A Homily for Epiphany 1 

The Baptism of Jesus 

January 12, 2014 

   

From the words of the Gospel: 

   

Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by John. 

   

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God, what can we do as a society to make the world a better place?  A world of peace, and not worship materialistic things? 

Keep this question in mind as we dip into the Gospel Reading today.  It is one of our “One-Question-I-Want-To-Ask-God” questions from last spring, and it might surprise you how it fits the Reading. 

    

Let’s start by remembering or by learning the context for Baptism of Jesus.  What, first of all, is the context for John the Baptist? 

   

In our Bible, John plays such a subservient and brief role, that most of us know embarrassing little about John, or about the baptism that he practiced. There are followers of John the Baptist, however, to this day.  Their sect has continued to survive in the middle east, in particular in Iraq and Khuzistan, and they refer to themselves at the Mandaeans, which comes from an Aramaic word, and it means “to have knowledge.” 

   

They believe that Jesus was a false messiah, they generally reject messianism altogether, and they revere John as a Divine Teacher who baptized, taught, and worked miracles, leading his disciples into the spiritual knowledge of healing the world. 

  

John’s baptism had its own history and context.  Long before the time of John the Baptist, which means, John the Baptizer, or John the Immerser, there were water and washing rituals.  From the time of Moses, there were ceremonial washings of anyone or anything who was unclean, there was the immersion of the priests at their consecrations, there was the washing of sacrifices, the washing of the priests hands before offering a sacrifice, the baptizing (immersion) of Gentile proselytes, the washing of one’s body after it was defiled by touching anything unclean, the healing of lepers or the official pronouncement of their healing by immersion, and even the metaphorical washing of the heart from wickedness. 

   

The meanings of these washings ranged from the making people or things spiritually clean, to the symbolic participation of converts in the Mosaic salvation through the Red Sea.  What began as a Temple ritual of purity became a more general ritual, not just for cleansing, but for preparing, or initiating, or presenting. That’s the long history and context of baptizing. 

  

And John the Baptist apparently belonged to a community, the Essenes, who practiced a daily baptizing.  It was John who gave his once-for-all baptizing a sense of urgency.  For John, the Old Age was coming to a close, and a New Age was coming. 

   

His baptism was a preparation for this immanent coming of the New Age.  And in keeping with the general context of baptism, no one was allowed to participate unless they were willing to admit their guilt in not keeping the Jewish laws and expectations, and were willing to recommit themselves to a holy and faithful life. 

  

The ultimate standard to which he believed the Jews were held, was to be a light to the nations, or as it later came to be known, Tikkun olam, which means “the repair or healing of the world.” 

  

So even though John baptized individuals, each person was understood in the context of the larger community.  Each individual was professing his or her solidarity in the Jewish community, and his or her solidarity in the great work of being a light to the nations, of healing the whole world. 

  

So there you have it.  The larger context of baptism and of John the Baptist, whose followers have survived to this day. 

  

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The Christian scriptures, of course, have a different spin on John the Baptist relative to Jesus, who Christians know as the Messiah, or the Christ, not the political, military Messiah or Christ that some people in the time of Jesus expected, but a spiritual Christ who introduced a spiritual Kingdom. 

  

To overcome some of the difficulties of Jesus the Christ being baptized by John the Baptist, Matthew, who started out with Mark’s version of the baptism, added this conversation between John and Jesus that sort of explains why Jesus needed to be baptized - “to fulfill all righteousness,” he says, which for the very Jewish Matthew, means something like, “to fulfill the Jewish Scriptures.” 

  

For the early church, the baptism of Jesus and the symbolism of the heavens being opened, and the dove, and the voice, and the proclamation that Jesus is “my beloved” are all ways of communicating that the Jesus is the true light that has been born into the world. 

  

Jesus himself apparently didn’t practice baptism, but obviously, at some point, his followers did.  Not as a repeatable sacrament like other sects, but as a one-time, sacramental event, which meant what?  What would you think that the sacrament of baptism meant to the early Christian community? 

   

What meanings could the early church have adopted from the Jewish washing rituals?  What meanings would they have added? 

   

[DISCUSS] 

   

Some of the Jewish meanings that apparently carried over included: purification or cleansing initiation of converts solidarity with a community saved by passing through water preparation for a New Age.

    

A new layer of meanings apparently included dying and rising with Christ - dying to an old life or an old identity, and rising to a New Life or a New Identity, in solidarity with all the Baptized, dying to mortality and rising to immortality with all the saints. 

   

Eventually, even deeper levels of the sacrament of Baptism became clear.  We are not just the passive recipients of grace - we are baptized to do something.  We are empowered in Baptism to do the great work, as the Jews put it, of Tikkun Olam, of healing the world, or, as Jesus put it, of bringing in the Kingdom of God.  

