Isaiah 43:1-7 (CEB)
But now, says the Lord—
the one who created you, Jacob,
the one who formed you, Israel:
Don’t fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are mine.
2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
when through the rivers, they won’t sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire, you won’t be scorched
and flame won’t burn you.
3 I am the Lord your God,
the holy one of Israel, your savior.
I have given Egypt as your ransom,
Cush and Seba in your place.
4 Because you are precious in my eyes,
you are honored, and I love you.
I give people in your place,
and nations in exchange for your life.
5 Don’t fear,
I am with you.
From the east I’ll bring your children;
from the west I’ll gather you.
6 I’ll say to the north, “Give them back!”
and to the south, “Don’t detain them.”
Bring my sons from far away,
and my daughters from the end of the earth,
7 everyone who is called by my name
and whom I created for my glory,
whom I have formed and made.
Poem: Passing through Waters, or Visit to Switzerland (Debra Gingerich)
I didn’t know what to do but smile
for the photo with the Kreuzgasse street sign
over my head marking where Anabaptists
received their judgment, or next to the plaque
identifying how Felix Manz drowned. The water
of the Limmat River was so clear
the pebbles at the river’s bottom sparkled with sunlight.
Did Felix ask as he passed through this river,
that it would not sweep over him?
Did others pray when they walked through fire,
that they would not burn? It would be nice
if life was as easy as a stroll along Lake Zurich
in June, with the statue of Ganymede looking over
sailboats and swans. There are days
when water fills the lungs
and skin gets singed, even for those of us
without the credentials to be honored in the Martyrs Mirror.
Sometimes it must be enough
that it is written “Do not fear,” that it is written
“I am with you;’ that it is written
“I am the Lord your God.” Sometimes the words
scoop us up from the raging waters and hold us
as if in the palms of God’s hands.
Speaker: Mark Rupp
I have to begin this morning’s sermon with a confession: I’ve had a strained relationship with the martyrs.
When I was hired as pastor here at CMC, I was given a gift as part of my installation. It was a beautiful reproduction of the artwork of Dirk Willems reaching down to save his captor who had fallen through the ice, artwork found in the Martyrs Mirror but colorized and altered into the style of the more traditional religious icons. This gorgeous piece of art hangs on the wall in my office, and even though I am extremely grateful for the thoughtful gift, I sometimes struggle with Dirk’s story, and the other stories of the martyrs.
If you grew up in the Anabaptist tradition, chances are you encountered Martyrs Mirror at some point. If you are unfamiliar, we have a copy here on our altar table during this series, so you can see what an impending tome it truly is. More than a thousand pages long, it was first published in 1660 in the Netherlands, and its full title is The Bloody Theater, or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians. It begins with the stories of early Christians persecuted by Rome, but it is especially remembered for the detailed accounts of 16th-century Anabaptists who were drowned, burned, beheaded, and starved for their convictions.
What made this tome truly iconic were the artistic renderings of the various stories done by artist Jan Luyken. These black and white renderings of the various martyrs, including Dirk Willems and others, helped etch their stories into Mennonite-Anabaptist consciousness and identity. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but I can’t help but see parallels to the black and white linocut style artwork included in the recently published Anabaptist Community Bible, art that now surrounds us, and perhaps will shape our identity in new ways for years to come.
But for generations, Mennonite households treasured the Martyrs Mirror. Some families kept it on a special table in the living room, alongside the Bible. Children were told the stories as examples of faithfulness. Catechism classes often included lessons from Martyrs Mirror, so that young people could learn the names of those who had suffered and died for the faith. According to Wikipedia–which take that for what it is–the Martyrs Mirror was often given as a wedding present in Amish and Mennonite families…
“Oh happy day! Here, have some stories about torture and death.”
For better or for worse, this book has shaped our identity profoundly. To be Anabaptist, in many ways of understanding it, was to be willing to suffer and die for your faith. That heritage still whispers to us today.
