Thoughts on Jesus' Baptism, Christianity, and Death

Thoughts on Jesus' Baptism,
Christianity, and Death
Rev. Carol Luther
January 9, 2005

Readings:

Isaiah 42:1-9
Acts 10:34-38
Matthew 3:13-17
Psalm 89:1-29 or 89:20-29

Every year, on the first Sunday following the Epiphany, we celebrate the Feast of the Baptism of Christ. Epiphany is a Greek word which means "to show forth." The season begins with the showing forth of a star to the Wise Men and ends with Jesus transfigured into pure light atop Mt. Tabor. In between these points, the lessons show forth what it means to be a follower of Jesus. The first Sunday after the Epiphany is always celebrated as the Feast of the Baptism of Christ. In each of three Gospels, we read that Jesus was baptized and "the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from Heaven said, 'This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.'

In the Ancient Church, Baptism was a great mystery of initiation. In the beginning, we were not a religion with fixed rules and dogmas, we were far more fluid, calling ourselves [the Greek phase for] "The Way." Baptism, that quintessentially fluid experience, was how one declared he or she was ready to walk the way. In those days seekers were welcome to attend the liturgy of the word, meet practitioners of the Way and join in the prayers. If, after time, one found these words and prayers lifegiving, they could take the next step, and become catechumens, and begin working with a teacher. In the early Church, because of the seriousness of the Baptismal experience, many chose to remain catechumens until practically the hour of their physical death. Baptism was seen in those days with all the seriousness of monastic vows, a death to sin so complete that sins committed after Baptism were far more disruptive than a sin committed by someone not under a vow. The rite of Baptism took place on Easter morning, following an intense vigil of fasting and prayer. Those who were baptized on Easter vividly relived, both for themselves and the community, Jesus' death and resurrection. Entering into deep waters, the initiates would be completely immersed three times and emerge gasping for air. Leaving the watery tomb, they would be clothed in white robes, in some cases into the full vestments of priesthood, and fed their first communion, the food and drink of new and unending life. With the passage of time, as Christianity moved from being the Road of life to becoming a "religion," we lost a great deal of the power of the Way. As a culture, we have made our medical peace with death and new and unending life becomes more a metaphor than a fact. We have become a culture of survivors.

Jesus, of course, begs to differ. Jesus took no survivors, because Jesus did not know death. He passed through what we think of as death and certainly showed it to be real, but he also revealed its impermanence. God is God of the living, not the dead. That is why Jesus preached a living Way, not a solid and codified religion. Indeed, he was highly critical of the rigidities that happen when spiritual paths turn into laws and dogma. Dogma seeks permanence and the moment that something stops and becomes permanent, it dies. As the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann wrote, "Christianity is not reconciliation with death. . . .Christ is . . . Life. And only if Christ is Life, is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely the enemy to be destroyed, and not a 'mystery' to be explained."(1)

Baptism was one of the ways that the first Christians acted out the impermanence of death and the growth into everlasting life. Baptism involved a conscious choice. Birth brought you into creation, into natural life, but Baptism took you beyond the limits of natural life. So difficult and yet so central to our faith is this teaching that the Lectionary texts for Year A during Lent are known as the great baptismal texts. These texts explore in great depth the relationship between a life limited by human nature and unlimited life in God. These readings deal with breakdown and transformation. They show us what signs to look for along the Way. Churches have the option, especially when preparing youth and adults during Lent for baptism, of using these texts every year.

We are in Year A. We are in this great year of nature, transformation and Baptism. This is the year when we are asked to consider how God, the rock of our salvation in the words of the psalm, saves us from drowning in the chaos of our hyperactivity, our fear, our business, our stress, our finances and everything else that threatens to overwhelm us.

This is also the year that began with a very literal and concrete overwhelming, the waters unleashed from the depths of the sea, washing over the coastlands of South Asia. In last week's Chronicle, columnist Joan Ryan wrote, "an event of this scale -- biblical, some have said -- has even nonreligious people grappling with the nature of God and the purpose of suffering. I posed the questions to followers of different faiths." Here is what some of the people she interviewed said.

I think the one that touched me the most, simply because when something terrible happens, my first impulse is reach out in prayer, came from Baslim Elkarra of Sacramento, a Muslim with the Council on American- Islamic Relations, when he said, "Life is not supposed to be easy. How we respond is the test of our faith. Here in the West people ask, How could God do this? Over there, they turn to God even more, asking for his mercy."

Monsignor Harry Schlitt of the San Francisco Roman Catholic Archdiocese, while agreeing with others that there was some unknowable purpose to it, concluded that "God did not cause the tsunami. It is nature taking its course." (Note that he separates God and Nature.)

"In Islam," said Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at UC and Oakland dad, "all those who die in a natural catastrophe die in a state of martyrdom. They are not held accountable for their sins in life; they are given passage directly into paradise. For those left behind, he said, a tragedy of this scope is a reminder of God's power and our own mortality. It's a recognition of the need to walk lightly upon this Earth with a sense of humility and respect for the divine, and to be thankful for the blessings you have."

The Rev. Amos Brown of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco asserted that the tsunami is "not an expression of God any more than famine or war or street violence. But we find ourselves questioning God in this tragedy because so many people died at once."

"If you ask why God didn't stop the tsunami, why aren't you asking why God didn't stop slavery?" Brown said. "Why he didn't talk to George Bush before he went to war? Look at Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia. Where is God there?" "It is a misguided question," Brown said. "What we should be asking in the wake of any tragedy isn't 'Where is God?' but 'Where are we?'"

Of all the explanations this one disturbs me the most. Part of it is certainly appropriate, but part of it is not. Can we seriously believe that God has abandoned Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia? How can anyone know whether or not the tsunami is an expression of God? We don't know why things happen. We only know that God has promised to be with us even in the worst things. Imagine a person being swept out to sea and calling out and God saying "I had nothing to do with that. Go ask elsewhere. Look to yourselves." A god who is either absent or manipulates reality, sending this tsunami and stopping that one, is not the God who became fully and vulnerably human in Jesus.

Which brings us right back to this morning's Gospel. Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" At this moment, John expresses all our ambivalence toward God. God is above all these human things. God does not need to go with the flow or follow the rules. God wrote the rule book.

But Jesus does not agree. "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Righteousness is a word that has become so encrusted with religion that it is easy to forget that it doesn't mean better, it simply means "right." It is right for Jesus to go into the waters. By giving himself to baptism, he chooses to follow the path of full humanity. He has come to show us a God who does not lord it over us, or sit in citadels or temples, a God who does not retreat to the high ground when things get bad, but who plunges right into the depths where we are, who witnesses and speaks to us through our triumphs and our catastrophes. If God felt "absent" during the tsunami, it may have been because he was fully present with its victims. And it is not until Jesus emerges from these human depths and difficulties that the Holy Spirit descends and call him the Beloved and sends him on yet another quest.

The only way to God is through the depths of our humanity. That is what the early Christians understood about baptism. We cannot be fully alive until we have faced and defeated the fear of our deaths. We cannot understand our creator until we understand our creatureliness. We cannot join with God as long as we keep anything to ourselves. God shows no partiality. God made us as we are and loves us as we are with all our love, our questions, our difficulties, our blind spots, our habits, our anger, our hopes. If at times it is futile to question God's purpose, we need never question God's presence. Just to practice the presence of God is enough. And as slowly we learn, like Jesus, to enter the waters of acceptance, God begins to show us the way out. And what a way it is! AMEN.

NOTES

1. The World as Sacrament, 1966, quoted in A Sourcebook About Christian Death