  

And we are not just declared through baptism to be God’s beloved, we are given the powers to do our job - together.  We are given all the wisdom, all the strength, all the courage, all the compassion, all the kindness, all the vision we need to partner with God in doing the job God has given us to do.  

  

Even if they lie dormant and hidden within us, life, grace, and effort draw our powers out of us.  In our Baptisms we are, as Gregory of Nazianzus put it, Christened (Christ-ened).  We are fully vested with our true Christ Selves.  And we spend the rest of our lives, perhaps the rest of eternity, living into our Baptisms, living into our true Christ selves, living into our mission in the world, 

  

So there it is. The development of a Sacrament whose history and context span the centuries and connects us with John and Jesus and with all the Baptized in this world and in the world to come. It’s an incredible and huge vision of what it means to be Christian, of what it means to be human. 

  

So where does this touch you?  What does it speak to you?  Where does it grab you mentally or emotionally or spiritually?  Or how does it respond to the question: God, what can we do as a society to make the world a better place?  A world of peace, and not worship materialistic things?

  

Let’s take a few minutes to share. 

  

[DISCUSS] 

  

Where it touches me....  I have a daughter who has to learn everything through personal experience. She can’t learn through vicarious wisdom. During her teenage years, she had to try some things and learn some things the hard way.  Several years later, it’s still easy for her to see herself as an ADHD kid who messed up. 

  

As a dad, my job is to see in her the potential to answer some of the world’s great problems.  With the training she is getting in social work, she will at least make the world a better place one family at a time.  Sometimes our job is just to see in others what they can’t see in themselves.  

  

As the Baptized, we all have it is us, working together, to make this world a better place,  to transform the world into the Kingdom of God.  We seldom see that in ourselves, and, if the truth be told, we seldom see it in each other. God sees in us what we can’t see in ourselves. God help us to see Christ in, be Christ to, receive Christ from, everyone we meet.  

Unto Him be worship and power, dominion and splendor, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

A Homily for Christmas 2 

January 5, 2014

From the words of the Gospel: 

Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.

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God, will all people, regardless of faith and beliefs, or lack thereof, be re-united with you when our lives on earth end? 

What a great question to go with today’s Gospel Reading.  You probably recognize that question as one of the “one-question-I-would-like-to-ask-God” questions that was sent to me last spring, and which I promised to address in the homily time this year.  So let’s see what we can do with it.

   

As usual, the starting point is the Gospel Reading itself, which is from our Gospel storyteller for the year - St Matthew.  The truth is that this Gospel, like all our other Gospels, circulated anonymously until sometime in the second century when Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, assigned names and authorship to them. This one, he attributed to Matthew. 

  

One of the unique characteristics of this Gospel is that it is so Jewish. It is the most Jewish Gospel of any of the gospels in our Bible. For Matthew, the events in the life and ministry and death of Jesus are always fulfillments of some prophecy or expectation of the Jews.  Keeping the Torah is crucial to the Jesus movement, as Matthew understood it.  In Matthew, Jesus himself says, “I did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.” 

    

The story for today about the wise men and Jesus, is nowhere to be found, other than in this one particular Gospel. And every detail is connected in some way to Matthew’s Jewish heritage. The references to the East, to Jerusalem, to Bethlehem of Judea, and to “their own country” are all related to symbolic Jewish landmarks. 

  

Bethlehem was an unlikely but predicted site for the birth of the Messiah. Jerusalem was the power base for the Jewish authorities who continually rejected God, and the East is the land of the Gentiles, the “nations,” who God had on his heart from the beginning when he promised Abraham that he would be a blessing “to all nations.” 

  

So the story of Jesus, as Matthew sets it up in the very beginning of his Gospel, is that Jesus is the Messiah prophesied by the Jewish scriptures. Not the Messiah the Jewish authorities wanted or expected, but the one that is most truly predicted by the scriptures. 

  

According to this story, if Jesus is the new Moses, Herod is like the new Pharaoh, killing all the first born in the next chapter while Jesus, Joseph, and Mary flee to the symbolic land of Egypt. And since the Jews were not willing or able to recognize or accept Jesus as the long awaited Messiah, God led the Gentiles to him, represented by the three wise men.  

  

That’s one of the major themes we will see again and again this year as we follow the Gospel of Matthew - the Gentiles will take the place forfeited by the Jews, and the Church will become the true Israel of the last days, destined to share in the joys of the new age. 

  

The bottom line: Jesus, not Herod, is the true King. He is the true Messiah, and the Church (increasingly made up of Gentile converts to Judaism) is the true Israel. That’s the main point Matthew is making in this story. 