And yet—if I’m honest, I’ve always found the book hard to hold. Dirk Willems looks down on me from my office wall, both literally and figuratively. These stories are a gift, yes, but also, perhaps, contain their own stumbling blocks.
They are a gift because they root us in a lineage of courage. These were ordinary people, mothers, fathers, farmers, tailors, cobblers, students. Ordinary people who stood before kings and councils and said, “We must follow Jesus, even if it costs us everything.” Their lives bear witness that faith can be more than convenience or cultural habit. Their stories inspire and challenge us to imagine what it means to be faithful in our own time, what it means to walk boldly toward the fire of persecution or enter the raging waters of suffering for the sake of our convictions about the kin-dom of God.
But they can also become a stumbling block. The weight of those stories can easily start to feel crushing. The martyrs seem impossibly brave, impossibly faithful. If I struggle to pray, or if I doubt, or if my biggest suffering is just trying to get through another week of work or parenting or grief—it feels like my faith doesn’t measure up. Martyrs Mirror can make ordinary Christian life feel small, even shameful. I can’t be like THAT.
Next to those with the credentials to be included in the Martyrs Mirror, if I am not dying for my faith, am I truly being faithful?
And beyond the weight of these stories, a community that builds its identity around being persecuted risks seeing itself only as the victim. It’s possible that we become so identified with our ancestors’ suffering that we have trouble recognizing the ways we might now participate in the oppression of others. When our story is always “we are the ones who suffer,” we can miss the truth that sometimes we are the ones who benefit. Sometimes we are the ones who keep others underwater. Sometimes we are the ones who light the fire.
That’s the shadow side of a martyr-shaped identity: it can blind us to our complicity, keeping us from telling the whole truth about ourselves.
And so I find myself asking: what do these stories mean for those of us who are not martyrs? For those of us whose grief is quieter, less dramatic, but no less real? And what do they mean for those of us who must learn to see ourselves not only as sufferers, but sometimes also as participants in another’s suffering?
Into that tension, we hear the prophet’s words from Isaiah 43:
“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;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.
When you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.”
These words come from what scholars often call “Second Isaiah,” written to the people of Judah in exile in Babylon, around the 6th century BCE. Jerusalem had been destroyed, the temple burned, many people killed or carried off into captivity. To them, it felt as if God’s promises had failed. They were, quite literally, living through waters that threatened to overwhelm and fire that had already consumed.
And into that despair, the prophet speaks God’s reassurance: You are still mine. As I once brought your ancestors through the Red Sea, as I once walked with them through the wilderness, so now I will be with you in this exile and beyond. I have not abandoned you.
So when Isaiah says, “the waters will not overwhelm you,” it’s not a guarantee that nothing bad will happen. It’s a promise that even when destruction comes, God’s presence will not fail. This is the language of covenant. God is renewing the relationship, reminding Israel that their identity is not defined by Babylon’s power, nor by their present suffering, but by God’s steadfast love.
It is a bold promise. And yet, anyone who has read the stories in Martyrs Mirror knows that it is not literally true in the sense of physical safety. Felix Manz was swept away. Michael Sattler was consumed. The waters and the fire did not spare them.
So what do we do with that?
Debra Gingerich’s poem wrestles with this same question. She describes standing by the Limmat River in Zurich, where Felix Manz was drowned. The water so clear, the pebbles sparkling. And she wonders:
“Did Felix ask as he passed through this river,
that it would not sweep over him?
Did others pray when they walked through fire,
that they would not burn?”
The poem does not rush to resolve this tension. It names the reality that sometimes the waters do fill the lungs, sometimes the fire does singe the skin. The martyrs knew it. And we know it too, in our own ways: in hospital rooms, in the hollow ache of depression and grief and loss, in the private suffering that never makes it into any history book.
