I shared these previous musings with you because the dust and the musk of the stable lingers for me as we move from the mystery of the Nativity to the “beginning of the good news” as the Gospel of Mark announces in chapter one, verse one. This Sunday almost begs us to hold up in juxtaposition (or perhaps in remarkable complementary fashion) the beginning of creation, the infinity of Creator/God and the amazing physicality and earthiness of the baptism of Jesus, and of course the wild baptismal officiant with him in the water, his cousin John. We have been taught that the finite can convey the infinite. And here in this set of lessons I am reminded in a mind blowing way that the creator of the cosmos walked up to this dusty musty man of the wilderness and got down into the muddy waters with him. So as the season begins for us I am captivated by this image of Mary’s boy, with all that the incarnation of infinite grace means, stepping into baptism, not as a mysterious angelic apparition, but as Mary’s grown boy. Thus my meditation for this entire season is to immerse my mind in this thought – that the creator of the starfields, the maker of light, the crafter of soils, the designer of all webs of life walked into our earthly lives to be with us and thereby show us the way.
On the surface of it all these lessons this morning will present a seeming or apparent discontinuity, or as some will put it - a disconnect. But then again when we read them within the grand sweep of the biblical testimony we will once again come to the unity in message. It is an exercise of reimagining and reaffirming the foundation in our Christian belief. They tell again why we are “Christ”ians and not theists. In short outline what I mean to point out, and what I pray and hope will carry some spiritual nurture, comfort, or even grist for the mill of divine reflection; is that the lessons begin before time in the awesomeness of the mystery of creation, and then take us into history into the muddy waters of the Jordan River. These lessons begin with the voice that started everything, and leads us to the voice we will hear in the narrative of the one named Jesus of Nazareth who gets down into the water to be baptized (to be anointed in that physical water with those royal words resounding in the heavens) among sinners; and the voice that echoes still as water is used in every baptism ever since.
So we begin with in Genesis 1 and Psalm 29 with two testimonies to the powerful voice of God. These two sources are magnificent in telling us of the awesome power of God. Genesis 1 is unsurpassed by giving testimony to God’s creative authority. God merely utters the idea of something that had not yet been – light – and it comes into being. God says “let there be light - and it was so.” Power to create, not even out of something else, but to bring into being out of the void and the darkness. It is a testimony of awesome authority shrouded in the mystery.
Psalm 29 in a very different manner connects this power of God to the voice of storm and earthquake attributing the power and presence of God almighty all around us – and then in a deft move in verse 10 says that this awesome God sits enthroned above the flood. The voice of the Lord bursting forth in lightening, wind, and mighty waters is but a manifestation of the origin that is above and beyond all imagining – and then that this God is your God, the one God to whom you may pray, the one God upon whom you may rely, the one God in whom you will find life and meaning. I live close to Lake Superior and on the fringe of the Superior National Forest. Everyday this psalm reminds me that the voice is still resounding. I listen and wonder at the mighty deeds of my God.
Unimaginable authority and power all centralized, all emanating from this one who we then encounter in a different tone of voice in the Gospel. The story then moves in the Gospels, in particular in Mark with a message so earthbound, so simple, and so graphic in mundane detail. After spending time in the rarified atmosphere of Psalm 29 and Genesis this juxtaposition is almost wrenching and unthinkable, if it were not for our understanding of the incarnation. Because here we listen in on a story witnessed 2000 years ago when God, the one God who created all, the one God whose voice can make oak trees writhe, this God waded into the shallow shore line of the Jordan River to stand before John the baptizer. John had just said that one more powerful than he was coming, how true he spoke. John was giving testimony to the authority of that one, and then the one standing in front of John the Baptizer was Jesus who did not fit the picture of what John had been describing. It was Jesus standing before John, Jesus who was born in a manger, who would be a refugee fleeing violence as a child, and then grow up in a nowhere town, the one who would cure the crippled and dine with outcasts, the one who would suffer and walk all the way to Golgotha. No, Jesus seemingly bears no resemblance to John’s testimony, or the expectations of anyone, and certainly was not congruent with the grand language of Psalms and Genesis. But Mark’s gospel is definitely telling us of the path that God did choose; that God chose this way to step down into the waters; to bow beneath John’s hands, to take on servanthood, to demonstrate the way of compassion and shared suffering, to step into the waters of human pain and vulnerability. This is a day to remember water, frozen as it is in these northern lands where we live, water is sacred as the element God chose for this action we now call sacrament. Every river, every lake reminds me of God’s choice, God’s love.
This was the path God chose, the one to whom you may pray, the one upon whom you rely, the one in whom you find life. This God did not remain a voice echoing above the deep, this God does not remain enthroned above the flood. And yet God’s voice does continue echoing over the waters, we hear it every time we stop at Gooseberry, Cascade, or Pigeon rivers and hear their mighty falls. God’s truth is conveyed through all the amazing grandeur and in the equally amazing intricate webs of life God has made where we can trace the path of water. Every spring day when I plant seedlings of pine, spruce, and oak my spade reveals the webs of mycorrhizal threads transferring nutrients and water unseen beneath our feet. In late winter tapping sugar maples reveals the jaw dropping hidden rhythms of life that have been in place long before humans ever learned the sweetness we can find there. This year I thought about God’s voice of sweet grace quietly splashing into each bucket. And I was reminded that I had so little to do with all this, but now I have an opportunity to be part of the tending and keeping of creations so amazing. And these stories are telling you about this God who chooses to be with you in all the earthiness of our lives. And therefore this story reveals and proclaims the path by which our highest honors, our truest selves, our greatest meaning are fulfilled.
Over and over again in scripture and in life we witness the highest and most holy choosing a wandering Aramean, selecting a rejected dreamer, responding to an enslaved people, choosing a stuttering cast away son in a basket, following a nation into exile and continually declaring that this presence of the divine was right there. And then when we move with the story we see the pattern repeated when the highest most holy creator of all chooses the path of a poor baby in a manger, walks in the sandals of a man rejected and acquainted with sorrow, and says I dwell especially there. This story brings into clarity and sharp focus this powerful and mysterious message we can hear in God’s choice of revelation. This incarnating God reveals what we know in the depths of our being –that steadfast love and mercy, in short, grace, is the highest truth and that therefore in correlation, the highest praise, the warmest admiration. The lasting legends of humanity are not the exploits of the powerful, but the illumination of love in acts of compassion both great and small.
These lessons explain to me again why we find such blessing in those moments when our words and deeds, our hearts and souls resonate and thrum in harmony with the one who set this planet spinning in love, and then, as the Beloved, stepped into the muddy waters with us.
But even more than providing me the understanding of why seeking to live the life of compassion fits so well with souls made in the image of the God of compassion. These lessons give us one more weekly dose of the gospel medicine we need, that God of compassion chose to step into the muddy waters of our lives, that God didn’t wait for us to shape up before dwelling in our hearts, that God got into the water with the lost, the grieving, the weak and the sinners, to prove to you and me that no matter what our days, our weeks, our lives, God is here for us, wading through the waters with us; and that this God is your God, the one God to whom you may pray, the one God upon whom you may rely, the one God in whom you will find life abundantly. What amazing grace that God so esteems you, and you get to remember this with every splash of water. Incarnation just blows me away.
