January 8, 2012. Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, B. St. Francis Church

Rev’d Jennifer Phillips Gen1:1-5;Acts 19:1-7;Mk1:4-11

When I went off to Hidden Lake Girl Scout Camp, near Lake George, NY, in the fifth grade, I discovered I was the only child in my unit who did not already know how to swim. This quickly became public knowledge since on the first day, a swimming test was administered to assure that all campers who would be using the canoes and rowboats were swimmers. We were all forced to jump off the dock into the deep end, even me, protesting (rather quietly) that I didn‘t know how to swim. I had to be hauled out mortified and a bit scared by one of the counselors like a drowning cat. Horribly embarrassing! The good news was that I had one to one instruction from a lovely counselor and in three days I was floating and swimming and then boating with the rest. But I remember the dark lake water closing over my head.

Maybe you have happier memories of being underwater…the way the shock of the cool water hits your dry skin; the change of light from underneath the surface looking up; the haze of bubbles around you; the way sound suddenly stops after the roar of the water in your ears and then is muffled and strange; the way time seems to slow down in that dense environment and your limbs move differently. It can be delightful (if you know how to swim): diving in with this rush of sensory change - a liminal experience, a boundary crossed into a new world where everything familiar is disrupted just for a moment or two. I want to invite you to go down with the young man Jesus under the water of the Jordan this morning. Close your eyes and call back an underwater experience, whether pleasant or not. The moment before…the going in and under…the underwater sensations…the coming up.

Resurfacing after crossing that water boundary can be a visceral reminder that this moment is entirely new. In this moment - every moment of our lives in which we are awake and alert and attentive - is the moment when we are crossing into something new and in which we may hear again God summoning us into our true vocation - the calling for this piece of life (the change of direction, or holding a steady course, the arrival of a new potential, the seizing of some sense of urgent summons or concern we’d held at bay or been distracted from); and the deep summons to the trajectory of our whole life and being from God, to God, because of and despite everything we are and we do, being drawn into our perfecting in the purpose and time of God.

On this feast, we remember our commitment to our baptismal promises in solidarity with Jesus the baptized one, whose Spirit is given to us. And we recall that baptism isn’t just a few drops of water on the forehead after which usual life goes on, but a passage with Jesus through death and the grave, a parting of the seas of the ordinary into a promised land of both peril and life abundant. Baptism is intended to be a bit scary; a life-and-death matter. When an infant wails upon being dunked or splashed, most adults feels a little clutch in their stomachs, some anxiety - and properly so - for the baptismal moment is a microcosm of both our mortality (the inevitability of our dying, our suffering in life, and the way that following Jesus leads us to the cross); and also of our immortality - as we are raised into newness of life now and in the future. We will not be left under the water, in the grave of the earth, in the oblivion of our sin and separation from God and each other. No, we will be raised into light.

At the start of the book of Beginning, Genesis, in archetypal language we hear of the primeval universe. In beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was -in Hebew tohu v’ bohu - unformed and empty. In the beginning, God. That’s the first word we have in our holy Scriptures: in the beginning God; and in the lovely flexibility of Hebrew, also: in beginning, God created. Tohu is the vacuum, chaos, confusion, unreality, purposeless waste. The word is very ancient and comes to us from the Babylonian tamtu, the abyss, the sea deeps, sheol, the subterranean waters; embodied as Tiamat, the Babylonian mother-goddess from whose belly the universe was made, also as Techom the great sea monster, leviathan. And the earth was bohu, empty… but this word, too, comes to us from the name of the Babylonian land-monster-god behemoth, pictured like a hippopotamus. Our first story of creation (one of three varying creation stories in our Bible) gathers in the even older mythology of the Akkadian and Babylonian and Sumerian Near East from around two thousand years before Jesus in which the great god Marduk does battle with the sea goddess Tiamat and divides her into pieces which he makes the sky, the firmament, and the earth.

The first Hebrew creation story does not grant the abyss and the void the status of even minor deities though; only God is the actor in this creation, but the ancient echoes are there, and perhaps they are useful to remind us of the mystery and the fearful power of death and chaos for us mortal creatures -- we too, after all, personify death in all sorts of fanciful ways as the cloaked skeleton, the grim reaper, and so on, to try to master and contain its fearfulness. The God creates the light and begins the process of calling the created things good. The creation story is full of boundaries being established and distinctions made, the chaos being ordered, according to God’s calling.

Our moments of coming up from the waters into the light and air, the environment of our life and labor, bring us, too, into the world set in order by God and called to be good. Whatever the nature and direction of our vocation for this piece of life, whatever the tasks before us and the virtues required of us to do them, we may be confident that God establishes an order in and from them, and that they participate in the divine goodness. The work of today, of tomorrow and the next day, for us died and risen with Jesus in our baptism, is part of the divine purpose which is to bring order from chaos, meaning from emptiness, good from all of it.

Darkness covered the surface of the deep and a wind from God swept over it; or another rendering of the Hebrew: the spirit or breath of God moved gently (murmured, cherished, fertilized, hovered over, brooded over) over the face of the waters. That divine Spirit which cherished and subdued and made fruitful the original waters, which evoked their goodness and purpose, is the same Spirit which descended upon Jesus seen as a dove, and that same Spirit, the apostle Paul says repeatedly, which was in Jesus is given also to us in our baptism. It is the breath breathed into the first human creature Adam in the second creation story of Genesis, the sign of divine life in all the breathing and transpiring creatures of the planet. Every breath we take reminds us that we share in the divine breath. And at no moment are we more conscious of receiving that life-giving breath than when we come up from submersion under the water where we cannot breathe and live.

So this morning, in this moment, give thanks for your baptism, and breathe in your next breath as a gift from the Holy One whose Spirit you bear and whose work you are called to do. As you bring order to the world, as you point to and repair and restore its goodness and health in every way you can, as you brood over the stuff of creation and cherish and make it fruitful by your energy and imagination, your love and labor and breath, know your calling to collaborate in God’s work of creation in every moment. You are making the world new alongside your Creator, and you, too, are being made new.