If you are a lectionary preacher and a tracker of the Christian year, you wonder: should we mark Sunday, January 7 at Epiphany (or first after…)? Or as the Baptism of the Lord? Most likely, I will somewhere in my sermon mention that yesterday (Saturday the 6th) was Epiphany… but then my focus will be Mark 1:4-11. Below I have some cool stuff from The Life of Brian, Karl Barth, O Brother Where Art Thou and The Shack – but first:
We do a renewal of baptism on this Sunday
each year – a lovely way to kick things off.
I have to admit that when we did it the first time, I had much fear and
trepidation, and we didn’t really know what we were doing or how to do it – but
it has become a big, meaningful thing.
Here are my homilies, and then moving video of people renewing their
baptismal vows (including overhead shots where you see the rippling in the
water), from 2016
(at the 17 minute mark) and 2017 (at the 26 minute
mark).
And I’m okay with the fact that very few
who come forward to dip a finger in the water and touch it to forehead or lips
could articulate the meaning in any coherent, sound manner. “Meaning” happens at many levels – and in
this case, it’s the tactile thing, the sensation, and the impact of moving
forward with a crowd of others who can’t be sure what it means, but they all
know they need something… and it’s somehow up there, at the altar, in the
water.
When the magi appeared with gifts, did
Joseph understand? Did the magi? Or even Mary,
really? I try to read Mary's face in Rembrandt's "Adoration of the Magi." I am thinking that, when
preaching in 2018, I will leave more room for mystery, for the unexplained and
inexplicable, and preach more questions and trust in the power of movement and
water and such than the compelling logic of my verbiage.
Even the “meaning” in processing to the
front. I’ve often quoted Dom Jeremy Driscoll: “Monks are always having
processings. Whenever we go from one place to another, we don’t just do it
helter-skelter. We process into church; we process out. We process to a meal.
We process to our cells… I am glad for
all this marching about. Of course, it could become too formal; we could make
it over-serious, and then it would just be weird. But I experience it as an
extra in my life, something in my day that I would not have were I not a monk.
And so I am reminded again and again that I am not just vaguely moving through
life. In my life I am inserted into the definitive procession of Christ. I am
part of a huge story, a huge movement, a definitive exodus. I am going somewhere.”
Or maybe better: Martin Sheen, the great actor and devout Catholic, told Krista Tippett (in his fabulous interview with her in On Being) how he felt about standing in line in worship: “How can we
understand these great mysteries of the church?
I don’t have a clue. I just stand
in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith. This explains the mystery, all the love. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, just watching
people in line. It’s the most profound
thing. You just surrender yourself to it.”
First, the magi. 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. My mind drifts toward that
hilarious scene in The
Life of Brian where the magi show up at the wrong house –
understandable, if their pointer is a star far up in the sky! 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?
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