Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 42: 1-91
1Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. 2He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; 3a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. 4He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
5Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: 6I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, 7to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. 8I am the Lord, that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols. 9See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.
Gospel Lesson – Mark 1: 4-112
4John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
“Water Is Life.”
Water is
life.
We are the people who live by the water
Pray by these
waters
Travel by these waters
Eat and drink from these
waters.
We are related to those who live in the water.
To
poison the waters is to show disrespect for creation.
To
honor and protect the waters is our responsibility as people of the
land.3
So says the voice one Native American, Winona LaDuke, whose ancestral lands were spread throughout the Great Lakes.
We forget that none of us lives very far away from water. As I write this our pregnant daughter-in-law, Patricia, anticipates that not long after her “water breaks”, her son – and our grandson – Gavin, will splash out into a world brimming with water. In creeks and rivers, ponds and lakes, estuaries and bays, seas and oceans, as well as from faucets and wells, water flows endlessly through our lives. It shouldn’t be so surprising just how much it impacts and shapes us. It’s a wonder how water seeps through the fabric of our world to touch everything we are and do.
As most of you know, I grew up on an island in the Caribbean and practically everything we consumed had to come to us shipped in freighters – across water. We drew our drinking water from brackish wells that was then treated by a process of desalination that was considered radically new for its time.4 The entire populace depended upon those wells. The sea that surrounded us nourished us both figuratively and literally.
I got my first view of an immense underwater world not long after I learned to swim; later I learned to venture out beyond the breakwater into the open ocean to go SCUBA5 diving. Practically every weekend was spent either going body surfing or water skiing, sailing over or diving and swimming through the watery playground that was both my front and backyard.
What are your earliest memories of water? Do you remember standing with a parent or other adult somewhere near a lake or river and being warned about the danger of water? Friends of ours, the Hannas of Siskiyou County, have a cattle ranch and there are water troughs everywhere – not just for the cattle but for the horses too. None of them are more than two feet deep, but their son, Judd, lost his little dog who jumped up into one of those troughs and drowned. Children who live near rivers have to be warned again and again about the danger of water.
I learned early on in my life that water can be powerful. I pulled my younger brother out of a raging surf one time as he was going down, he thought, for the last time. I’ve come close to drowning myself. But we’ve learned ways of harnessing that great power. I marveled at the size of the turbines underneath Hoover Dam that water turns and just how much electricity they produce. I stood in the spray under Niagara Falls in awe over the quantity of water that comes over those falls, every day, year after year, century after century.
Where does it all come from? Where does it all go? Geologists tell us that Niagara Falls is receding every year, as the sheer power of that falling water erodes and breaks apart even the rocks over which it flows. I haven’t noticed much difference in my lifetime of seeing those falls only a couple of times, but I’ve seen the changes in the falls at Yosemite since I first saw them in the 1950s. And we here in Napa know all too well how helpless we can become when faced with a raging river that’s overflowed its banks.
Living here in the Bay Area we’re never far from the water. It’s in us, all around us, sustaining us, nurturing us. It’s our distant past and our future promise. Yes, it can be dangerous and powerful when unchecked – as the people of New Orleans will never forget and those who live on the coastal plains of the state of Washington are experiencing at this very moment. But it also sanctifies what it touches and connects us with the earth. It gives life as it binds together our families and communities. It cleans and nourishes and refreshes us into embracing what’s to come.
Put a baby into water for the first time and he or she may stiffen up in fear at first; but held gently and guided through that experience, it won’t be long before any child will be splashing around and having fun. We can learn to love water just for the sheer delight that it gives. Never having been exposed to its frozen version until I was an adult, skating across it was more perilous than pleasurable; but who among us hasn’t enjoyed a time of squirting friends with it out of little plastic guns? We’re in awe of it thundering over great cliffs in places like Niagara Falls, mesmerized by its majesty as it curves up in the air in beautiful arcs in huge public fountains, or strangely comforted as we listen to its soothing sounds in little trickling fountains like this one.6
In the end, then, the waters of our baptism are meant to be waters of joy – joy that you and I are children of God: given birth, loved, forgiven, and given abundant life. If any people should be known for their enjoyment of life, it ought to be us. Every single day we who are Christians are invited to wake up to a new beginning – with the compassion and grace found in one Jesus of Nazareth it’s always possible for us to begin again. In that sense baptism is less a one-time event and more of a lifelong process of our becoming who we were created to be. God is still saying to us, “Let there be life” over and from within our own emerging personal stories, in the same way that the ancients believed God to say “Let there be life” above the chaos that became creation at the very beginning.
