St. Gregory’s Church Woodstock

Sunday, 11 January, 2009, Second Sunday after the Epiphany

The Rev’d Susan Auchincloss

Mark 1:4-11

For today’s reading go to: http://bible.oremus.org

            Perhaps some of you, when you were children, read a book by Charles Kingsley called The Water Babies.  It was published in 1863 and became a staple of children’s literature into the 1920's.  I must have inherited my mother’s copy.  In any case, the color plates drew me into another world, as did the story.  Briefly, the story is this.  Tom, the little boy protagonist, lives the harsh life of a London chimney sweep.  One day he falls out of a chimney into one of the rooms of the house where he is working.  Appalled and disgusted at the sight of this filthy little person, the family has him thrown out.  Accidentally he falls into a river and drowns.  The rest of the book details his adventures as a water baby in a beautiful underwater world with other water babies.  I am invoking that image as a way to talk about Baptism; because on the face of it, today’s reading presents a puzzling picture of Baptism.

            Does it strike you as odd that Jesus came to be baptized?  What did he want with a baptism of repentance?  What did he have to repent?  What do you suppose he said, when “the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were... confessing their sins?”  Of course, if he had stayed away then he would have had something to confess: the sin of pride.  But he did not stay away, so something else must have been going on. 

            I wonder if Jesus wasn’t drawn to Baptism for two reasons.  First, he identified with the whole human race.  If humanity had sinned he had sinned.  This was not just an intellectual conviction of his; he felt it.  He felt the burden we carry from our sins –  the remorse, the grief, the pain.  He stood in the water, conscious of all our acts of greed and anger – all the ways we serve ourselves at the expense of others – and he said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”  Mightn’t that have been his first motivation?

            The second would go even deeper.  Picture the scene.  John the Baptist, we are told, ate locusts and wild honey; he wore camel hair, held in place by a strip of leather.  In other words, John came as a wild man from the wilderness.  His Baptism was no gentle dipping into a little font.  Jesus must have watched as John seized those ahead of him by the hair and plunged them bodily into the river.  Surely the wild man must have held their heads under water a long time, long enough so they would realize that they had entered another realm, a completely other realm.  Jesus knew he needed to enter that other realm; and that was his second reason to come for Baptism.

            By starting with the story of Tom and the water babies I am trying to suggest that in a sense Jesus never did come up out of the river Jordan.  He lived the rest of his life in that under-water world.  For most of us Baptism is a quick dipping at best, but then we return to the world as we know it, the work-a-day world of getting and spending.  We will spend the rest of our lives learning, bit by bit, to live in that other world which Jesus entered at his Baptism and never left.  The Gospel casts that other world as living in the Holy Spirit, or living in Christ, or living eternal life – all different formulas for a mystery that cannot be put into words, but which can be known.

            In the Episcopal Church we baptize infants.  This is like opening a bank account for them and depositing $1000.  They have it; it is theirs; and – at least as banks should work – nothing can take it away.  However, many of us grow up, lose track of our bank book, so to speak, and never realize: “Hey!  I am a person of substance.”  Other of us grow up very much aware of our inheritance.  But how do we claim it?  How do we start to work with that spiritual capital to make it grow?  To claim it and work with it requires a conscious commitment of our lives to Christ.  To put it in terms of today’s image, this is a commitment to learn to live under water.  The sacrament of Confirmation gives us the solemn opportunity to affirm the commitment that others made for us at our Baptism.

            Most of us know people who have been unwilling to make that commitment.  “Why should I commit myself to one religion?” they ask.  “Why limit myself?”  “Why go under water, so to speak, in one religion and lose my ability to dip into them all?”  To reply, I think of George Bush and his fly-by over New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  The smells never touched his nostrils; he never saw what treasures and trash floated in the waters; he witnessed none of the countless, small acts of heroism, nor the heart-breaking beauty of people enduring thirst and heat in patience.  We must immerse ourselves in one religion if we hope to learn and grow spiritually from it.

            It need not be Christianity.  All of the great religions that have stood the test of time lead to the sea; so if we were born into Judaism or Islam or Buddhism – or if we chose one of them as an adult – they can lead us to the sea.  I am sticking with that image of rivers and sea, because it allows me to say this: the nature of the spiritual landscape is such that we cannot get there overland.  Let me explain why.

            We enter into a religion in order to draw close to God.  Each religion creates its own world of faith – its own stories, teachings, rituals and ceremonies, disciplines, holy days, deities – and they all work together organically, the way cilia work in our windpipes, to move the believer closer to God.  We need to enter that world of faith to be transformed by it; a PhD in comparative religion is like a fly-by; it will not bring about transformation.  Commitment is a must.  Immersion is a must; and Baptism signals that.  We cannot think our way to God; we can only love our way to God with our whole being.

            Let me liken Baptism to a marriage, not a civil marriage but a Christian marriage.  Entering into a Christian marriage, we commit to making every joy and every misery of our shared life into a rung on our spiritual ladder.  Much more difficult than a civil marriage, I vow to make you and our marriage, for better or for worse, a chief means of my spiritual growth.  Thus the sacrament of marriage serves as a God-given elixir for spiritual development.  Let me comment as an aside that to withhold this means of grace from homosexual couples constitutes a form of spiritual abuse; and worse yet, we do it in God’s name.  My point, however, is that Baptism, like a Christian marriage, signals that I am no longer looking around for the perfect religion – assuming I ever was.  I have chosen Christ and the Christian religion and I will immerse myself in the life it offers and trust it to carry me to the sea.

            This is the spirit in which we need to hear a passage such as this from the Acts of the Apostles.  Of Jesus, it says, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”  This is speaking from within the Christian religion; it is not making any claim about other religions.  They have their own faith world.