1st Epiphany B - 11 January 2009

1 Epiphany B - 11 January 2009
Genesis 1: 5-11; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11
James V. Stockton

God brings order to chaos. It is the basic effect of the movement of God across the face of the world, a movement many people long to witness in their lifetime. I received an email recently. In it a fellow we’ll call ‘Sam’ tells of his experience with something he calls “A.A.A.D.D., Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder.” “I decide to water my garden,” writes Sam. “As I turn on the hose in the driveway, I look over at my car and decide it needs washing. As I start toward the garage, I notice that there is mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mail box earlier. I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car. I lay my car keys on the table. I put the junk mail in the garbage can under the table, and notice that the can is full. So, I decide to lay the bills back on the table and take out the garbage first. But then I think, since I'm going to be near the mailbox when I take out the garbage, I may as well pay the bills first. I take my checkbook off the table, and see that there is only one check left. My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the can of soda that I'd been drinking.”

And so it goes. Even ages after the Spirit of God first moved across the face of the world, Sam experiences chaos. Many people will hear the beginning of the creation story, as we do today, and will recognize it as such. How many people, I wonder, will recognize it more personally? In the beginning there was utter absence; no inner light with which to move forward, no inner voice to try to follow, no helping hand to hold. How many people will more fully appreciate what it means to be in relationship with God when they recall or imagine what it is like not to be? I remember when my family and I first moved to Austin in 1996. Highway 183 was just a four lane blacktop from Balcones Springs Road northward. Driving up highway 35, I could tell easily where Austin stopped and Pflugerville began, then Round Rock. Now, 183 is a major six-lane highway through to Leander. Now going up I-35, the boundaries of Austin, Pflugerville, Round Rock, and Georgetown are indistinguishable. And if the analogy is not perfect, if we have some nostalgia for what once was, then this helps, too. It reminds us that chaos is present still today at the edge of our existence.


Sam continues with his description of his AAADD: “I go inside the house,” he writes. “I go to my desk where I find the can of soda that I'd been drinking. I'm going to look for my checks, but first I need to push the soda aside, so that I don't accidentally knock it over. The soda is getting warm, and I decide to put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold. As I head toward the kitchen with the soda, a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye; they need water. I put the soda on the counter and discover my reading glasses that I've been searching for all morning. I decide I better put them back on my desk, but first I'll water the flowers. I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water, and suddenly I spot the TV remote. Someone left it on the kitchen table. I realize that tonight when we watch TV, I'll be looking for the remote, but I won't remember that it's on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs; but first I'll water the flowers. I pour some water in the flowers, but quite a bit spills on the floor. So, I set the remote back on the table, get some towels, and wipe up the spill. Then, I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do.”

For many people in Jesus’ day, they can no longer recall what they were planning once to do. In the struggle just to get by, they lose track of what they’d intend for their lives. In their efforts merely to avoid further hardship, they lose sight of real friendships and settle for a network of strategic acquaintances. In their busyness, they lose their ear for the sound that love makes between the hearts of two whom God has called together. They settle instead for those passing clichés that frightened lonely people mumble to one another as they go their parallel ways. They forget their desire to make of their communities havens of peace and progress, of faithfulness and of humanity at its best, and settle now for a society oriented around fear, fear of the Romans who rule their world, and fear that the God who rules their being, must surely be just as demanding and severe. These people are coming to John from everywhere. And with them comes One whose baptism will move across the face of the void with the power of the Holy Spirit. People wonder, if Jesus comes among us, yet without sin, why would he be baptized? Maybe as an example? Maybe to validate John’s ministry? And while these theories might be exactly right, I suggest that Jesus gets baptized in order to experience personally the substance of the thing.

At its most basic, baptism is a person’s movement toward God, and God’s reciprocal movement to get between the person and the sin that infects his world, or hers. Yes, God intercedes to relieve the person of the spiritual consequences of her own sin, or his. But God also moves to intercept the effects of the sins of others; effects that deafen a person to the harmony of God ringing in the world; that rob a person of the vision of God’s holy order latent if not active in the world around them; that deny a person the sense of God recreating and sustaining him or her from within. Jesus comes to John to say, “I want to participate in the movement of God. “I want the Peace of God to descend like a dove upon me, and, through me, to move across the sin and chaos of the world around me.” Sam concludes his description of his AAADD. “At the end of the day,” he writes, “the car isn't washed, the bills aren't paid, there is a warm can of soda sitting on the counter, the flowers don't have enough water, there is still only one check in my check book, I can't find the remote, I can't find my glasses, and I don't remember what I did with the car keys. Then, when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I'm really baffled; because I know I was busy all day, and now I'm really tired. I realize this is a serious problem, and I'll try to get some help for it. But first I think I’ll check my e-mail. So,” Sam writes; “do me a favor: forward this message to everyone that you know, because I don't remember who I sent it to.”

You probably agree that even such small experiences are not limited to those who, like Sam, are growing older. We all have our own similar brushes with chaos and disorder. And I pray that most, if not all, are ones like this, ones that can make us laugh even when we identify with them very much. And when we do laugh at them, then I suggest it is because we know, at least on some level, God offers to you and me, and to anyone who seeks it, a personal participation in that same movement of the Spirit that descends upon Jesus.

In some way, we know that by your participation or mine in Christ, God moves across our inner worlds, our fears and hopes, our disappointments and our successes and settles them all where they belong. I think somehow we know that today, tomorrow, this week, and this new year, by our participation in Christ, God’s Spirit is descending upon this world in the form of you and me. I think we know somehow that God will move through us across the face of the world around us, and in the world of the people around us with whom God is brining us face to face, across vacuous despair and to create real hope and genuine promise; across hidden shapeless fear and to move us all to confidence, contentment, and Peace.

And so may Almighty God, who through the ministry of Christ, has prepared us in heart and mind, find us always ready to welcome and to share the blessing of the Spirit of God; who with the heavenly Father and our Savior Jesus Christ, lives and moves and reigns One God, now and forever. Amen.

© 2009, James V. Stockton