  

The one extra twist in the story is that the Gentiles, as willing as they may be, are nevertheless unable to discover Jesus without consulting the Jewish authorities who consult the Jewish teachers.  That’s Matthew’s redemption of the Judaism he continues to believe in. 

  

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Many a sermon and commentary has focused on the mysterious wise men or the mysterious star as the main point. A great deal of interesting speculation has been written about these unknown figures, some of which has been enlightening, but not really the point of Matthew’s story. 

  

Although…. we are now on the other side of some phenomenal archeological digs and other discoveries that have revealed the significance of these wise men, even for Matthew, and, I think, even for us. 

  

The term Magi comes from the old Iranian word, magi, meaning “priest,” and referring to a priestly tribe or cast in Zoroastrian Iran who had to be present for any ritual of the ancient Iranian religion to be valid, who were the guardians of the spiritual knowledge and of the ritual procedures of Zoroastrianism. They would have been well known to Matthew, and deeply respected, sort of like the Pope or the Dalai Lama. The translators of our Bible have translated them away with the unoffensive term “wise men.” 

  

The Jewish legends of the Magi, which were likely known to Matthew, included the legend that prophetic knowledge concealed on the Mount of Triumph by Seth, the son of Adam, predicted the birth of the Messiah (the Christ) at the end of the age, and were found by the ancestors of the ancient Magi. 

   

For centuries, the Magi made pilgrimages to the mountain, expecting that a star would one day descend from the skies, enter the holy cave on the mountain top,  and take the form of a royal child. 

  

What finally happened, according to legend, was that the Magi eventually saw a great star descend to the mountain peak, but it did not enter the cave. Instead it led the Magi on their long pilgrimage to Bethlehem, where they found the child born in a cave and gave him their gifts.  

This was the Jewish version of the original Iranian legends which predicted a reincarnation of Zoroaster at the end of the age.  

  

And as odd as it now sounds to us, this Jewish-Iranian mysticism in Matthew preserves, in rather startling clarity, the identity of the oriental priests who travelled so far to see the birth of the one “born to be king.” 

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So the question for the day is: God, will all people, regardless of faith and beliefs, or lack thereof, be re-united with you when our lives on earth end?  And what have we got to work with? 

   

What we’ve got is a very Jewish author of a gospel attributed to Matthew, who alone tells this fascinating story, using symbolic references to the Jewish scriptures, to say that Jesus (a Jewish teacher and healer rejected by his fellow Jews), is the true Messiah, and that the Church (a movement made up of increasingly Gentile converts who DO accept Jesus) is the true Israel.  

  

And furthermore, we have an author, well acquainted with Jewish-Iranian mysticism, who uses references to combined mystical traditions to say that the most sacred and revered priests of the Gentile world, guardians of true spiritual knowledge, have followed the heart wisdom of generations to the discover that the prince of the new age, is none other than Jesus. 

  

So where does that leave you? Where does this touch you? What message does it have for you? How would you answer a question like: Will all people, regardless of faith and beliefs, or lack thereof, be re-united with you when our lives on earth end? 

Let’s take a minute to share whatever is on your mind or heart. 

[DISCUSS] 

To me, the key word in the question is “re-united,” or as we sometimes put it “at-one-ment,” which is actually the goal of all religions - the re-union, the “comm-union” of the Creator and the creation, of heaven and earth, of Divine nature and human nature. 

• The two triangles that come together to form the star of David, 
• the yin and yang of Taoism which represents dynamic unity, 
• the Buddhist Wheel of Life which represents the Eight Noble Paths that lead to the center where all things are one,
• the symbol of Islam, which is not the Crescent and Star but the Arabic script for Allah, meaning “The One” - 
• the cross which was a symbol of the intersection of the horizontal and vertical axes of reality at the point of union even before Jesus died on one - 

all the symbols of the major wisdom traditions speak of their ultimate vision of unity.  

For me, Jesus is the Teacher, Guide and Friend who I follow. But I am perfectly ready to go with the Gospel of John, in which Jesus is the manifestation of Logos, the Word, the Wisdom, the Self-Manifestation of God, and to allow for other manifestations, at least to other degrees, of the One God at the center of all things. 

    

So in the end, the bottom line for me is that the sooner we all stop being so fundamentalist about who is right and who is wrong, and the sooner we can commit ourselves to the re union of all people, religions, and things, and the better we can set boundaries on the behavior of extremists without demonizing other religions, the sooner we will all reach our vision, which, to me, is the dream of God himself. 

As a thirteenth century Suffi put it, 

“Beyond our ideas of right and wrong, 

there is a field.  

I’ll meet you there.”

Unto Him be worship and power, dominion and splendor, for ever and ever.  Amen.