Ryan’s Meditation from Baptism of Our Lord ‘09

MARK 1:4-11
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.  He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.  I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

MEDITATION

We humans have a love-hate relationship with water.  On the one hand we exist because of water.  Our very beginnings are in water, we spend nine months developing and growing completely surrounded by water.  Then once we we’re out we find that our bodies are made mostly of water and that means that our whole life is dependent on water.  We can’t even go a week without drinking the stuff.  So on the one hand all of our existence is wrapped up in water: we come from water, we’re made of water, and we need water, but on the other hand we’re terrified of the destructive power of water and how quickly it can take away our existence.  (This is the ambivalence that made Kevin Costner’s film Water World such a smash hit.)

Even right now the swollen creek behind our house is eating away at our yard, slowly inching towards our house to carry it away.  Chuck was telling me about the year he lived in Japan, and how the only cities built on the ocean are primarily for tourists because of the fear of tsunami that is deep within their culture.

My mom loves the water, loves everything about it, loves to go to the ocean and to go boating, but she is deathly afraid of drowning and can’t swim to save her life.  She just drops straight to the bottom.  She thinks her fear and lack of buoyancy stems from a child hood trauma.  When she was seven some church boys thought it would be fun to ‘baptize’ her, holding her under ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’.  You can imagine what a terrifying and scarring experience that would be.  It was like religious water-boarding.

But for many of us this isn’t too far off from our experience of baptism in the past… terrified of a God who wants to hold us under, drown out our sins, and us with them.  And for many of us this was also how we experienced communion too – with the stern warning that ‘you best search your heart, because if you don’t confess every sin before communion… bad things.  Bad things will happen to you.’  And these encounters with grace somehow made God out to be the stalker from I Know What You Did Last Summer.  I feel sad just thinking about the religious fear mongering that so many of us have endured and unknowingly believed.  Being asked to be vulnerable before someone who you suspect wants to destroy you if you don’t fix yourself or if you don’t fess up the right way sounds vindictive and abusive and tragic.

But here’s where the Epiphany comes.  Here’s the big revelation about God:

Why was Jesus baptized?  What repenting did the spotless One need to do?  What offense had the Christ made?  What failure of love had the source of love itself committed?  We trust that it’s none, so then why was Jesus baptized into John’s baptism of repentance?

Matthew’s gospel says that Christ’s baptism ‘was to fulfill all righteousness’, meaning to sets things right and set the record straight about who God is and how God does things.  And this is how God does things:  God in Jesus gets into the soup of sin with us.  “The one that knew no sin, became sin on our behalf.”

The baptism of our Lord is like a mini Gospel story all right there, because in Jesus’ baptism, God shows us that he is 100% connected to sinners.  In Jesus’ baptism, God shows us his ‘emmanuel-ness’, that he’s with us and he knows that when he gets into the nasty old bath water with sinners, that he gets dirty too.  But he does it anyway.  He identifies with us, he incriminates himself and says, “I’m with that guy.  I’m with that gal.”  And now we have a new vision of God.  Because Christ gets into the water with sinners no one is left out of God’s love.

For me this is a huge epiphany of how God really is.  Because of Jesus we go down into baptism fearing punishment and we come up hearing God say, “You are my Beloved Child.”  We go down fearing God’s disappointment, (and that’s the worst isn’t it?  When I was growing up I would much rather have a swat on the bum than my parent’s disappointed furrowed brow) …we go down in fearing God’s disappointment and we come up hearing God say, “I am so pleased with you.”  We go down fearing death and abandonment and we come up alive with the Spirit of God.