Power Beyond Words

Cruciform baptism:  marked with the Sign of the Cross

In the Jordan

People have often had a hard time with Jesus’ baptism. That is because they start out with the notion that Jesus is fundamentally unique among human beings.  They call him “sinless” to emphasize that he is one-of-a-kind. So the problem right off the bat is to make some sense of Jesus’ doing something that was totally unnecessary, since they suppose that baptism was for sinners and therefore not for him.  Some have explained that Jesus was baptized to demonstrate how he was so humble.  Others have argued that he needed and wanted to identify with John the Baptist and the old prophetic tradition instead of getting mixed up in some of the other movements of the day, notably the legalism of the Pharisees, the revolutionary politics of the Zealots, the monastic withdrawal of the Essenes, or the reactionary reductionism of the Sadducees. 

What happens if we begin to rethink the baptism of Jesus not in terms of how it does or does not fit our ideas of who and what Jesus is, but in terms of the power of baptism itself?

Start with what baptism is on its simplest level.  It is basically a bath.  And a bath is generally for the purpose of getting clean.  But baths are more.  Baths, including showers, are often relaxing, pleasurable. Sometimes the pleasures of bathing or showering are in fact its primary feature with cleansing almost an afterthought. 

The Baptism of Christ

It is clear from the gospel accounts that John the Baptizer was administering baptism to get people ready for the coming Day of Yahweh.  His message was “the kingdom of God is at hand.” It is unlikely that John taught any highfalutin doctrine of baptism.  It was a bath that signified a need to clean up in preparation for this kingdom-at-hand.  In Luke’s gospel, John explicitly tells what religious leaders, soldiers, tax collectors, and others need to do in order to clean up their acts.  Now, did it make any difference?  We cannot say. We have no records to prove one thing or another about the effect that John’s baptism had on his early audiences.  What we do know is that he had a number of disciples.  We know that Jesus was directly affected by the baptism that he himself experienced because, in Mark’s account, it is the baptism that triggered a descent of the Spirit of God on Jesus in a singular way and that Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness to wrestle with what shape his Messiahship would take.  But you may be sure that no one imagined that John baptized largely for the fun of it.  Nor did he imagine that he was simply giving free baths to the physically dirty.  In other words, baptism was a ritual that had the potential of being life-changing.  Whether it would succeed depended upon the degree to which the baptized would actually live out what baptism promised and provided:  a new life lived with markedly changed motives.

So, long before the Church got ahold of baptism and made it its initiatory rite, the simple baptism by John was a powerful act, powerful enough to change hardened souls, powerful enough to change behavior, powerful enough to change minds, powerful enough therefore to change the world.  That is what good rituals do. If they express real longing and true feeling, they can be mind-blowing in richness.  But even if the person undergoing a ritual is unconscious; even if those leading the ritual have ulterior motives; even if participants are confused or ignorant about the symbolic action involved, rituals can still be amazingly effective, for good or ill. 

Let me give you an example of what I mean.  Years ago a parishioner of mine had a massive heart attack. His condition was grave.  He lay unconscious in ICU for weeks.  Some of his vital signs were strong, but the doctors were not giving us much encouragement that he could survive the damage that had been done. One evening I was in the hospital with his wife, son, and daughter-in-law.  We gathered around Bill’s bed. As we offered the prayers of Compline, the nighttime prayer office, all of us reached out and touched Bill.  We held his hands, rubbed his legs, caressed his forehead, massaged his feet.  We watched the monitor. Every once in awhile it looked as if Bill was responding in some way, but that could well have been wishful thinking on our part, or simple happenstance.  He was unconscious.  Yet here we were, praying, anointing, laying hands all over him.  Would we have done it even if the doctor had walked in minutes beforehand with a pronouncement that nothing more could be done for him?  Of course we would have.  Why? We believed that what we were doing had an effect well beyond what could be rationally understood, at least by the sick man himself.  Did it make any difference?  Who knows?  Bill died a few days later.  What I do know is that I am telling you this story forty years later because that ritual changed me.  I am not even sure how.  But I know that the very action of soothing a dying man made me more human, opened up some channels of sensitivity, taught me more deeply how love translates into prayer and prayer into touch. The Presence of the Holy was there.  We knew it.  We felt it.  We were one with it, just as sure as if we had been able to see the spirit of healing descend on Bill and us in dove-like form.

