ.
Come, O Holy Spirit.
Come, O Divine Fire.
Amen.