St. Gregory’s Church Woodstock

Sunday, 7 December, 2008, II Advent

The Rev’d Susan Auchincloss

Matthew 1:1-8

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

        This past summer up at Byrdcliffe I sat in on a conversation. The five artists-in-residence had arrived and they were relaxing on the porch at the Villetta, having lunch with Jake Berthot, the painter who would serve as their mentor.  They peppered Jake with friendly but hard-hitting questions, and Jake explained how he works.  Starting with a blank canvas, he draws lines, dividing the canvas into geometric segments.  Then he begins to paint.  In time, the lines no longer show, yet he continues to lay on paint.  One of the artists-in-residence asked him if the lines imposed limitations on what he could do with his brush or the paint.  Not at all, was the answer.  In response to another question he said that he tries to paint, in a landscape, for instance, what you sense is there but cannot quite see – a rock, say, or a tree.  Someone who knows Berthot’s recent paintings might say they depict dark smoke moving in a forest just as dusk turns to night.  Dull?  Not at all!  His paintings teem with excitement and mystery and an eerie beauty.  But what has all this to do with the biblical text?  Let it serve as a background while we sort out a long-standing point of contention with the Christian church.

        The Gospel reading speaks of two baptisms: John’s baptism of repentance and Jesus’ baptism in the Holy Spirit.  They differ greatly, but have also been greatly misunderstood.  In fact, from the early days of the church until now, what should be a healthy tension between these two baptisms has more often been a source of opposition.  This morning I want to suggest a proper relationship between – let’s call them – the church of John and the church of Jesus.

            First, the baptism of repentance.  When you hear repentance, what springs to mind? Sin, certainly; and sin involves judgment; and judgment involves fear; and fear involves scarcity.  The numbing litany can go on.  What lies at the heart of it?  Isn’t it fear?  As a member of the church of John, I fear that there is not enough to go around – not enough forgiveness, not enough grace, not enough love.  To get mine I must make myself pure, righteous, and moral.  I seek out like-minded people and we hammer out tests of orthodoxy.  We feel judged and so we judge.  We stake out sterile environments against the risk of contamination – against ‘moral lepers’.  We deal in the coin of comparisons; for fear, ever at our ear, murmurs: but are you clean enough?  We can only answer: compared to her I am; compared to him I am; compared to them we are.  We live immersed in a community founded on purity; and most crucially, what we stand against holds us together.   

            What marks baptism in the Holy Spirit?  This church comes together, not around cleansing, but around celebrating.  Celebrating what?  Celebrating unlimited abundance and generosity, celebrating forgiveness and reconciliation, celebrating compassion, and a creative spirit.  If the church of John sets up boundaries, the church of Jesus lives to remove boundaries.  If John’s church lives by the cookie standard, where the more I give away the less I have; Jesus’ church lives by the candle standard, where the more light I give away the more I have.  If John’s church stands for the visible and rational, Jesus’ church stands for the invisible and paradoxical.  In short, the church of John sees a moral universe, while the church of Jesus sees a mystical universe.   

            I have been talking about these baptisms in an either/or way for heuristic purposes; in reality, of course, every church combines an uneasy mixture of both.  Be that as it may, this either/or approach to faith has opened up a fault line in church history that runs from the day of the apostles to the present day – and this fault line runs not only through the church, but through our own lives.  What would it take to bring these two churches together to strengthen and not oppose each other?   

            First, the church of John would need to jettison its false view of repentance.  Instead, let it think of repentance as sculpting.  To bring out the form I see in a block of marble, I chip away bits and chunks of stone.  I reject them as not appropriate for the form I have in mind.  Doesn’t that describe repentance?  Rejecting things I do or say or think that stand in the way of the form I want?  It is not a question of being against those things.  It is not a question of fear and guilt and shame.  I simply chip away in a steady, on-going, life-long effort of rejection.  I stand against nothing, not my sins and certainly not myself.  God is not a God of opposition, but of creation.  Are not creation and rejection two sides of one coin?   

            Next, for the two churches to strengthen each other, the church of Jesus would need to share its great purpose – none other than Jesus’ own purpose.  Jesus came to let the world know the true nature of God: that God is a God who can only love.  He came to let the world know that this life is not all there is; a larger life surrounds us – our true life that is one with all of creation; and anyone may enter.  He came to let the world know that we are loved without condition, for the stench of our sin never reaches God’s nostrils.  We are forgiven even before we confess.  God wills joy for us, joy everlasting; and not when we die, but now.  God can only give, and gives to all, evenly, without counting the cost.  So the church of Jesus has a message to spread and we spread that message best by living it.  And we live it with passion, for a great purpose demands passion.   

            The church of John needs that great purpose; because purpose does not reach too far here.  Fear has held it in check.  In fact, purpose has not gone far beyond me and mine and our purity.  Without a great purpose, a purpose vastly larger than ourselves, we can only gather around what we stand against.  On that basis, rage must take the place of passion.  Besides, to indulge passion is to risk sin.  To risk sin is to risk losing my place in line when they ladle out the thin soup from the half-empty pot.  Is that any way to live?  Let the church of John catch fire from the church of Jesus.
 

            Finally, for the two churches to strengthen each other, the church of John must share the great value it places on repentance.  Not the old, self-defeating repentance, but the new repentance, fueled by the need for strength to serve.  The church of Jesus needs this discipline of structure to support its great purpose.  Without it, living the good life can become an end in itself – truly the emptiest of purposes.
 

            Isn’t this the spiritual battle of our individual lives as well?  To hold onto our great purpose?  To spread the truth of God’s abundance by trusting it and living it?  To live in the tension between passion and structure?    Let Jake Berthot’s paintings sum up what I am saying, for words are quickly forgotten.  He gives us a surface of haunting beauty, an invitation into some great mystery.  Under that lies what he cannot do without: geometric structure.  Flesh and bones.  Truly, structure without passion lacks life; while passion without structure runs amok.  With both our great purpose becomes possible.  In fact, passion with structure created the world; and as many lives and works of art show, passion with structure continues to create the world.  Amen.