But the surprise came the next morning, when the doctor came in to release me and the baby from the hospital. He grinned at us cheerfully and said: “Well, the easy part is over. The hard part is the next 21 years.” And Tom and I just stared at each other blankly – because how could anything top the drama of a child being born?
That afternoon, we dressed Sarah in footie pajamas and a little knit hat, wrapped her up carefully in 7 or 8 blankets, nestled her into her state-of-the-art child safety seat, and took her home – and I remember walking into the house, all prepared with cribs and cute baby equipment and plug covers and child safety locks; sitting down with Sarah on the couch, looking at her, looking up at Tom. And together, in unison, we looked at each other and said, “Now what?”
Because it suddenly occurred to us that we thought we had prepared everything we could possibly prepare, but we had no idea how to be parents.
And for the last 20 years, we’ve done what every parent has ever done – figured it out as we went along, taught her what we were taught, hoped she learned some things we couldn’t teach her, helped her grow up as best we could, and most of all, just loved her. Because that’s the whole point of being born, isn’t it? It’s not about all the preparation that led up to the birth, the work on creating a family that can nurture a child, the nutrition, the gathering of supplies. Those are all important – but the whole point of the birth is, now what? What is going to happen during the course of this precious new life? How is the child going to live into the promise of perfection, the day she was born?
As we read the story of Jesus’ baptism in our gospel today, the question that baptism points toward is – Now What? This baptism is the very first event in Mark’s gospel – Mark’s version of the Christmas story in a sense – the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the moment when his identity comes clear, the opening of the trajectory of his life. And from this moment of baptism, we can look backwards to see all the preparation that has brought Jesus to this moment, but more importantly, we can look forward to understand what his baptism is pointing toward – what it will mean for Jesus, and what it will mean for us.
Looking backwards, this scene from Mark’s gospel evokes some deep truths, some vital events in Israel’s history that every listener would have understood. First, at the most basic level, the ritual of baptism points to cleansing and purifying rituals that would have been familiar to every Israelite. John takes this simple and repeatable act within Judaism and re-purposes it as a one-time ritual symbolizing repentance and forgiveness of sins – which is a direct challenge to the power and authority of the Temple in Jerusalem – because the Temple has a monopoly on ritual acts taken to ask for forgiveness. John circumvents all this and says that the Temple apparatus is not necessary. For forgiveness of sins, what is necessary is repentance and baptism, and the past will be wiped clean, life can begin again, anew – with a second birth.
Taking the meaning a step deeper, the fact that this baptism takes place in Jordan River brings to mind for Israelites the triumphal entry of the Israelites into the Promised Land. Moses had led them out of slavery and had died, and had turned over leadership to a new leader, Joshua, who parted the waters of the Jordan as Moses had parted the waters of the Red Sea and led them to their new home. Jewish people hearing this story of Jesus’ baptism for the first time would have understood intuitively that Mark is telling them that a new Joshua has arisen, who is leading them to a new place of Promise – emphasized by the fact that Jesus’ name, in Hebrew, IS Joshua – a name for heroes, meaning “God Saves.”
But here, instead of the waters being parted, it is the heavens that are torn apart as the Holy Spirit comes to rest on Jesus. The people are not coming to live in a new place, in a new way. It is God himself who is coming out of the heavens to rest on Jesus, the Son of God who is making his home among us, and who will make the everyday reality of our life right here the new Land of Promise.
Behind that story lies one more, still deeper and further back. Many peoples and cultures have creation stories that involve water. The Hopi people, for instance, tell of worlds before our world, that were destroyed by fire and flood; and of a Creator Woman rescuing the Hopi people from flood and making them boats in which they floated to safety, until they finally emerged into new creation from a certain spring at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Other cultures have similar stories of our world emerging from creation water.
Our Old Testament lesson points the way to this truth also: the Bible tells us that in some deep and mysterious way, all of creation comes out of water. We read this morning, “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.” ‘Wind’ is same word as ‘Spirit’ in Hebrew – so we understand that into this brooding, wet, windy, Spirit-filled silence, the voice of God speaks the words of creation – and life bursts forth.
Perhaps underneath those stories of creation lie some deep truths. Not only the scientific facts of our earth, that tell us that life emerged from water. But the fact that each of us were held in our mothers’ wombs, suspended in water, before we were born, emerging from a world of water into a world of earth and air.
As Jesus stands in the Jordan River, as he emerges, dripping, from the water, as the Spirit of God descends upon him, we see that what is happening to him is no less than a moment of new creation, new birth, new life.
Which is where we come back to our original question – Now What? Because the point of new birth is not the preparation, but the life to be led after the birth. For Jesus, the key to Jesus’ baptism is this voice that declares he is God’s Beloved Child. Jesus’ own Belovedness becomes the key to understanding everything he does. Because, for any child, the experience of being loved by a parent, or some other mentor, becomes the foundation of our ability to love others in turn. Because Jesus is loved, he is able to give love away freely on the cross, and love becomes the whole meaning of his life.
Jesus’ baptism points the way to our baptism, a new birth for us too. Someone recently asked me, what are the minimum beliefs required to be a member of our church? And here’s the answer: there are no minimum beliefs. We only ask people to be baptized, which is full initiation into the church. There are some other procedural things to become a member of Church of the Nativity, but there’s no quiz on beliefs. And sure, the church has basic beliefs, all spelled out in the Nicene Creed. It’s not that the beliefs aren’t important – they are, and I believe them. But we don’t ask people to be 100% certain of those doctrines to be members – as Queen Elizabeth I said in helping to settle the conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, “I will not make windows into men’s souls.”
We’re all on a journey where we are traveling toward more knowledge of God. There’s a story of Billy and Ruth Graham driving along a highway somewhere, when they came to a long stretch, maybe 20 miles, that was under construction. So of course they had to slow down and creep along. When they finally came to the end of the construction, there was a sign, and Ruth Graham pointed to the sign and said, “That’s what I want on my tombstone when I die.” Billy Graham looked at the sign and it said, “Construction Complete. Thank you for your patience.”
Baptism is the beginning of a lifelong journey of growing into the new birth God has given us in baptism. I tell parents who are baptizing their babies – when they are born, physically, you don’t expect them to understand everything about how to live. What you do is accept them into your family and promise to feed them, love them, cherish them, teach them what they need to know to become wise and strong and caring adults, who are ready to take their place in the world.
It takes a lifetime to grow into the promise of our birth. And the same is true for our rebirth, our baptism – it takes a lifetime to grow into. A lifetime of accepting our belovedness, a lifetime of learning to love others.
So – for us who have been baptized in his name – Now What? Jesus asks us all to listen carefully, on this Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, this day on which we all remember our own baptisms. Listen carefully to what God is saying to each of us in our baptism: You are my Child, the Beloved: in you I am well pleased. You are loved by God: the love of God that was poured into Jesus at his baptism, is the same love that has been poured into us by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are forgiven, we are healed, we are reborn into new life. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are given the ability to pour that love into the world, loving others as we have been loved.
So it’s a simple question, really, but it’s a question that I invite each of you to think about this week. It’s the question of all of our lives as Christians – what happens now? How should we live into our baptism, the new birth we have been given? How are we called to love world as God loves us?
Now that we have been baptized, now that we have been reborn into new life, now that we have been given new birth as children of God – Now What?
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