Mark 1
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” The Gospel of the Lord, Praise to You O Christ.
Water is serious business. The Chinese sage Lao Tzu said, “Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.” I really get this. It makes sense to me because I have experienced it and have worked with some of the principles behind it. Have you ever gone out to play in the waves of the ocean and played a game that pits yourself with all of your human strength and knowledge against a weak as water non-sentient ocean. You stand flat footed and broad chested and try to defy the waves at their breaking point. “You can’t knock me down!” Yes, yes they can. Some of the ocean’s waves travel 9000 miles before they reach their destination. For fun I did a quick math estimate and found that there are about 353 Quintillion gallons of water in the oceans at about 2.7 Sextillion lbs., so Defy the Ocean is a fun but futile game. Usually, a wave will kick you like a mule and send you head over heels toward the beach until the ocean is done with you. In some situations it can tumble bulldozers and carry away buildings. Water is powerful. Many a kid and adult have learned that once your body gets about 18 to 24 inches below the surface you can no longer breathe through a snorkel or hose. You can’t compress water. It’s filled with mystery from surface tension to hot water freezing faster than cold water to the fact that we do not understand the exact process that makes ice made of water, slippery. It can be dark, confining, limiting, devastating and murderous, yet, yet when my son, Nathan, was little, we put a really secure life jacket on him and I put him on a boogie board and would give him a shove as a wave was breaking. He would take off toward his mom, surfing seemingly forever, all the way to the shore. I was so jealous, but the ocean made me a rock star in my kid’s eyes. Water also propels, moves, cleanses and sustains us. Lao Tzu was right, water has two natures. In this week’s readings water and baptism are featured prominently and the focus highlights these two natures, water destroying and water saving, from Noah and his family to Jesus at the river Jordan on to us. Whenever I think about the flowing waters of baptism I always end up thinking about the quote from the prophet Amos. It’s in the fifth chapter of Amos, verse 24. “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” We don’t think of tiny trickles as rolling. For a river to be rolling, there has to be some power there and uncontainability. The verse draws me to the question, which nature of water do we perceive? Do we perceive the waters as dark, confining, limiting a series of thou shalt nots, with threats of damnation or do we see them as life giving streams, endless unfailing fountains of unstoppable and uncontainable grace and love? Water that does wash away and destroy wickedness within us. Do we stand and play Defy the Ocean or do we surf the tide? Do we experience the thundering chaos or the propelling flow? Do we feel cleansed or dashed? Do we perceive grace and justice as something that gives or takes away? Here’s the thing, being baptized is not only having God’s love poured onto you but into you, all of us. The waters of baptism also bring to mind the coolest moving water thing I have ever seen. The first time I ever saw this trick or phenomenon was at EPCOT at Disney World. The trick is a fountain or squirting water, but it’s no ordinary fountain or water burst. The water comes out and looks like a glass tube or glass ball. It retains its shape and flies through the air and looks remarkably clear. I’ve had water poured on me, stood under a waterfall, been sprayed with a garden hose and been shot with a fire hose and all of them have the same thing in common. Aside from getting me wet, I could feel the sensation of droplets hitting and pounding on me. All the water comes apart, but the water that I’m talking about, the magic water, it all stays together. I cannot describe the sensation of one of the water missiles hitting you or what it feels like to catch one of the water balls in your hand. Well, maybe it’s not magic. Actually, it’s pure science. To create water columns like this you merely take advantage of what the physicists call LAMINAR FLOW. The opposite to laminar flow would be a turbulent flow which is what we most often encounter. Wikipedia will tell you that Laminar flow occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between the layers. At low velocities, the fluid tends to flow without lateral mixing, and adjacent layers slide past one another like playing cards. There are no cross-currents perpendicular to the direction of flow, nor eddies or swirls of fluids. In laminar flow, the motion of the particles of the fluid is very orderly with all particles moving in straight lines parallel to the pipe walls. A turbulent flow is characterized by conflict, disorder, or confusion and is not controlled or calm, the water molecules are Defying the wave and crashing around head over heels. There is a remedy or a cure for turbulence. In water or fluid dynamics you introduce screens like rolled up scotch brite pads and you control the flow which calms the turbulence and gets all the water molecules flowing in harmony with a common direction. That’s how the imagineers at Disney pull off the Jumping Fountains and Juggling Balls of Water. We as human beings behave just like water or dynamic fluids. Left to our own devices we crash into one another, we cling to the wrong things like fluids adhering to the walls of a pipe and spinning off in the wrong direction. We move fast and take no prisoners and create chaos and turbulence and disharmony all around us. When Christ was baptized, he was immediately driven out into the wilderness. Jesus went with the flow of the Spirit that descended at his baptism to a place to prepare for the way of the cross. The waters led him to the wilderness to the place where people have no hope dwell. Jesus’ life and act of love and grace that he made on the cross stands as a screen that gets us flowing in harmony and peace. It says in our proverbs that God established The Fountains of the deep, he assigned to the Sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command. God created and understands fluid dynamics, also our human needs, desires, wants and our fondness defying the waters. God saw the turbulence and defiance in our system and even watched as his Son got caught in it, so he made some changes to the system. Through faith our lives flow through the grace of the cross and are put back into harmony. Justification or being made right is nothing less or more than the promise that God accepts you as you are not because of who you are or what you have done, not because of what you might become or do, not because of who you have promised to be or what you have pledged to do, but that God accepts you because that’s who God is and what God does – justify the ungodly in order that we might know peace and turn in love to extend the same grace, mercy, and acceptance to those around us. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to his grace in which we stand.” The Spirit organizes us into a laminar flow to be a community that looks outward rather than inward or even upward. We are not called to survive, but to bear witness to the peace of God in Christ that responds to the needs of the neighbor. Outward not upward: God doesn’t need our good works, our neighbor does. In a sense, God in Christ takes care of all the “vertical” dimensions of our life – our relationship with Him and our eternal destiny – so that we can throw ourselves into the “horizontal” dimensions of our life with those around us. When we turn our eyes outward and extend the peace of God that allows us to transform suffering – ours and that of others – into endurance, character and hope because we have experienced God’s love, the Spirit of Christ is surely present. This is living the cruciform life, or the life of the cross. Receiving from God and serving as vessels or conduits to pass it on. In this the turbulence, the conflict, disorder, confusion, roughness, storminess, tempestuous winds, the wild and raging violence are ordered and redirected into the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.These are a description of a laminar flow life, a life that flows through the Cross of Jesus Christ and that is changed by it, so that, it can flow out into creation as an awesome spectacular thing. When we are flowing together it is a beautiful thing, better than Jumping Fountains and Juggling Water. It’s our mission and what God intended ever since God laid down the foundations of the Earth.
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