The Fire Next Time

Luke 3:15-17

John’s preaching stirred up great hope among the people that the much anticipated Messiah was about to appear. They even wondered if John himself was this Christ, which John was quick to let them know he was not. In fact, he was nothing in comparison.

John and Jesus were actually cousins. How much they had known each other is pure speculation, but it is possible, even likely, that they had spent time together while growing up. John was older than Jesus, if only by a few months. But having lived in the wilderness for so long, he may have been physically stronger than Jesus, who was “just” a carpenter.

And yet John’s comparison is not about bragging rights among cousins. The power with which John speaks of Jesus has nothing to do with abs and triceps. John says that the One to come is so much greater than him, he (John) is not even worthy to take off his sandals for him.

While in college, I worked a summer in a shoe store. One thing I learned, it was expected that you as a clerk would take off and put on the shoes of your customers. I quickly discovered a scientific principle in shoe sales. The smellier the feet, the more likely they were to want you to change shoes for them and the more shoes they would try on. Guaranteed. Taking off someone else’s shoes is no sweet honor in my book!

John wasn’t even worthy of that honor when it came to his cousin. Whatever their natural relationship when they were younger (I seriously doubt Jesus was above a boyish wrestling match as a kid), John was well aware of what role Jesus was now assuming as a man.

If you think my preaching is tough, John is saying, just you wait. My baptizing is with water, but his will be with fire. When James Baldwin wrote his classic “The Fire Next Time”, he drew his title from the old slave spiritual, "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time."

Baldwin wrote in his book: "If we--and I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others--do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world." Otherwise, the fire next time. Better not to wait, Baldwin pleads.

John is saying that now is the time for repentance. For at this moment the rite of repentance is through water baptism. But the One coming after me is going to mop things up with a baptism of fire. He will take a winnowing fork and separate the good from the bad and burn up the bad.

You don’t want to repent of your evil deeds now? Just you wait. And I can hear my mother saying, Just you wait until your father gets home. A not so subtle threat that if you didn’t straighten up for her, you will live to regret it. The water is always preferred over the fire.

As Baldwin published those words in 1963 for the one hundredth anniversary of the emancipation of black slaves, few could have predicted that a refusal to repent of segregation would lead to the fires of revolt a mere four years later when the supposedly ineffective pacifist methods of Martin Luther King’s were violently rejected for far more painful means.

God always gives room for us as people to change, but if change doesn’t come, then expect “the fire next time.”