Mark 1:4-11
Presented January 11, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The First Sunday after Epiphany
If you were to look back over the course of your life and consider the key moments, the critical experiences, that have given shape to the direction and quality of your life, which experiences would you list as most decisive? In my own life, critical moments include decision about marriage and family, calling and vocation, values and priorities. In recent years, the decisive moment is one that I did not choose—my wife Janice’s accident and death. Yet that event has given shape to so much of what has followed, including renewed struggle with my calling in life, grappling afresh with questions of faith and doubt, a deepened quality in my relationship with my children, and openness to new relationships and direction for my living. In the nearly three years since the accident, I have found myself in the process of creating, as must survivors of cancer and other pressing life challenges, a “new normal” for my life.
In his book The Only Necessary Thing Henri Nouwen asserts that for Jesus, the core moment of his life was his experience of baptism in the Jordan River, a time when Jesus heard those powerful words of affirmation from God, You are my beloved on whom my favor rests. It was the core experience of Jesus, the defining decision of his life, says Nouwen—a time when Jesus “is reminded in a deep, deep way of who he is.” The remainder of Jesus’ life—his public ministry, his proclamation of the unfolding realm of God’s love, his compassion and his reaching out to those on the margins of life, his challenge against those content with business as usual, his passion for justice, peace, and generosity, his willingness to empty himself and give his life for the healing and reconciling of all creation—all of this involved a continual claiming of his identity and calling as God’s beloved.
Nouwen’s contention carries weight, I believe, precisely because we have a tendency to downplay the significance of Jesus’ baptism, to look upon it as mere formality—a matter of “going through the motions,” confirming the obvious. But the Gospel writers would suggest that, for Jesus, the act of baptism does indeed carry a compelling role in his unfolding mission. Baptism did indeed hold a significant affirmation of his identity and a powerful confirmation of his mission and purpose. And for those of us who seek to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, our baptism can serve as a critical shaping event as well, for in truth, it is as if we, too, hear the divine voice of affirmation, You are my beloved son, you are my beloved daughter. Baptism represents a time when we choose to embark upon a life journey rooted and grounded in the gracious love, mercy, and forgiveness of our God. Rather than an ending or culmination point, baptism serves as a beginning point, as a public confirmation of our intention to embrace a markedly new way of living in the world. Writes Nouwen in his book Life of the Beloved,
Every time you listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls you the Beloved, you will discover within yourself a desire to hear that voice longer and more deeply. It is like discovering a well in the desert. Once you have touched wet ground, you want to dig deeper.
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that the gospel faith is organized around the way it was and the way it is. Once I was lost, and now I am found. Once I was dead, and now I am alive. Once I was blinded to much of reality, but now I see with fresh insight and wisdom. Once I was caught in self-doubt and self-rejection, but now I know myself to stand among God’s beloved. Once I was bound in self-centeredness and greed, but now I am free to embrace Christ’s way of compassion and peace, generosity and loving-kindness, servanthood and a thirsting for healing and wholeness. Brueggemann puts it this way:
The miracle is that Jesus came into the world, gathered up the stranded people and made them into a new community. He called disciples, he called little children, he called publicans and sinners, he called tax collectors and fishermen…all sorts of people who did not belong to each other, did not know or trust each other. He drew them all to himself, and in doing so he drew them to each other in a new joy and a new purpose and a new obedience (Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann, 81).
It was a matter of experiencing life afresh. Beginning a new journey in life in relationship with a new community. Celebrating the wonder of God’s mercy and peace, God’s compassion and promise of new life. Moving from contentment with the way life was to a new vision of the way life is and can be. The writer of the first letter of Peter puts it this way, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:10). As Jesus heard the divine affirmation, you are my beloved, prodding him to take hold of a compelling vision for life and ministry, so we too hear the words of affirmation that compel us to expand our horizons and embrace a new life direction in a new community.
Writer, environmentalist, and social critic Wendell Berry describes a character in one of his novels who displays a narrow perspective toward life, asserting of the character, “He thought the farm existed to serve and enlarge him” (Jayber Crow: A Novel). It’s an apt description of the way it was, life without a compelling vision from God, life lived for oneself alone, life in which other people, and indeed all creation, exist only for our self-centered purposes. From that kind of self-indulgent point of view, Christ’s way of abundance, generosity, compassion, servanthood, and peace makes little sense.
