God Redeems Even as Wildfires Spread

A few days ago, the world around me exploded into flames. Sparked by an unprecedented wind event with 100-mile-per-hour gusts, six wildfires engulfed huge swaths of the greater Los Angeles region. I live just south of where the Eaton fire erupted, which has damaged or destroyed more than 7,000 buildings and left at least 16 people dead. Even now, the fires continue to rage, with the forecast predicting a new round of wind events that threaten to expand and extend the unprecedented destruction.

For the past 14 years, I have taught at Fuller Theological Seminary, located in Pasadena near the epicenter of the catastrophe. Although my family’s home remains intact with only minor damage, the same cannot be said for so many others connected to Fuller or in my broader community. I know of at least eight faculty, staff, and students at Fuller whose homes went up in flames.

But we’re not alone. Fuller is but a microcosm of all that has been lost in our area. Entire neighborhoods—homes, businesses, churches, schools, parks, and libraries—now sit in smoldering ash.

It’s as overwhelming as it is surreal. Some have said that these once-quaint residential areas now look like the set of a postapocalyptic movie. But the images I’ve seen of seen of my daughters’ burned schools remind me less of postapocalyptic Earth than of an alien landscape.

Of course, given that we live in Southern California, this isn’t the first time our community has been affected by raging wildfires. In the fall of 2020, my family and I had to evacuate from our home in Monrovia along with thousands of others, much like many residents there had to do again this past week. In fact, for many members of our local community, their entire life has been defined by this exact kind of instability and disruption.

But this event has been something altogether different. We’ve had windstorms before. We’ve had fires before. But the pace, scale, and extent of this particular trauma is something new—some even have called it the “new normal.”

Many of these same dynamics were in play for the people of Israel during the time God spoke through the prophet as recorded in Isaiah 43. The Exile was a catastrophic disruption. Some were forcibly removed from the land, and some were privileged enough to remain. Any sense of togetherness or commonality or unity that might have grown from this shared experience was threatened by their separate traumas. It is into this conflicted space and to this traumatized people that God speaks:

Now, this is what the Lord says,

the one who created you, O Jacob,

and formed you, O Israel:

“Don’t be afraid, for I will protect you.

I call you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I am with you;

when you pass through the streams, they will not overwhelm you.

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned;

the flames will not harm you. (Isa. 43:1–2, NET)

In a time of instability and uncertainty, what does God say to his people? I created you (bara), formed you (yatsar), and called you (qara). This is the very same language we read in Genesis when, in the beginning, God creates (bara) the heavens and the earth (1:1), forms (yatsar) the human from the dust of the ground (2:7), and calls (qara) the light “day” and the darkness “night” (1:5). In other words, God reminds Israel that they have quite literally been made for such a time as this.

And what kind of time is this exactly? According to Isaiah 43, it’s a time in which the people of Israel will be passing through flood waters and traversing rising rivers and navigating uncontrolled fires—each of which threatens to overwhelm them at every turn. One would think that the prophet would bring a more reassuring message, especially to a people who longed for nothing more than to go back to the stability and security they knew prior to the Exile.

But that’s not what they get. Instead, God speaks through the prophet Isaiah with this message: There is no going back to a time of stability or security or certainty. There are only cataclysmic waters and catastrophic fires ahead. In fact, for Israel, it is not a matter of if they will encounter these scenarios. It is only a matter of when.

It is therefore all the more significant that, having painted this harrowing picture of what’s to come, God still has the audacity to say, “Don’t be afraid.” And the rationale for why the people need not fear is pretty much the same as the one God always gives: I have redeemed you, and I will be with you. As the waters rise. As the fires bear down upon you. As the land beneath your feet begins to crumble. You are mine. And I am here.

Even though that kind of message pulls on all my evangelical heartstrings, in my more transparent moments, I have to admit that God’s presence sure doesn’t seem like enough to justify all the chaos and uncertainty and loss that are now permanent fixtures in our lives. I will be the first to confess that, more times than not, if given the choice between a stable existence without God or an unstable existence with God, I’d choose stability.

