Baptized with mud? Wait, that doesn’t sound right… One of the places that our tour guides always took us on our pilgrimages to the Holy Land is the site at the Jordan River where it was believed that Jesus was baptized. For many, Jesus’ baptism is a story that is foundational to their faith. Through our own baptismal stories, it connects us to Jesus and his ministry. Because of this, the Jordan River is still a popular site for baptisms, with the gift shop even selling long white T-shirts to be baptized in and small containers to take some of this holy water home as a souvenir or to be used in future baptisms. But, I have to say that the Jordan River looked nothing like I expected it would.
Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration because it is a river, but it is a river full of silt, with a boundary-marking buoy floating in the middle. All three times I’ve seen the river (twice from the Israeli side and once from the Jordanian side), the water levels have differed to the point that sometimes baptisms were done on a platform, other times lower in the water. And, on the Jordanian side, the platform was so deeply covered in mud that I don’t think we could have gone down to the water even if we wanted to. Based on the Biblical story, I was also not expecting there to be a gift shop or military men, but, then again, it is a popular tourist destination and a contentious boundary line.
Because the water was so muddy, our tour guide often suggested that we hold off from getting water at the Jordan River and instead get it from the springs that feed the River at either Tel-Dan or Banias; more stories about those places another day! With the note that if we put the water in an empty plastic water bottle, to make sure we marked it so that we didn’t end up drinking it on accident. For all of the wonder in this Biblical story of Jesus’ baptism, with the sky opening and the voice of God, this was not what I expected.
I share this not because I want you to be disillusioned by today’s Gospel story, but because I think having my expectations put in check was actually helpful for how I thought about this story moving forward. Because when Jesus appears at the river, no one is expecting anything fantastical. It’s just John, Jesus, and a river. I’m sure there were some onlookers too, but it was just an average day. Even John was surprised when Jesus came to him for baptism because in John’s eyes, it should have been the other way around. Jesus’ baptism, like his birth, wasn’t fancy or ornate. But it happened through ordinary means, through the waters of the probably slightly less muddy Jordan River.
We too, in our baptisms, use ordinary water. Although, when God’s word, God’s promise gets added to it, I would argue that any water can be holy water. Water that connects us to creation and which is a life-sustaining substance in our world. I have seen baptisms that are simple and baptisms that are ornate; including full immersion in a feed trough, although that’s a story for another day too. There are so many differing theologies around baptism, including ones that are exclusionary to those who have not been baptized, that it seems like we have gotten away from the ordinariness of Jesus’ baptism. And, of what truly mattered in those moments. That in the moments after his baptism, Jesus’ is verbally claimed as God’s son and the Spirit descends on him.
When I think of baptisms in the church, I see them as an outward claiming of an already inward reality. We are already God’s children, God’s beloved ones; the ones made in God’s image. But before God and the community of faith, in our baptismal rite there is an outward claiming of that identity. One that binds us together in the body of Christ and connects us with other Christians now, as well as those who have come before us, through water and God’s promises to us.
While there are lots of ways we can talk about baptism and how baptism changes our lives; trust me we will keep talking about this, I want to share about a time when this connection in baptism felt the most powerful to me. In an unexpected place at an unexpected time. It was at an interfaith conference in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was both the coolest and strangest experiences of my life. We meditated with strangers, cried in a yurt with strangers, and heard powerful stories from people of all religious traditions about how their faith impacts them and the way they live their lives. Then, while Dr. Monica Coleman was up on stage, she had the whole auditorium, hundreds of people, join her in singing “Wade in the Water.” Hundreds of peoples singing acapella. To this day, I still don’t quite have the words to describe it exactly, but it was a spiritual experience. In the connection of our voices, we were joined together in this experience of life. Even though most of the people in the room didn’t identify as Christian, there was still this deep connection as we sang about the change God is going to bring through water.
This is what I think of when I think of what baptism does for us. It connects us in ways that are hard to describe verbally because they are so experiential. And, it connects us to people and places we never thought imaginable, or perhaps even desirable. Whether we know the people or not, come from similar religious traditions or not, when we are baptized, we are baptized into the one body of Christ. In a world, and even a faith tradition, that is full of conflict and division, I find it beautiful that we have something that connects us so deeply in this way. A connection through the ordinary means of life-giving water and the promises of God that when combined help us to outwardly remember that we are children of God and so are the people around us too. We are children of God whether we were baptized in a small font of water, a feed trough, the muddy Jordan River, or those who haven’t yet been baptized. We are a part of this history that extends back to our Gospel story today, when Jesus entered the waters desiring to be baptized and then set out on his ministry that would continue to change the world. So, as we remember the baptism of Jesus this day, I invite you to think about, what does baptism mean to you?