Sunday, January 13, 2013

Putting love on public display



Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

On the day that I was baptized I woke up on a couch in the living room of my friend Phil.  I let myself out and rode my bicycle through the empty fog-shrouded streets of the Mission District in San Francisco.  When I got home I ate some breakfast, showered, put on a white shirt and walked over to St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church.  For a while that morning it seemed as though the clouds were lifting, so no one bothered to extend the retractable awning that covers the outdoor space at St. Gregory’s where the font is located.  But when we were all standing out there, just about the time we had finished reciting the baptismal covenant, and the priest was beginning the prayer over the water, it started to drizzle.  Not rain, exactly, but that heavy, falling mist that often comes in coastal Northern California.   Nobody seemed to mind, and by the time we all processed inside for the Eucharist it had stopped.  But it pleased me then, and it still does, that at my baptism everyone got wet together.
And that’s how the Gospel according to Luke describes the baptism of Jesus.  Mark and Matthew both talk about the all the people who went out to the Jordan to be baptized by John, but when Jesus’ turn comes the focus of their narration zooms in on him.  He comes out from Galilee, and if anyone comes with him, Matthew and Mark don’t say so.  They also don’t say whether anyone but John is there when he’s baptized. But Luke tells it this way—“when all the people had been baptized, Jesus also had been baptized, and was praying.”  Jesus’ baptism is in the same frame with all the people.  Everyone gets wet together. 
The way Luke tells the story it is not a private moment between Jesus and John—it is a public event.     And there’s another way Luke makes this point.  Mark and Matthew describe the theophany that follows the baptism, the heavens opening and the spirit descending, as a subjective experience.  It is something that Jesus saw, and they leave it ambiguous whether anyone else did.  But Luke describes it from point of view of his omniscient third-person narrator.  It is something that happened.  It is, you might say, a historical fact.   Matthew and Mark both talk about the Spirit that Jesus sees “descending like a dove.”  For Luke this is no metaphor—“the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove.”  Again—not a mystical vision, not a subjective experience, but a matter of the historical record, a public event that everyone could see.
I think Luke tells the story this way because he’s trying get us to shift our focus, from something that happened a long time ago to something that happens now.  He’s trying to get us to think of Jesus’ baptism as something that he does with all of us, something that still happens and that we can see with our own eyes every time we see one of our friends, one of our children or grandchildren get baptized.  He wants us to think of the gift that comes to us through baptism, the baptism we share with Jesus.  He wants us to know that this gift of a new life of grace, of belonging to God’s family, of being the child of a proud and loving God, doesn’t depend on having a mystical experience.  The gift of the Holy Spirit that baptism gives all of us together does not depend on having some particular feeling of being “born again.”  It is an objective fact.
For Luke the proof of this fact is the existence of the church.  The fact that we are here, that we gather to hear the scriptures and remember Jesus, to break the bread of his passion and drink the wine of his resurrection—this could not and would not happen if the Holy Spirit were not here, drawing us together, brooding over us like a hen sheltering her chicks under her wings.  The ordinariness of the church, the obviousness of it, is precisely the point.  God’s love and good will toward the world is right out there in public, where anyone can find it, and come and get it for free.
A priest friend of mine likes to tell a story about a time he attended the Great Vigil of Easter at Grace Cathedral.  As you may know, in the ancient church the Easter Vigil was the primary worship service of the year.  It is a baptismal liturgy, and that night at Grace Cathedral was no exception.  There were several candidates for baptism, both youth and adults, who had spent many months in prayer and study, preparing for what was no doubt to be a profound religious experience. 
When the big moment arrived they processed through the darkened cathedral, following the deacon carrying the paschal candle to baptismal font, amid clouds of incense and clergy in their finest vestments, and the choir chanting a psalm in the ancient style.  And when the last of the candidates had been baptized and anointed, Alan Jones, who was the Dean of the Cathedral and the presider at the liturgy, looked around at the crowd that was assembled and called, “is there anyone else here who wants to be baptized?  Anyone?”  For all the great pains that were taken to invest this sacrament with awe and mystery, for all that was done to ensure that those who received it found it a potent and life-changing experience, Dean Jones made it clear that the essence of this sacrament is available to anyone.  Even if you just happened to be there, and hadn’t prepared at all, and didn’t have a sponsor, and got caught up in the spirit of the moment and decided “what the heck?  Why not?  Why not now?”  
In Luke’s gospel Jesus learns the truth of his divine nature via the public address system.  He receives the gift of the Holy Spirit in bodily form that anyone can see.  Everything that he does after that will be a demonstration of how to make that nature visible to others, so they can see themselves in the same light.  The whole work of the rest of his life will be to share the Holy Spirit in concrete ways.  But the full meaning and purpose of Jesus’ baptism will only become evident on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends on his disciples, in plain view of people from many nations, to be the ongoing, concrete, historical manifestation of God’s love for the world.
Which is where we come in.  There are consequences to receiving this gift.  It brings with it questions of responsibility, and the confession that we don’t always live according to that truth.  It comes with a call to action to make God’s love for all her children concrete, visible, and real.  It urges us to confront the powers that continue to organize and administer the world as if there was no God, or God does not love us, or God only loves a few of us, to denounce their hypocrisies and expose the lies that they tell.
But mostly the Holy Spirit returns us again and again to the gift we received in our baptism, which is the basic truth of our belonging.  Everything we do as individual Christians, and as the church, flows from this source.   God chose us, created us, loves us, is well-pleased with us, and this is the defining truth of who we are, and a gift that we are sent to share.  We can verify this truth by our own most profound religious experiences, but those can be few and far between.  In the meantime we depend on each other to remind us.  That is why we do liturgies, and celebrate sacraments, do public reading of the scriptures and preaching about them.  That is the purpose of our community fellowship and our works of mercy and justice in the world—to make a public demonstration of God’s love for this world, which is always true, whether we know it or not, whether we feel like it or not, whether we deserve it or not. 

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.