The Pastor’s Sermon: The Festival of the Baptism of our Lord Jesus

Disclaimer: At the request of a few of the congregation, I’m ‘publishing’ the text of my sermon ‘as written.’ I cannot guarantee that I will deliver the sermon ‘as written.’

 

‘And 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.

• The “tearing apart” of the heavens sounds very violent. We talk about “the heavens opening up” when we discuss a huge rainstorm. We might even say that “the heavens were opened” to us when we contemplate a starry night on a clear evening. Still, none of this is the heaven being “torn apart.”
• This is quite a distinctive saying. It is undoubtedly poetic and it displays a very sure idea that something extraordinary has happened. Something beyond the normal experience has taken place and the reality we know cannot be the same. The status quo cannot be maintained.
• There is a sort of violence and wild power involved in this portion of Mark's Gospel. Just after the passage we've read today, Jesus is driven into the desert. Some hold that the passage says he was “thrown” into the wilderness, where he was tempted, surrounded by wild beasts, and yet he was waited on by angels. When Jesus comes up out of the water of the baptism of John, he is the one who sees the Spirit descending from the splintered heavens. He is also the one who hears the voice of the Father, proclaiming who he is. After this his mission is to let the world know who he is by what he does and what he says. (Mark, by the way, concentrates more on what Jesus does. He also does it through a breathless narrative, constantly using the word “immediately.”)
• This is the beginning of Jesus' ministry. It is also the beginning of Mark's Gospel. Here, Jesus alines himself with those who wish to make a new start, free from sin, who wish to take their relationship with God seriously, which is the meaning of John's baptism, and he does it in such a way that the power of God is shown not only to him, but to us, the readers.
• This “tearing open” appears once again in Mark's Gospel. When Jesus breathes his last on the Cross, the curtain of the Temple is torn in two. This is the dividing line between the Holy of Holies, where God's presence was most concentrated, for lack of a better word, and the rest of the Temple and the whole world. It is torn from “top to bottom”, meaning it was done from the inside by the power of God. Just following this, the centurion proclaims Jesus to be God's Son, paralleling what Jesus heard at his baptism when the heavens were town open.
• So what does it mean that as Jesus emerged onto the scene the heavens get torn open and that as Jesus exits the scene the curtain in the temple gets torn open? There's a story about an occasion a few years ago when a biblical scholar was explaining Mark 1 to a group of teenagers. This scholar told the teens that when Jesus was baptized, the skies did not just open up, as some older translations said, but in the original Greek of Mark 1:10 we are told the skies ripped open, split in an almost violent way. This was very dramatic and forceful. "Get the point?" the scholar asked the group. "When Jesus was baptized the heavens that separate us from God were ripped open so that now we can get to God. Because of Jesus we have access to God--we can get close to him."
• But there was one young man sitting in the front row, arms crossed, making a fairly obvious display of his disinterest. But suddenly he perked up and said, "That ain't what it means." What?" the Bible scholar said, startled. "I said that ain't what that means," the teenager repeated. "It means that the heavens were ripped open so that now God can get at us anytime he wants. Now nobody's safe!"
• “Safe”... Such a strange word when it come to God. There is no “safe” around God since God's grace changes everything. Things can't be as they were nor can they return to the way things were because the heavens have be torn apart and the Spirit of God is loose in the world and “the Kingdom of God has come near.” And Thank God for it.