 |
| Daniel Bonnell, The Baptism of Christ |
One Wednesday night in cold February, 2008, I stood in line
holding my nearly six month old son on my hip as he sucked his little fist and
clung to me with his other arm. In
front of me was a dear 99 year old woman. I watched the pastor smear ashes
on her soft, wrinkled forehead and say, “From dust you came and to dust you
shall return.”
I felt my heart rise to my throat and the tears come to my eyes
as I witnessed this and thought, not long
now.
The pastor’s words felt very true as I watched this woman
slowly turn to walk away, leaning heavily on her cane. The truth of our mortality, I thought, right before my eyes.
But I snapped back to attention when the next thing I knew,
the pastor was pressing her ash-covered finger to my baby’s own soft, tiny
forehead and saying the very same words to him, from dust you came and to dust you shall return. Then the tears did
come. I didn’t want what was true for the old woman with a long, full life behind
her and one foot in the grave to be true also for my tiny one, not long out of
the womb with his whole life in front of him.
But it ‘s true of us all.
And Lent is about telling the truth.
We’ve begun our 40 days of Lent, to mirror Jesus’ 40 days in
the wilderness. It’s the 40 days that lead up to Easter (minus the Sundays,
which for Christians are always days of resurrection). And we begin Lent with these verses from Mark, that pack
into a very small space Jesus’ baptism, his temptation in the wilderness, and beginning
of his ministry – all in whirlwind kind of storytelling that leaves no room for
details. Baptism. Wilderness. Ministry.
Ready, set, go!
Jesus comes up out of the waters of his baptism, and the
Spirit like a gentle dove alights on him, and the voice of God says, “You are
my child, Beloved One. I am delighted in you.” And then, suddenly, violently,
the same Spirit drives him, still dripping, into the wilderness.
The wilderness is a big motif in scripture and a big
metaphor in our lives. Perhaps we think of wilderness as barren and lonely, and
it often it is. Isolated, cut off from what gives you security, community,
purpose and direction, wilderness feels somehow both wandering and stranded at
the same time, with the very real possibility that you will not make it out
alive.
But in Mark’s breathless and brief telling, the wilderness
feels almost crowded and noisy, Jesus was surrounded by wild beasts and
inundated by temptations delivered by Satan, and ministered to by angels.
And Mark says almost nothing about the temptations. The other gospels describe this in some
detail, but Mark finds it sufficient to say he was tempted by evil incarnate, and leave
the rest to the imagination.
Perhaps for Mark it doesn’t matter specifically what the
temptation was; just that it was a real temptation. He wasn’t teased by the devil, or given a
safe opportunity to flex his refusal muscles or assert his boundaries, like
practicing a language, or doing a training exercise. This wasn’t a game; Jesus was genuinely
tempted.
Tempted, like we are.
Tempted to hunker in our corners and shout insults at the other side,
rallying against our enemies. Tempted to give in to despair, or let anger
swallow us up. Tempted to make our world
really small and really safe and really pleasant and ignore anything that feels
too big or overwhelming, especially the plights of others. Tempted to numb the pain – with alcohol, or
medications, or pornography, or non-stop work or being sucked into the social
media vortex, whatever dangerous addiction or mindless pastime we can find to
help us not to feel bad, even if it means we wont feel much at all.
Temptation is real and all of us face it. Jesus did too.
And in the wilderness, stripped down to desperation,
everything offered to him - each deal or suggestion or idea that evil incarnate held before
him - seemed really, really good, and he was tempted to give in, to take the
sweet relief offered and be done with the struggle. It was a fight within himself, a battle to
resist, complete with doubt and second guessing and anxiety. Oh, and also there were wild beasts. Mark doesn’t elaborate on them either.
And then angels come and minister to Jesus in the
wilderness.
And that’s all Mark has to say about them too.
But the story doesn’t begin in the wilderness; it all begins
with baptism.
And so even as the sign of the ashes on our foreheads on Ash
Wednesday made visible, traced over the blessing spoken on us at our own
baptisms, we begin Lent here, too, the place of our identity, belonging and
naming, Beloved.
We begin at baptism. Today we will remember our own baptisms
as we baptize little Rowen.
When God with us came into this life he took on death
alongside us. Before his ministry begins, Jesus is plunged under the water
symbolizing chaos and death, and pulled back into the light of breath and life.
He metaphorically dies and is risen –and when we are baptized into his death
and resurrection, we do the same.
