The Baptism of Jesus | Mark 1:1-9

*Preached at Grace North Church January 16th, 2000*

When I was freshly out of High School, I went with my best friend Bob to a wooded piece of property owned by his family near the Oregon border for a week of camping, swimming, and overall relaxation. It was a marvelous week, and Bob and I spent a lot of it exploring a river. For several days in a row we would don sandals and bathing suits and go rock-hopping for a couple of miles downriver.

One day we discovered the most idyllic scene imaginable. It was a deep pool of dark blue water, banked by rocks as large as a house, shaded by giant trees. The wind was light, and the rustling of the leaves was counterpoint to the river's melody. Both of us were awe-struck, speechless. We stood motionless for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, Bob spoke, "This is where I will be baptized." I looked at him like he was from Mars. "What?" I asked incredulously. "I want to be baptized," he answered, "here." He breathed a deep sigh and closed his eyes. After a moment he opened them again and turned to me, "Will you do it? Will you baptize me?"

I hemmed and hawed for a moment. I was still a pretty strict evangelical Christian at the time, and Bob was a universalist raised by Hippie parents. "Um, well," I started, flustered, "Do you even know what that MEANS?"

"I know what it means to ME," Bob said. "Will you do it?"

Well, who was I to deny him? "Sure," I said. We both gritted our teeth and entered the frigid water. Assuming the proper Baptist position for Baptism, I placed my right hand on Bob's back, and kept the left one free to pinch his nose at the proper time.

"Have you, Bob West, accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?"

"I have," he said.

I was SURE we were going to be struck by lightening, because I knew for a fact that what Bob meant by that was not what I meant by it. Still, the proper answer had been given, and so with a shaky voice I continued.

"Then by this act you symbolize the dying of your old self, and the resurrection of your new self in Christ." I pinched his nose with my left hand and leaned him back on my right until he was underwater. He broke the surface to the music of birds in the trees, and sunlight flashing out from behind the thunderheads.

"Thanks," he said smiling. And I gave him a hug in congratulations, though privately, I wasn't at all sure what I was congratulating him on at the time.

Well, time goes by, and people change. I feel like I understand Bob's baptism much better now than I did then, perhaps better than he himself understood the act at the time. There certainly has been little consensus on just what the act means throughout history, but we have continued to do it, just the same. Let's take a look at what it has meant to folks in various times and places, and perhaps, Bob's baptism will make sense to you, too.

Baptism is not a ritual of Christian origin. In Jesus' own time, baptism was a familiar symbol, used in many religions, including Judaism. In fact, if you were to go up the street to the Jewish synagogue and asked to convert, you would be baptized just as surely as you would have been if you were converting two thousand years ago.

To the Jews today, baptism is a ritual of cleansing. Of washing away impurities and standing before God as a whole person. It isn't so much tied to the idea of sin as it is to the idea of pure intention, of readiness, and worthiness to stand before God. Baptism signifies the voluntary "submersion" of a man or woman into the Torah, which bathes one's life with blessing.

But in Jesus' day, the Baptism of John was a highly-charged political act. You see, the temple in Jerusalem was run by the Sadducees, who were largely made up of the priestly tribe. These folks administered the sacrifices and other rites at the temple, and although people revered the temple highly, the Sadducees were woefully out of step with public sentiment. The Sadduccees had something to lose: the temple, and with it, their jobs, if they did not cooperate, or as some would say, collaborate, with Rome. The Sadducees were also extremely secular, in spite of their position at the temple. Unlike the Pharisees and most of the populace, they did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, and felt that all that was needed to please God was to keep the proper ritual schedule, regardless of what was in a man's heart.

John the Baptist was a member of this tribe. His father, in fact, had been the chief priest. But instead of joining the priesthood at the temple, he rejected the whole lot of them, and went out into the desert and began to preach.

So when people started pouring out of Jerusalem in droves to hear this guy, people were incensed. Here was this religious renegade performing sacred rites on his own authority, not under the "proper" auspices of the temple clergy at all. This was John's intention, I believe. The temple baptism had become an empty rite, like circumcision. But John preached a circumcision of the heart, not of the body.

John's baptism called people not to ritual purity, but to real, existential repentance. To turn from one's ways and be totally cleansed of the past, and of their collaboration with the Roman invaders. It added another layer to the meaning of baptism, and made it a wild and dangerous act of political defiance, and therefore an act that carried great conviction and commitment.

