"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)
As beautiful as these words are, I have a hunch that a lot of us don't quite know what to make of them.
After all, if I hear someone tell me they'll be with me as I'm wading through rivers, something in me wants to raise my hand and ask, "Wait--why would I be in the middle of a river in the first place?" And if someone, even someone I deeply trust, tells me that they'll keep me safe when I'm walking through fire, my gut instinct is to say, "Hold on--who said anything about fire?" Even if those assurances come from God, I've got to admit that I am more used to thinking that it's God's job to keep me out of the water and away from the fires altogether, rather than picturing God going with me through both.
All of that is to say, I think for a lot of us--and I'll confess, often for me as well--we tend to assume that faith is about getting God to keep things safely the same for us, rather than leading us somewhere new or pulling us to take a risk somewhere over the guardrails or beyond the rainbow. We tend to approach prayer as a means of trying to get things in our lives "back to normal" when they are out of their usual order, more than we seek to have God make us faithful or daring. We tend to see God as a way of getting back to our comfort zones, rather than being drawn out of them because God is leading us somewhere.
And yet, the promise here in Isaiah 43, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, is not, "Don't be afraid, because I'll let you stay home instead of ever having to cross the river," nor is it, "Keep those prayers coming and I'll just guarantee there will never be a fire to walk through." Rather, the promise is that God will indeed lead us through the waters and through the flames--and God will be with us there. That's really the way the whole arc of the Scriptures goes: it's the story of God calling people into wilderness places (like Abraham, or the newly liberated Israelites, or the exiled people of Judah at last coming home, as Isaiah 43 depicts here), and of God calling people to precarious new missions, from Moses raised up to lead his people out of slavery in the face of Pharaoh's tyranny to prophets like Amos sent to be holy troublemakers, to Daniel in the Lion's den, resisting an arrogant empire. In other words, the constant thread of the Bible is of a God who leads us through dangerous, risky, and uncomfortable places, rather than a deity who just piles blankets on us and lulls us back to sleep.
These words from Isaiah 43 only mean something to people who are being led like that. The reason that God promises to be with them through the rivers and the flames is that as these words were spoken, the people were hundreds of miles away from their ancestral lands in exile, and God was daring them to imagine a journey home. But the hitch for those exiled people was that a whole generation grew up in Babylon and had only ever known life there--it was the "devil they knew" rather than the fearful and unknown notion of going to a place that was "home" but somehow new to them. Trusting God meant being willing to leave behind the comfortably familiar to go into another wilderness journey. And indeed, there were literal rivers to be negotiated and the memory of smoldering ruins back in Judea to be dealt with. The prophet had to persuade people that it was worth packing up the lives they had settled for under the boot of the Babylonians and going where God was leading, and that meant also preparing them for a new (and frankly scary) way of life along the way. His job was to convince them, as Octavia Butler once put it in her novel Parable of the Talents, that "in order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix must first burn." Rather than tell people God's job was to keep things the way they were, predictable and pat, the prophet said that God was leading them beyond what they knew and outside of what was comfortable. Only then would it mean something to say that God would be there with them in the flames.
In our own lives today, I wonder if we need voices like Isaiah 43 again (or, actually, if we just need to listen to these ancient words on their own terms!) to remind us that the life of faith isn't about keeping us comfortable, but about going where God leads us, even when that is through the waters and through the fires. I wonder if we have told ourselves that Christianity is basically a scheme for keeping things familiar and comfortable in our lives, when the Scriptures themselves say the opposite. Could we hear the prophets again tell us, "God is doing something new, for all the world--and it will be worth it, but getting there will sometimes feel like swimming across a river or walking across a fire. And God will bring us through..."? Could we let these ancient words help us see our journey with God not as a predictable round-trip outing to the shopping mall and back, but an adventure to somewhere we have never been, and yet which turns out to be home?
Lord God, lead us where you will, and make us brave rather than merely comfortable.
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