 Over the Face of the
Waters
A
Sermon preached at St. Luke's Church
by The Rev. Anne E. Hodges-Copple
on the First Sunday of Epiphany, 9 January 2006
Once
again our Sunday Lectionary brings us back to John the Baptist at the
River Jordan. I suppose it is terrible for a preacher to say this, but
isn’t this story getting a little overworked? We heard the first
eight verses of this account from Mark just a month ago as the Gospel
for the Second Sunday in Advent. A similar account was read from the
Gospel of John just a week later. We heard it so much its hard to
really hear it again. John the Baptizer, warning everyone to get ready
for the one who is coming. John offering a baptism of repentance by
water, but another one coming, bringing something more.
This time, however, something is different.
This time, as opposed to previous accounts which stopped short of
the appearance of Jesus, Jesus arrives.
Today the gospel takes a different emphasis.
The Messiah has arrived. The voice from heaven knows that. We the
listeners know that. But it will take awhile for John and the rest of
the disciples to fully understand this.
We are no longer being asked to focus upon John’s
prophetic role in announcing the coming of the Messiah. There is no
more waiting. The Messiah, Emmanuel, God’s anointed one has come. Jesus
is among us. And my how time flies.
Seems like yesterday he was just a baby
wrapped in swaddling clothes. Do you suppose that John, watching his
cousin work his way through the crowd, thought to himself: “My, how you
have grown, Jesus. Not long ago we were children eavesdropping on our
mothers; we listened to them tell stories about our births. Funny how
parents love to tell and children love to hear the stories of their
births. When they thought we weren’t listening, they told some pretty
wild stories about us: how impossible it was that each should
conceive; how inevitable is was that each would conceive. strange
stories about angelic pronouncements. But look at us now.”
It makes you wonder, what, in God’s name, is going
on here at this river Jordan?
It seems we keep coming back to baptism, in
scripture as in our own lives. We keep coming back to baptism as a
starting point for understanding our purpose as disciples. We keep
coming back to baptism as place where life both ends and begins.
Baptism is where we surrender the safety of what is
comfortable and graspable for the risk for what is possible and
ineffable. But the sacrament of baptism is not just a one time
event, where we sink into the water of the flood, or where we pass
through the Red Sea over to a new life. Baptism is also like a compass
that continues to provide us a sure and true direction home even
if the path we need to take is not straight or safe or certain.
Perhaps we keep coming back to the river Jordan and
baptism because somehow new life, new purpose, new meaning, new
relationships seem to emerge from a mysterious watery deep that
is as ancient as the Genesis Story of Creation.
Let’s look back at those first verses
from Genesis:
“ In
the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was
a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”
While not forgetting that all language is
metaphorical and that this account is written in a particularly poetic
fashion, please notice there is a mysterious presence of
water even before Day and Night are created. “A wind from God
swept over the face of the waters.” It appears that
water, or something like it, was there even before Day and Night were
created. Out of this water, out of the face of the deep, God created
life. Out of this chaos and formlessness came relationship and purpose.
Now, if ever an honest to gosh theologian asks you
out of what did God make the creation, the correct answer, strictly
speaking is: nothing. God made all of creation out of nothing. Ex
nihilo. Nothing can exist before God because God is the creator of
everything. All that is comes from God. God is existence, being itself.
Simply put there is nothing before there is God.
Even so, seems like water made a very, very early
appearance. Water is a component of creation, but a seemingly essential
component.
Still, before even water, or the formless void, or
the primordial chaos, there was God. And there was the Spirit of God.
“a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Now the Holy
Spirit as a member of the Holy Trinity is a proper noun and a doctrine
the church came up with years after Jesus had come and gone. But
the Holy Spirit was there from the beginning; the holy
spirit and God go way back. way, way back. to the beginning. Just like
a potter working with clay or a painter working in oils, the Holy
Spirit has been working in and through water FOREVER.
Now let me point out that the Son of God is there,
too, in the beginning. Again, no proper names yet. No Jesus, no Christ,
no Messiah. but the second person of the Trinity is there, nonetheless:
“Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” God
spoke. God acted. The voice of God is the Word of God
Speaking/commanding/performing/all the same. The Word of God is the
Action of God.
Or, as it is more beautifully expressed in the
Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word….”In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in
the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and
without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in
him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” All
that, right in those first verses of Genesis: Creator, Word, Spirit.
So let’s return to the River Jordan. It may
have appeared to John the Baptist and to the crowd and maybe even to
Mary and Joseph’s boy, Jesus, that God the Father was only just
now communicating with his Son, the Beloved, anointing and
adopting him by means of a type of heavenly Hedwig. But, in
fact these three had been one from the beginning.
There is a sense in which Jesus’ baptism is a
continuation of God’s revealing himself to a creation that has been
very slow to understand and obey our Creator.
Still, this event is not a repeat of earlier
attempts to communicate. The baptism of Jesus is a singular event. In
this act, God made man comes us to greet us in the most intimate,
personal, graspable way: as son, as friend, as shepherd and companion.
as brother.
Of course, this is the same God who speaks in Psalm
22 , whose voice sounds like the thunder of the storm; whose
voice command the earth to quake such that mountains in the distance
appear to gyrate like animals. But this same God has emptied himself of
such glorious, exalted and frankly, frightening manifestations so as to
come in human form; to be among us as one who understands us from the
human inside out.
Here at the river Jordan, the one almighty God in
three persons is ready to start again:
Baptism is that strange reminder of the weaving together of loss and
gain. We lose our lives in the waters of baptism. It is a ritualistic
drowning that gets rather lost in our pretty ceremony at a beautiful
font. The baptism of John reminds us of all the sin we need
to lose.
Baptism in the Name of Father/Son and Holy Spirit
reveals not just what we have to lose, but all we have to gain.
Because Jesus has risen from the waters of his own baptism and from
death into life. we know God will strengthen us to rise to any occasion
of trial or trepidation.
When we think we can fully tame the forces of nature, take control of
our circumstances and manage our lives without any assistance, then we
have forgotten the mysterious power of the Holy Spirit moving
over the face of the deep.
If we believe we are entitled to a good life rather
than offered eternal life, then we have forgotten that we are the
creation whose only purpose is to praise the Creator.
Christopher: it is doubtful you are going to
remember much about this day. Before you know it you will be
three/twelve/thirty three and then collecting Social Security, if it is
still around. But I have a strong suspicion will you will hear
lots of stories about water. From conception until you were born, a
kind of holy water know as amniotic fluid protected you. Around your
first birthday, the from the face of the deep, the watery chaos we call
a hurricane tried to assert its dominance over your life and countless
others. Like Noah you and your family survived the flood waters. You
and your family have crossed various kinds of Red Seas, to emerge on
the other side of life, ready to rebuild and renew your lives.
But today, in the waters of baptism, Jim Crave
will symbolically carry Christopher into the river Jordan.
Christopher’s parents are surrendering him, so to speak, just as they
surrendered his sister two years ago to a new life in Christ. And after
Jim has dried the waters of baptism from Christopher’s forehead, he
will take oil and anoint his head and mark him as Christ’s own forever.
It will be an invisible but also an indelible. Though the grace of God
will wash away his sins, nothing in creation can wash away the fact
that he is joined to God as a beloved Son, watched over, treasured and
never, never to be abandoned. Christopher Puckett, who knows if our
lives will ever cross again on this side of the river Jordan.
But by the waters of baptism, our lives are forever
joined in the glory of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy
Spirit.
Amen.
Genesis 1:1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11
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