We don’t do it very dramatically here- you should go home
and watch the youtube video of the Orthodox priests in Georgia thrusting babies
head first into water and then flipping them over and and dunking their feet,
three times back and forth, head feet head feet head feet, in less than 5
seconds total, and then dropping them into an outstretched towel before these waterlogged
little ones know what hit them and set up wailing.
Here we just pour an almost tidy amount of water on the
head.
But the intention is that it symbolizes our death and our
resurrection, both our actual death and our death to all that keeps us from life
–and a rising to life in Jesus’ own life and death, now to be defined by love, the
Kingdom of God, the reality we choose to live in.
Rowen can’t choose this yet. He gets to be told later that
God’s love was spoken and poured over him before he could do anything to earn
or reject it. And that it will be the very last thing true about him as well.
It never ends. Nothing he can do can make God stop loving him. This is what
gets to define him now. Not any success or failure in his life, not anything anyone else thinks about him, or even what he thinks about himself. Only this: God naming him beloved.
Brittany and
Jonathan, when you hand your son over to the waters, you are handing him over
to the real reality. You are saying, Yes, death will come for him. But death is
not the final word. The final word is life – love, resurrection, hope. And the first and last word of his identity
is beloved, child of God, delight of
God’s heart.
The most terrible temptations he will face, pure evil that is in this world, the wild beasts
that will threaten to tear him apart, the lonely and barren places he will walk
through in his lifetime, cannot separate him from God’s love, cannot change his
identity, or his calling. Beloved, child of God in whom God delights.
This means Rowen can live without fearing death. He can live
without dodging his vulnerability or hiding his weakness. He can live without
avoiding or numbing pain, or striving to try to earn his belonging.
Rowen will be invited to live into his baptismal identity. From
this day forward, he is called to discover what it means to belong to God and
belong to all others – to let love be what defines him, to receive and give
forgiveness, to join in the ministry of God always underway, and to know in the
wilderness that he is not alone and that it doesn’t end there.
I wonder if the reason Jesus’ wilderness experience comes
immediately after his baptism, is because to truly be human Jesus must come face to face with evil incarnate. Must experience despair, and fear, and temptation, and being ministered to.
To take in that God has claimed and chosen you
to join in God’s reality and bring others into it too, brings you right up against your own complete inability to fulfill that calling, makes you face the despair at
the futility of it all, if it is in your own hands.
Because if it is all in our own hands we are doomed.
It’s been a hard week. A school shooting brings to light the existence of absolute evil, and the terrible suffering we can often ignore, along with the culpability and failure of us all
to be who we are meant to be and to love as we are meant to love, and the utter
impossibility of protecting those who need protection and preventing horrible
things from happening. Life is
precarious and sometimes terrifying. And
we rage and wail at it and wring our hands and try to overcome our limitations
but we are just as helpless to create good and stop evil as we’ve ever been.
And yet, and yet, Jesus comes out of the wilderness
proclaiming to the world that there is another way. That the time is right now. That God’s transformation of the world is
already happening. And that you, and I, and everyone else, is invited us to
trust in it, and join in it too. Because it’s not in our hands at all, this is
God’s show.
In this time before Easter when we enter Lent, we endeavor
to repent, and to trust in this good news, because normally in life, we are not
very good at either one of these things.
And then we go with honesty into a kind of wilderness, where we face our fears
and the beasts that threaten to tear us apart, where we name evil incarnate, and feel the temptations to numb or hide, or hurt, or hate, so enticing with their false
promises of relief. We go to that place of wilderness honesty and
vulnerability. We join Jesus there.
From dust we came and
to dust we shall return, every single one of us, ready or not. Lent helps
us tell that truth, but also the truth about death being real but not the end.
Lent invites us to live into the absurd truth that in weakness and fragility,
love overpowers and outlasts hate and evil.
Because we have looked at death without looking away, we
will be ready to welcome life. We will be ready for the good news of the
resurrection that opens wide our hearts when we let them be broken first by the
truth of our mortality.
Only then can the angels minister to us, and only then can
we come out the other side not only proclaiming but believing it for ourselves
– that the kingdom of God has come
near. That God’s love and salvation has
come into the world, is coming even now, and will one day be all that endures. Only then are we ready to truly live out our
calling – brave and vulnerable and real. On Easter we
Beloved, children of God, delight of God’s heart, this is
the story that defines you, this is the identity into which you are called,
this is the truth spoken over you, and this is the life into which you are
sent. Baptism. Wilderness. Ministry.
Let
us join Jesus there and begin again.
Amen.
