Sermon: Spirited Baptism

Texts: Mark 1:4-11; Acts 19:1-7

Date: January 8, 2012

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

          Since I didn’t see you last week, and the year is still pretty new, let me begin by wishing you a Happy New Year!  Even though New Year’s day is sort of a made-up human construct, and doesn’t mean much in terms of cosmic time, I still like this time of year, and the whiffs of newness, beginnings, fresh starts and so forth that go along with an observation of a new year beginning. 

          Did any of you make a New Year’s resolution?  (Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to report what it is.)  I was internet fishing on the topic of resolutions and found a couple of articles written by a motivational speaker named Steve Shapiro who distinctly lacks enthusiasm for this practice.  He had done some research and found that making resolutions was more a practice among the young.  According to the study, New Year’s resolution usage in America has been falling rapidly with age; 57% of those aged 18-24 set New Year’s resolutions, compared with only 32% of those over age 54 who still set them.  Shapiro says that’s because setting resolutions is not a very effective means of modifying behavior.  “As we get older, we get wiser and we identify things that don’t work for us and stop using them,” says Shapiro.  Apparently only about 8% of the general populace manages to regularly make positive changes in their lives based on making and keeping New Year’s resolutions.  And the older one gets, the less successful the keeping of resolutions becomes.  Shapiro calls making New Year’s resolutions “one of our nation’s most masochistic traditions.” [1]

          I hope I have not discouraged any of you who are doing really good on your resolutions on Day 8 of 2012.  If resolutions work for you, by all means carry on.  More power to you.  I don’t often make New Year’s resolutions, especially now that I’m older.  It’s not that I think I am perfect—far from it—but I don’t like to volunteer for personal failure, when failure by accident happens plenty often enough.  I’ve come to think that trying to change yourself by a sheer act of willpower is pretty tough.  Even when the spirit is willing, as the Good Book says, the flesh is weak.  And the more resolved one is at the beginning of a hoped-for change, the greater the disappointment at the failure that besets as many as 92% of January resolution makers.

          I’ve been toying with the idea that a similar force is behind the Christian understanding that John’s baptism of repentance was inadequate.  What, after all, is repentance, other than a resolution to turn from the old way to the new?  I don’t want to downplay the importance of repentance in human life—it’s an essential spiritual move.  But it’s not enough.  It’s possible to repent, fail, repent, fail, repent, fail, over and over and over again without sustaining real change.  John remembers his dad quitting smoking a number of times while he was growing up. As he recollects, his mom would consent to getting a new car if he would quit smoking, and the new car would be purchased but soon tobacco would have its hooks into Dad again.  A couple years later, a new resolution, a new car, and then again the old habit would have a resurgence.  I don’t doubt that the repentance/resolution was genuine on each round; it’s just that some changes are really daunting to make on one’s own.  Pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, spiritually speaking, seems inordinately difficult.

          Most of us can’t be badgered into genuine change, either.  That doesn’t stop us from trying the badgering technique on those close to us.  It’s pretty easy to see how much other people need to repent.  Just give me your blank resolution form, Dear One, and I will fill it out for you.  Anybody recognize that impulse?

          I found this poem by Chana Bloch titled “I and Thou” that tickled me.  It’s a poem in three parts.

1

How I hate you tonight!

I tick off

the bumps on your back,

your hangnails, the acid

smell of your sweat. 

You corrode my skin.

Who let you in?

When did you grow that nose?

You changed your name.

Of course you’re to blame.

What do you care.

You don’t know me,

you don’t know me.

2

For your information, my toes

are rosebuds

of  superior breeding.

yours are tough,

discolored,

misshapen by shoes.

And how did you ever get

tobacco stains

on the bottom of your feet?

3

The princess

picked up the Little Green Frog

spotted ugh! all over

and threw it just as

hard as she could

against the castle wall.

“Here’s your chance!”

she cried.

“Now become

a prince.”

          Y’all remember the story of the Princess and the Frog?  How does the transformation into Prince happen in the story?  The princess kisses the frog; only then does he change.  Which technique, do you suppose, is more likely to result in positive change—the kiss or the full body slam against the wall?  The kiss, duh.  Curious, isn’t it, that we humans keep trying the other method on ourselves and others, somehow imagining that if we inform our dear ones or ourselves how disgusting they/we are, repentance and reform will follow.  Slam, then “Here’s your chance—now become a prince!”    Tragically, there are religious people of various stripes that seem to think this is the way God operates, that God invites change through a vicious critique and the threat of violence in this world or the next.

