A Great Schism
Beginnings. Today is Baptism of the Lord Sunday (January 6, 2021). And, while we don’t read the first three verses of Mark, this is the beginning of Mark’s gospel. He skips over the birth narrative and jumps straight to the meat of what he wants us to know about Jesus. Listen for the word of the Lord from:
Mark 1:4-11
4 And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. 6 John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
9 At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
A Great Schism
I began my day Thursday morning on a call with interfaith leaders from around Dallas coming together over Zoom to pray. Rabbis, Pastors and Imams joining to share our fears and our hopes, setting aside our differences, praying our deepest tremblings together. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we had to use careful words – we are humans and disagree on a great many important and weighty things. Care had to be taken with our words, care that we should all always use with our words. People often forget and get careless with the power their words hold. This mishmash of faith leaders from Faith Forward Dallas ended our time together with a centering exercise. Yes, I rolled my eyes at first thinking how stupid this was going to be over Zoom. Even though I was protected in my curtain of leaving the camera off, I decided to cooperate – and as the leader stepped us through the motions, I could feel my body oozing out the tension, my muscles relaxing and the slight throb behind my eyes begin to ebb.
We find so many ways to block the words when they hurt and then retaliate doing further the damage with the words we too hurl into the space around us. Too often we don’t think of how those words will be absorbed in a hurtful way, how our words take on the very power of creation or the very destruction of the vulnerable around us - how our words can build up or sever relationships forever or do damage in ways that can take ages to heal.
This week we have been complicit in this. We are quick to look at the words of others and start bantying back and forth the damage he or she did. And while this may be true that many wrongs were done this week, there is nothing Christian about this response. A response that has become so engrained in us that we have turned our nation, our neighborhoods and our churches into battlegrounds. People on all sides of the battles we make can do better, we must.
So, instead of turning off or tuning out by a challenging word - the Word proclaimed this morning, let’s begin by focusing together with centering prayer:
Pray with me – even though I can’t see you, just try it. Sit up and place your feet flat on the floor. Place your hands in your lap, maybe palms up to show openness to God’s message. Take a breath in, purposefully work to empty your mind of distractions and worries, push the pause button on what you have planned next – it will be there when we are done! Breath all that ‘stuff’ out. Focus in your gut with your whole being before God. As we pray hold in your mind’s eye a simple drop of water – close your eyes if it helps. See just the simple pure clean drop of water. Let us pray.
God, most holy, you welcome your children in with water.
Remind us of this cleansing, cleanse us again.
Remind us of your peace, turn aside our hatred and anger.
Remind us of your connecting, connect us, interweave us one with the other again.
Remind us of your care for creation, create in us a new thing.
Remind us of your power, open our eyes in awe.
Remind us of the life you have given us, may we live it for you.
Remind us of your claiming, claim us again.
Remind us of your claiming, pour your Spirit into us in love.
Remind us of your claiming, bathe us in the baptismal waters.
Remind us of your claiming, we are each your beloved child.
Remind us of the power, the awesome wonder and power of Your Word given to us, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
What kind of God wants to be a part of this mess we make of our world with us? A God who has no fear of the chaos and will venture through anything to walk alongside us. As Lee Barrett writes, “Into the wilderness of our own broken lives and our own bleeding world erupts the promise of a baptism of new life.” Where does it begin? In Genesis with God speaking things into being – God looked at the depths, the chaos, and brought a peace, brought light into the void. This powerful awesome creator God spoke words that brought into being all that is, and it is good. Yet God so desperately wants to be in relationship with us that God became human – to teach us the words of life, the walk of life to stop us from un-creating with the bludgeon of words gone awry. When we seek to de-humanize one another this special human Jesus stepped into our world in using all our senses to reel us back into right relationship with one another and with God – ever showing us what this humanness should look like.
Once again, this isn’t always the gentle scene that we have pictured in our minds’ eyes. Mark’s gospel is the oldest of the four but rather than carefully orient us by telling a life story of a baby, the beginning of it all for Mark is the baptism. Mark wastes no words but rather is concise and almost rations words so that each one written is embued with more depth and power in the telling. His careful words have weight. They have strength. Think how much harder it is to limit a really excellent story to a shorter length – think of the urgency of getting each and every word right for the world to hear the strong good news.
Jesus goes to the Jordan to be baptized in a muddy river not because he needs a baptism but because he joins us in our mucky waters changing their very essence and radically reforming who and what we are reminding us whose we are. We want to tame things yet again and take this rustic earthy scene of a bearlike man on the fringes in the wilderness, in a crowd softening the edges. Mark uses his important limited number of words to remind us they are in the wilderness and that the very one paving the way for Jesus is a bit eccentric and very earthy. Verse ten more literally rendered says “And IMMEDIATELY stepping up from the water he perceived the heavens being rent – ripped apart and the Spirit as if a dove descending on him.”
