What can we say January 7? 1st after Epiphany? Baptism of our Lord?

   If you are a lectionary preacher and a tracker of the Christian year, you wonder:  should we mark Sunday, January 7 as Epiphany (or first after…)? Or as the Baptism of the Lord?  Most likely, I will somewhere in my sermon mention that yesterday (Saturday the 6^th) was Epiphany…  but then my focus will be Mark 1:4-11, the Baptism of our Lord – and our congregation’s renewal of Baptism to kick off the year.  

  The Matthew 2:1-12 text: So many corny options – like “wise men still follow him.”  I’m fond of Amahl & the Night Visitors, and various other pageant settings… although nobody sees them in early January.  

   The 2^nd Sunday of Christmas text, John 1, adores the “light that shines in the darkness.” Isaiah envisions a great gathering of the nations (not just our neighborhood!) – and in my blog 2 years ago I suggested the feel might be (corny as it seems) kin to the dramatic ending to “Field of Dreams” – or visually, John August Swanson’s “Festival of Lights.”

   Of course, the magi arrive. Not as in “wise men still follow him,” but astrologers! – an art, an alchemy condemned in Judaism and Christianity! Yet, so eager is the Christchild to be found, and by everybody, that these deluded ones find their way to Bethlehem, and the Scripture, Bible-is-Clear! people miss out. He’s a Capricorn? 

   What astral phenomenon did the magi see? Halley’s comet? A supernova? Check out the great scene (view here! – trust me, 3 minutes well-spent!) in Pasolini’s Italian film, “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” where the magi show up in the daytime, and have silent, tender interactions with Mary and her baby.

   It’s a tad irreverent, but the bawdy scene in The Life of Brian when the magi show up at the wrong house might help us see that there’s some sarcastic humor tucked inside this text. Or maybe Owen Meany’s remark while singing the gory 4^th stanza of “We Three Kings”: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying? Doesn’t sound very Christmasy to me.”

   There is a hilarity in Matthew 2 we easily miss: these guys are astrologers – a pseudo-science, a “fake religion” not just today but back in Bible times!  And yet God uses their bogus discernment to lead them to the Christ child, while Herod and his henchmen, well-versed in Scripture, are left clueless.  I think of that line in The Shack: Mack asks Jesus, “Do all roads lead to you?” He replies, “Not at all. Most roads don’t lead anywhere” – and then adds “I will travel any road to find you.”  Even bad, false religion?  You have to love Matthew’s (and God’s) good humor here.

   And just as The Shack begins with the murder of a young girl, the cutesy magi story segues into the brutal slaughter of innocent boys in and around Bethlehem.  From the outset, proximity to Jesus is perilous – light years from the kind of piety that presumes God’s job is to keep us safe.  It’s a cosmic battle that’s been launched, with the forces of evil already in knee-jerk, violent recoil to God’s incarnate invasion of what the evil one counted as his stronghold.  The preacher is wise to understand and dare to articulate the larger theological stakes in this story – and in the long history of violent reprisals to the good even into our own day.  Reni's "Slaughter of the Innocents" captures a bit of the horror that we continue to experience too regularly in our world. This is why the Baptism of our Lord matters.  

   Mark 1 depicts Jesus arriving on a hostile scene, being baptized, and then striding into a wilderness to do battle with beasts.  Baptism isn’t this nice rite of passage, featuring lovely gowns and photos for Facebook.  A line is drawn in the sand (or a massive wave is stirred up in the water), a taking of sides in a cosmic battle.  Alexander Schmemann reminds us of the historic act of exorcism in Baptism, and why it matters more than ever: “The exorcisms mean this: to face evil, to acknowledge its reality, to know its power, and to proclaim the power of God to destroy it… The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ’s until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often ‘sell’ Christianity today!”

    In one way, we are baptized like Jesus – but in another way, we merely watch and are awed by what we could never manage.  Karl Barth (in the skinny volume of Church Dogmatics, IV.4, published not long before he died) shrewdly suggested that “Jesus was not being theatrical.  When Jesus was baptized, he needed to be washed of sin -- not his sin, but our sin.  When faced by the sins of all others, he did not let these sins be theirs, but as the Son of His Father, ordained form all eternity to be the Brother of these fatal brethren, caused them to be His own sins. No one who came to the Jordan was as laden and afflicted as He.”

    If you have a joyful, hopeful baptism story, it’s worth telling. I baptized a 45 year old man shortly before he died from pancreatic cancer – in his home, as he’d grown progressively fragile and unable to move about.  Three months earlier we’d started meeting, praying, sharing what Christianity was all about. When I reached out and applied water to his forehead, he bolted a bit and began to shake, and then weep.  After a couple of minutes, he looked at me, smiled, and said “I feel lighter.”  And I’ve been able to take quite a few people to the Jordan River for quite moving baptisms and renewals.

     I love the painting of Jesus’ baptism in the St. John’s Bible – which we might rent or buy for our bulletin cover on January 7.  Of course, we have the unforgettable scene in O Brother, Where Art Thou – which is kooky, but has the lovely “Down to the River to Pray,” sung by Alison Krauss, which I hope my choir or a soloist will reprise.  We have much water/Baptism music on the more classical side, including Aaron Copland’s “Shall We Gather at the River.”  I plan to re-read Flannery O’Connor’s great short story, “The River” – another ominous, hauntingly tragic read of what it means to go down to the waters of baptism.  A young boy, Harry, hears a preacher, named Bevel, who’s baptizing people in a stream, say “Leave your pain in the river.”  The boy has much pain indeed, and the story ends tragically.  Well worth the preacher’s time to ponder – even if it’s not used in the sermon!  We need to experience, know and feel more than we tell.

   If you want illustrative material, it would be hard to top that very sorrowful moment in The Secret Life of Bees, which tells us about twin sisters who were “like one soul sharing two bodies.  If April got a toothache, May’s gum would plump up red and swollen.”  After April’s death, “it seemed like the world itself became May’s twin sister.”  Any word of anyone suffering struck agony into May’s heart.  All her family could do was to build a “wailing wall” in the back yard; May would write down the hurts of the world and people she knew on scraps of paper and press them into the wall.  But over time she could bear it all no longer, and simply walked into the stream below their house and drowned – to the elegiac singing of “Song for Mia” by Lizz Wright.  Moves me every time.

     I’m not sure I would have preached on Mark 1 in such a way twenty years ago.  But I think these sad moments of solidarity with those who suffer cut to the heart of what Mark’s Gospel is trying to tell us about Jesus’ opening salvo in his mission to defeat evil.  The Old Testament for January 7 undergirds this line of thought.  In creation, in the teeth of chaos (“without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep”), God let light come to be – and the waters of the firmament as well.  There’s hope in the darkness, and in the pain.  The Gospel begins there – in the dark, when the earth and your soul are without form and void, in the brokenness, or not at all.

   On the somewhat lighter side, I do plan to explore potential connections between the water of Baptism and all the water we encounter in our daily lives – which occupies a whole chapter in my book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week.  One year on this very Sunday, we gave our people these shower tags (which originated with Adam Hamilton at the Church of the Resurrection) – so every shower or bath is a reminder of baptism and a prayer: “Lord, as I enter the water to bathe, I remember my baptism. Wash me by your grace, fill me with your Spirit, renew my soul. I pray that I might live as your child this day, and honor you in all that I do.”  Any time we drink, or rinse our hands, or see a stream, or clouds – can we think of the life-giving waters of Baptism?