As Jesus stood in that river before his cousin John, a river that welcomed the Hebrew wanderers from the dryness and desolation of the desert into the moisture of the “promised land”, he not only was baptized, he immersed himself in the very waters of creation. He leaves behind a private life overshadowed by family ties and becomes drenched with a mission and a vision of a new Jerusalem. Whatever happened for Jesus at his baptism happens for us too. Because of what went before, even the waters of the River Jordan have seeped into it all, binding us together, giving us new life, and preparing us for what’s yet to come.
Remember your baptism, and be thankful.
* * *
1 Our reading from Isaiah is from the first of four so-called “servant songs” – the servant may be Moses, one of the prophets, the author himself, or even Israel. Whoever it is this song portrays the servant as one chosen by God. The servant works as God would work, bringing about justice by giving life. The servant is commissioned not only to bring the covenant to the people of God, but to embody that covenant. Not surprisingly, the early Christian community adopted this imagery for Jesus.
2 The story of Jesus’ baptism by John is at the center of today’s celebration. From this central point the church looks backward to that servant in Israel and forward to our baptisms as Christians and the life that is meant for all who will let themselves be filled with the Spirit of God. So while today celebrates the baptism of Jesus, it’s meant to be a reminder to us all of our own baptisms – a time for us to hear that with the help of God we, too, are meant to be “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations” (Isaiah 42: 6b).
3 Winona LaDuke is an Ojibwa, of the Algonquian tribe, and these words were translated from her native language. The waters in question are, first, the St. Lawrence River, but this people migrated from its banks southward coming through Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake Huron, through the Mackinac Straits south to Lake Michigan and then west to Lake Superior. No wonder the Ojibwa people described themselves as living, praying and traveling by these waters. In what later became the province of Ontario and the states of Michigan and Wisconsin, these waters meant eating and drinking and life to them.
Interestingly enough, the tribe refers to themselves as the Anishinabe, which means “the human beings” in the Ojibwa language. For more than twenty years, Winona LaDuke has impressed people around the world with her oratory and debate skills and as an advocate for Native American rights, a champion of women’s and children’s issues, a protector of the environment, and as a leading voice of the Green Party. She is recognized by many as a charismatic and inspiring speaker as well as a writer.
4 The process used to provide potable water for us on Aruba is called “reverse osmosis” and involves seawater being pushed through a semi-permeable membrane that traps the salt and other impurities on one side and allows water to be filtered through a microscopic strainer.
5 The term SCUBA (originally an acronym for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) arose during World War II, and referred to United States Navy combat frogmen's oxygen rebreathers, developed by Dr. Christian Lambertsen for underwater warfare – in fact my first instructor was an ex-Navy UDT (underwater-demolition-team) expert – a precursor to the current SEAL (itself an acronym for combat operations at sea, from the air, and on land). Although the word SCUBA started as an acronym, it’s now usually seen as a normal word, “scuba,” and it’s become acceptable to refer to “scuba equipment” or “scuba-diving gear”. I loved those many, many hours that I spent deep underwater cruising over the teeming life associated with tropical reef systems.
6 I borrowed my colleague’s bubbling desk-top fountain for a visual and auditory experience throughout this day’s worship service. It stayed on top of the baptismal font and became the focal point for that time that we call “a moment for the child in us all.” I really had to resist passing out squirt guns to everybody and letting them go at it with cries of “Remember your baptism and be thankful!”