Anointing, Blessing, and Baptism - Epiphany 2
By Charles Rush
January 9, 2011
Matthew 3: 13-17
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.8Mb) ]
r pop culture celebrates mean at the moment. It is almost the central premise of shows like “The Jersey Shore”, “Growing up Kardashian”, and a host of other shows, and it is spreading. Someone recently sent me a list of the top 25 Country Classics- Titles you couldn't make up if you wanted to.
#23 – How can I Miss You if You Won't Go Away
#19 – I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well
#15 – I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Like
Having You Here
#4 – If the Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know It's
Me Not Calling
#3 – I Hope to Live to Be as Old as I Look
#2 – She's Looking Better Every Beer
#1 – I Haven't Gone to Bed With Any Ugly Women
But I've Sure Woke Up With a Few
They are cute,
but man they are mean.
I would
contrast that this morning with that wonderful line we read in scripture, “This
is my beloved Child in whom I am well pleased.” These are words of acceptance.
They are the antidote to mean, hurt, mad. They have a transcendent power to
heal low self-esteem and unworthiness. Blessing is powerful like that.
Many moons ago,
I had an occasion once to speak with a man I sat next to at a fundraiser. He
was a man of considerable achievement. Someone introduced us and said to me
that he had recently lost his wife of many, many years. I started a conversation by commenting on his
achievements and his reputation, how interesting it must have been to have
lived his life.
He said to me,
“I'm not actually all that interesting.” “To tell you the truth”, he said,
“when I lay down at night, these days, I remember back to when I was in
college. I was just another engineering nerd at M.I.T. I didn't have any
confidence in myself. I couldn't carry on a conversation, particularly not with
girls. I had no goals, no plans for my life. In comparison with my brothers, I
wasn't athletic at all. My father always treated me like the son he had to
tolerate so that he could enjoy the other two. My secret game plan was to avoid scrutiny at all costs. I was most
content just flying under the radar, escaping everyone's notice.”
“Then one day I
met this girl at a party. I was standing there doing nothing except holding up
the wall. She walked over to me and said, ‘I bet you're the most interesting
person here and you don't even know it.'”
“It was awful.
I couldn't think of anything to say. I talked about the dumbest stuff. There
was this insufferably long silence. I just couldn't think. I'll never forget at
the end of it, looking up at her smile. She was just smiling at me.”
And he was too
shy to ask her name or walk her home. They parted in some stilted way. He beat
himself up for days, replayed the scene over and over in his mind. Finally, one
day, he saw her in Cambridge.
“It was the
boldest thing I had ever done. I asked her if we could go for coffee. It was
the same long silence. Again, that smile. What a smile.” She went. Way led to
way, and a not so elegant romance developed.
She helped him
with a lot of little things that he really needed. She helped him dress. She
told him once, ‘You crying chaos at us with that outfit.' He let her
dress him.
She helped him
develop friends. She got him to speak more clearly in public. She got him to
speak up in class and to introduce himself to his professors. She believed
in him and he started to bloom. She gave him confidence in himself. She loved
him into being. And when they went home together at the end of the semester
to meet his parents, his mother had that incredulous look that Mother's get
when they have to concede that another woman has worked a miracle she couldn't
and suddenly Mr. Snerdly is looking like
a stock worth investing in. She couldn't believe it.
He went to
graduate school, became successful in his first career, cashed it in and
developed another business, became extraordinarily successful, developed a
number of ventures from there, raised a solid family. He said, “In all
honesty, everything I've ever done in my life that was worth recognition, I
only did because she inspired me to become who I am.”
What a tribute.
She loved him into being. Great marriages are like that. What you hope is that
you can bloom someone else through love. None of us realizes our higher
selves without being loved. It literally brings us to life.
Think of the
wonderful movie Cocoon. It was about a group of retirees living down in
Florida. Their days were spent idly, going through a routine of medicines,
unfulfilling group activities, checking on various ailments that the neighbors
had, dealing with each other's crankiness and irritability at the prospect of
growing old. They were just biding time, warehousing, a perennial option in old
age.