At one point the narrator of the poem glances across Lake Zurich, to a statue of Ganymede. I admit I had to look up Ganymede’s story because I imagined Debra Gingerich was not including this reference without reason. As with most Greek myths (and myths in general), there are many different versions, but the core of Ganymede’s story is that he was a young man with exceeding beauty who caught the attention of Zeus, leader of the gods. Because Zeus was pleased by Ganymede’s beauty, he took the form of a great eagle and swept up the young man, carrying him away into the safety and security of Mount Olympus to serve as cupbearer to the Gods.
I think Gingerich has the poem’s narrator glance toward the statue of Ganymede to point out the difference between the gods of these mythic stories. The God of Felix Manz and Israel is nothing like Zeus. In Isaiah 43, God does not seize, or snatch away but marks the people as beloved, saying “I have called you by name, you are mine.” God does not whisk away to heaven but assures, “I will be with you.” God’s claim is not about possession but about belonging. Not about being useful or heroic or beautiful, but about being loved.
Where Zeus snatches away the chosen, worthy few to some other realm of safety and security, the God of Israel gathers among us and says: “Do not fear, for I am with you.”
That brings me back to one of the most haunting lines in the poem:
“Even for those of us without the credentials to be honored in the Martyrs Mirror.”
That’s where most of us live, isn’t it? Not on the pages of Martyrs Mirror. Not as names remembered for heroic faith. Our sufferings are usually quieter: a broken relationship, a season of depression, the grief of losing someone we love.
Do the martyrs inspire us? Sometimes. Do they challenge us? Often. Do they tempt us toward complacency? Perhaps.
But Isaiah’s promise and the poet’s prayer remind us: God’s presence is not graded on a curve. God does not love the martyrs more than God loves us. God is not more present in a Zurich river than in our hospital rooms, our kitchen tables, our quiet prayers of desperation.
The martyrs show us one kind of faithfulness, but Isaiah and the poem invite us to something just as profound: trust in a God who offers presence, a God who walks through the fire alongside us and weathers the storm by our side.
Debra Gingerich writes, “Sometimes it must be enough that it is written ‘Do not fear,’ that it is written ‘I am with you,’ that it is written ‘I am the Lord your God.’ Sometimes the words scoop us up from the raging waters and hold us as if in the palms of God’s hands.”
I think of that image of the Limmat River, the water “so clear, the pebbles at the river’s bottom sparkling with sunlight.” For Felix Manz, those waters became his death. For us, waters like those mark us with life in baptism. We step into the waters not to prove our courage but to be named and claimed by God. To hear again: “You are mine.”
Baptism does not promise that we won’t struggle, or grieve, or suffer. But it does promise that our identity is rooted not in our own heroism, nor in the stories of our ancestors alone, but in the God who meets us in the waters, whether sparkling and clear, or raging and deep.
Our religious ancestors became known as the Anabaptists, and the act of “re-baptizing” became a core identity marker for them. But when they stepped toward those waters of baptism, there was so much more that was clear to them than the idea that people should choose baptism for themselves.
What was clear about those waters was that in following Christ we must resist any attempts to baptize us into a system of domination and violence. What was clear was that the God they were reading about in the Bible was a God who isn’t just waiting to whisk away humans somewhere else but was a God who dives in head first and meets us where we are to show us how to make this world a little bit more like heaven. What was clear was that we must be submerged into a new way of living, plunged beneath the surface and raised into a community marked by peace, mutual care, and costly love. Those waters were not just about washing away sin but about washing away allegiance to empire, cleansing the imagination, and immersing ourselves in the truth that our deepest value comes not from our beauty, our heroic actions, or our suffering but from our belovedness.
So today, if the waters you find yourself in feel muddy or churning with uncertainty and chaos, remember this clearly and let it wash over you: you are beloved and God meets you exactly where you are. Whether you carry grief, or fear, or memories of those who suffered before us, hear this promise again:
You are called by name. You are God’s, and you will be remembered. The waters may rage, the fire may burn hot, but we are not alone. God is with us. Always. Even here. Even now.