There is nothing gentle in this imagery – picture a great schism in the sky. This is the same word used for the temple curtain ripped in two at the crucifixion – nothing peaceful about this ripping apart of what Genesis tells us God ordered in the beginning – a God willing to tear asunder anything to come to us. To rip the very heavens of creation to come to us. We also make a mistake when we think of a peaceful floaty ethereal dove icon. This is more like a dive-bombing Holy Spirit bursting forth to be on the scene. An explosive imagery that bursts open our controllable trinity concepts of God nevertheless the duality of the nature of the Holy Spirit– and then God speaks again. While the words are to be cherished they are also to be held in awe and with trembling for the responsibility that they carry when we blithely use this Sunday to remember our own baptisms. “You are my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased!”
Do we hear those words? For in our baptisms, that is what is shared with us through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – not a tame simple droplet but the powerful fire of crystal clear water charged with the cleansing of God and at the same time the irresistible joining of us in those very same waters with all who meet us there. Placing in our souls the power of the Holy Spirit, giving us the charge to carry the Good News – to carry God’s Words to the world.
The waters of baptism that Jesus entered at the Jordan also welcome us in but becoming a part of this family is not a clean experience. It connects us even to those we prefer to see no connection with. We follow Jesus, our God who willingly welcomes all and have an obligation to then reconsider how we hear and how we share words with all God’s children.
Empowered and adopted we can do no less. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty....indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” Friends, we have work to do as a nation, community and church we are a people divided. We need to look carefully at our places of confidence as well as our places of fear. And remember that listening and healing are the hard work we spoke of so easily in Christmas. But a work that demands we do self-introspection of our anger and practice different words. We have set aside our empathy and connectedness that these baptismal waters call us to. In our own fear and sense of rightness we stopped listening to one another. We stopped seeing each other as beloved children of God and began an embarrassing quest to be right at all costs. We began to treasure independence too dearly.
It is time to listen and weigh our words again. As The Reverend Amy Moore says,
“To cut through the self-protective layers that blind us to deeper truth, we must be willing to ask why are we here…and then be willing to listen. Together we must identify our fears and hopes. This is an arduous task – one of great tension and fear itself. Because to embrace learning about the other will pierce our armor of self-rightness, bring us to anger, challenge our identity, and reduce us to tears. Only the courageous will walk the journey of empathy and the practice of nonviolence to find a way to repair relationships and follow the North Star of beloved community rather than fight for individual freedoms.”
Can we do this when we are angry? When we are hurting? Together, we can see our God would render everything asunder to be in relationship with us – a beginning of a different sort than we envision. Are we brave enough to trouble the waters, to remember the waters of our baptisms, to do the unexpected and eb the hands and feet of God in the act of creating a different world?
Jesus was baptized in a wilderness with John the Baptist who was as down-to earth as it gets. There is nothing ethereal or abstract about Mark’s gospel. Lee Barrett reminds us that this gospel is “down to earth, grounded in the real, tactile, sensual, fleshy world.” He goes on to ask if in our rituals of baptism are so nice that, “we neglect to mention the uncomfortable implications of inviting God’s Spirit to invade our lives?”
We need courage – when we think of ourselves as exceptional, we need to look to the real, the earthy instead of the images and perfection we present. Rip away this protective façade we hide behind. We aren’t the models to the world, Jesus is. May God inspire us to be more than we have been and to do the hard work of being God’s beloved children together. Sitting together in prayer, pausing to dispel tensions by listening will help us to allow the Spirit to crash into us again and recreate our lives. May God bless us with the courage to fight off fear and work toward loving our neighbors and ourselves. Take care with our words – empowered by the Holy Spirit as children of God – take care. Use these words to show love.
When we feel attacked or that the ‘other’ has gone astray do the hard work of looking deeper – we must do the work of caring, the deep gut-wrenching work of getting to know and care for the ones we label as other. This is the hard heavy work the Holy Spirit calls us to follow in our baptisms.
Do I know you, do you know me? God knows us, and amid the wreckage we make between one another, God weaves, writes, molds and pulls us back together. God’s words name us, claim us and value each and every one of us. God’s words twine us together more surely and strongly than we know – our schisms don’t stand a chance with a God who is always willing to crash into our lives in shocking ways to recreate and write the story new involving and cherishing each beloved child of God knit together in Jesus Christ. Together, leaning on each other. Pulled again together. Begin the work our baptism demands – work to be God’s people living together pulled to one another. God gives us the Word. Breath in the Spirit, take care and exhale the words that bind us, heal us, claim us. Amen.
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