          I think what we see in Jesus’ baptism is the kissing God.  When Jesus was baptized, the heavens were torn open, the Spirit descended, and a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  This was a message for Jesus, of course, but not for him alone.  God’s tender love for humankind infuses scripture and mystical experience.  If this was a private message for Jesus alone, why would the gospels have captured it for our overhearing?  The point of Jesus’ incarnation is not the distance between ourselves and Christ but the closeness; not our dissimilarity but our similarity.  Jesus’ baptism, the baptism that transcends John’s baptism of repentance, is known by the Holy Spirit’s affirmation of love and pleasure. 

          Christian mystic Meister Eckhart once asked, “What keeps us alive, what allows us to endure?  I think [he answered] it is the hope of loving, of being loved.  I heard a fable once about the sun going on a journey to find its source, and how the moon wept without her lover’s warm gaze.  We weep when light does not reach our hearts.  We wither like fields if someone close does not rain their kindness upon us.”[2]  I think the ol’ mystic is on to something.  We wither like a parched field without love; assured of love, we are capable of blossoming, of bearing fruit.  Jesus, who shared our humanity, needed to hear confirmation of God’s love as much as we all do.  He opened himself to that love fully, his heart like a lotus opening in a rain shower, being soaked in it, containing it within himself, overflowing to others.  After his baptism, when he felt dried up and withered he would retreat to prayer to reconnect with that outpouring of grace and power.  Huston Smith describes Jesus’ nights of prayer as saturating himself in a different reality, “dunking himself like a sponge in an ocean not of water.”

          I don’t know that it comes naturally to try to reconnect with that sense of being truly beloved when we’re feeling low and let down.  The knee-jerk response to failure is judgment—whether we’re judging ourselves or others (or maybe judging others and then judging ourselves for judging others…).  We can judge ourselves and repent—again—but it seems like at best you’re just circling around to the same starting line, rather than getting anywhere spiritually.  A character from George Orwell’s Animal Farm popped into my head while I was thinking about this dynamic—the horse, Boxer.  Do you remember what his response to trouble on the farm was?  “I will work harder.”  Regardless of whether there was ample evidence that his efforts would be wasted in a corrupt system, he just doggedly stuck to his motto and his commitment, “I will work harder.”  I think it’s possible to get into a kind of repentance rut in which you’re repeating the same failures, whacking yourself upside the head [Here’s your chance, now become a prince!] , and doggedly repenting and trying again with the same results.  The will to repent is good, but the missing element is surrendering to the powerful, affirming grace that actually makes growth viable.

          Listen to this verse written by Hafiz called “The Vintage Man” which throws light on an alternative.  “The Difference between a good artist and a great one is: The novice will often lay down his tool or brush / Then pick up an invisible club on the mind’s table /  and helplessly smash the easels and Jade. / Whereas the vintage man no longer hurts himself or anyone / And keeps on sculpting Light.”[3]  Could this be the difference also between John’s baptism of repentance and Jesus’ Spirit baptism of affirmation and power?  I hear in Hafiz’ verse the forbearance of one who is confident that God has set him or her to making something beautiful out of their life, and is confident that mistakes will be forgiven and corrected.  Not only that, but that real progress will be made toward perfection, with the Spirit’s power and guidance. 

          I know that word “perfection” is a loaded one.  It’s in the United Methodist ordination vows: “Are you going on to perfection?”  It is, I assume, based on the verse in the Sermon on the Mount which urges disciples, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” [Matthew 5:48]  It’s hard to say yes to that, but can you hear the impetus behind it?  It implies that progress is possible; not only possible but expected, not only expected but empowered.  When the Holy Spirit gets involved in our lives we embrace the prospect of being changed from the inside out.  We are loved, affirmed, and improved.  In the rubric of the Princess and Frog story, we are kissed by God and transformed in beautiful, powerful people.  It’s not quite right to say we become princes and princesses in fairy tale vocabulary, but we might draw on 1 Peter’s imagery where the text declares that the disciples are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you might proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” [1 Peter 2:9]

          In order to join this holy nation you do have to relinquish your low self-esteem and helplessness.  Rumi wrote a beautiful verse about giving up your old notions about yourself:

You suppose you are the trouble
But you are the cure
You suppose that you are the lock on the door
But you are the key that opens it
It's too bad that you want to be someone else
You don't see your own face, your own beauty
Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.

If you get nothing else out of worship today, I hope you carry away the vision of your own self being beautiful in God’s eyes.  You are beloved.  God is pleased with you.  You have incredible potential.  When you join your love with God’s love, you are capable of the most amazing things.  As Rumi wrote in another verse, “If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love, you’re helping people you don’t know and have never seen.”  That’s because every life hitched to the Holy Spirit moves the world toward grace in ways we can’t even yet perceive. 

          Let yourself be kissed by the Holy Spirit again today.  Spirit, now live in us, pour out your blessing on us so that, like our brother Jesus, we may be channels of your grace.