A little over 8 months 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 about a mile south of where the Eaton fire erupted, which, along with the Palisades fire, became the most damaging wildfires in US history. Although my family’s home remained intact with only minor damage, the same can’t be said for so many others connected to my broader community. Entire neighborhoods—homes, businesses, churches, schools, parks, libraries—they were reduced to smoldering ash. Our three children lost their schools in the fires. Others lost everything.

Given that we live in Southern California, this wasn’t the first time our community has been affected by raging wildfires. We’ve had windstorms before. We’ve had fires before. We’ve even evacuated before. But the pace, the scale, and the extent of this particular trauma was something new—something altogether different. I can only imagine it’s something similar to how the people of Kerr County Texas were feeling back in July. They too were a community accustomed to flash-flooding, but the speed at which the Guadalupe river rose, and the sheer scale of the devastation it left in its wake was unprecedented—especially as it concerns the number of lives that were lost.

For those of us who had to walk through these wildfires and these flooding rivers over the past year, Isaiah 43 is a striking passage to read and or to hear. But even if you haven’t endured literal fires and waters, odds are that your life has been upended in some significant way over the past few years. Both nationally here in the U.S. and internationally, it has been a season of acute instability, disruption, and chaos. Whether it’s ecological disasters like the LA fires and the Kerr County floods, biological catastrophes like the COVID-19 pandemic, or geo-political crises like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, we are all in the midst of a once-in-a-generation experience that few, if any of us, were fully prepared for, much less anticipated. In fact, so common have these ongoing disruptions become that many now suggest that such instability is the “new normal.”

That said, I am painfully aware that, for many of you, depending upon the unique body you inhabit, and the specific context in which you are embedded, your entire life has been defined by perpetual instability and disruptions of various kinds. Nothing about what you’ve experienced the last few years is new. Normal might actually be a better word for it, but the truth few are willing to acknowledge is that the only people who can talk about a “new normal” are those who had the privilege of experiencing the old world as something stable, predictable, and secure. What this means is that, regardless of how much we share in common, we have to recognize the ways in which the various disruptions of the past few years continue to be distributed in unequal, unjust, and inequitable ways.

There is of course no direct comparison, but many of these same dynamics were in play for the people of Israel during the time that God spoke through the prophet as recorded in Isaiah 43. The exile was a catastrophic disruption. But Israel’s shared experience of de-stabilization and disorientation was being further amplified by the tensions that emerged between those who had been forcibly removed from the land and those who were privileged enough to remain on the land. Any sense of togetherness or community or unity that might have grown from this shared experience was itself being threatened by the radically different ways in which the trauma of exile was affecting the very different bodies they inhabited and the distinct spaces in which they were embedded. Sound familiar?

It is into this conflicted space and to this traumatized people that God speaks:
He who created you, O Jacob
He who formed you, O Israel
Do Not fear, for I have redeemed you
I have called you by name, you are mine
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you

In a time of radical instability, what does God say to God’s people?

I created you, in the Hebrew (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, when God forms (yatsar) the human from the dust of the ground, and when God calls (qara) the light day and the dark night. In other words, God reminds Israel that they have quite literally been made for such a time as this, so much so that it was written into their name.

I have called you by name. We know from Jacob’s story that his name reflected the events around his birth. His was this relational matrix and a broader world fraught with instability. Jacob literally means “heel grabber” or “one who supplants.” It also has the potential meaning of “layer of snares or traps.” But the story only gets more complicated from there. Jacob is later re-named at the river Jabbok where, after wrestling with God all night, God calls him Israel, which the text tells us means “you have wrestled with God and with humans and have won.”

So God not only says to Israel that I made you, but I also named and re-named you for such a time as this. And what kind of time is this exactly? Well, according to verse 2, 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. You 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 we 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 fires ahead. In fact, for Israel, it is not a matter of if they will encounter these scenarios but 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 “fear not.” And the rationale for why they needn’t fear is pretty much the same one that 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.

I don’t know about you, but even though that pulls on all of my Christian heart strings, in my more transparent moments, I have to admit that God’s presence doesn’t seem like enough to justify all of this. 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 nine times out of ten.

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

In other words, through the mouth of the prophet, God says yes, I am indeed with you in the midst of chaos, but not in some superficial or saccharine sense. There is no sentimentality here. Rather, God makes it clear to Israel that they have been redeemed not from something but for something. I have created you and formed you and called you by name not to save you from instability, but to prepare you for it.

I didn’t read it, but verse 18-21 of Isaiah 43 makes this clear, it says this:
Do not remember the former things,
Or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
And rivers in the desert …
For I give water in the wilderness,
Rivers in the desert,
To give drink to my chosen people,
The people whom I formed for myself
So that they might declare my praise

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 wilderness or fire scorched earth when water suddenly appears. Flash floods, toxic runoff, and the reshaping of the land on a fundamental level. So sure, rivers in the desert present an opportunity for much-needed refreshment, but they are also radically destabilizing. Come to think of it, new things are always destabilizing. That’s what makes them new. The old is upended, transformed, re-constituted.

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 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.

So today, as we endure things like devastating wild fires in California and floods in Texas, the unlawful detainment and deportations of immigrants throughout the US, and the brutal wars that continue to rage in Gaza and Ukraine, the question I think we all 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 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 at the present moment, 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 acknowledgement 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 is sad, and the end of joy is grief” (Prov. 14:13)

In the midst of chaos and loss and disorientation, Joy is a rebellious act. It is a willful protest against the world as it has been handed to us. It is neither to pretend as if the rising rivers and flood waters and rampant fires that surround us don’t exist nor is it 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 de-stabilizing forces and, at the very same time, a declaration of praise to the God who is always and forever about to do something new.

So keep this in mind as you go about the rest of this day, this week, and this year. Whatever your last few years have been like and wherever you are headed after today, you have been created, shaped, and called by name for such a time as this. 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 - you have been redeemed not from instability but for a new form of instability. You have been created to collaborate with the work of a God who is always doing something new and you have been called to serve as a witness to a God who is always de-stabilizing the present in order to bring about a world that doesn’t yet exist.

As Isaiah reminds us, the future God has envisioned for God’s people does not involve the return of stability but the emergence of a new form of instability. And that radical kind of newness is not only dis-orienting and disruptive; it’s also somehow life-giving and hope-filled and most of all joyful.