Sermon at The Church of
the Holy Apostles, New York City
January 13, 2008,
The First Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A
Deacon Megan Castellan
Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17
When I went to the Jordan River, three years ago, I had
high hopes. The River Jordan has a lot of baggage in popular
imagination—popular in everything from Jewish lore to
spirituals, to evangelical thought. My childhood best friend
had been baptized at the First Baptist church in water that a
relative had smuggled back from the Jordan, and the excitement
over that was something I’d not seen before. “Down to the
river”, Wade in the Water: these are powerful images, and at 21
years old, I was not immune. I was really looking forward to
wading in the river. I had images of water cutting through the
desert, swirling over rocks, something wild and prophetic about
the whole scene, somewhere I could really begin to hear John the
Baptist crying in the wilderness.
No dice. The site in Israel that is THE Jordan River
pilgrimage site, where you can be truly baptized in the River
Jordan if you want, is way up in the Galilee, at a place where
the river meanders through the leafy green trees, as calm as you
please, deep and green and wide. It’s run by an Israeli
kibbutz, who helpfully provide a roped off section near the bank
for wading and baptisms, with a set of stairs down into the
water, and a well-stocked gift shop. The printed brochure from
the government informs the visitor that this is not, in fact,
the actual site of Jesus’ baptism or John’s ministry, but it is
the same river! So you should get the same bang for your
pilgrimage buck.
I was disappointed. I waded in the river and took a
small pebble to mark the occasion, and our little group sang a
hymn and it was all perfectly nice. We braved the gift shop,
and loaded back on the bus. But the experience was too calm,
too tame. I couldn’t see John the Baptist starting up a
revolutionary ministry in the middle of a forest, on a
picturesque riverbank.
I found out later, on the ride back to Jerusalem, that
the real site of Jesus’ baptism had been shut down for years.
It was further south, on the Jordanian side of the river,
cutting through the Judean desert, where the river widened out
and got shallower and faster. So fast, in fact, that several
tourists had drowned during their baptisms. Declared unsafe,
the site had been closed to tourists.
That’s an interesting thought. Jesus was baptized and
started his ministry in a place of danger. He didn’t wake up
one morning and decide to take a brisk swim; he knowingly and
deliberately took a risk that would alter then rest of his life.
That seems more fitting to the story we hear today—a story where
the skies are torn apart, voices come from heaven and the Holy
Spirit flies down to earth. There’s nothing calm about this
story.
But frequently, we’d like to whitewash the story a bit,
downplay any wildness. We’d like the baptism of Jesus to be
quiet, moving and quaint. We’d like to think it was a calm
announcement of who Jesus was to the world, a nice justification
of the way things would be. But the truth of it is that this
was a pretty scary scene. John didn’t have any idea what was
going on, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want to be doing what
he was doing, and all of a sudden there are booming voices and
incoming heavenly doves. It’s worth noting that Mark’s gospel
describes the skies as being torn open—a phrase that doesn’t
occur again until the skies are torn apart at the crucifixion.
This scene is not comforting, it is risky. It is a challenge.
So too for us, who have been given the same baptism.
Too often we construe baptism as a nice thing that happens to
babies or people who are born-again. It is a nice ceremony
where you declare your faith, and God accepts you. That’s all
true—a large part of baptism is accepting your faith publicly,
accepting your birthright as a beloved child of God—but baptism,
like all sacraments, defies an easy one-note meaning. Baptism
is declaring your faith in Jesus as Lord, but baptism is more
than that. Baptism is a challenge. Baptism is dangerous.
Baptism, for Jesus and for us, is standing up and
beginning to become who God intended you to be. It is saying,
Yes, I am a valued child of the Creator. But it is also saying:
Because I have committed myself to God, I will show forth God’s
commitment to the world. That’s the scary part. We promise to
live into the vision God has for the world; the commitment of
God to each and every person. We are joined to God in baptism,
and so we have to continue the work to join the world to God.
And therein lies the risk. Committing to the world is
difficult, heartbreaking stuff, as we know. Baptism gives us no
easy answer or escape hatch. At the baptism of Jesus, the Holy
Spirit comes down to earth and it doesn’t swoop Jesus up to
heaven—it drives him out into the wilderness to confront the
devil. It doesn’t provide Jesus with an out—quite the opposite,
it turns him to face the world, and deal with it. “This is my
Son”: now prepared to go out and engage the world for the sake
of the kingdom.
The same goes for us. At our baptism, we promise a
whole host of things: we renounce Satan, we accept Christ, and
we vow to live in a particular way. We turn to face the world,
and we commit to it in a particular way, and like Christ
himself, this is a fraught and difficult mission.
Read the front page of the paper someday, and then read
your baptismal covenant. Read what the world currently is, and
then read again what you have promised to embody in the world.
Almost two hundred thousand Iraqi deaths since the start of the
war: we have promised to strive for justice and peace. 47
million Americans live without access to health care; we have
promised to respect and honor the dignity of every human being.
Presidential candidates argue over how much torture is too
much: we have promised to seek and serve Christ in all persons,
loving our neighbor as ourselves.
If we take it seriously, our commitment to God and
God’s commitment to creation puts us at odds with the brokenness
of the world. It sets us on a risky mission, where we are
obligated to confront the forces that would make us less that we
are, and most often, obliged to be the voice shouting in the
wilderness.
It would be easier, I suppose to push this
confrontation away, to pretend that baptism is nothing other
than security for the afterlife. But that carries its own
dangers. For if we lose the riskiness of baptism, the riskiness
of the life we are all called to, we risk losing the Holy Spirit
as well—that spirit of God who descended on Jesus at his baptism
is our consolation and guide on our journey in the world.
The same Spirit that drives us to confront our demons
in our modern wildernesses, also guides us as we do it, leading
us into fresh ways of being, and helping to grow into the
creatures of God that we were meant to be. And while the Holy
Spirit is not known to be a tame presence---without the openness
to her action, we would likely miss the fingerprints of God in
the world.
There is a story about Pope John the XXIII, that I
heard in college. On Good Friday, the pope was listening to the
reading of the Passion Narrative in John’s Gospel. When he
heard the part describing the trial, and the narrative’s blaming
of the Jews for Jesus’ death, he became upset. He ordered the
reading to stop. “This must change,” he said. He called the
Second Vatican Council that day, and the Roman Catholic Church
began to address the anti-semitism that had festered from the
beginning.
Those moments when we confront the broken world, and
begin to heal it--- this is the life more abundant we are
promised, when we begin to grow into what God intended for us.
Ultimately, it is worth the risk, when we glimpse, if even for a
moment, the vision of God becoming reality. When we see the
outcast included, when we see our neighbor change his mind, when
we realize, for the first time, the spark of God in another
person. It is that moment, that flash of dove’s wings, that
makes the risk worth taking.
Amen.
.