It was to this kind of baptism that Jesus submitted, but did it have an even different meaning for him? I believe that it did. In all acts of baptism, something is being left behind, and something new and better is chosen. John's baptism rejected the hypocrisy of the Sadducees and the temple, and chose nakedness before God.

But if you'll recall Jesus' preaching, Jesus' main opponents were not the Sadducees, but the Pharisees. Now, in a way, we can see Pharisees and Sadducees kind of like Catholics and Protestants. Sadducees were convinced that as long as the proper rituals were performed, a person was all right before God, just like Catholics might have taught before Vatican II. But the Pharisees rejected this teaching, and believed that following God's laws was what assured one's salvation. Kind of like evangelical Protestants today, Pharisees were very strict in their behavior and very picky about their theology.

The Pharisaical tradition was the one Jesus was raised in. He was himself a Pharisee, of course, as all rabbis are from the Pharisaical school. We know now that several of Jesus' sayings in the New Testament were not original to him, but were quotes from previous rabbis, such as Hillel. But Jesus, by submitting to the baptism of John, was making a statement of his own. His baptism was a ritual turning away from legalism as the path to salvation, and the embracing of a new kind of relationship with God: one based on intention. Not rituals, not laws, not any outward observance, but upon the private, internal embracing of the living God as one's Father and friend.

Something died that day at the Jordan river, and something was born anew. So it is with all baptisms. As the Christian church began to spread, baptism became the symbol for the leaving of one's old religion behind, and the embracing of Christianity. Then in the fifth century Augustine invented the notion of original sin, and baptism in the West would never be the same. For while the Eastern Orthodox churches even today believe that everyone is born without guilt, the West followed Augustine into a terrible perversion of theology which says that we are all born bearing the guilt of Adam. This focus on sin, and especially original sin has been a plague on the West, for it has convinced fifteen hundred years of people that they were just plain born bad.

This theology cause quite a delimma for Mark and Rita when they contacted me and asked if I would baptize their baby. We met for dinner, and Rita told me about her strict Catholic family, and how they had to have their baby baptized to satisfy her parents, but she just couldn't stand the thought of her baby possessing original sin, or submitting her to some ritual to remove something she so strongly disapproved of.

I told them I sympathized, and we had a wonderful talk about baptism for adults, and baptism for children. We all agreed that when adults are baptized, it can have many meanings, of leaving things behind, and choosing a new life. But for a child...well, that was something altogether different. I told them that the church also teaches that baptism was a ceremony of welcoming the child into the community of saints. This seemed much better to them, and in the end, we worked together to construct a "welcome to earth" ceremony for their baby Camille. We held the ceremony in the woods, and although Rita's relatives found it very odd indeed, the fact that it was a Catholic priest performing the rites kept them from complaining too loudly. It was a lovely ceremony, and Camille was properly welcomed.

Each of us is different inside, and each of us come to our experiences from vastly different perspectives. Of course baptism is going to mean something unique for each one of us. For John, it was leaving the temple behind, and embracing purity of heart. For Jesus, it was leaving the Pharisees and all their laws behind, and embracing the God within. For Mark and Rita, it was leaving an outdated theology behind, and embracing their daughter as a precious gift from God. And for Bob, for Bob I believe it was leaving the baggage of Christianity behind, and embracing the Jesus of his understanding and experience.

What does baptism mean to you? If you were to undergo it today, what would you be leaving behind, and what would you embrace? What ideas, experiences, disappointments or hurts would you wash away in that water, and into what new life do you desire to rise forth to meet?

In the Catholic tradition, there is a "little baptism" that takes place every week, and in some monasteries, every day. It is a ritual of sprinkling holy water called the asperges, and its purpose is to remind us of our baptism and to renew our commitments to God and to one another.

Instead of the regular meditational prayer this morning, I would like to perform the ancient ritual of the asperges. This bowl contains holy water, and with this branch, traditionally a hyssop branch, I'd like to sprinkle you, lightly. So do cover up anything that shouldn't get wet, let us pause a moment to ask ourselves what it is that we leave behind, and what it is we most want to embrace.

Dear friends,
this water will be used to remind us of our baptism,
of the waters that cleanse and make us new,
and of the waters of the Earth that refresh and sustain all beings.
May God bless me as I perform this service.
With the Earth's hallowed waters do I consecrate
this holy altar and sanctuary.
And bless also this people who gather to
celebrate an astounding love. Amen.