Detritus in the Jordan

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
BAPTISM OF CHRIST
(January 10^th) 2016

 

Readings:

Isaiah 43: 1-7

Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

 

As the early Christians set about proclaiming what theologians tend to call the Christ event – that is the entire birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus – they were beset with many problems. One of those, apparently a well-circulated oral tradition, was the Baptism of Jesus. Why was one soon to be described as sinless baptised in a rite that John the Baptiser described as being “for the forgiveness of sins”? The Christians could not wriggle out of the dilemma: it was a well-known fact of Jesus’ life.

The Christians were determined to use the Hebrew scriptures as proof that their crucified Saviour,  powerfully known to them in worship and fellowship, was also known to them to in the Hebrew scriptures. As they journeyed through the Hebrew texts of faith they found reference after reference that ignited their sparks of faith and joy. Some of them may seem a little tenuous to a contemporary reader, but they were not to our forebears.

So when they found an Isaian reference to a saviour figure who would journey with believers through waters and fires and flames they had no difficulty in seeing the life of Jesus foreshadowed. It resonated with their experience of the presence of the risen Christ as they grew in faith. It resonated with their stories of Jesus’ own baptism by John. It resonated with their sense that every Christian life is a journey through self-surrender and death to resurrection and eternity. The early Christians glimpsed eternity again and again in their worship and fellowship and study, and no one was going to take it away from them. The Jesus they knew had passed through the waters of the Jordan and the waters of death.

Baptism wasn’t a new thing when John used it, nor was it unique to Judaism. In many religions of the Middle East (and elsewhere) water, preferably but not necessarily running, was a powerful symbol of birth, cleansing and death, not necessarily in that order. John adopted it, but gave it emphasis on cleansing. He linked the rite with God’s apocalyptic wrath, with a powerful critique of corrupt leadership, and with an energy that would soon be a hallmark not only of his ministry but that of his kinsman and protégé Jesus.

Jesus himself saw the power of the symbol and handed it on to his followers. In the hands of the Jesus-followers, not least Paul, it became a symbol of death and resurrection, and, because Jesus himself had undergone the rite, of baptizands’ participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Whether Paul was the first to see it that way we cannot tell, but his teachings gave that belief powerful impetus, and it has stayed central to Christian beliefs ever since. It became associated, too, with the indwelling of the Spirit, as reflected in the tellings of the story of the baptism of Jesus himself.

The Christians saw clearly that the Baptism of Jesus was no parenthesis, but a central event of cosmic significance in the saving life lived by Jesus. Paul’s language of grafting on, probably borrowed from Jesus in any case, became a powerful tool by which to understand the event. The Incarnation, the “descent” of God into human form, was the grafting of the Jesus-event onto the human story. The Creator, fully yet impossibly present in the Man of Nazareth, enters into the confinement and restriction of human experience: “from heaven you came, helpless babe.” Human experience entered into the heart of Godhead. But the baptism was something else, something more specific still. The experience of human sinfulness, the sense of a need for restoration and reconciliation with the Creator, became a part of the experience of being God. Later the two dimensions, being human and being fallen, would culminate in the utter aloneness of the experience of dereliction and death, when God would cry out in the psalmist’s pain-filled scream “my God my God, why have you forsaken me?” God was grafted on to all human experience, even the experience of God-forsakenness. All that experience was then caught up in the unrepeatable, “unsurrenderable” and incomprehensible event of the Resurrection.