Susanna Annesley Wesley

It’s relatively easy to make a case for a powerful ritual in such circumstances.  A life-and-death situation suggests something of overwhelming importance.  But let’s take another example. Susanna Annesley, born in 1669, the 25^th of 25 children, was married at age 19 to a priest of the Church of England.  She gave birth to 19 children.  Nine died in infancy, four of whom were twins.  A maid accidentally smothered one.  A brilliant woman, Susanna once wrote to her husband that, although she was neither a man nor a minister, she took seriously her responsibility for her children during her husband’s long absences.  She managed to devote an hour of her time to each of her children once a week. Imagine that ritual:  a personal conversation with each of her children.  Did it do any good?  Was anyone changed by the ritual? We cannot say precisely how.  But we do know that two of her children are known to all the world for the way they turned 18^th century England upside down.  Their names are John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism.  I doubt that Susanna Wesley ever called what she did with her children a ritual, but that is what it was: a regular, predictable, practice of simple presence and conversation.

Simple rituals have amazing power.

You have rituals too. Some are so ordinary that you take them for granted.  They may include sitting down to a meal each day and offering thanks before you take a bite.  You may have a ritual of kissing the person you love first thing in the morning or the last thing at night.  You might have a routine that is more than a habit but yet something that sustains you, opens you, conveys to you a meaning and purpose that springs from the deepest part of your soul.  Perhaps you have a ritual that you share with your family weekly or annually. You are at a ritual this moment.  For you have taken a place in a ritual community today, one in which you share a meal, say and listen to some prayers, make ritual movements such as bowing or kneeling or stretching out your hands to receive holy things.  Do you understand what you’re doing?  Somewhat, no doubt. I can tell you fancy answers to that question myself, but at the end of the day I cannot explain the power of the Holy Eucharist.  I cannot tell you why sometimes saying words I don’t even need to read from the book will sneak up on me like a thief in the nighttime and steal my breath so that I cannot utter them without my voice cracking or my eyes brimming with tears.  Is it just an illusion?  I think not.  I can honestly say, as you probably can, that well beyond anything I can explain, I have been changed little by little, imperceptibly even to myself, so much so that I can almost no longer think about anything without summoning the phrases that have become like flesh to me: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known.”  “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies.”  “But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.”  “That we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.” 

Who knows why Jesus was baptized, except that he was moved to identify with whatever it was that John was saying and doing?  What we do know is that he picked up John’s theme and took it way further than John was able to do before he was thrown into prison and ultimately martyred.  What we know is that long before there were stories circulating about his conception, his birth, or anything else, he stepped out of the shadows and engaged in a profound act of immersing himself in a passionate love of God that manifested in a profound love for all manner of human beings.  His baptism was just the beginning of a God-soaked life. 

And the point of that life, the point of his baptism, was not that he was categorically different from you but that he is the Way that you can become authentically the person you are created to be, just as he was authentically the person he was created to be.  You have been baptized with the same power and our vocation is nothing less than to be as passionately full of God as Jesus was.   

A sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Christ, based on  Mark 1:4-8.

© Frank  Gasque Dunn, 2018.

-->

Last Word

First Sunday after the Epiphany:  The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Luke 3:14-17, 21-22

Fred Hedgepath was my pastor at Conway Methodist Church from the time I was eight until the time I was twelve.   He still emerges as one of the two or three most significant figures in my life when I think back over the years of all the folk who have shaped me.  To this day, I remember many of his sermon topics, illustrations, even poems he quoted.  Once he said that if he had only two sermons to preach he would choose one to be on the love of God and the other to be on the forgiveness of sins.  I have thought from time to time what I would choose to preach on.  I think without doubt my two would be the incarnation of the Word made flesh and the resurrection of the body.  Both speak of the union of human and divine, of reconciling humanity with God, and above all with the human body as the vehicle for God’s life.  But if I had only one sermon to preach I would choose to preach it on baptism.  For in baptism, these two great themes come together as nowhere else.  So it is not altogether by accident that I set this Sunday as my final one at St. Stephen and the Incarnation.  I just can’t quite get enough of baptism, nor say enough good stuff about it.  It is indeed, for me, the heart of the Good News.

