The year was 1969 and the iconic singing duo of Simon and Garfunkel were singing their song about “a bridge over troubled water” that helped give voice to a very troubled time in our land. I was a young naval officer then, recruited because of the lingering war in Southeast Asia, though I hasten to add that, unlike many other less fortunate soldiers and sailors my age and younger, I was safely out of harm’s way. Many of those who were not, if they managed to live through the combat, still carry the physical and emotional wounds of war to this day.
War is a terrible thing, and there is no such thing as a holy war of aggression though the term is thrown around as if we should accept it without question. Holy war is an oxymoron – a fundamental contradiction in terms offensive to God. It is certainly a contradiction in terms offensive to the God we claim to follow, though even fellow followers of our God have initiated what they’ve called holy wars, through the centuries into our own day. It is an offense that makes God weep. But that’s often what happens in this sin-ridden world of ours.
We’re at war now, our leaders tell us, yet again, even after a history of countless wars. Some of you here this morning can still remember, some quite vividly, even the first and, certainly, the second world wars of the past century, and then Korea and Vietnam and the assorted deadly skirmishes thrown in that we have sometimes called “police actions” perhaps because we begin to feel ashamed to speak so much of war. But yet again we are at war, they say, though this time in a less defined theater of combat operations.
I’ve always found that metaphor – theater of war – a bit curious, as if we’re merely acting out a drama on a stage. Maybe we are, but the consequences are all too real, requiring no suspension of disbelief. Now the war is being played out here and there, not always on a main stage, but in the wings, in fits and starts, by would-be bombers who may or not be double agents or who fill their underwear with explosives and sit down among two hundred and more unsuspecting people merely trying to fly from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day. It’s all so crazy and so wearisome.
“Why do they hate us?” someone asked me at a party over the holidays. I can certainly understand the frustration from which that question emanates, but I am not the one to offer her a quick and succinct answer that would in any way satisfy me, and, probably, not her. We live in a very complex time and no one seems able to offer either the wisdom or the influence to do too much about changing things.
Maybe that’s why I thought of Simon and Garfunkel again and their song about troubled water. It helped us back then, and the words and plaintive melody seem to resonate with a more current time as well. When you’re weary/Feeling small/When tears are in your eyes/I will dry them all/ . . . Like a bridge over troubled water/I will lay me down/Like a bridge over troubled water/I will lay me down.
And maybe I thought of that song again also because on this first Sunday after Epiphany, in this hour of worship, we are called to remember Jesus’ baptism. It’s a thing we do every year on our liturgical calendar on this first Sunday after the Christmas season has concluded. Maybe I thought of the song because it refers to troubled water – and troubled water is not only descriptive of what’s around us but also of the water we go through, if only symbolically, as Jesus did – in our baptism.
And thinking of that bridge over troubled water, I thought of Jesus, too. If there’s anyone who functions as a bridge over troubled water that rushes and roars beneath us, it’s Jesus, isn’t it? The one who went through the water that he might become for us a bridge to cross over it.
Again, Simon and Garfunkel: I’ll take your part/When darkness comes/And pain is all around/Like a bridge over troubled water/I will lay me down/Like a bridge over troubled water/I will lay me down.
It’s as if in writing their song those pop singers were alluding subconsciously to what Jesus said as recorded in the Gospel of John. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. That was Jesus’ whole mission, wasn’t it? To lay down his life for us in opposition to all forces – Paul calls them powers and principalities – that would de-humanize us and smudge the image of God we are called to reflect is if with a light from heaven. And that whole mission began with Jesus’ baptism which we remember today.
The Gospel of John doesn’t record the story of Jesus’ baptism – it only refers to it as having happened – but the synoptic Gospels, the other three Gospels that derive in part from common sources, all tell their own version of Jesus’ baptism, each with slightly different variations and emphases. This morning let’s look only at Luke’s version to note what this Gospel wants us to hear.
First there’s that evocative introductory phrase: . . . the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah. In the time when Jesus was baptized, in other words, the air was filled with yearning for the one who was to come to put the world back together again, or, if not again, finally and after all. The time around Jesus’ baptism was a time of troubled water, not unlike our own.
Even in our most recent national election such comparisons were in the air in both positive and negative ways, depending, in part, on one’s political leanings. The hope for someone who can lead people out of current difficulties is a recurrent theme in human experience and history, especially when elections are at hand, economies are down, or nations are at war. Expectations and hope related to those and accompanying issues filled the air in our land in November of 2008. There was great yearning for leadership from either side to right the ship of state. And we continue to yearn for expectations yet unfulfilled. Political wrangling often gets in the way, and perhaps our expectations must always outstrip reality. But Luke tells us that there was a similar political climate to ours two thousand and some years ago when Jesus strode into the Jordan to be baptized into his vocation as God’s anointed one.
Some thought the anointed, or chosen, one – the Messiah – might have been John. He had been attracting a lot of attention and claiming many converts along the banks of the Jordan, Luke tells us, preaching his piercing message of repentance and calling for social justice. He was only a precursor, however, as he understood his role, to someone more worthy. But he had set the tone in such a noticeable way that Herod had had him imprisoned.