 The Baptism of Christ then was about God grafting divine being onto humanity – God entering into and transforming both the existence and the faith-life of God’s people. But it was also about sin. It was about God the logically sinless entering into the murk and degradation of sinfulness. Icons of the Baptism of Christ will often depict him standing in the shallow waters of the Jordan surrounded by the detritus of human existence – today we might depict him standing amidst the syringes and lifejackets and dumped  tyres and batteries and sexual apparatus of post-modernity’s webs of sin. It is about entering into the corporate sin of injustice and ecological exploitation, but it is also about the personal sin by which I dehumanise those after whom I might lust, or on whom I might prey, or who’s portion of the world’s resources I might nonchalantly discard. It is about my wearing of sweatshop-manufactured clothing, my consumption of palm-oil exploiting spreads, my participation in the sin that degrades human bodies whether I do personally or just participate in a world that does so. It is about my sin and our sin, and our sin as a handful of people and our sin as all humanity. It is into that degradation that Jesus steps in the Jordan.

But that is not the end of the Baptism-story any more than Good Friday’s cry of dereliction is the end of the Incarnation-story. Jesus emerges from the detritus-ridden waters of the metaphysical Jordan and from the mortality-ridden waters of the “deep waters of death.” Jesus rises – cleansed for us, so that we too might rise, cleansed. Neither greenhouse gasses nor my own propensity for sin is the end of the story: God’s restoration of humanity and of me and of you is the foreshadowed and yet to come never-end, the endless story of God’s love. It is a personal story of our rebirth, and a cosmic story of the new heavens and the new earth yet to be seen, long to be longed for, never to be surrendered. It is the story that my life transcends death, and the story that all life and all love transcends death, even the death of planet Earth.

It is the story that you and I are called to proclaim with our every attitude, our every action, our every fibre: it is the story that we must proclaim with words if necessary but with actions inescapably if we are to be a resurrection people. It is the story that must be our story this year, if we are not to be left behind on the bottom of a murky Jordan River.

Fortunately, though, there is a Spirit hovering above the waters, and by the sid of that Spirit, the invasion of that Spirit, we too may participate in the emergence of Jesus from the detritus of Jordan and Death alike.

 

 

TLBWY

 

The logic of Matthew's Magi

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
EPIPHANY
(January 3rd) 2016

Readings:
Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

In “The Journey of the Magi,” the famous poem of T.S. Eliot, the young anglo-catholic poet deliberately fuses the stories of Christmas and Easter, as one of the wise men recalls a journey he made long before. The journey was made with two companions, but the details are now slipping into a fog of dementia: “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” the old man muses. In his dementia he radiates wisdom: there was a birth and a death, and Eliot and the gospel-writer Matthew alike want us to know they are inseparable in meaning.

The human brain cannot fathom God unaided, but nor are those who seek truth expected to place otherwise intelligent brains in neutral. Human intellect by itself won’t lead a punter to Jesus, but as C.S. Lewis or more recently Terry Eagleton have reminded us, if an intelligent human genuinely seeks to know the God of Jesus Christ they may well find what they are looking for.

Matthew wants to create a symbolic story, placing the birth of Jesus at the collision point of human need and political corruption. He tells his tale to remind proclaimers of God that intelligence and wisdom, that of the wise sages, are servants of meaning. The wise, he suggests, still seek Jesus.

For Matthew Jesus’ birthplace and related happenings take on symbolic and theological meaning. We still engage in this kind of enriched story-telling: famous Gallipoli stories of Simpson’s donkey in Australia or Henderson’s in New Zealand generate an inspirational awareness of bravery far more important than the details of the events. Stories about the Chappells’ under-arm bowl in 1981, or Bob Deans’ non-try of 1905, or more significantly of Tārore’s martyrdom in the 1830s, stories from vastly different contexts, generate meaning and bonding for the tellers and listeners. Matthew knew this trade well: Jesus may or may not have been born in Bethlehem, wise men may or may not have journeyed to adore him, a star may or may not have shone to guide them, but Matthew and his successors knew well that these are useful descriptions of the remarkable implications of the birth of the Saviour.

These stories are not nonsense: they tell of Jesus’ unique place in the purposes (and even being) of God. That belief was supported by the experiences worshippers had of the presence of Jesus in their midst, conquering injustice and fear and doubt, making, as Annie Lennox put it, “the bad things go away.” Armed with that knowledge believers could face anything life or the Roman Empire threw at them.

