As a child, I had a mental image of John the Baptizer in the River Jordan with Jerusalem on a height in the background. I don’t know if this was based on some illustration in a book of Bible stories for children, on felt-board Jesus, because we all loved felt-board Jesus, or if it was pure fabrication, but I was pretty committed to the idea that the river was near the ancient city, no longer a real capital in the time of Jesus but still the center of the Hebrew religion, with its great Temple. My mental image was completely wrong. The River Jordan is a full twenty one miles from Jerusalem, which makes it much more dramatic when we read about the crowds coming from Jerusalem to take part in John’s repentance revival, for there were no cars or buses, not even good hiking boots from Patagonia.
Once they got to the river, they would hear John proclaim that they were sinners who needed to be cleansed. One by one, they would step into that river, where they would be dunked, then pronounced a part of the repentance community, their sins washed away. Baptism felt like a fresh start, and if John was right and the Day of the Lord, was indeed at hand, a day of judgment and wrath, better to be prepared than sorry.
John’s baptism was a religious innovation in his context. The Hebrew religion had the Mikveh, the ritual bath used to cleanse impurity, but it was not used for abstractions like sin. We might be skeptical about the concept of ritual purity and the idea that uncleanliness contracted from things like menstruation and dead bodies was contagious, but to the ancient Hebrews, this was real and physical, so they had mechanisms for cleansing.
Spiritual impurity, sin, was handled by burnt offerings at the Temple, and was not contagious though it could be communal. This thing John was doing was new, this untamed prophet with his dire warnings, exciting to some, scary to others, and deeply offensive to many. By what right did he announce the forgiveness of sins? Only the priests had that right.
While the Baptizer was unique in the Hebrew tradition, and his baptism would eventually be coopted by the Jesus movement, the idea of washing away sins in the river is not unique to Christianity. An ancient Hindu text called the Brahmanda Purana written three centuries before John the Baptizer states that “Those who bathe at Ganga at least once in its pure water are protected from thousands of dangers forever and get rid of sins of generations and are purified immediately.”
Of course, you take your life in your own hands bathing in the Ganga, or Ganges River, today. It isn’t so pure, the level of fecal coliform bacteria more than a 100 times the safe level, though countless thousands still ritually bathe in it every year in great and crowded festivals. The Jordan isn’t thriving either, polluted and diverted for agriculture, at times little more than a filthy ditch. We continue to destroy the planet faster than it can heal itself, threatening our own existence, and our great rivers are no exception to our madness, but that is a sermon for another day.
Churches around the world turn to the baptism of Jesus on this day, the rhythms of church life a tenuous connection between us in an age of so much division. Some will focus on the theophany, that moment when the voice of God is heard, declaring Jesus to be God’s son. Some Christians believe this is a moment of adoption, others a clear signal that Jesus was sent from somewhere else, maybe not the future of our first reading, but possibly from some eternal and heavenly reality separate from our own, one where the things that feel so broken in our world are whole.
Others will focus today on the idea of community as created by the rite of baptism, and baptism is generally still considered a requirement for membership in a Christian church. So central is baptism to Christian self-understanding that denominations as far apart as the Roman church and the United Church of Christ have formal agreements to recognize the validity of one another’s baptisms, the reason I still use traditional language when performing the rite despite my use of inclusive language everywhere else. In many houses of worship, even some of our own, congregants will be asked to renew their baptismal vows this morning.
As someone raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, I was not baptized as an infant, for we claimed a “believer’s baptism,” the notion that you needed to be old enough to understand that you were a sinner in need of God’s grace and salvation in order for baptism to be effective. Like those who trekked down to the River Jordan, baptism was a choice in my childhood, one I made at the age of ten after an extended stay in the hospital. It was filled not just with the symbolism of cleansing, but also with the language of death, dying to the old sinful self, being born again, just as it is in every church and in scripture, even when infants are involved.
Coming into our United Church of Christ tradition, which still baptizes infants, I wrestled with the meaning of the rite. So much did it trouble me that I wrote my Master of Divinity paper on the topic, looking at the history in scripture, theology, and practice. I learned that infant baptism was a sort of fudge, a relic of a time when entire households would convert at once, as we see in the writings of Pal and of Luke, that the idea of original sin, and by extension things like limbo, were manufactured to justify a practice that didn’t make sense in the context of the historic Jesus, for the Hebrew faith had moved away from the idea of inherited guilt by the time of the prophet Jeremiah.
I learned that the Reform branch of Christianity of which we are a part abandoned the idea of original sin though it remains so pervasive that many still think it a core belief. That is worth repeating. Though we have room for theological diversity in the United Church of Christ, our theological heritage is not one that accepts that babies are born into the world stained with sin and pre-condemned, and though those at the font may well believe they are saving the baby from damnation, I suspect very few pastors share in that belief.
I learned that confirmation was meant to address this fudge of infant baptism, for it is fully titled Confirmation of Baptism, in case you ever wondered what it is exactly we are confirming. It is the point where the young person takes on responsibility for their own baptismal vows, stewarded for them for so many years by parents, godparents, and the community of faith, that moment when the young person says “Yes, I choose to be a Christian” in a way that makes sense to them and to their faith community.
And for all of my work, historical, critical, theological and constructive, I still felt I was far from what was happening in the River Jordan and in so many churches around the world every single week, for I miss the urgency, the hunger, the brokenness that was at the heart of John’s baptism and is at the heart of so many baptisms today.
I wanted baptism to have that sense of salvation we read in the work of Ann Lamott, the urgency and relief when the drunk dies in that water and comes up a new person, the tears of joy when someone who feels they are not worthy of love, not their own, not god’s not anyone’s, suddenly feels new.
Religion is not meant for those who think everything is fine. People did not go down to the Jordan because everything was just hunky-dory in their lives and in their world. They didn’t drop their nets and follow Jesus because life was just rolling along.
Religion is for the broken and the wounded, for those who see the brokenness and woundedness of the world. Religion is for those who hunger for the might-be of love and longing and connection, who feel the gravitational pull of the divine. Religion, every religion, is for those who cannot live without it. It is no wonder that the most energetic worship is found in the most broken places.
We have bled our faith dry of any vitality with our logic and skepticism and most of all with our manners, for religion is raw and not always bothered with refinement. It is that bearded prophet standing in the Jordan. And I need it to be real and I need it to be for messy people, because I am a mess. I need this man who is proclaimed to be the son of God to be snarky with James and John, to lose his temper with Peter, to weep in despair in the garden, for I will do those things too. And if he can love when love seems impossible, maybe, just maybe, I can too.
Even that best loved of sermons, the sermon that basically just says “aren’t you swell,” attends to a hole, for there is that small little corner of your soul that is not sure you are swell, not sure you are safe, not sure that you are worthy of God’s love, and no number of “likes” and Instagrams and “snaps” are going to fill it up.
We need to be reminded that we are loved, that we are amazing, that we have original blessing instead of original sin, but we also need a place to put the brokenness and the fear. We need to believe in the might be, for ourselves, and for our world, a world filled with lonely people, scared people, people who do not love themselves, who do not believe they are worthy of love.
Even secularists like Eddie Vedder and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam know the feeling, writing in “Amongst the Waves”:
But I am up riding high amongst the waves
Where I can feel like I
Have a soul that has been saved
Where I can feel like I’ve
Put away my early grave
I gotta say it now
Better loud than too late
Come to the water, the river, the font, the lake, the sea. Feel the waves of holy love wash over you. Better now than too late.
Amen.