Genesis 1: 1-5 Psalm 29
Acts 19: 1-7 Mark 1: 4-11
Shine upon us, O Morning Star, with your light that never ends and which the darkness cannot overcome. Amen.
I remember the first time that I was served a meal that was in a Bento box. I was thrilled! This, I thought…this is how food ought to be served. Each section of the box, so neatly sectioned off….and each section containing the food so carefully arranged. Oh, this appealed to the list making, order seeking person that I am. Yes…give me my food in a neat and orderly fashion….give me every day in a neat and orderly fashion. What the heck? Give me life in a neat and orderly fashion!
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void…
A formless void, chaos….this is the beginning of the Old Testament canon; this is Genesis 1. It begins with chaos…formlessness. A careful reading reveals that there is something present…wind and water…but it is out of control…formless.
Today is the day when the church remembers the baptism of Jesus. How many of us can remember our own baptisms? Most of us, if we were raised in a mainstream denomination, were baptized as infants. It’s a lovely thing we do on those occasions, but it is hardly chaotic. It is almost always orderly. We come to this font with a child scrubbed from ear to ear, dressed in his or her finest, with proud parents and sponsors and we make promises about how we will support that child in his or her raising up in the church. We will do this next week when we baptize Daniel here at this font.
One of our neighboring Lutheran congregations makes use of a trough to hold water when the baptize anyone older than an infant. And in many Protestant denominations, a baptism involves a pastor wearing hip waders and literally wading into a large baptistery, where the baptized is fully immersed.
When I lived in Alabama, we lived near the Tennessee river. It was not unusual on Sundays for a caravan of cars to arrive at the river. As the people gathered, the pastor and other elders of the church would wade into the water, with those desiring to be baptized, and another immersion would take place.
I have also seen this happen here, in Puget Sound, at Golden Gardens.
I think that no matter how it happens…by sprinkling, or pouring, or immersing….in water that is fresh or salty….baptism is an established and orderly way of inviting us to live fully lives that are often uncontainable and chaotic.
Frederick Buechner writes this about baptism: “Baptism consists of getting dunked or sprinkled. Which technique is used matters about as much as whether you pray kneeling or standing on your head. Dunking is a better symbol, however. Going under symbolizes the end of everything about your life that is less than human. Coming up again symbolizes the beginning in you of something strange and new and hopeful. You can breathe again.”[1]
Luther puts it another way, describing baptism as a once and for all event that takes your whole life to do. He said that baptism means “that our sinful self, with all its evil deeds and desires should be drowned through daily repentance, and that day after day a new self should arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever.”[2] That is messy business, drowning daily. There is nothing orderly about it. But it is something we can celebrate in all of its fullness…in its lavish, unselfish, untamed glory we can daily claim and remember that Baptismatus sum! I am baptized! We are baptized!
In Creation, God begins to re-order what is present. That is our task as we live into our baptismal calls, that we re-order our lives. Our priorities change, our focus shifts. We no longer live for ourselves, but we live in service to others and in pursuit of righteousness in response to the gift of grace we have been given in baptism. Reordering our lives does not call for a set of rules and regulations and restrictions. Reordering our lives calls for an outward focus and an understanding of how we live into our calls as God’s beloved children.
The two other baptismal stories in today’s readings are also stories of disorder that becomes God’s order. In the story from Acts, which describes the life of the early church after Christ’s death and resurrection, Paul has traveled to Ephesus and come upon some new believers. They have not heard of the Holy Spirit, they were baptized into John’s name, not Jesus’. And Paul takes the dis-order of their experience and baptizes them in the name of Jesus
In the reading from Mark’s gospel Jesus is baptized by John. Tradition holds that John was Jesus’ cousin and that he was the forebearer of Jesus…he had come to prepare the way. And Jesus comes to him to be baptized. Much ink has been spilled over why Jesus would need to be baptized. Some scholars believe that it was at this point in Jesus’ ministry that he truly understood what his mission was to be. Others believe that this was the public pronouncement of Jesus as son of God. Still others believe that in the very act of the baptism, Jesus was symbolically washed clean, an act that the Jewish community of his time would have understood. Whatever the case, in a scene of disarray, in an act that seemed to be reversed in intent, Jesus comes to John at the Jordan river; he is washed there in a ritual act of cleansing and inclusion and he is called the Beloved. God has taken a chaotic scene and turned it into one of order.
Being a person who craves order often does not serve me well. Arguably, there is not a great deal that is ordered and predictable in the world today. I daresay, as we move through 2012, an election year, we will find ourselves in the midst of chaos and disorder. The economy continues to falter, meaning that many people have to deal with the uncertain and unpredictable nature of unemployment, welfare, and homelessness. People continue to oppress others, particularly those who are pushed to the margins, unable to find a voice to speak for themselves. In the Bento box of life, nothing fits easily into the prescribed places.
In baptism we give ourselves over to the deep and chaos and messiness of life, precisely because we know that we do not go there alone. This, I think is the real answer to the question of why Jesus came to be baptized. Mark’s account of the baptism of Jesus says that all of the people of Jerusalem were coming to be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins. An entire city filled with sinners, standing there, waiting their turn to be dunked into the water of the Jordan river. And into that crowd of sinners comes Jesus. He doesn’t condemn the sinners. He doesn’t point out the sin. He doesn’t do much of anything except wait there with them for his turn to be washed in the waters. He would do the rest some three years later.
So it is that we come to this life. Sometimes life will go along pretty much as we had planned it. We will get the right job or the right partner in life. We will have children who are relatively well behaved or parents who are relatively self sufficient. Our limbs will work. Our cells will not divide against themselves and attack our healthy cells and result in this terrible thing we call cancer. We will resist what tempts us. We will not say or do or think the wrong thing. It all fits well into the plan we have.
But at other times we find ourselves standing on the shore of the water; fully aware that what we need is not a sprinkling, what we need is water that runs with the same lavish abundance as God’s grace. We need copious amounts of water to tame the chaos of our lives. And we need Jesus the Christ, who we will find standing with us, in all of our messiness and sinfulness and unruliness.
Beloved community, let the waters crash and pour down and part before us, washing away our sin, each day, as we are born new creatures in Christ.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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