Our Wednesday morning Bible study group has been exploring for some months the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Though I’ve read and studied that letter with some frequency in the past, our study this fall has provided me a richer sense of the apostle’s concern for the fledgling congregation at Corinth. Again and again Paul makes it clear that he writes the letter with a deep passion that the church come to fully embrace its calling as the people of God. The apostle yearns for the Corinthian congregation to see itself as a community of God’s people giving witness to the light and love of God, made manifest in the life and ministry, the death and resurrection of Jesus. On a number of occasions Paul draws a contrast between behavior that “builds up” and behavior that “puffs up.” Behavior that “puffs up” is self-centered action, concern for one’s own image and status and position alone, while behavior that “builds up” moves beyond self-preoccupation, placing primary focus on the strengthening and creating and encouraging of the body of Christ, the church community, that it might more fully embrace its identity and its mission as the people of God.
The willingness to move beyond concern for puffing oneself up to building up the church is a central mark of humility—the kind of humility portrayed by John the Baptist, when speaking of the coming of Jesus the Messiah. “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me,” John announces in this morning’s Gospel lesson. “I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals” (Mark 1:7-8). In John’s Gospel the Baptist asserts simply yet profoundly, “Jesus must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30). In The Message Eugene Peterson offers this telling paraphrase of the Baptist’s words: “This is the assigned moment for [Jesus] to move to the center, while I slip off to the sidelines.” It is a matter of learning to live no longer as if you or I must be the center of all that happens in life; rather, it is recognizing that life’s meaning and life’s fullness are found as life in rooted and anchored in relationship with our gracious God.
“The life of Jesus,” attests Walter Brueggemann, “is a sequence of newnesses…forgiveness, healing, cleansing, feeding…giving life back by the investment of self in others…. Jesus gave his life in a continuing act of mercy. And those who received mercy are formed into a new community. The church is the people who have received mercy.” The church is the people who, touched and transformed by God’s goodness and grace, embrace a new vision for life, shifting from the way life was to the way life is. The church is the people who discover, in Christ, a “new normal” for their living.
In his commentary Mark for Everyone biblical scholar Tom Wright asserts that a good deal of Christian faith is a matter of learning to live by a new reality, even when we cannot fully see it. Sometimes, as in that moment when Jesus hears the divine affirmation, You are my beloved, the curtain is drawn back, and we see and hear and experience what we had previously only hoped might be real. But most of the time we walk by faith, not by sight. Indeed, the power of the gospel is in its invitation to walk in a new way, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, to embrace the new reality of life based upon mercy and compassion, justice and peace, self-giving love and servanthood. The gospel ever invites us to allow this new way of envisioning and experiencing life to mold us and change us, that we might indeed live as God’s beloved community.
Henri Nouwen is convinced that prayer is central to this matter of claiming our true identity and learning to live in community. Writes Nouwen, “Prayer is listening to that voice—to the One who calls you the Beloved. It is to constantly go back to the truth of who we are and claim it for ourselves” (The Only Necessary Thing, 67). Nouwen then reminds us that we are not simply what we do. We are not limited by what others say about us. We are so much more than we have and possess. Success, popularity, possessions, and power have their place, but in the final analysis, asserts Nouwen, our spiritual identity is not rooted in the things we can grasp hold of. Rather, our lives are rooted in the good news that we are God’s beloved daughters and sons. Whatever we do, says Nouwen, we have to go back regularly to that place of core identity.
Joan Chittister offers similar words of truth, reminding us that prayer was never intended to be a matter of cajoling or changing God, but of allowing change to occur within me. Writes Chittister, “The function of prayer is to change my own mind, to put on the mind of Christ, to enable grace to break into me.”
My friends, this is the wondrous affirmation of the gospel, that you and I can shift from the way life was to the way life is, to a new reality, to life in God’s realm of gracious compassion, mercy, and peace. Along the way, we become Christ’s salt for the earth, light on a hill, a seed of the word, a blessed and a pilgrim people.
May it be so. Amen.