Ten and a half years ago, on a warm evening in Seattle, late in the evening — I know it was late because it was already dark, in June — I walked around Queen Anne Hill. This had been a sad and traumatic day for our city. This was the day when Seattle Pacific University suffered a mass shooting.
The neighborhood was quiet, but before long I noticed the smell of fire in the air. I turned onto West Fulton Street between 8th and 9th Avenues West, and saw leaping flames. Someone’s house was on fire. But maybe it wasn’t their house — I couldn’t be sure. It might have been a shed out back. But if so, it was a big enough shed to cause an impressive, unnerving fire, with large bright flames and billowing black smoke. (I can’t even begin to imagine the size and heat of the fires in southern California that have destroyed thousands of houses, businesses, schools, and churches.)
“Oh, Seattle,” I remember thinking, I remember feeling, on that warm, weary June night. “Oh, Seattle,” I said to myself, “Oh, Seattle — rest now. You have had a terrible day.” I breathed quiet prayers for our beleaguered city, torn badly by a violent shooting, vulnerable to devastating fires, heading into another anxious summer in this era of climate catastrophe. I’m sure I was projecting, at least a little, but Seattle felt feverish, even somehow sweaty, that night, the way you feel when you just can’t rest. Your bed sheets are wrinkled and clammy, the fitted sheet keeps slipping off the corner of your mattress, the air in your room is stagnant and ten degrees too warm, you have a dull headache and you just can’t rest. (Have you been there?) “Oh, Seattle, rest now,” I chanted again.
And that was ten years ago. Thousands of mass shootings ago. Hundreds of wildfires ago. Three national elections ago. Russia had annexed Crimea that February, but was still eight years away from a full invasion of Ukraine. A month after my nocturnal walk, Israel launched an attack on Gaza in retaliation for deadly violence perpetrated by Hamas. (The more things change…)
Since that restive summer, our city has confronted several more crises, including of course the pandemic, which coincided with — and exacerbated — the housing crisis that devastated this neighborhood, the crisis that now drives and shapes our mission here.
Oh, Seattle, rest now.
But Seattle can’t seem to rest. Yet here we are, all of us, you and me, gathered in this restful, quiet, sacred space between a curving pool of water and a live-edge wooden Table. We gather here week by week, and we say our fervent prayers. Oh, Seattle, we pray. Oh, Ukraine. Oh, Gaza and Israel and Lebanon and Russia; oh, Egypt and Syria and Turkey; oh, South Sudan and Sudan and Nigeria; oh, England and Canada and Haiti and Ecuador and America. How can we help you rest?
The sacred space between a pool of water and a table. This is where we pray. If you listen carefully, the pool may remind you of a river. When you practice silence and stillness in this sanctuary, I hope you can hear the living water.
This living water evokes the curving banks and treacherous rapids of a great river, and we listen to the sound of this water in the middle of a city that rises at the edge of the Salish Sea. We say our prayers just a few miles from several rivers, especially the Cedar River and Tolt River, which serve as life-giving watersheds for all the living creatures here. These rivers carry just a tiny fraction of the precious little fresh water that supports life on this planet. (Oh, humanity: do you know that only three percent of the water on this planet is fresh, and much of it is locked away from us in glaciers and ice caps? Oh, humanity: do you know that less than one percent of the water on this planet is available for our use, for our sustenance, for our survival?)
And so we stand close to this living water, and we praise a Savior who stepped into this water, into the flowing river we call the Jordan. He submitted to the water; he acquiesced to baptism; he condescended to dwell with us in this precarious, sleep-deprived, traumatized, overheated, thirsty, restless world.
Oh, Jesus: we praise you.
As Jesus prayed in the water (take note! just like us at the edge of this pool, when he is on or near water, Jesus prays) — as Jesus prayed in the water, the heavens opened. The heavens opened. Usually when we say the heavens have opened, it’s a figure of speech that means a storm has rent the sky. Think of the heavens opening and pouring a drenching rain down upon us. (Oh, Los Angeles: may you be blessed with opening heavens!) One time while I was running around Queen Anne Hill, the heavens opened and I was soaking wet, and as I (somewhat foolishly!) ran down the hill of 10th Avenue West not far from my house, I suddenly was literally up to my waist in a flash flood of water! That’s what we usually mean when we say the heavens have opened.
But this time, at the river Jordan, when Jesus is praying, the heavens open and drench Jesus and all the people gathered around not with a downpour, but with the thunderous sound of God’s voice. Was it a thunderclap? I think we can imagine that to be so. God thunders with a voice that shakes the wilderness, and makes the oak trees writhe, and strips the forests bare. God speaks in a deafening opening of the heavens, and speaks directly to Jesus. And here is what God says:
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Jesus is soaking wet with these passionate words.
“You are the Beloved,” God says. “The Beloved.” The thunderclap, the devastating thunderstorm, the flash flood of God’s awful voice, speaks love to Jesus. Not condemnation or judgment; not even good tidings or joyful greetings. Just love.
God thunders down from the heavens to say “I love you.”
And this thunderclap is but an echo of another “I love you” from God, an “I love you” we heard again this morning in the reading from the prophet Isaiah. With the voice of the prophet God tells the people that God loves them.
Love comes down. Love pours down. Love feeds the watersheds and fills the bays and lakes and rivers. Love showers us until we are soaking wet with it, and can’t help but share that same love with one another.
But this is a problematic metaphor. We live in times when we long not for beautiful metaphors, but for literal rescue, for the literal sound of God’s voice, for the prophet to mean it literally, when speaking for God, that “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.”
And did you catch just now that in the prophet’s voice, not just fire but water cuts both ways? The water that supports life also drowns; the fire that warms and enlightens also destroys. In this time of deadly floods and terrifying fires, we cry out in vain for God’s literal, concrete presence and power in all of these overlapping catastrophes, begging God to give rest and safety to Seattle, to our loved ones, to our neighbors, to war-torn nations, to ruined cities, to ourselves.
But then we remember that extraordinary person in the river Jordan, the One who stands prayerfully beneath the opening heavens and hears God speak love in a voice that splits the flames of fire and shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. This person goes on to found a community of love, the community that rises up even here, on another continent, many distant centuries and cultures away from that clutch of people at the edge of the Jordan.
And this community of love shows us, finally, how God defeats floodwaters and wildfires, even if they literally overwhelm — or even kill — us. Soon we will take a green branch and fling water over this assembly, a ritual that ‘opens the heavens’ right here in this room, showering everyone with God’s love, God’s “I love you.” And week by week this assembly learns the Way of Christ, who gave away everything, even his own life, in a flood of love for his friends.
Are we safe from floods and earthquakes, from hurricanes and wildfires, from war and violence, from ignorance and malice? No. After all, we praise God’s Beloved One, who lived among the poor and the oppressed, who knew hunger and thirst, who was tortured at the hands of an authoritarian government, who finally died and was buried.
And yet, showered with the thunderous love that raised Jesus to life, we who are vulnerable to suffering and death are safe, we are beautifully safe, we are blessedly safe: we are safe from isolation and loneliness, we are safe from nihilism and despair, we are safe from anything that threatens in vain to break God’s loving hold on us. This love sends us powerfully back into this burning world, back to lend our aid, back to embrace and encourage the victims of disaster, back to guide our neighbors to safety, back to rebuild a better, safer, lovelier world, with God’s healing power and God’s abiding love.
In a few moments, as the drops of living water fall on you, I hope you will hear the thunderclap directly above you, that magnificent voice that says to you — to all of us — “You [all] are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”
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Preached on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, the Baptism of the Lord (Year C), January 12, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22