First Sunday After Epiphany Year B 2009

January 11, 2009

01 Epiphany B 09
Baptism of Our Lord

Genesis 1:1-5
1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Psalm 29
1 Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings,
ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.
2 Ascribe to the LORD the glory of his name;
worship the LORD in holy splendor.
3 The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the LORD, over mighty waters.
4 The voice of the LORD is powerful;
the voice of the LORD is full of majesty.
5 The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;
the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
6 He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,
and Sirion like a young wild ox.
7 The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire.
8 The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness;
the LORD shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
9 The voice of the LORD causes the oaks to whirl,
and strips the forest bare;
and in his temple all say, "Glory!"
10 The LORD sits enthroned over the flood;
the LORD sits enthroned as king forever.
11 May the LORD give strength to his people!
May the LORD bless his people with peace!

Acts 19:1-7
1 While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples. 2 He said to them, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?" They replied, "No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit." 3 Then he said, "Into what then were you baptized?" They answered, "Into John's baptism." 4 Paul said, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus." 5 On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 When Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied-- 7 altogether there were about twelve of them.

Mark 1:4-11
4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 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. 6 Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 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. 8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 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. 11 And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

Extreme Make-Over: Whole Person Edition

When I first moved to New York in 1982, I rented a railroad flat that didn’t have a shower, just a big, deep clawfoot bathtub in the kitchen. It took a lot longer than showering. You had to spend time waiting for the hot water to fill the tub. To have to get up a little bit earlier in order to get the tub filled and to get my bath was kind of inconvenient. And, once in the water, I had this worry that I wasn’t really getting clean, because, after all, everything I washed off stayed in the water with me.

But I really got to like it. It was a wonderful way to start the day, floating nearly weightless in that hot soothing water, a cup of coffee on the stand nearby. And strangely enough, I always felt squeaky clean afterward; even cleaner than I had felt showering.

Ritual bathing was a basic facet of Jewish practice long before John the Baptist came along. They called it mikvat, and it is still the means by which Gentile people become Jewish. But it was also used by Jewish brides prior to being married and, in the days of the temple, to prepare to go into the temple for worship.

Bathing is an earthy act. We get naked to bathe. There are no rich people or poor people or smart people or stupid people in bathtubs. Everyone is reduced to the basic human creature. You can’t wear those slimming clothes, you can’t hide the imperfections.

In the ancient church, people were always baptized naked. You removed your clothes before you went in. Presumably you stood there naked when you were asked those last important questions. Do you believe in Christ? Do you reject Satan? Can you imagine?
Bathing is an earthy act. Once in the bathtub it’s all about directly confronting the nasty. Scraping and scrubbing the dead skin and the dirt and all the rest, inspecting yourself, turning this way and that. We all learn how to twist ourselves in pretzels to reach the parts we need to reach.

But when you come out, don’t you feel good? New and fresh.

William Willimon once said, “When one joins the Rotary, or the League of Women Voters, they give you a membership card and lapel pin. When one joins the Body of Christ, we throw you under, half drown you, strip you naked and wash you all over, pull you forth sticky and fresh like a newborn…”

After baptism in the ancient church you were dressed in a flowing, pristine white robe, much like the one I wear in traditional worship. That’s why some preachers like me wear these white robes, and why St. John describes the heavenly host in the Book of Revelation as “robed in white.”

I found a great sermon to steal on the internet by a Pastor Roop of a strange church in Tennessee that calls itself the Knoxville Ecumenical Orthodox Church, whose mission statement sounds a lot like the Disciples, though perhaps a little more open to the ancient orthodox tradition.

Roop brings up another aspect of baptism, and this is probably closer to what John the Baptist meant by it. God judged the world by drowning it, and when one is baptized, the old dying sinner is given his just desserts.

