Baptizing Jesus

Text: Mark 1:4-11

Confirmation classes began this Friday. You’ve raised another bunch of independent thinkers. We asked about their faith, and they said they could select what they believe, based on what worked for them. ‘How dare you?’ I thought, as ‘designated old fogey’ in the room. Surely, are children meant to be seen, not heard, and to accept what they are told and taught. Surely we don’t want a ‘pliable biable’, loose-leaf highlights only.

But I began to remember my own youth, and our preacher George Goth, with whom you could never agree since he contradicted himself in the course of every sermon, saying ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.’ We’d go home and argue about his opinions, even in our early teens, knowing we could, and should, think for ourselves. Perhaps things have not changed that much since the late ‘60’s after all.

Peter C Newman wrote a popular book a while ago, here in York Region. It was called The Canadian Revolution: From Deference to Defiance and he may have overstated his case that our colonial submissiveness has been replaced by an Americanized aggression. We were never submissive, just respectful, and we knew how to resist what didn’t work for us, and how to cooperate with whoever and whatever might.

Barrie Wilson, down the road at York University, wrote another favorite in our church library: How Jesus Became a Christian. He muses at how a good Jewish boy, a mystic maybe, and not a self-believer, got remade into the key figure of a whole religion called Christian. He points out that we started ‘baptizing Jesus’, restating Jesus’ life and teaching in terms of our Christianity, from the earliest scripture writing, and since.

Sure enough, as we start the ‘year of Mark’ in the lectionary, and a study of Mark in Lent, we get hints of the earliest process of baptizing Jesus. Mark has no Christmas story. Bang, it begins with John the Baptist, preaching a baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sin, and promising someone greater soon, who would over a baptism of the Spirit. He meets Jesus, a thirty year old still living at home with his parents, and the rest is history, and a tale of hope for all you with young adults still in the basement.

Scholars tell us that the stories and traditions of ‘John the baptizer’ reflect one movement that centred on repentance. They shared the title of Snoopy’s book of theology in Peanuts: “Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?” That’s not a great guilt trip. It’s an admission that we might not yet do and say all that we were made to do and say – we might yet change for the better – improve.

Another movement in the merger we call now call Christianity was a Spirit-filled one of the courage to be. En-couraged, inspired, filled with God-stuff, this was a positive energy to complement what might have gone negative in repentance circles, or legalistic in early circumcision movements. These’ ‘Jesus people’ are mentioned in Paul’s early letters – and are the audience that ‘wrote’ other parts of this ‘baptism of Jesus’.

We have shaped and re-shaped how we construe and make sense of Jesus from the very beginning. God knows he did not do it all! We learned together with what to resist, and with whom and what to cooperate, and told it as Jesus stories, gospels. Repentance alone was not enough, even for John the baptizer. We needed baptism of the Spirit, and Jesus gets associated with it. In Mark, only Jesus sees the heavens open, and the voice affirm him as the ‘beloved.’ He gets it – the crowds don’t yet.

How dare those kids presume to pick and choose and tailor their beliefs by what works for them and makes sense to them? How dare they not! They will baptize Jesus in their turn, as every generation from the beginning has done, more or less consciously. As Daniel Berrigan, the American Jesuit anti-war and civil rights leader of the 60’s said:

The real effort, never really done with, is to discern what Christ is saying to us from within the real world. All else is a mortician’s job, or a child’s game.

Yesterday would have been the 83rd birthday of Martin Luther King, had he not been assassinated in April 1963. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day in the US, as they remember his nonviolent campaign in Birmingham and Selma Alabama, and across the southern states, to end racial segregation.

We had a great afternoon session at the church today with speakers from Sikh, Zorastrian and Jewish communities and our own Ruth Noble speaking on prophets and visionaries like Martin Luther King. I spoke in the evening at an Islamic event and drew on the same stories. I used one version of the ’10 Commandments’ of the Birmingham pledge signed by civil rights marchers in the morning, and another in the evening:

1. As you prepare to march meditate on the life and teachings of Jesus
2. Remember the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation – not victory.
3. Walk and talk in the manner of love; for God is love.
4. Pray daily to be used by God that all men and women might be free.
5. Sacrifice personal wishes that all might be free.
6. Observe with friend and foes the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7. Perform regular service for others and the world.
8. Refrain from violence of fist, tongue and heart.
9. Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10. Follow the directions of movement leaders and of captains on demonstrations.

I told you this morning that our pastor Dr. George Goth took time off work and went to march in Alabama with his classmates from Union Theological Seminary in New York. (Not all things American are bad!) Ruth Noble told us this afternoon that her father the United Church minister picketed the American embassy and had his phone tapped and an RCMP file opened with congregants’ help. We remember how they baptized Jesus.

How dare we baptize Jesus? How dare we pick and choose and restate how we talk about him and construe and make sense of him? How dare we not! We’ve been ‘baptizing Jesus’ from the beginning, and each generation has the challenge of discerning what we resist and with whom and what we cooperate. Thank God!

I closed the service again with the words of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber:

We cannot avoid.
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion.
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction,
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully

Go on, baptize Jesus! It’s up to you, up to us. It always has been, and always will be. And that is, as the confirmation class already knows, his irresistible appeal!
Prayer for Grace

God, bless us busy ones,
Who dare not slow down
Like the Roadrunner in the cartoon
Already past the precipice and in space
Spinning legs in midair futility
Before looking down, and beginning the awful fall….

God, bless us passive ones
Who dare not move a muscle
Like a wild animal scared of predators
Trembling, unable even to run away
Living with fear and threat….
Before even identifying the scary Other…

For we busy ones, and we passive ones,
Have gathered here, now, to listen
What word do you have for our hearts
O God, give us ears to hear.

Not simply a word of knowing or believing
But also a word of hope and encouragement
Of grace and of mercy
A word to address our frantic busyness,
Shift the burdens you never laid,
A word to comfort our paralyzed passivity,
to give heart to our resistance and to our cooperation

Relieve our fears, en-courage us
And bless us here –
That we might in turn bless your world,
As you did, and do, and will,
In Jesus Christ, whom we baptize in turn…
Amen