One day a group
of three couples happen upon this large pod, looks like a huge clam shell.
These pods were filled with the radiant life-giving power of the universe. Even
to go near them, just to touch them, filled these retirees with a shot of élan
vital- the life force. It made them recover energy, youth, desire. The energy
is infectious.
The men become
like boys, plotting an adventure with this pod, and sneaking out of group
activity like High School kids cutting class. They devise surprise parties for
their wives. Their wives court them with dancing. Life is fun and they all
have this infectious, deep happiness about living that just won't go away.
They can't contain it. Real gracious love is like that and real gracious
love is the spiritual force that courses through the heart of the universe.
It is the life force. It is the Spirit.
Traditionally, this text is lifted up
for us to show the uniqueness of Jesus. Jesus is called out for special duty.
Jesus is spoken to from the heavens. Jesus is blessed as special in a way that
the rest of us should recognize. He is God's anointed in a way that you and I
are not.
Yet, that should certainly not be the
only way we look at this story. There has been a tendency in the history of the
Church to so emphasize the uniqueness of Jesus that he almost loses his
humanity. What a tragedy that would be because this story is also the story
of what God wants for each and every one of us. God wants us to feel
beloved and fundamentally affirmed. God wants us to spiritually bloom.
As the poet William Blake declared
"Jesus Christ is the Child of God, and So Are You and So Am I." Have
you been loved like that? Have you had that feeling that you were accepted in a
way that was quite in spite of who you are or what you have achieved, but just
because…? That is the way that God loves you. That is what Jesus came to tell
us about God and about the spiritual life.
And there is an interior dimension to
it, an internal congruence. My daughter described for me her experience of
being awake early in the morning on the Serenghetti plain in Africa, watching
the herds of animals migrating and foraging to start the morning. Looking out
over the sheer vastness of the plain, the sheer scope and size of the big game
in Africa and having a transcendent feeling of her place in the big scheme of
things, being part of this much bigger world, and having a place in it. That
feeling of convergence, the interior sense that you are part of the universe,
that you have a place that matters in the midst of the vastness- that is part
of the transcendent power of being accepted by God. It fills us with wonder,
with meaning, with hope and promise… with humility and perspective too.
That is so important spiritually. It is
an antidote to many other powerful forces that surround us. If you spend any
time listening to our children speaking honestly about their lives, they come
back to this underlying anxiety that they have, a nagging
anxiety. They are surrounded by so many people that are so successful, so
smart, so gifted musically, so athletic, whose families have so many resources
that they don't feel that they can compete. They don't feel adequate. They
don't feel worthy. They don't feel good enough. And I am always surprised at
the people who give voice to this anxiety because they are kids with
considerable talent, with considerable brains, considerable family resources.
I'm always surprised how many of our
daughters are secretly worried that they are not loveable because they are not
beautiful enough. They have interiorized this very narrow image of feminine
sexiness that comes straight out of MTV, Hollywood- a Heroin chic, waif-like thinness-
only size 4 and under need apply. What have we done with all of that? These
very powerful images tell them they have to be sexy to be loved when in truth
it is loving and being loved that makes us all sensual and keeps us sensual
in our post-MTV years.
They
are interiorizing the competitive world we adults have chosen for ourselves.
Our kids are simply saying what we only think to ourselves, what we let slip
out of our mouths to our spouses when we don't think the kids are listening. We
are living out of the other forces that surround us, one's where we are not
acceptable, certainly not accepted. We are living out of a world of values
where we only matter if we have these assets, if we have achieved these
vocational goals, if we are of a certain cool factor.
God didn't want for Jesus alone to live
as a beloved child of God. God wants for all of us to have that sense of
acceptance too. This is, perhaps, the fundamental starting point for the
spiritual life that Jesus came to teach us about. The spiritual quest is not
about becoming holy and pure in the face of an angry, judgemental God whose
wrath we should principally fear. The spiritual quest is not about renouncing
the ephemeral world around us and finding inner peace through internal
meditation. The spiritual quest is about letting God bless us through
love into living out of our higher selves which realize the values of the realm
of God- love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, understanding, justice, and
peace.
