Baptism of Our Lord January 11, 2009

Genesis 1:1-5                                                                       

Acts 19:1-7                                                                          

Mark 1:4-11

 

 

He was born a prince, given a name that meant “he who achieves his aim.” His father the king kept him carefully sheltered in his royal palaces, shielded from all exposure to human suffering, disease, old age, death. When at last, at age 29, he left the compound and ventured out to meet his subjects, the young man was overwhelmed by what he saw of suffering, disease, poverty and death. He reacted by adopting a life of extreme asceticism. When this failed to satisfy him, he sat down under a tree, vowing to remain there in meditation until he discovered Truth. After 49 days, he achieved what he called Enlightenment.

 

He then embarked upon a ministry of teaching others the wisdom he had found. At its core, this teaching was that suffering results from attachment; that all material things are impermanent and the self is an illusion. There is no God, there is no infallible scripture. The individual’s path is to attain Nirvana, an escape from the cycle of rebirth and hence attachment to material things, to self, to life.

 

We are talking, of course, of the Buddha. And I outline his life and teaching, however summarily and inadequately, to highlight their contrast with the life and teachings of Jesus. In Jesus we have a man born into poverty, beset from the very beginning by conflict, suffering and death. A man who, at the beginning of his ministry—his baptism by John at the River Jordan—symbolically “plunges into” life, making common cause with the lot of other human beings. Mark’s gospel, which lacks any nativity narrative, states that it was this very plunge into common cause with humanity that led God to proclaim Jesus “my Son, the Beloved; with [whom] I am well pleased.”

 

Mark’s gospel goes on to show us what this life of common cause consists of. In Jesus, it shows us a man who proceeds at every turn to embrace and take upon himself the miseries of life and death—lepers, outcasts, the blind and deaf and lame. A man whose teachings are not about escape from, but rather transformation of, human existence. A man whose life culminates in his death, death of a most horrible kind, embraced for the sake of others—for us.

 

For Buddhism, the very notion of there being a God is a form of illusion or attachment. For Christianity, belief in God is what makes humans human, what makes life capable of meaning and redemption. For Buddhism, holy writings are subsidiary to the individual’s own experience; for Christianity, Scripture is the repository of wisdom about holiness and individual experience is to be always tested and evaluated in light of this wisdom. The Buddhist Nirvana is a kind of blessed nothingness. For Christianity, the end of this life is resurrection of the body, the transformation of all Creation into a new and eternal existence. In this kingdom of God, human beings and indeed all Creation are to live in harmonious reconciliation with God, an ultimate “more real reality.”

 

When Gene Robinson was ordained bishop, he stated that one of his goals for our diocese was that every one of us would be able to state what Jesus meant in his or her life. It is an important goal, and I want to hold it up again for us. To ask it as a question: “Who is Jesus Christ to you?” is to ask the question of who we are, each one of us; what our lives are about. It is the most important, even the only important, question of our lives.

 

I was visiting with one of our oldest parishioners last week. She is in a nursing home following a set-back that sent her to the hospital, and this week there will be a consultation about what is next for her in her life: back to her daughter’s home, permanent transfer to a care facility? She is a woman of remarkable strength of character and good cheer. There was nothing self-pitying about her. But she asked the question: “What is this all about? What isthe good of it, being this helpless old lady on a walker?” She smiled as she asked, but behind the smile was obvious pain.

 

That night as I was praying the office of Compline in bed before turning out the light, I came upon the words in the confession of sin. It is a very simple form of confession, and I say it every night, but I was suddenly struck by what I was saying:

 

For the sake of your Son our Lord Jesus Christ,

forgive us all our offenses;

and grant that we may serve you

in newness of life,

to the glory of your Name.

 

The “point of it all,” this confession is saying, is that we may live our lives to glorify God. This is our “service”; this is what life is all about. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon in the second century, one of the earliest Christian saints, put it this way: “The glory of God is the human person, fully alive.” (Irenaeus was a fierce opponent of Gnosticism, which in a somewhat Buddhist way denied the goodness and even the reality of the material world.)

 

We pervert the materialism of Christian teaching to exalt money, possessions, the importance of the self as a sort of god, life in the sense of a medically sustained existence as supreme good. We are shaped by our culture to see our lives in utilitarian terms: what can we produce, what do we buy and own and consume? But Christianity says that the material created world, our selves, our lives are good in measure as they glorify God, as we are fully alive to him and to each other. It does not matter if we are eight or 88; we can glorify God in this way, just as we can help others to glorify him.

 

I have been puzzling about how the current economic crisis may be turned to spiritual opportunity for us. It seems to me that it casts into doubt the whole way we have been living, the “American way” of frantic getting and spending, using and discarding. How do we turn from this way and begin to glorify God in ourselves and each other? What does life look like that has a place for 88 year old ladies who are too frail to be alone, that makes a way for them to glorify God? What does life look like that has a place for the young man who has come to a dead end with drugs and drink and crime, who has murdered a policeman; how do we envision a way for even such a one to glorify God? What of those who have lost their jobs? Those who cannot pay the mortgages on their homes? Those being killed in Gaza? Their fellow human beings in Israel? The hundreds of millions in Africa? The desperate young militants in Afghanistan, in Pakistan?

 

The waters of Jordan, the waters of life, are so full of human suffering—but also of human potential. Whatever the answers to these questions, it is our call as Christians to plunge into the waters and take upon ourselves the struggle to glorify God in the renewing of human life.