            It took the Church a very long time to accord Jesus’ baptism the importance it deserves. That is because the oddity of Jesus wanting, let alone needing, to be baptized, has just perplexed people.  What folks often have missed is that Jesus’ baptism is the point at which he thoroughly and unequivocally identifies himself with humanity.  I think most of us would agree that “sin,” even when we think of it most deeply and broadly as the condition of alienation from the Truth, from the Source of Life, from the best and most positive intentions of the Creator of the universe, is a bit too narrow to describe the entire human condition.  Of course, an argument can be made that human beings are totally depraved (ask John Calvin and Joseph Casazza); but they too exhibit qualities that simply don’t fit in the category of sin—or at least Casazza does—I am not so sure about Calvin.  At any rate, Jesus in being baptized got as far down in that mud-hole of a Jordan River as he could possibly get:  right down into the hungers and anxieties and regrets and shame of stumbling, fallen humanity—and also into the unleashed potential, the capacity for greatness, the quality of empathy, the talent for creativity that mark human beings as well.  We are not only ashes, but also glory.  For every demon that lurks behind a human persona, there is an angel waiting to be a messenger of the holy. 

            The thing easy to gloss over in Luke’s account of the great epiphany at the Jordan River is what John the Baptist says about Jesus.  For years I never paid much attention to this stuff:  “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”  It seemed only to belong to the rather wild-eyed and sideways-walking nature of the old Baptizer.  But I have begun paying more attention to him and his description of Jesus.  Rather than hear it as a raw condemnation of non-conforming humanity, I hear it now as precisely what Christ does.  He winnows.  He sifts, he sorts, he discerns.  He is not afraid to cast away what is opposed to life and health, to healing and wholeness.  He indeed plunges us into a holy, spirit-driven life.  Yet, the baptismal water strangely ignites the fire of enthusiasm rather than dowses it with cold, dull suppression of human energy. 

            And this is why the Baptism of Jesus is the most profound witness to the incarnation, the embodiment of God.  The whole point of God’s becoming human in Jesus is not to make and keep him special, but to take not just human nature but the entire created order and reveal its capacity for manifesting God.  We are to be epiphanies of God.  We are to understand our lives as being best and truest and purest and most honest when the very bodily existence we have mirrors our Maker.  And we do it the way Jesus did it:  by praying, healing, feeding, listening, teaching, telling the truth, taking on the know-it-all authorities, breaking the rules that keep people separated from each other, transgressing the boundaries of social propriety in favor of justice and mercy, and finally by owning yet detaching from our deepest and controlling fears by dying courageously, trusting only in the power of Love.  That is it.  We are to be the Word embodied, so much so that people can actually look at us and see the Body of Christ. 

            But baptism is not only a radical statement of incarnation.  It brings us to resurrection and resurrection to us.  And it does it in a most peculiar way:  the way of death.  Rather than actually dealing with death, the Church is always trying to put makeup on it and take the sting of it away before we feel it.  Every Sunday we gather at the altar and tell a story replete with images that ought to shake us to the core:  betrayal, crucifixion, blood being spilled and body being broken.  But none of that hits home until and unless we realize that it is not just Jesus’ story; it is ours.  Not only because our lives have their share of tragedy and suffering, which is true enough; but also because there is no way of being mortal without experiencing mortality.  Back up to our list of things that Jesus (and we) do to reveal God:  we don’t get to march in the light of God praying and singing and healing and feeding and telling the truth and taking on authority by playing it safe.  We don’t do it by refusing to grow.  We don’t get there by resisting change, let alone by insulating ourselves against transformation.  No, it takes a dying, a dying to the false and inflated self—a real and conscious choice to let ourselves be “handed over” to the possibility of letting everything go—even the things we give our lives to—so that we can get to the bottom of it all. 

