He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

John knew. The Lord is powerful, mighty, and He comes to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. He comes to call all to a change of heart.

What does that really mean for us, you, me, the folks up front and out back. It seems all so, well, cryptic.

What the Holy Spirit and fire means is change.

How often will our rationalizations, our daily compromises overcome change? How often will we allow our weakness to overcome the Holy Spirit and fire?

Let’s look at our lives.

Husbands, been a little demanding lately? Are you coming home filled with expectations and when you find them unmet, you feel free to let go with a cutting remark or a diatribe, an expression of the wrong kind of fire —“ the fire of jealousy, meanness, and selfishness?

Wives, the same goes for you. Many of you work, some are engaged in work and/or hobbies. Work and hobbies in perspective are fine. But, are they an all consuming fire leading you to neglect, meanness, and selfishness.

Selfishness, self-centeredness is a fire, an evil fire, a sinful fire that gets in the way of the love we must carry for each other.

Those are just two examples. Examples from our daily lives that speak to the kinds of fire that burn so hot within us that we can’t see, much less experience, the Holy Spirit and fire Jesus brings.

Look at the person next to you. Do you know them? How well?

I tell you, you know them perfectly well. They are you and you are them. We are all joined together, in the body of Christ, the Holy Church, by the baptism Jesus sanctifies today.

Husbands! Your wife is your sister in Christ. She carries His mark within her. You had better learn to love her as your sister in Christ before you look at her in any other way.

Wives! Your husband is your brother in Christ. He carries His mark within him. You had better learn to love him as your brother in Christ before you look at him as anything other.

All of us! The person next to us is not meat, a stranger, an accident. They carry His mark within them. We had better learn to love them as our brothers or sisters in Christ before we look at them as anything other.

We’ve heard about love for our brothers and sisters over and over. We think about the poor, the far off, the destitute, and those ravaged by tragedy. I’m giving to the Red Cross; I’m helping my brothers and sisters.

Those brothers and sisters deserve that help. Unfortunately they are a convenience for us. We wash them out of our minds and hearts as soon as we write the check. I think we do the same with the people right next to us. They are a convenience, something easily washed away in the daily noise we put first.

Look again at that person next to you. That’s right; he or she is your brother or sister in Christ, by baptism part of Christ’s mystical body, by the power of the Holy Spirit born unto new life.

Jesus has come with the Holy Spirit and fire to change hearts. We must STOP everything immediately, kneel, and commit to giving our all for the spiritual, physical, and mental good of our brothers and sisters; those far off, those next to us. We must commit to keeping them in the front of our minds each moment of the day. We must pray for them, love them, and sacrifice everything we want, desire, need, and care about. We must put their welfare first and full-time, even ahead of our own lives.

I formed you, and set you
as a covenant of the people,
a light for the nations,
to open the eyes of the blind,
to bring out prisoners from confinement,
and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.

Jesus has come and has baptized us with the Holy Spirit and fire.

Now is the time. Lord, open our eyes. As You have done for us, so we must do for each other.

Be changed, let us open our eyes. Lord, change our hearts, bring us out from the darkness. Let us live full time in Your one body, fully committed to You, Your Church, and our brothers and sisters in You.

Amen.