But that is a false binary. The actual, concrete choice we have before us is not returning to a more stable past or suffering through an increasingly unstable present. The real choice is whether we commit ourselves to a paralyzing nostalgia for a past that never was or dare to leap into the unstable and unpredictable future that is to come—diving headlong into a world that does not yet exist.

God makes it clear to Israel that they have been redeemed not from something but for something. God has created them and formed them and called them by name not to save them from instability but to prepare them for it.

Look, I am about to do something new.

Now it begins to happen! Do you not recognize it?

Yes, I will make a road in the wilderness

and paths in the wastelands.

The wild animals honor me,

the jackals and ostriches,

because I put water in the wilderness

and streams in the wastelands,

to quench the thirst of my chosen people,

the people whom I formed for myself,

so they might praise me. (Isa. 43:19–21, NET)

I am about to do a new thing, says God. Rivers in the desert. Water in the wilderness. Drinks for my thirsty people. It all sounds so lovely and refreshing and peaceful, unless you have ever experienced what actually happens to a desert or fire-scorched earth when water suddenly appears: flash floods, toxic runoff, and reshaping of the land on a fundamental level.

Rivers in the desert present an opportunity for much-needed refreshment, but they are also radically destabilizing. New things are always destabilizing. That’s what makes them new. The old is upended, transformed, reconstituted.

When God moves in the world, nothing is ever the same. And when we participate in that newness, not only is there no going back to normal, but also none of us are left unscathed. Just ask Jacob, whose reward for encountering God was a lifetime of instability in the form of a chronic injury—a limp that would forever remind him of how God had created, shaped, and called him (Gen. 32:28).

So as we reflect theologically about wildfires in Los Angeles (or earthquakes in China, or brutal wars in Ukraine and Israel), the question Christians today must ask is this: If we too are being redeemed—not from instability but for instability—what does it look like to participate in God’s ongoing work of destabilizing newness? Especially when we ourselves are constantly in a state of disruption?

It’s surely not the only answer, but as I think about the ways in which God not only shaped Jacob’s life and formed the people of Israel but also calls us today, it strikes me that one way of participating with God’s work in a time of permanent instability is to disrupt the disruption. And given the cascade of overlapping crises we are all facing, I cannot think of anything more disruptive, more scandalous, or maybe even more offensive to contemporary sensibilities than joy.

I’m not talking about some kind of Pollyannish version of happiness that ignores or overlooks the various traumas we have all endured and continue to endure. I’m talking about something deeper and far more hard-won—a wide-eyed acknowledgment that the only thing of which we can be certain is that all of life’s joys are “in spite of” something. Or as Proverbs reminds us, “Even in laughter the heart may ache, and rejoicing may end in grief” (14:13).

In the midst of chaos and loss and disorientation, joy is a rebellious act. It is defiant. It is a willful protest against the world as it has been handed to us. It is neither to pretend as if the rampant fires that surround us don’t exist nor to accept that they will have the final say. Joy, if it is in any sense Christian, is both a fierce commitment to disrupting those destabilizing forces and, at the very same time, a declaration of praise to the God who is always and forever about to do something new.

I would never dare to suggest that this most recent natural disaster should be seen as good because it is somehow preparing us for more chaos. God can and does exchange beauty for ashes for those who are grieving (Isa. 61:3). But it’s still too soon to skip to this part of the story—personally or theologically. The wounds are still too fresh.

At the present moment, all we can do is mourn with those who mourn, open our homes to those who have lost everything, and hold on to the hope that God will be with us as we walk through these fires and prepare for whatever uncertainties are still to come.

As the next few days, weeks, and months unfold here in Southern California, there is no going back to whatever came before. There is no “normalcy” on the horizon. But that’s just as it should be. Fear not, the prophet reminds us. We have been created to witness and collaborate with the work of a God who is always doing something new. And at least in my mind, that’s reason enough to embrace a defiant joyful.

Kutter Callaway is the William K. Brehm chair of worship, theology, and the arts; associate dean of the Center for Advanced Theological Studies; and associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary.

The post God Redeems Even as Wildfires Spread appeared first on Christianity Today.

Translate »