The young child of a Baptist minister was in church one morning when she saw for the first time a baptism by immersion. She was fascinated by it, and so when she got home she thought she would baptize the cat in the bathtub.  Now, of course, the cat wasn’t ready to renounce Satan and all his ways (because cats are the spawn of the devil) and put up a terrible, bloody fight.  You can imagine the scene - water everywhere, arms ripped to shreds, clothes destroyed, and a very angry kitty.  Finally, the girl gave up, battered and bruised, and let the cat jump onto the floor and scamper as fast as it could to a hiding place.  And as it hurtled down the stairs the girl called out in a frustrated voice, “Fine, be an Episcopalian if you must!”

We are, of course, familiar with baptism with water.  We see it happen plenty of times, and we know what it means and why we do it – whether it is by ‘sprinkling’ as in our tradition, or immersion, as in some other traditions.

But, there is another baptism in addition to the water baptism we’re so familiar with.  And it’s mentioned in today's gospel reading by John the Baptist.  He prophesies the coming of Jesus and says, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”  So there it is.  Two baptisms.  One in water, the other in the Holy Spirit.  One given by a wild man living on the edge of desert, the other by the Messiah.  One given as a sign of repentance and forgiveness, one given as a fire in the bellies of God’s people.  One a washing, the other a dry clean.

We know plenty about John’s baptism.  It forms the basis of the Christian baptism that the early church created and which we practice now.  And I’m not going to talk about water baptism.  Instead we’re going to think a bit about this other baptism.  The baptism with the Holy Spirit.  Because that’s a mysterious phrase.  So what is this baptism with the Holy Spirit that John says will be the ministry of Jesus?

Well, that word baptism has the meaning of immersing or dipping.  Jesus, then, will immerse people with the Holy Spirit.  Paul thinks of it more of a Christian being filled with the Holy Spirit, like a glass is filled with water.  And taking those two points together we get the clear teaching that it is God’s intention for all his followers to be drenched, soaked, submerged and filled up to the very top of our lives with himself.  To be full of God.  To be in constant, intimate, undivided connection with him.

John uses a very powerful and startling metaphor.  Christ will baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire.  Now I thought about that image of God as a fire, living in us, filling us up.  And I came up with four properties of fire, that I think may have been on John’s mind, but certainly would apply to the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives.

1          Fire burns.  And on a cold winter’s day that’s a good thing.  But at other times that burning can be fearsome.  Fire can cause destruction on a scale and at a speed that those of us who have never seen an out-of-control fire find difficult to imagine.  As Smokey the bear and Bambi know well.  Fire consumes.  And the hotter it gets, the more it eats up.  In fact, and scientists present can correct me here, but I think I’m right in saying that there is no material on earth that can resist a fire if it gets hot enough.  At some point it will be consumed.

And at the right time and in the right place, that consuming power of fire is not only a good thing, but is essential.  What would the world be like if we could not burn garbage and garden waste?  Fire gets rid of rubbish.  It also purifies precious metals.  The gold jewellery you’re wearing has gone through extremely high temperatures.  It was melted by fire, and then miraculously, the impurities lying invisibly in the gold rose to the top of the molten metal and a craftsman skimmed the dross off the top.  And what was left was a purer form of gold, which cooled and shaped, and eventually found its way onto your finger.

Peter says in his first letter that trials come to Christians “so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine”.

And that is one of the outcomes of being baptised, filled, with the Holy Spirit.  We are purified.  God changes us on the inside.  He burns up the impurities in our thoughts, words and actions.  I suspect that most of us at some point have become disillusioned with some aspect of our behaviour.  We sin, and try as we might we can’t seem to break the habit or resist the temptation.  And you prayed and prayed, and wonderfully over time God has changed you.  He has taken away the urge to sin in that particular way.  And sometimes you may have suddenly stopped and thought, “Mmm, a few months ago I would have reacted badly to this situation”.  God the Holy Spirit has been purifying you.  But ask the gold in the goldsmith’s furnace, purification is not always easy or pain-free.  When the Holy Spirits purifies us it is with some cost to ourselves.