Luke continues: When all the people, and when Jesus also had been baptized . . . Another Gospel writer includes several verses of deliberation between John and Jesus about why Jesus should be baptized at all. If this is a baptism of repentance, from what is Jesus repenting? Luke gives this notion no attention whatsoever. For Luke what apparently is most important is that Jesus recognizes fully the humanity he shares with all the rest of us. He does not submit to baptism, he claims it.
Jesus seems to know that he was born both from and into a world of systemic sin, and his baptism is a signal that he understands fully the implications of God’s incarnation. In his baptism Jesus does not merely identify with or show solidarity with our human situation, he enters it, fully acknowledging its tragic structure. He acknowledges that there are no purely innocent, no absolutely perfect, no unquestionably unambiguous, indeed no sinless choices from which any one of us in this world is immune.
I introduced myself to a new neighbor the other day as both of us were shoveling snow from our driveways, a young man who told me he’s a criminal defense attorney. “I meet a lot of the bad guys,” he quipped, then added with a bit more seriousness, “but I wonder if I lived in Camden if I wouldn’t be a lot more like them.” Which I guess would be part of my answer if forced to say something in response to the question of my party friend, “Why do they hate us?”
As the academic dean of Claremont School of Theology, Marjorie Suchocki wrote her book Fall to Violence, which is essentially a treatise on human sin. She opens the book with reflections on her experience serving as a jurist in a case where the defendant was found guilty. Although she believed that the individual had committed the crime for which he was convicted, she began to reflect after the trial on her own place in the system in which the man had lived and which eventually had indicted him. As a member of what she believed to be an interrelated system, she felt she had some connection to the man’s crime. This is what she writes:
The sorry world of the crack house . . . had seemed so distant from my world as the academic dean of a theological seminary. But in truth, that “other” world was only a few miles from my home. Where did that world start, and where did it stop? “My” world was geographically close, but had I ever intentionally done anything at all to touch the lives in that “other” world? Was I only involved to judge its inhabitants? Or was there not a sense in which I was a participant in that world as well as mine, even if that participation were as an absentee neighbor?
The wondrous truth of the Incarnation is that in Jesus Christ, God enters our human world of sin, and there is no greater demonstration of that indwelling than when Jesus steps willingly into the waters of the Jordan River as a symbolic act of turning away from the ungodly powers of this world by entering the world with God’s redeeming love. And perhaps the most important thing Luke tells us about Jesus’ baptism that links his to our own, is what he says happened immediately after the baptism.
He says it this way: . . . and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. The important phrase it seems to me – especially since in the three baptism stories we have it’s only Luke who includes it – is: and was praying. That is, it was as Jesus prayed that “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him.” For Luke the story of Jesus’ baptism becomes important primarily as it leads to a life of prayer. It is in Jesus’ practice of prayer that God opens the heavens and declares him to be beloved.
Throughout his Gospel, Luke shows Jesus praying. Jesus prays before he calls his disciples, he prays before asking them who they think he is, he prays at the time of his transfiguration, he prays before teaching his disciples how to pray, he prays on the night of his betrayal and arrest, and he prays at his death, commending his spirit to God’s care. And for Luke, what is characteristic of Jesus will also be characteristic of the church.
In the Book of Acts that same author who wrote Luke’s Gospel shows the gathered disciples in prayer as they await the promised coming of the Spirit. And after the Spirit descends not as a dove this time but as tongues of fire on Pentecost, Jesus’ followers continue the regular practice of prayer. What is begun in baptism is lived out through the regular practice of prayer by which we also receive the Holy Spirit. Just as Jesus was empowered for and guided in his ministry through prayer, so, too, are his followers, all of us, down to this day.
A few days ago I found myself very moved by the circumstances in the lives of a couple of families I know and love, increasingly, beyond measure. I wish I could reverse the course of the waters that trouble their lives. But I can’t. In that way I am characteristically human and nearly powerless. But I found myself trying to reassure them that my prayers continue for them, as Paul would say, without ceasing, and that thought gave me comfort. I hope it gave them some measure of comfort as well.
Next week we will baptize another infant in worship, the child of a child of this church, continuing the tradition in which we have been birthed and nurtured. And I hope we will remember the baptism of Jesus and the life of prayer and sanctification to which baptism calls us as well. A respected Christian professor and theologian of our time, John Leith, liked to say that every human life is rooted in the will and intention of God. “In baptism,” he said, “the child’s name is called because our faith is that God thought of this child before the child was, that God gave to this child an identity, an individuality, a name, and a dignity that no one should dare abuse. Human existence has its origin not in the accidents of history and biology, but in the will and the intention of the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth.”
Luke uses very few words to share with us the baptism of our Lord. But those few words lead us to very deep wellsprings of joy in the faithful ministry and life of prayer to which we are called through our own baptisms. To identify with all people, to depend upon God in prayer for the strength to live and to love, and to hear the affirmation of our God as the source of our calling and purpose are the most enduring joys of life. These are the blessings of our life together in Christ as the church.
So in grave matters of life and death – in the threat of being drowned in troubled water – let us remember the waters of baptism through which we go hand-in-hand with Jesus, courageously and in prayer toward God, who alone can save us.
Faced with the undeniable fact of troubling water swirling around us, we find comfort and courage in Paul’s familiar and soaring words in the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans: What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not also give us everything else? And these: For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. To which I would add, simply: Amen.