And you know what’s at the bottom.  Love.  Loving your Self.  Loving your own body.  Loving your nature, rather than denying it.  Loving profligately, so that love spills over the brim and runs down the crevices of your life and out into the streets and into the fields and streams so that boundaries disappear between you and people, you and nature, you and animals, you and the earth, you and the sky, you and the sun, you and the fire that burns unquenchably in every star, in every planet, in every atom in this cosmos.  We don’t get to cross that Jordan without getting down, down, down into the Source of the water itself, into every blessed molecule, every atom, quark, hint of being and lying helpless and defenseless.  You probably will never get there unless you either have to, like Julian of Norwich, falling so sick that your conscious mind is overruled by clear insight; or because you grow old enough to see what you simply cannot comprehend when you are busy becoming important (or conforming to those who you believe to be important) which is what all of us do during the first half of life.  When Julian, in the twilight of the 14^th century, got to the bottom of everything she had learned in the revelations of divine love to her in her illness, she wrote:

Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing?  Learn it well:  Love was his meaning.  Who shewed it thee?  Love.  What shewed He thee?  Love.  Wherefore shewed it He?  For Love….Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning.[1]

And that is resurrection.  Not some existence in the sky by and by, but a radical affirmation of the body, and thus of mortality.  Resurrection is the only thing left at the end and depth of life:  the power of Love.  

So, wade in the water.  Wade in the water, children.  It won’t part until you stick your toe in.  And then it will roll back and stand at attention as you march through on dry ground, O Israel.  Wade in the water with Mother Scott and Bill Wendt and Jack Woodward and all those who have gone before.  Wade with Moses and Aaron and Miriam.  Wade with John and Jesus and all that brood of vipers that slithered out of Jerusalem to come see what all that racket was down at the Jordan.  Wade in the water of baptism until you are so human that you bleed love.  Wade in the water until you catch the vision of the Bread that is the Body of Christ become your body, and your body become as dazzling as the body of the resurrected Lord.  Wade in the water until you become as little children and so enter the Promised Kingdom.  Wade until the dove alights on you and you hear a voice that says, “Come on in.  Sit and eat.  I’ve been waiting for you since before the world began.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016.

---

[1] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Kindle edition, first published 1901), p. 175, location 2273.

Dear Gabe,

Dear Gabe,

            When I met with your mom and dad to plan your baptism, they told me that you have a thing about getting water in your face.  They said you don’t particularly like it.  “He’ll not be too upset,” they assured me.  “He’ll just turn his head and try to avoid it.”  So I sent them home with an assignment to practice with you.  I don’t want for your first experience in the Christian Church to be unnecessarily disturbing.  And, Gabe, I’ve been practicing too, in my mind at least.  I have been thinking that I want to make sure that the water that comes over you, even if it stuns you and takes your breath away, even if it jars you a bit, will run back into the font and not into your face.  Because the last thing I want to do is to give you a scratch in your soul that, though you can’t remember it consciously, will on some level make you ever feel that somehow your Christian community or Jesus or God’s Spirit, would do anything at all that would not respect your little body.

            The truth is, Gabe, we have been waiting for you all our lives.  I don’t mean that, of course, in a literal way.  I mean that you come, as does every child and every person, as Jesus himself came to us.  You came as a baby.  Already you are no longer a baby, but a visibly growing boy.  We don’t yet know what your life will bring, or what all the gifts are that you’ll share with us, your family and friends, as a companion on our journey.  But just as Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, so you will as well.  And little by little we’ll glimpse things like hope, joy, promise, humor, and insight from the things you do and say.  It was like that with Jesus, I feel sure.  He did not start being wise when he was grown.  He did not start being loving or caring or sensitive when he started his public ministry.  He, like all of us, grew into what he became from seeds that were planted when he was born and even before he was born.  His parents cultivated those seeds, tended them, nurtured them so that in time they would bear fruit.  All the while, what they saw coming to life in him was the Life of God.  We don’t have many stories—only one really—of Jesus as a boy.  It is a story about how his parents got all upset because he stayed behind to talk to the teachers in the Jerusalem Temple while they were making the trip home to Nazareth.  He was inquisitive, probing, searching, and interesting.  People began to see in him glimpses of what God is like.

