In today’s online worship service, we hear Mark’s account of John baptizing Jesus, and explore how in Jesus, our cries to God to “tear open the heavens and come down” are answered. In the midst of life’s chaos, our hope is that God has come to save us!
Here’s the sermon for Baptism of Our Lord Sunday, RCL Year B, January 10, 2021. The sermon texts for this week are Mark 1:4-11 and Genesis 1:1-5.
I found helpful this sermon from Phillip Martin, this commentary from Melinda Quivik, and this Dear Working Preacher column from Kathryn M. Schifferdecker.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
I’ve been wrestling in the last few days with how this weekend’s readings are relevant to what’s going on in our world right now. I’m always happy to preach about baptism, but we had a baptism last weekend. If we were together in person, perhaps I’d ask you to dip your fingers in the baptismal font water and make the sign of the cross, but that’s tough to do through a screen.
And I have a strong suspicion that the questions at the top of your mind this weekend are not theological debates about whether John the Baptist represents an Elijah figure or how exactly the Trinity is present in the Father speaking and the Son in the water and the Spirit descending.
A few weeks ago as we entered the season of Advent, we had a reading from Isaiah with what I think is one of the most important verses in all of Scripture, Isaiah 64:1, where the prophet cries out to God, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.”
I talked then about the season of Advent being about waiting, and how hard waiting is, and how tired we get as we wait, and how it feels like we’re in this in-between time, doing so much waiting, “waiting on the world to change” as John Mayer puts it.
What’s harder is figuring out what exactly we’re waiting for. A month ago, it felt like we were waiting for 2020 to end. I’ve seen so many jokes and recap articles about how hard 2020 was, and I think on some level, I actually started to buy into the suggestion that the new year would make it all better. Obviously I knew flipping over a calendar page wouldn’t actually change anything, but did you have that temptation too?
Well, now we’re just over a week into the new year, we survived 2020, and Christin showed me a meme on Facebook of someone saying, “Ok, I’d like to cancel my subscription to 2021. I’ve completed the 7-day trial, and I’m just not impressed.”
This week we’ve gotten a glimpse of both how fragile and how resilient our democracy can be. We’ve seen the tragedy of people living in information bubbles fed by media who live on peddling outrage, how people people can be so afraid of the future, so afraid of being displaced that they are willing to try to tear down the entire system, and not just rhetorically. It’s not hard to see how alive and well hatred, racism, and fear are, even in 2021.
At the same time—and if you missed this in the news cycle, it’s understandable—this week we’ve broken our national record for most coronavirus deaths at least twice, and vaccine distribution is taking longer than expected.
I’m still stuck on that Isaiah verse from the end of November. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” Break into this broken, fragile world, O God, and come do something.
Today’s gospel reading is the beginning of Mark’s story of, as he puts it, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Part of what’s interesting about Mark is that he skips entirely over Christmas. As we enter Mark’s Gospel—and we’ll be reading a lot from Mark this year—you can set aside just about everything you know about the Christmas story. I don’t know if Mark has ever heard about the shepherds and the wise men and the manger story, but if he has, he doesn’t care. It’s not important to the story he’s telling.
Instead, he starts his telling of the Jesus-story with a character named John, who appears in the wilderness, on the outskirts, in the wild-places. He’s a wild sort of many, wearing rough clothes made of camel’s hair, eating strange food of locusts and wild honey, sort of an all-natural diet, and the people from the city and the countryside are coming to him to be repent, to confess their sins, and to be washed by him in the water of the river Jordan.
And in those days, says Mark as he introduces his main character, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And—listen to this part. This is God’s answer, the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophetic cry—just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.
At Jesus’ baptism, God tears open the heavens and comes down. It’s the same promise the other Gospel writers tell in their Christmas accounts. God has come to us. Matthew and Luke focus on the promises the angel reveals to Mary and Joseph, and the prophets Anna and Simeon recognizing Jesus’ identity in the temple. John talks about the Word becoming flesh and living with us, the Light entering the Darkness.
For Mark, God’s plan to redeem the world begins at Jesus’ baptism, with the heavens torn open, and the Spirit descending like a dove. By the way, I usually picture that moment as a soft white dove slowly and gracefully fluttering down towards Jesus, but I saw someone point out this week that birds don’t only descend slowly and gracefully—sometimes they dive straight down. I think this week I like that image better, the Holy Spirit diving into the world.
In case we miss the point, Mark will come back to this imagery of the heavens being torn open twice more in his Gospel. In a few weeks, we’ll hear the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain top, when a voice from heaven again declares Jesus’ true identity. Then on Good Friday, as Jesus breathes his last on the cross, Mark describes the veil in the temple being torn in two, the boundary that sets apart God’s dwelling place being ripped open.
So the promise I want to share with you today is simply that God has heard our prayers and entered our world, in the person of Jesus Christ. God is not afraid of the disruption and chaos in our world, the uncertainty we’re facing as a nation and as individuals.
In the first reading, in the very opening pages of the Bible, we hear that in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Maybe you’ve heard me talk about this before, but in the ancient near-Eastern understanding of the world, the waters represent chaos. God comes into the watery nothingness, the formless void, the uncertain darkness, and God gets to work, creating, speaking the world into being.
God is not hindered by fear and chaos. Instead, in the wilderness, God is beginning to work.
As evidence of God’s work, consider your own baptism. Not only has God broken into the world, God has torn apart the barrier of sin separating you from your Creator. By the work of the Holy Spirit, that same Spirit that descended to Jesus at his baptism, you have been washed clean and given new life. You have been named beloved by God, claimed as God’s children, gathered into the Body of Christ.
As I said, it’s hard to invite you right now to come up to the baptismal font and dip your fingers in the water and trace the cross on your forehead. Not being together for worship is part of the disruptions and the wilderness of this year.
But beloved of God, remember your baptism. Remember that God has torn open the heavens and come down into this world. May you see and share God’s presence this week.
Amen