Here’s how Pastor Roop describes baptism:

"When you finally stand before the church and fess up to the fact that you are a whitewashed tomb filled with all manner of rottenness and dead men’s bones, don’t expect to hear, 'Oh, no. You’re OK. You’re not really that bad.' No, the church is likely to say, 'Yep, you’re a hopeless mess alright, so hopeless that we’re going to have to put you out of your misery. Yep, we’re going to have to kill you. Our preferred method is drowning.'”

There are pictures of last year’s baptisms out there in the fellowship hall in an album that Don Leyden put together. It was a little embarrassing to find out that I’d been confirmed and ordained a pastor in the church but had never been baptized, not even sprinkled. An oversight of my parents, it appears.

If you go out there and look at the pictures of this summer’s baptismal candidates, I have to say they look very much like people on their way to being executed. I didn’t realize then that this was probably appropriate.

Not many of us have had the personal experience of dying. It’s one of those one-time things, I guess. But a lot of us have been around people as they were dying. I was with Frank Cooke and his wife Kristin yesterday, and Kristin, who is probably about 23, a child to most of us, cares for her husband as he is very, very sick with cancer. We all pray that Frank gets well, but he is truly very sick, and death is close by.

Death’s closeness to Kristin has awakened her to a vision of the world that is entirely new. She had once seen the world as a rather cold place in which people basically struggled with each other. But as death has come closer, she has begun to experience the presence of God, as he comes to her in the people who care. This is what John the Baptist’s baptism of repentance is all about. You can’t really know what God is doing until you really confront the nasty. You can’t really see what God is doing unless you die.

So baptism is a bath, and it is also an execution. But the executed person rises again. Baptism is also about resurrection. A new baby is born, a baby Christian, not of the flesh, as St. John said in last week’s lesson, but of the Holy Spirit of God. It might take years and years for that baby to grow up into everything he or she is meant to become, but when she comes out of the water, the sinner has become a new person, a new kind of person. The old dying sinner was scraped and scrubbed away and washed out to sea, leaving a baby Christian.

How many of you have seen the show “Extreme Makeover”? It’s that show where taste-challenged people are taught how to dress and put on make-up. And then there’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” where deserving families have miserable homes torn down and built new. Well, I want to announce a new show called: Extreme Makeover: Whole Person Edition. It happens every time we take a new believer to the water, and Jesus Christ is the host.

Jesus was the first of this new creation. This is why he is so central to our way of life. This is why it’s important to know a lot more about Jesus than that he was born in Bethlehem or that he died for our sins or that he rose from the dead. This year, I have a pressure within me to preach about Jesus, to really get into who he was and what he meant by what he said and did, and who is continues to be today.

God began creating a new world when Jesus assented to letting his old self die through the baptism of John. The heavens, the separation between our world and God, were torn apart and the Word of God came down and made Jesus a new creation, a child of God, beloved, and well-pleasing to God. Brand new, fresh, and squeaky clean. And that same promise is extended to all who follow Jesus into the water.

Michelangelo said his sculptures were already there; he just removed the stone. His creative act was more like revelation of something that was hidden than making something out of nothing. The Greek word for revelation is apocalypse. An apocalypse is not complete destruction; it is the removal of the stone to reveal the beautiful sculpture underneath. The creation story we heard this morning is not so much about making something new as it’s about revealing something that has been hidden. That’s what baptism is. The dirt and the dead skin are being scraped and scrubbed away, to reveal the beautiful new thing hidden under it. And that is our mission as a newly made-over community of the washed: to work with God to reveal the beautiful world hidden under the mess.

It may be hard to believe, but the creating power of God is given to God’s children, everyone who is baptized, and perhaps even to many who haven’t. This is what the baptism of Jesus means for you and me. Just as the believers Paul baptized were given power, so each one of us is given the same power, the power to see with new eyes, speak with new voices, the power to push back what is hiding God’s beautiful creation.

Listen to these words: “You are my child, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Do you hear them from a pastor named Mike, or do you hear them from the torn-apart heavens? Are they only human words, or are they God’s word addressing you? If they are just human words, well, they may not mean anything. But if they are God’s word, you have some work to do, some things to learn, to skills to hone. You have a world to remake.

Amen.