            So when I say that we have been waiting for you all our lives, I mean that we are always eager to see how God shows up and comes out in a person’s life.  Would it happen if we did nothing but just observe you, listen to you, let you alone to be whatever you will be?  Perhaps.  But most of us, like your parents and godparents, think it is probably a good idea if we give you a little structure, a bit of support, some steady help.  We recognize that structure, support, and help are not any better than the degree to which they enable you to be Gabe.  So that is why we have come together today to baptize you.  We really believe, Gabe, that God’s spirit does live within you, and that by making a place for you in this community of God’s people, that spirit will grow stronger and begin to flourish.  Today we are making promises that we will do everything in our power to hold you up as you grow and develop.  And we believe that if we do this, you’ll have every opportunity to show us God in the life of Gabe.

            And speaking of Gabe, Gabe, it won’t be long before you hear your name in church in another way.  If you were a Joseph or a Mary or a Moses or a Daniel, you’d hear your name quite often in stories.  But you’ll hear a story along about Christmas time every year that the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee to a girl whose name was Mary.  You’ll hear how Gabriel announced to her that she would have a son and that she would name him Jesus.  You’ll hear how she had a hard time believing that such a thing could happen, and you’ll hear how Gabriel assured her that nothing was impossible to God.  I wonder if you will wonder about the connection between that Gabriel and you.  I wonder if you’ll begin to see yourself as someone who, in your own way, does the work of God.  I wonder if you’ll begin thinking of yourself as one who announces good news at important moments in people’s lives.   I don’t know.  But what I do know is that we’ll be here to help you figure out who you are and what you are going to do and how you can live for and with God.  And I can tell you that we are going to be very interested in what you tell us.  Your story, whatever it is, will be as holy as the Angel Gabriel’s story, as Mary’s story.   And you will have a place in the great big story of how God loved the world, and gave his Son to heal and save the world so that everything and everybody could share God’s life and love.

            One of those stories in the great story is about a time that a woman encountered Jesus, desperate to get him to heal her little girl who was seriously sick.  It is a strange story in many ways, because Jesus at first seemed not to want to help the woman, we are not quite sure why.  The easiest explanation is that the woman was “different,” and she seems to have been something of a pest, poor thing.  What we know is that the woman stood toe to toe with Jesus and said that even though she came from a different people and spoke with a strange accent and perhaps worshiped in an odd way, she still had a claim on him and his healing power.  And what we also know is that Jesus was deeply impressed with the woman’s faith, and promised her that her daughter was whole and well because of the mom’s faith.  That story, Gabe, has a lot to do with your baptism, believe it or not.  When we take you today and pour that water on you—carefully, Gabe, making sure that it doesn’t get in your face!—you’ll be like that woman, totally at the mercy of the priest, the people, the world, even God.  If you were a grown man, you might even put words to it all like, “God, have mercy!”  You might feel that life was bigger than you could manage, and that you’d somehow reached the limit of what you could do on your own, that you were like a little toy duck in your bathtub, just bouncing around with nothing to say and hardly anything to do beyond bobbing till someone picked up you and put you back in your place.  But at the moment the water touches you, it is like the finger of God connects with you, Gabriel, as the one who is going to announce God’s News.  You’ll come alive (maybe with a cry—it often happens) like a black-and-white drawing coming to full color, a still picture coming to animation.  You won’t see it and neither will we, but you’ll be as full of God’s life as the Angel Gabriel ever was, as close to God as Mary when she said, “Let it be, let it be,” as much a child of God as Jesus was when at his baptism he heard God say, “You are my son, in whom I am well pleased.”

           

© Frank Gasque Dunn 2012