What was nonsense was to dismiss the deep truth embedded in the stories, to sneer at them, to stand over them in judgement so that those who wanted to encounter the life- and death-transforming Christ were unable to take that life-transforming leap to encounter his healing, saving goodness. Seekers for meaning, the genuinely wise, do not “diss” narratives that convey truth. Matthew knew that. He knew that his wise men stood as representation of every human being who has set out to discover meaning to life, every wise person who has sought to proclaim justice amidst injustice, hope amidst hopelessness, God in the midst of a terrifyingly and logically empty universe.

Matthew had little time for human logic: Herod, in his sneering schemes, becomes the symbol of the kind of logic that dismantles human hope, that mocks simple faith, that attempts, as Paul put it, to tear down rather than build up the vulnerable and vulnerable-in-faith. Matthew’s listeners did not necessarily need to believe in strange eastern sages, but they did believe that in the simple things of Jesus they had discovered wisdom greater than the corruption and evil and injustice or the Roman Empire and of compromised religion, greater even than the precariousness of life in the first century. In Jesus they had found life – and life greater even than death.

So-called “progressive” Christians will often cringe at the bigoted pronouncements made in the name of the Jesus of Americanised Christianity, and rightly so. I suspect we have little difficulty in finding more wisdom in the toenails of Malala Yousafzai or Aung San Suu Kyi than in proponents of religious bigotry who claim to be followers of Christ, more bravery in the struggles of an Anousheh Ansari or her protégé Sepideh Hooshyar than the conceit of a Creflo Dollar or a Benny Hinn. Nevertheless we need to critique aspects of our own faith and practice, too.  Do we allow a place for those who hear God speaking to them, to those who have visions, to those whose understanding of the scriptures is uninformed by so-called “higher criticism”? Do we scorn those whose worship is so full of the emotional joy of knowing Jesus that without inhibition they raise their hands or dance or clap at his presence? Do we look askance at the oddballs in our society, the eccentric and befuddled, the damaged and bewildered who might equally be bearers of gold and incense and myrrh to the feet of Jesus?

Herod felt that he was smarter than the gauche travellers from the East. He sought to outwit them, and failed. Matthew will go on to tell a story of the infant whose appointment by God thwarts the machinations of the smart and the mighty, who sidesteps the tyrannies of the Roman Empire and the bigotries of oppressive religion. Herod represents in Matthew’s hands a cynical merger of Roman oppression and religious compromise. We want to be on the side of a story that sidesteps Herod, but in order to be so we need to look for all that is Herodian in us.

Where do we belong in this story? We need to make sure that we still have a child’s heart that can look on the baby Jesus with awe and delight, and place gifts at his feet. We must ensure that we can still dance with angels, mesmerized by the mystery of the Creator of the universe lying in a manger. We need to hear, too, the cry of baby Jesus, and know that this is, as Matthew will go on to tell us and Justin Welby has reminded us, the cry of every child who will be thrown out in the lottery of world politics and in the refugee’s search for safety from oppression and war.

Can we still weep tears of consternation and joy with Mary, as she finds the vulnerability and holiness and righteousness of the Way of Jesus bewildering, frightening, yet unavoidable? Can we muddle birth and death in our minds so that the whole of Jesus’ birth and teachings and death and resurrection and future coming become a wonderful fertile ground of laughter and joy and strength in times of weakness? Can we so throw away propriety (for Herod was a very proper man) that we instinctively welcome and embrace all who would cautiously or gauchely slip a toe in the door in the search for truth?

The story becomes muddled, like that of Eliot’s old traveller: the wise men enter Jesus’ stable. Yet at the same time Jesus enters the mysterious and searching, welcoming and embracing stable of their hearts and minds. Perhaps this was what Phillips Brooks was saying when he cried out to the infant Jesus “cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.”

TLBWY