Jesus and John the Baptist (Mark 1)

     “I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” From the Gospel according to Mark, the first chapter, verse 8.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     We can hear today’s Gospel as a summary of steps in our spiritual lives, as a pattern of spiritual development as we grow spiritually. The story describes events in the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus, “and people from the whole Judean countryside.” These events are more than external, visible events happening to the participants, to someone else, but not to observers; they are also spiritual events which bring about important changes in everyone involved, including observers. And they are a pattern, a way of thinking about our own spiritual changes.

     “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness.” The wilderness, uninhabited places, the desert, is never far away, in the story and in the world that we know. In California, we don’t need to travel very far to find ourselves in wilderness, whether it is the rocky, sandy wilderness of a desert, or mountains and forests that cover so much of our state. The wilderness was, still is, a place where people can go to search for God, to encounter God directly without the temptations and distractions of life in cities and towns. In the wilderness is the world as God made it, before humans rearranged it. So it is understandable that a prophet would appear in the wilderness, and that people would flock to him there. There John heard God’s call to him, to “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” For John this took the form of the baptism of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins.

     Mark the Evangelist makes it clear that John the Baptist is a prophet descended from the prophetic tradition of Elijah and Jeremiah and Isaiah. Camel’s hair and a leather belt were apparently the standard uniform of prophets. But I’m not sure that John’s diet was standard prophetic fare; one scholar suggests that John wasn’t eating insects, but actually a kind of bean, which evidently the Greek seems to hint at. Another scholar suggests that the locust image comes from the book of the Revelation, in which locusts are demons. Then John the Baptist is a prophet who devours demons, the way locusts devour plant life. The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures didn’t eat demons; this makes John’s prophetic ministry something new, a step beyond the old prophecy and a step toward something, and someone, completely new. John was a charismatic figure able to draw people out of their villages, into the wilderness where God could be found, where God was waiting for them. There God, through the ministry of John the Baptist, was able to release them from their sense of sin, to prepare them for the next step in their spiritual lives, an encounter with the one more powerful than John. All that John was able to do was to baptize them with water, to free them from their sins. No small thing, to be sure, and a necessary thing, a step closer to their encounter with Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

     Today’s story is about prophetic religion, in which prophets point out spiritual and other shortcomings in society and in individual lives, and they proclaim God’s will as the prophet has received it, which is usually a proclamation of what God requires as a way to curing the ills that the prophet has perceived. Prophetic religion is a necessary balance to priestly religion, the religion of the Temple. Although today’s Gospel doesn’t mention the Temple, everyone in the story knows about it and takes its existence for granted. Prophetic religion is a perpetual reminder that there is more to spiritual life than the performance of canonical ceremonies and scholarly study of Scriptures and the maintenance of impressive sacred buildings. The “people from the whole Judean countryside” respond to John’s ministry because there is something in it that they don’t hear anywhere else. God is offering them something more immediate than what they experience in their ceremonial duties in attendance at Temple rites.

     And that ‘something more immediate’ is an encounter with “the one who is more powerful” than John the Baptist, more powerful than the priestly religion of the Temple in the city. There is a progression here: from the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures to John the Baptist to “one who is more powerful.” And that encounter is in the wilderness, where there is nothing between the people and God, and where God’s forgiving presence is made known to them in baptism. That makes them ready for the appearance of Jesus, and baptism with the Holy Spirit.

     Jesus accepts John’s baptism. In doing this he is not so much repenting of anything, as he is placing himself on the same level as the people around him. He is enabled, dare I say it, to receive the descent of the Spirit, because he has accepted the same condition for it as everybody else. That condition is acceptance of the reality of ordinary human life. We are granted a look, so to speak, behind the grandeur of later theological statements, behind the ‘two natures of Christ’ and the ‘second person of the Trinity’ and the ‘procession of the Holy Spirit’ and so on, a look at Jesus as ordinary, as one of the “people of the whole Judean countryside” getting into and out of the water like all the rest of them. Only then, when he accepts human ordinariness, human realism, is he ready for the next step in spiritual life, the descent of the Spirit.

     And what a descent it is! “He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove!” What a stunning contrast of images: the torn-apart heavens producing a dove! I don’t know what “the heavens torn apart” could have looked like, if it were a physical, external event at all. As a description of a life-changing event, it is very dramatic and suggestive. By accepting the ordinariness of human life in the baptism of John, the heavens opened to Jesus. Ordinariness, human reality are the clues here. Heaven and earth, humanity and divinity, are not far apart. The realization of this closeness through direct perception of reality, which the baptism of John prompted, is what is happening here. The torn-apart heavens suggest a lightning bolt, a flash of awareness that leads to new perception. And that new perception is called the Holy Spirit, and its arrival is heralded by the appearance of a dove, a small, quiet, undramatic creature, gentle and not the least bit noisy. “And a voice came from heaven,” which sounded like thunder, probably, to everyone else, and in that sound Jesus heard the voice of his Father, proclaiming his nature, which we call the Incarnation.