And Baptism. My colleague Grant Gallup
has pointed out that in the long history of the Church baptism has too often
reinforced the notion that it is a ritual that we have to go through in order
to be acceptable to God and part of the community of faith.
For those of us who grew up in the Catholic
tradition, this is worked out through the theology of Original Sin from St.
Augustine. In Augustine's thought, we are born into a state of Sin from the
Fall of Adam. It is a given part of our nature. The sacrament of baptism,
cleanses us of this unrighteousness, and is principally understood as washing,
a kind of spiritual prophylaxis or inoculation against evil. There is
that bold question that the Priest puts to the parents and the Godparents
before they baptize the child, “Do you renounce Satan and all of his ways?”
I would use that question at Christ Church but too many of you would say, “Well,
what do you mean by renounce- give me a list of what we are talking about here.”
It is a guilt tradition in the Church, which is not to say that there is not a
place for it. My only lament is that it became the dominant approach, drowning
out all other meanings of baptism.
But if you look at the Baptism of
Jesus, we have another model that flows from being blessed and begins us on a
commission. Jesus is baptized in order to go an do something. It is the start
of something blessed and wonderful. As Rev. Gallup points out, we scrub up for
lots of reasons, not all of them bad. Bride and Bridegroom scrub up before a
wedding, out of joy, out of hope, out of love. Scrubbing up is a getting
ready for a great celebration, for living in the fulfilled time, the kairos
time, as the Bible calls it. It is a time when things are rich with
blessing, with the wonder of life, rich with meaning.
Baptism could be that as well. John
called the people out of Jerusalem, back over the river Jordan. He was calling
them out of the Promised Land because the bible says that the Israelites, when
they left Egypt, after they wandered for 40 years in the desert, crossed over
the Jordan into the Promised Land. John was calling them out of the Promised
Land, in essence to renounce all of their former allegiances, all of their
inherited identities, and to be washed in the river to take on some new values
and new identities, to start off on a new mission as Kingdom people.
There is no question that the Romans
and the Priests in the Temple understood this as a threat to their authority
and their traditions. The Romans had John the Baptist killed for inciting an
insurrection. They got it that a bunch of people, filled with a sense that they
were children of God, wouldn't be content to be vassals of the Roman Empire.
How true that proved to be. In the two
thousand years since that baptism, think of how many movements have been
started by people who laid claim to their new identities as children of God
rather than any identities they had been given by others.
From Susan B. Anthony to Fannie Lou
Hammer, so many of those women in our country that stood for women's rights,
did so in large part, because they read their bibles and believed it that that
they were as important to God as anyone. Believing the good news, they set out
on a great mission.
Rosa Parks, who had that wonderful
combination of believing she was a child of God and just being plain tired. It
was later said of her that when one woman sat down, the whole world stood up.
And stand up they did. Some reporter once asked Dr. Martin Luther King about
why people were marching for their rights in Alabama. Dr. King said that there
was nothing more dignified than people willing to walk, their heads held high,
for the respect and dignity that was due them. And he was right. Believing the
good news, they set out on a great mission.
It remains to this day, that there are
no more elevated words in political history than those penned by the framers of
the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men and
women are created equal. That we are endowed with certain unalienable rights,
that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Regardless of
whether those gathered for that first Continental Congress were Deists or
Episcopalians, they understood and believe the teaching of Jesus that they were
all children of God. Believing the good news, they set out on a great mission.
Baptism should also be understood like
this.
We hold in our grasp, a great spiritual
power of blessing. We have the ability to anoint others on behalf of God. We
can tell them, “You are God's child, with whom God is well pleased.” It is more
honest than indulging them. It is more empowering than entitling them with your
assets and power. It will fill them with a real identity and esteem that
nothing else can do. Find ways to bless those around you. And watch, watch, for
they will do great things. Amen
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