Genesis 1:1-5, Psalm 29, Mark 1:4-11
For the most part, our lives are low-key, routine, perhaps even a bit boring. We wake up, leave for work or school, come home, eat dinner and do approximately the same thing every evening: homework or helping with it, reading a book or watching TV, surfing the Web or dining with friends — some variation on a theme. Even for those of us with less predictable daily schedules, we have our menu of options, and rarely do we order off menu. And, for the most part, we like it this way. We like the safety and security of knowing what’s coming, of having our lives be predictable.
And then one day, the smooth fabric of our lives gets torn apart. We get a phone call telling us that both of our parents have been killed in a car accident. The doctor says, “I think it’s cancer. Can you come for a biopsy?” We find out that our unborn child has severe chromosomal abnormalities. We forget, when times are familiar, that all these unfamiliar times are also part of our lives, even though we are reminded each Sunday during our joys and concerns time of what could happen. Indeed, every example I just mentioned above was one we prayed about just last Sunday. We forget, as perhaps we need to, that there are those times when the heavens are torn apart, and we are battered by storms we couldn’t see coming. When we hear the roar of the thunder and the crack of the cedars breaking. When we feel stripped bare, like a forest after a thunderstorm. When the raging waters threaten to drown us or those we love.
These raging waters run through all three of our lection passages for this morning. Though coming very different parts of the Bible, they are united in a common fear of the waters of chaos. Water is a primordial force that is both something we need to live yet terrible and terrifying when uncontained. In Scripture, it is a common metaphor for the chaos of life. The sea is the “great deep” in the psalms, an “unfathomable and alien realm, its life swathed in darkness and mystery.”[1] In fact, in the beginning all is water, all is chaos, as we hear in our creation myth from Genesis: watery deeps, dark and formless.
The psalmist (who wrote our Psalm 29, our call to worship) uses the metaphor of water in the form of a fierce thunderstorm to talk about the fundamental powers that threaten human life. We don’t get many thunderstorms here in northern California, but I grew up in a part of the country that does. The last time I went home, a huge summer thunderstorm woke me up on night in the valley where my parents live. With a boom that rolled from one end of the valley to the other, with flashes of lightning that made half the sky purple with light, with winds that twisted tall trees, with rain so full it was if the sky had been slashed open — it’s no wonder that the author of this psalm chose a thunderstorm to represent the chaos that threatens us, that shakes us up, that upends our lives.
Interestingly, Hebrew liturgists who compiled the book of psalms lifted Psalm 29 almost without change from a Canaanite hymn to Baal, the storm god. As one commentator said, “Such blatant liturgical borrowing expresses a deep sense of legitimate religious commonality. Hebrew and Canaanite (people) expressed shared religious sensibilities in response to the human condition – dependence on the uncontrollable power that is both the source of life and (seemingly) a threat to it.”
In other words, the God who is seen as causing the raging storm is also the God that is supposed to be protecting us from it. The God who causes the thunderstorms that break mighty cedars is also the God that we are supposed to trust with out vulnerable lives. How do you trust a force so powerful it could snap your life in two without a thought? How do you give yourself over to the waters that you need to survive but that could also drown you?
For the most part, Jesus’ first years were pretty boring. There is almost nothing written about them, save for the time he stayed too long in the synagogue when he was 12. He was likely learning a trade from his father, and practicing it. Getting up, going to work, coming home. And then, one day, he visits a preacher in the desert, steps into the waters, and the heavens are torn apart. Finally, we have a response to our cry from Advent: “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” And what comes down on Jesus is not a storm, or a flood, but a dove, symbol of peace, and words of love: “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”
Now, we know that Jesus’ life after his baptism is not going to be more peaceful, at least on the surface of things. In fact, his boring life is going to get very unboring, very unfamiliar, as are the lives of all who will follow him. When Jesus steps into the waters of the Jordan, he steps into the waters of chaos. I’m betting Jesus knew this. I think he had at least an inkling of what he was getting into. But I believe he also knew in the core of his being that the God of the waters was trustworthy, that the Creator God of power and might and thunderstorms and floods was also “Abba” — a Father God, a Mother God, of God of love. A power that could be trusted with his life.
For when he stepped into those waters, he would have remembered the old, old story — the one we heard today — that in the beginning, upon the face of the deep water, God’s Spirit moved. That God made light to illuminate the darkness and to border it. And that (in the part of the old story that comes right after today’s reading) God contains and controls the waters — installing a dome called to the Sky to separate them out and then gathering the waters under the sky in one place so that dry land could appear. So that solid ground could be formed. He would have remembered that God can bring order to what was dark chaos.
And Jesus would have remembered another old story — that he was stepping into the waters of the Jordan, the river that his people crossed as God led them from exile in the wilderness into the promised land, the land of milk and honey. He would have remembered, too, that this same God had once led them out of slavery through the mighty and dangerous waters of the Red Sea. He would have remembered that God leads Her people safely through deep waters.
As Jesus steps down into the waters of the Jordan, he steps down into the waters of chaos and trusts that God will not let him drown. He trusts the God who calls him by name — the “Beloved.” And he spends the rest of his life bearing witness to this love, and inviting us to trust its power.
None of us is a stranger to thunderstorms, to the things that shake the foundations of our lives and blow away our security. None of us a stranger to the floods that threaten to swamp us. But over against all that shakes us to the core, all that threatens to wash away the very foundations of life,” Jesus invites us to trust the God who says (from Isaiah): “I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” Amen.
[1] This quotation, and some of the ideas in this sermon, come from Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Volume 4.