For Sunday, January 11, 2015 – Mark 1:4-11
Begin again! John calls to people near and far. This is the first day of your new life! You can pass once more through the waters of birth, repent and be forgiven all you regret having done or having failed to do. The old you can be buried and a new you can arise. And come they do. They lower themselves into the river of forgiveness, confessing publicly their sins and going home to make amends. What a tremor must have coursed through the countryside and the city at the news of what was happening, that someone was taking seriously our condition and giving us a simple path back to ourselves. Fresh starts all around! Do-overs for everyone!
Something feels almost reckless in John, this wilderness baptizer who calls people into the river Jordan, his camel’s hair clothes sopping wet, a smelly mess. Yet what promise and hope he brings! Someone more powerful, even wilder, will follow, he says, one who will baptize not with water but with Spirit. And then, unnoticed among them, he is there. Just Jesus, neighbor from Nazareth, the carpenter’s kid, meek and mild. He is hardly noticeable, except for the sheer lightness of his being, his empowered ordinariness, as he too goes down into the water—just like them, one of them. Is this what opens his eyes and his ears to be able to hear his true name, Beloved? He lowers himself and expects nothing more, nothing less, than anyone else. Is this what keeps us from believing our own belovedness, that in significant ways we have stayed on the shore?
At the water’s edge we can watch but not get wet. We see others finding “something more” but we are smart and see what ends when “something new” begins. Besides, the water will make a mess, will disrupt more than just our own lives. Our favorite habits and familiar doubts, our good reasons not to trust, all our baggage will be sacrificed, lost, without regard for how hard we have worked to achieve this level of dysfunction. Are you even in this with us, Lord? Do you approve of what is being asked, how foolish we will look? Oh, we daydream about going with the flow, letting go. We imagine how utterly reviving it could be to step out, surrender to other hands, join the adventure . . . but in some pretty big ways, here we stay, still on shore. Meanwhile, the river flows. Begin again, the water whispers. You can be forgiven. You can learn to forgive. Fresh start! Do-overs for everyone! Why is it so hard to step in?