2          Fire has power.  When I was a kid I used to sit hypnotised by the coverage of the Apollo space missions on TV.  And I used to hold my breath as Houston counted down to lift off.  And the living room would go silent as NASA got down to ten, nine, eight.  And then high anxiety as the engines roared and the most overwhelmingly powerful fire exploded out of the engines and slowly this magnificent machine rose off the ground and cleared the tower, and minutes later left our atmosphere.  And I marvelled that fire could force this 7 million pound lump of metal straight up for thousands of miles.

Now, let me ask you a question.  Do you think the power of the Holy Spirit (the power of God) is more than, less than, or equal to the power of a space rocket?  Now, the staggering news is that that same Holy Spirit is living in you and me.  By being filled with God, baptised with the Holy Spirit, we are packed with power.  What are we to do with this power?  Whatever God wants: resist temptation, pray for people, withstand suffering, cope with life’s challenges, share our faith with others.  God lives in you and wants to fill you so that you might live powerfully for him.  Much of the time I feel anything but powerful.  My faith seems weak and my spiritual strength seems lacking.  The answer is the Holy Spirit filling me and enabling me to walk with Christ.  This is the power that we see in the book of Acts

3          Fire is warm.  And by this I don’t mean the destructive heat that I mentioned earlier.  By warm I mean comforting, peaceful, relaxing.  If we find the idea of God burning up the rubbish in our lives and filling us with power a touch unnerving, then this aspect of the  Holy Spirit is a great comfort.  This is what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit; “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Comforter to be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.  I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”

Some of you may know that I have a spiritual director.  She’s a nun and lives at the Dominican Center in Grand Rapids.  And she has this knack of listening to me droning on about goodness what is bugging me spiritually, and when I’ve finished she’ll say something incredibly profound which seems to put all my fretting into perspective.  On one of my visits a while ago we talked together about prayer.  And if you’re like me you were probably raised to think of God as up and out.  You know, he’s out there somewhere.  And wherever he is it is a very long way from me.  And he feels very distant and it’s a struggle to reach him or hear him.  And my spiritual director in a few simple words transformed how I see the location of God.  And she used words similar to these in John’s gospel.  God is in me.  God is in you.  Yeah you know that.  You know what the Bible says - but let it sink in a minute.  God is actually inside you.  The Holy Spirit dwells inside you, and has done ever since you accepted Christ.  So, logically then, God is not just out and up.  He is also in.  He’s intimately involved in every area of my life, whether I want him to be or not.  And prayer, rather than me trying to reach God who is outside the universe, a gazillion miles away, is sharing time with the intimate Lord who is in me.  So we’re never alone, and we’re never far from God.  The journey to God is much shorter than we often imagine.

4          Fire illuminates.  A seeker after truth came to a saint for guidance.

'Tell me please, wise one, how did you become holy?'

'Two words.'

'And what are they, please?'

'Right choices.'

'And how does one learn to make right choices?'

'One word.'

'May I know it, please?'

'Growth.'

'How does one grow?'

'Two words.'

'What are those words, pray tell me?'

'Wrong choices.'

God guides us.  Now I know that saying that just like that makes it sound easy – you know, “just pray and God will tell you what to do with your life - what job to pursue, what house to live in, what investments to make, hey he’ll probably even tells you what football team to support, (obviously not Detroit).”  But, guidance is not easy.  Yet we do have a promise form Jesus.  “When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.  He will bring glory to me by taking what is mine and making it known to you.”  And if you have a big decision to make right now, then understand and take comfort in this - God the Holy Spirit is in you to guide and lead you; and in time he’ll reveal to you everything you need to know. 

Friends let me leave you with a final encouragement to let the fire of God’s Holy Spirit burn in our lives.  That is the way to healthy productive, fruitful lives in Christ.  Like, well, like blueberries.  You see, a good burning of blueberry fields in eastern Maine is, apparently, the best way to improve the crop. To grow to their full potential the farmers burn their fields to black ash. Their tractors tow steel trailers under mounted with propane jets shooting flames. Years of burning rids the fields of weeds and also consumes the tops of the berry plants, producing root growth, and delicious, sweet fruit.

So John baptized with water, Christ with the Holy Spirit and fire.  Let him will us up with God’s life and let us burn with his fire.