Eleanor’s baptism on this feast day in January 2023.
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Water is delightful and dreadful. Water makes life possible, but water kills. Water bathes, but water drowns.
We are made mostly of water. It roils within us, flows with purpose through our arteries and veins, surges along countless labyrinthine pathways that lead everywhere inside our bodies, carrying nutrients, carrying oxygen, carrying life.
And God’s Spirit hovers above the water, including the water inside us. She hovers; she broods; then she plunges. She swoops down, and with the Word of God she stirs the chaotic water into order, into rhythm, into beauty, into life.
We enter this community by water – water that is both delightful and dreadful.
Since 2011, this parish has enjoyed living water — that is, water that moves — at the entrance to our sanctuary. We placed our new font there because, again, we enter this community by water. We can dip our hands into this moving pool of water, this miniature ocean, and remind ourselves of our Baptism. One of our theologians in residence, Eleanor Bickford, was baptized on this feast day last year. Now three years old, Eleanor still touches the water each and every time she passes the font. She continues to teach us this key insight: We enter by water, by water delightful, by water dreadful.
Dreadful water … deathly water … water that kills … I want to delve deeper into this upsetting idea. We hear this fairly often at church, that Holy Baptism is not just a light party, that the baptismal water changes us in sometimes terrible ways. Maybe we hear it so often, it loses its power. And so this week I did some unscientific, highly qualitative research. I asked a couple of other Episcopal preachers, and one lay leader in this congregation, “What do you think it really means, that we are baptized into Christ’s death? What do you think it really means, that the baptismal water is dreadful?”
I heard some good answers. One preacher said, “Well, my husband would say that in Baptism we die to the powers and principalities of this world.” This is quite true. (And by the way, I like that this preacher listens to other voices, the mark of a curious faith leader.) Yes: our baptism into Christ’s death forces us to die — to die painfully, to die dreadfully — to the “powers and principalities,” to the easy answers and facile solutions of our political world, the world that divides people into allies and enemies; the world that breezily assumes that economic inequality is natural, even virtuous; the world that builds a shrine not to the God of the Liberated Slaves, but to the false gods of capitalism, of cutthroat competition, of self-interest above all. We die to all of that, in Baptism, and this is dreadful because it costs us: it costs us friends, it costs us money, it costs us the privilege of leisurely indifference.
But I replied to my friend, “That’s good, but I think Saint Jonathan Myrick Daniels would challenge us to be much more literal when we say we die with Christ in Baptism. I think Jonathan Myrick Daniels would say we need to take the bullet — the literal bullet — so that another person is not killed.” My friend readily agreed.
Daniels did just that on August 20, 1965, when he stepped in front of a gunman and saved the life – he saved the young Black body – of 17-year-old Ruby Sales. Daniels had already been a powerful witness for civil rights. He had already articulated eloquently, ahead of his time, how our faith demands that we go to war against racism, and begin that war by confronting our own complicity in white supremacy. But then, in a critical moment, he closed his life just as he lived it. The dreadful waters of Baptism drowned Jonathan Myrick Daniels on August 20, 1965. And by doing this, Daniels transformed a gunman’s dreadful violent act into a prophetic proclamation of justice. By the power of God, even a hate crime can be transformed into a life-giving event that stirs the conscience of a nation.
Another friend of mine was more reflective, more systematic. He did a little bit of big-picture theology when I asked him what he thought “baptized into Christ’s death” means. For this friend of mine, Christ’s death and resurrection “underpins the cosmos.” Christ’s death and resurrection is at the heart of all that is. We die for others, and in this dying, the universe rises to life. We give all of ourselves away in self-giving love, and in this giving, the universe is infused with grace, and we are given a new heart and a new spirit. I yield to you in love, and in that yielding, your life is preserved, and my life is restored, and given new meaning. The cosmos flourishes.
Yet another writer, Andrew Sullivan, put it this way some years ago, in this approximate quote: “At the heart of the universe is caritas.” At the heart of the universe is caritas: Caritas is the spirit and practice of self-giving love that lies at the root of the words ‘charity’ and ‘caring.’ Life is triumphant in the universe because life first submits lovingly to death. A parent gives their whole being away in their effort to raise a child. A friend labors tirelessly to help someone in extreme need. An ally jumps in front of a teenager and dies so that she may live. This is how the universe works.
And finally I asked a lay leader here at St. Paul’s, “What do you think it really means, that we are baptized into Christ’s death?” (Full disclosure: I asked Andrew, my husband.) Andrew said that for him, this is merely one part of a larger idea: we are baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. Therefore, being baptized into Christ’s death is part of the great hope at the center of our faith, which is that death does not have the last word. Well … that’s pretty good. I fully agree.
And that is the great hope that fills us today, as we sing with awe and pray with wonder at the bank of the River Jordan — a river, incidentally, that currently runs through a land ravaged by human atrocity and human suffering. Today we sing and pray as the Spirit broods over that muddy river, then swoops down and carries from the torn heavens God’s thunderous message: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
But wait: I want you to notice something here. Curiously, in the evangelist Mark’s report of this scene, we do not know whether anyone but Jesus hears God’s voice. After all, God speaks directly to Jesus: “You are my Son,” God says. Not “This is my Son.” Why? Why do we not know whether anyone else heard this message?
Well, consider again how terrible the call of Jesus is. He is God’s Beloved, which sounds (and is) delightful, but this identity will take him to the cross. This identity will take him along the dreadful journey of the prophet, who speaks truth to power and is subsequently crushed by that power. This identity will carry him into the crosshairs of the gunman. This identity will cost him everything, fusing his future to that of the whole cosmos itself: as God’s Beloved, Jesus will not live before he dies. He will not enter glory before being crucified. Recall our solemn prayer on Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion:
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
That’s intense. So maybe that’s why Mark leaves it unclear whether anyone but Jesus heard God speaking to him that day, at the delightful but dreadful river. Maybe Mark understands that this path of death and resurrection — a path that our sibling in Christ, my husband Andrew, assures will lead to great joy — is nevertheless not a path for everyone. (St. Paul later calls it a stumbling block to some and a folly to others.) Holy Baptism is never just a soothing hot bath with aromatic soap and warm lighting. (And I say this as one who adores hot baths.) Now, Baptism is warm and soothing! We sing together here at church until we choke with emotion; we dwell in silence here at church until we hear the music of the spheres; we embrace here at church when our aching limbs are crying out for connection, and reconciliation. We eat the bread of caritas; we drink the cup of blessing.
But we also … well … we also die here at church. We die to powers and principalities. Sometimes we literally die so that others may live. We give everything away, training our patterns of life to the rhythms of the grace-infused cosmos. We drown.
But in the baptismal life both delightful and dreadful, we are God’s beloved. In the giving and losing of life, we are God’s beloved. In all of this delight, and in all of this loss and death, we sing with the ancient singer of psalms. We sing along as they proclaim their mighty ballad:
Adonai sits enthroned above the flood; Adonai sits enthroned as Sovereign for evermore. Adonai shall give strength to us; Adonai shall give the people the blessing of peace. And in the temple of Adonai, all are crying, “Glory!”
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Preached on the First Sunday after the Epiphany (The Baptism of Our Lord), Year B, January 7, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Genesis 1:1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11