As the sun sets on Saturday evening, Sabbath draws to a close. The Jewish people celebrate this pivotal moment with the Havdalah, a ceremony with candlelight that recalls God’s separation, or division, of light from darkness, and waters from waters, in the creation. Sabbath gives way to the first day of the week, which is for Christians our Lord’s day, but for the Jewish people, an ordinary workday. On both ends of the Sabbath, at both its beginning and its end, there are rituals to mark this important reality: the reality that this day, the Sabbath day, is different. It is not a usual day. And so the Jewish people hail its arrival, and mark its passing.
One thing is not like another.
Havdalah — this word shares a root with the word mavdil, the Hebrew word we hear today in the creation story as the English word “separated”: God separated light from darkness. Light is to darkness as Sabbath is to a workday.
One thing is not like another.
Then, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus sees the heavens “torn apart” by God: the Greek word we translate as “torn apart” shares a root with our English words schizoid and schism. This word for “separation” takes on a harsher, rougher tone than the Hebrew mavdil. One thing is not like another … and so God tears them apart! God the creator seems more demonstrative now, more startling and deliberate, as Jesus rises from the river. God tears apart one thing from another.
(Jesus rises from the river … River: yet another image of separation! The English word rival owes its history to the word river. Rival comes from rivalis, which as an adjective simply means “waterbrook” or “stream.” But as an always-plural noun, rivalis is a source of water that is claimed by two people. If you and I both draw water from this one river, then, inevitably, we will become rivals.)
Do not despair: here ends my word-study safari. But I do want to invite you to hold three words together today, as we stand at the edge of the Jordan and watch Jesus rise from the river: mavdil, schism, rivalis: division, tearing apart, rivalry. Separation, tearing open, competition … and a controversial and powerful figure emerging in the midst of all this conflict, rising into the middle of those who are opposed to one another.
Jesus rises from the waters that flow just outside our front door here at Grace Church. When we baptize, we recognize in these living, moving, flowing waters the presence of Christ that rises up.
But what does this mean?
It might be easier to understand the meaning of Baptism if we return to the first-century rivers where people were first baptized, including Jesus. Today, when you stand on the western bank of the Jordan River, east-northeast of Jerusalem, you are standing in the nation of Israel. But you can see — and if you tossed a small stone it would easily land on — the kingdom of Jordan directly opposite you, on the eastern bank of the river. Sometimes you can see people coming down to the river from that side, often to experience the very same thing you are there to do: like you, they want to step into the same exact river that Jesus graced with his presence centuries ago, when he submitted to John’s baptism and then rose up from the water, just as the heavens were torn apart.
Baptism is easier to understand if you can imagine a river with two banks, and two streams of people descending opposite each other, to the same rivalis, the same source of water.
Now, imagine that all of these people, and the river, and the riverbanks, and Jesus himself — imagine that they are all inside you. Within your own self, there is a river. It flows between two banks, two groups of people, two ideas, two competing pressures, two priorities, two desires, two you-name-it:
Part of you wants to take what you need to care for yourself; another part of you wants to help your neighbor: Jesus himself rises from the river that flows between those two desires.
Part of you needs to grieve the real losses and injuries you have suffered; another part needs to move forward from them and pursue new life: Jesus himself rises from the river that flows between those two needs.
Part of you is motivated to fight injustice and oppression with vigor and righteous anger; another part is motivated to empathize with the oppressor and try to gather even him into God’s healing embrace: Jesus himself rises from the river that flows between those two motivations.
In all of these, neither bank of the river is fully bad or evil or wrong, and neither is simply, automatically good or right. Life is complicated. Jesus rises in the midst of complicated life, and our baptismal identity becomes for Jesus a way to locate himself right in the center of our lives, our hearts, our hopes, our desires, our conflicting passions and longings and needs.
And now perhaps we are ready to imagine the river of Baptism in a larger sphere: it is the river that runs within an individual, yes, but it also runs between you and me, between “us” and “them,” between Team Blue and Team Red, between the guy I voted for and the guy you voted for, between and among citizens of this nation in a time of vicious rancor and violent insurrection, between any two or more people who, in one way or another, identify with those who are on this river bank, over and against those who are on the other river bank. Jesus, in Baptism, rises from the water that flows between us all.
Jesus rises from the river, and we can see something redemptive or life-giving in the beliefs or behaviors of our enemy.
Jesus rises from the river, and we can see something problematic or unjust in our own beliefs or behaviors.
Jesus rises from the river, and all of us can see, maybe for the first time, how the river and its two banks are wildly diverse, but also one thing, one organism, one ecosystem of flourishing life.
Jesus, in Baptism, does not show us how we are all the same. Again, one thing is not like another. In Baptism, we see not how we are the same, but that we are all one. Christian and other-than-Christian; people of faith and faithful agnostics; people of all colors, damaged in different ways by white supremacy; transgender and cisgender folks; queer and straight; Jew and Greek; male and female: as Paul so memorably tells the Galatians, “all are one in Christ Jesus.”
Now, in our Baptism, we do not interpret all this as a triumphalist, exclusivist claim that all human persons should become Christian, or are Christian already but they just do not know it yet. No, that is not the way of life for us. I say it this way: for me, a baptized Christian, “all are one in Christ Jesus” means this: Jesus rises from the river to show me who I really am, and who you really are, and how life on God’s good earth is, and how it should be. Jesus does not rise from the river to demand that everyone become a baptized Christian. (God is never that small.) Jesus rises from the river so that those who are baptized can recognize Christ himself in every human person. Baptism isn’t about the formation of an exclusive club. It is precisely the opposite: Baptism is about opening the whole thing up.
Today we will renew our Baptismal Covenant, a practice that may worry some of us because it appears to threaten our deeply held value of inclusion: what, we rightly ask, what about those who are not baptized, and those who do not ever want to be baptized? Answer: they stand on both river banks alongside us. For them, perhaps “Jesus rising from the water” is happily not how they see things, not how they understand what God is doing with all this life that flourishes in this lush river valley we call Earth. But for some of us, and for us as a spiritual community, we are invited to see, in Baptism, the presence of Christ rising among us, changing us, moving us, improving our vision, strengthening our hearts, readying us for loving service to all people, for God’s glory.
One thing is not like another. And often enough, God’s good creation is riven with conflict. But God in Jesus rises up in the midst of all this complexity. God in Jesus rises up within us, between us, and around us.
Look: can you see? This river is filled with life.
***
Preached on the First Sunday after the Epiphany (the Baptism of our Lord), Year B, January 10, 2020, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Genesis 1:1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11
Photo: the Jordan River, taken by the author in January 2020.