     It is a nature in which we are called to participate, as it says in the Second Letter of Peter. The Incarnation is a sign of our true calling and destiny. Today’s Gospel summarizes and illustrates what the steps are that lead us to that participation: hearing the words of the prophets, accepting the baptism of repentance, which is really accepting the truth about ourselves. That in turn opens us to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is awareness of our destiny in God, participation in the life of the Trinity.

     “I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     

      

Theophany (Ephesians 3)

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     I have always preferred the Orthodox name for this feast, ‘Theophany’, to the western name ‘Epiphany’. ‘Theophany’ means “God-showing” and is more emphatic, and less general, than ‘Epiphany’, which means merely “manifestation.” Anciently, ‘epiphany’ referred to an appearance of a king before his people, in the manner of a British sovereign’s appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. In ancient times, kings had a godlike status, and even now kings have an aura of divinity, so perhaps we can sense the impact of this word.

        But nowadays the word has lost some of that impact; we like to say, when we come up with a clever idea or insight, that we’ve had an ‘epiphany’. Not on the same level as the ancient meaning!  And, no matter how clever our insight is, we’re not likely to say that we’ve had a ‘theophany’!

     The Letter to the Ephesians is about what God in Christ has shown to Paul the Apostle, and, through him, to us. The Letter itself is a theophany, and expresses Paul’s understanding of his experience of God’s revelation to him. We get a sense of the impact of this revelation in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, in which he, referring to himself, writes, “ I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person…who…was caught up to the third heaven…Such a person…was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” We may call this experience ‘theophany’, and in the Letter to the Ephesians Paul expands a little on his experience, and does in fact repeat something of God’s revelation to him.

     Today’s reading begins, “This is the reason that I Paul am a prisoner.” Our lectionary has dropped us into the middle of a discussion here. Paul doesn’t announce the reason right away. Paul leads us back to an earlier part of the Letter, when he writes that “the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ.”

     And that understanding is this, as Paul writes in the first chapter: “a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” That plan includes the Gentiles, “strangers to the covenants” as Paul calls them, as well as the “commonwealth of Israel.” God in Christ is creating “one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace.” These are glimpses of the revelation, the theophany, the God-showing, that Paul experienced. They are not the whole story, since he tells us that he heard things that “no mortal is permitted to repeat.” But he is permitted to repeat the Gospel as he understands it, and so he writes, “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise of Christ Jesus through the gospel.”

     Paul goes on to say, “Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace.” Paul experiences his service as a gift, as the revelation he experienced is a gift. And it’s a gift that he wants everyone else to have, as he says, to “see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God”. Paul has seen more of this plan than anyone else, and he is revealing that part of it that God allows.

     If I’m reading this section of the Letter correctly, it seems to me that there is a suggestion that Paul has been shown even more than what the angels in heaven have seen, and that what he has seen he has passed on to the church. Paul writes, “Through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” What can this mean? Do we, the church, have something to make known to the angels in heaven, something that they can’t know in any other way? It is an astonishing notion, that we have something to show even to the rulers and authorities in heaven, our own theophany, so to speak. And our own theophany is “the wisdom of God in its rich variety,” God as he manifests himself in the world. The “rich variety” is the infinite number of ways that the Incarnation works in us and through us, to produce all the unique individual ways we come to know and love and serve God and one another, in order to become the people that God means us to be. The vocation of the church is not simply to receive a revelation, but to be a revelation, not just to each other and the rest of the human race, but to the heavenly world as well. The risen, ascended, incarnate Lord in heaven is completed, as it were, by us his incarnate Body in the world, by all Christians past, present, and future, who make known to the heavenly places God’s “rich variety.” So the theophany, the epiphany, the manifestation of God is not only something which we see, hear, perceive, but is also something which we show to God; we are, as it were, transmitting back to God his gifts of grace, which have been transformed and transfigured in us “in accordance” as Paul says, “with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God.” So, like the magi bringing their individual gifts to Jesus, we bring our gifts to God and show Him in our theophany how we have revealed his gifts to the world. “Lead us,” we pray, in the words of today’s collect, “to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face.” In our faces will be the glory that God has enabled us to reveal, and that we have shown to each other and to the world.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.