First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
9 January 2005
Reclaiming the Waters
This past Thursday night, I stood up here with some of you for our Epiphany celebration.
The day of Epiphany and the season that follows is a time given to sharing the light of Christ's birth that is manifest in the world. On Thursday night, we sang "We Three Kings". We sang of the star of the wonder that guides us to thy perfect light. We had a beautiful candlelit procession in silence from the chapel through the darkened halls and passageways of the church and gathered here around the font to renew our baptismal promises. And today, together with churches of many stripes, we read the story of Christ's baptism in the river Jordan.
Before we said our vows on Thursday, I read an excerpt of T.S. Eliot's famous poem, "The Journey of the Magi." I'd like to share it with you again, or for the first time.
Through the voice of one of the wise men, Eliot writes:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different: this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no long at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
"Were we led all [this] way for birth or death?" I begin with this poem on a Sunday when both of our scriptures for today make mention of water. On the one hand, the gospel lesson mentions the waters of the river Jordan where Jesus himself was baptized by John. The word "baptism" is rooted in a Greek word, baptizien, which means "to be dipped." At the time, baptisms were done not just to dip but also to drown a person's old life of aimlessness and sin and to bring death to one's "old dispensation" as Eliot might say. At the same time, baptism was the birthing of a new life that would be lived in and for God. Matthew tells us that just as Jesus was coming up out of these waters of transformation, just as he was opening his eyes, catching his breath, and wiping the water from his face, the heavens opened and the very spirit of God descended upon him. Never before had the results of a baptism been so immediate or apparent.
In the Genesis story, on the other hand, we have to go back in time even further, to a time before time. The waters mentioned in the second verse of Genesis refer to the primordial waters of chaos. Apparently, even before the first day, before there was light and dark, before there were plants and animals, there was this watery abyss, a formless muck out of which God shaped the world. Many of the ancients, both those who were living at the time Genesis was written and even those who were living long before amidst pre-Biblical cultures, believed that the created world was the result of a mythic battle between a god of chaos, often represented as a leviathan or some kind of sea monster, and a God of Order. Seen in this light, our Bible opens with an account of which God won the battle. In Genesis, God's spirit moves over the deep and conquers the primordial water of chaos by naming it and shaping it and by declaring it good—in essence, by creating order. So, the very process of creation and of creativity, then as now, for God and for us, begins with chaos.
In both of these passages, God's spirit moves and breathes over water and draws wondrous and amazing things out of water. What we learn then is that water is a place, a location, a source of God's power and potential to create and to renew our lives and our world. God works with water to bring about things like order and beauty, to bring about goodness and love. The Bible tells us so.
How then...how are we to reconcile these watery passages that speak of new life when our headlines this week are still flooded with the death and destruction of the tsunamis in South Asia? Were we living in ancient times, we might wonder if the sea leviathan had pushed back against the God of order and won the battle this time. Rather than creation, we see the utter destruction of people's lives and livelihoods. Rather than order, we see the chaos on the evening news even as relief efforts are increasingly coordinated. Rather than a baptism of new beginning, we see the living and the dead coming out of the muddy water to face mass graves of unidentified bodies. As Mary said last week, it may well be too soon to pray lest we risk sentimentalizing the unspeakable grief these tsunamis have brought. It is clearly too soon to proclaim that new life, new patterns of living and being will emerge, from that mud and water. In some areas, the devastation reached some ten miles inland from the shores of the Indian Ocean. How can we even talk about the birth and creation and baptism of Christ and of the new life they bring to us as such a time as this? What is this 'new life', after all?
Eliot's wise man seems especially wise to ask, "did we come all this way for birth or death?" As we have heard again the story of the birth of Christ, as we hear today the story of creation and the story of Christ's baptism in river Jordan, we are invited to remember for ourselves the transformation to which God calls us. To know the new life that God promises us is to know birth and death, our death. Its not merely a psychological or spiritual kind of death. It is only through an encounter with our own mortality and with our limits as human beings that we may come to learn that our lives and ours deaths are so much more than a beginning and an end. The transformation to which we are called at our baptisms sets our feet on a journey that knows no end, one that follows the arch of Jesus life from his birth and baptism, through his ministry, to foot of the cross and to the empty tomb. Lest we return to quickly to our old dispensations and to thinking that birth and death are different, our faith reminds us that the new life to which God calls us is life eternal, wherein not even death can separate from the love of God in Christ. How hard this is to bear in mind when faced with a death toll of 150,000 and rising? And, how easily do we find ourselves clutching to a "small g" god that is supposed to protect us from any hard and bitter agony? Though there are countless examples of people crying out to God to protect them against their adversaries, nowhere does the Bible promise that God will protect us from suffering and death. God offers no such security or protection in this life. With Christ, human beings will suffer and die. With Christ, we will come to know that we are not in control, that we are not invulnerable, that our only power is in our weakness and that our only richness is in God. And yet, we like to return to our Kingdoms where we can think we are in control and the sole rulers of our lives, where we cling to our riches and our 'have no fear' self-images. We live in a country where our rulers arrogantly promise us security, as if we are somehow entitled to live our lives without fear of death. Amidst the illusion of this old dispensation, we assume that our lives are no more than what happens between the narrow parenthesis of our birth and death.
In the aftermath of 9/11, my friend Peter Gomes from across the Common was bold to proclaim our faith by asking a poignant question. Taken out of context, the question might be construed as callous, but he asked a group of Christians, 'why are we so surprised'? His point in asking was not a geo-political one but a theological one. He was saying that our faith and the Bible, tells us, again and again, that death is a fact of life, that we are not as invincible as like to think, and that people are capable of horrible and evil things. Even when nature ends life, is there a way in which we can see even this horrible tragedy in Southeast Asia as somehow unsurprising? Is there way that we could still feel the depths of grief and compassion that we feel and not be so shocked? At the very least, I wonder if our faith can give us the resources to say that even though this tragedy ranks among the worst natural disasters on record, that in God, the worst thing is never the last thing. In God, there is more to life than our lives. There is more to death than our deaths. For what will separate from the love of God in Christ? Paul's answer?—Nothing. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord; neither "death, nor life. Nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation". In times like these, I wish we could all have Paul's faith. There is more than passing comfort in these words. There is a basis for an entirely new and different way of seeing human life and death. We may find ourselves living and breathing with a hope that though the lives of 150,000 and counting are over, not one, not even one, is lost in God's eternal presence and abiding love. To let God's love abide is the new dispensation to which we are called. To stop looking for a God that protects us and to start trusting in a God that loves us and never leaves us come what may.
Do you remember what God said to Jesus, as Jesus was coming up out of those baptismal waters of transformation. God said to him and God says to us, whenever we are stripped to our barest self and most vulnerable self, when we encounter a hard and bitter agony, whenever we are seeking new life and in so doing finding our own death, God tells us all that we need to know. "You are my beloved." You are my beloved in life. You are my beloved in death. Because this is so, your birth and your death need not seem so different. In the new life I promise, you are my beloved through all eternity.
Amen.
© 2005, Daniel Smith