Mending the World

Mending the World

Jeremy Funk

Mark 1:4–11

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

January 11, 2015

During the season of Christmas, stretching from Christmas Day through January 5, we celebrated the coming of our Savior as a baby. In last week’s service we remembered the child Jesus visited by the magi, Gentiles who traveled far to see the Jewish boy that the heavens hailed king. They rejoiced to see his appearing (his epiphany). Today we enter the season of Epiphany. We celebrate Jesus as an adult. We remember his baptism—his first appearance of the new season—at the Jordan River.

Mark takes us to an austere place. Even in his terseness, he transports us to the wilds of Judea. We accompany those flocking to this forbidding and foreboding place, to terrain both rocky and chalky: a place far away from any first-century notion of civilization.[1] And out in the boondocks we meet John the baptizer, a prophet like Elijah: both men followed hard after God and urged others to do so. Both cinched leather belts around their waists. If we really use our imaginations, we might get a whiff of John’s camel hide or catch the scent of honey on his breath.

In the time of Jesus, baptism was a ritual washing for a number of Jewish groups, including for followers of John. In the Gospel of Mark, the Baptizer recognizes Jesus as the one coming after him and talks of little else. Some scholars speculate that before Jesus began his own ministry, he might have been a disciple of the Baptizer. From outside the Gospel of Mark, from Matthew for instance, we gather that John the Baptizer was leading a renewal movement among the people of Israel. He called listeners of many kinds to change their lives and follow after God. Undergoing baptism was part of this call.

Mark tells Jesus’s baptism story this way: “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.’”

To my way of thinking, the church celebrates the baptism of Jesus for several reasons. First, in this baptism God announces to Jesus himself, and to us, who Jesus is: Jesus is God’s representative sent with authority to act and speak for God. Second, in this baptism Jesus begins his mission: to go about mending a tattered and torn world. Third, Jesus’s path of mending the world opens for us a similar path. And fourth, we celebrate this baptism because in it, as in any moment of baptism, God takes part in the story, not to destroy but to restore.

In the very first line of his gospel, Mark announces, this is the good news of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. In the Hebrew Scriptures the term “Son of God” often describes kings or prophets: folks who have a special relationship with God, whom God anoints and gives authority and power to speak and act for God. In Jesus’s baptism God anoints Jesus and announces this special relationship.[2] Notice that, as Mark tells the baptism story, only Jesus can see his anointing by God’s Spirit: “And as he was coming up out of the water, he saw . . .” And as Mark tells the story, God’s affirmation is addressed to Jesus alone: “You are my Son; with you I am well pleased.” Yet not only Jesus but we also see and hear. Mark lets us in on God’s secret about Jesus. This announcement is for us as well.

But how is this announcement good news for us? After last week’s events, we might be forgiven for feeling that our world has been torn apart. Gunshots sounded in Paris, terror descended and lifted, and lives there have ended. Those left living, loving the newly dead, have been permanently changed, irreparably ripped. Violence, whether deemed newsworthy or not, severs our own city again and again, day after day. The family of Tom Palermo may rest in our consciousness today. So we pray for them. And we pray for Bishop Cook, who, as the Sun reported on Friday, will face charges in Palermo’s death. So we pray for those inside and outside our diocese whose lives have been sundered by this incident.

Jesus’s baptism is good news for this world. Our lesson today shows us that Jesus the divine representative is Jesus the human being. Jesus takes part in a very human ritual washing. Jordan’s waters clean his mud-caked feet and his sweaty armpits, and those of many, many others. And in the Gospel of Mark, the word baptism becomes more than a term for ritual washing.

The term baptism becomes shorthand for Jesus’s mission to redeem us:[3] to teach, to heal, to feed, to die, to rise. In Jesus’s baptism, God sets him apart for the special work of speaking and acting for God in his teachings and healings. These we celebrate during the season of Epiphany. Even though Christmas is over, Epiphany too centers on the truth that God is with us. Today and for the next several Sundays we hear stories of Jesus making important appearances: calling disciples, casting out demons, healing the sick: mending the torn-apart world.

As we move into Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, our attention will turn to the end of his mission. Later on in Mark, Jesus tells his disciples: “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.” In his death, Jesus confronts the forces that routinely tear our world apart: alienation, violence, and death. And in his resurrection, Jesus embodies God’s promise that the world will not always be torn apart, that God is at work knitting the world together.[4]

We celebrate Jesus’s baptism because it opens his path for us. Jesus’s baptism is different from ours. At our baptism we likely did not see a vision of God’s Spirit or hear God’s audible voice. But, if our liturgy speaks our faith, then we “are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”[5] And no doubt many of us could share testimonies of God’s Spirit at work in our lives, in the lives of those we love, and in the life our community.

“I baptize with water,” John the Baptizer says, “but the one who is coming will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” We, the followers of Jesus, marked by his Spirit, who hear this gospel, fulfill that promise of the Baptizer. And our baptism calls us along Jesus’s path. We are beloved children of God, marked by the Holy Spirit, mending the world in the name of Christ and in the Spirit’s power.

God knows the world needs mending. And precisely because it does, I’m finally struck by this detail from today’s lesson: “Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart.” Through this tear in the sky, God makes an unbridled appearance in Spirit and in voice. God inserts Godself into the story. As Christians we trust that God aims to restore and renew the world—to mend it, not to tear it. But our hope is that no matter how sturdy the fabric of our world seems, God is always working to find more ways into it. God wants more ways into us—from birth to baptism to breath to breath to breath.

The following story of world-mending grace comes from the StoyCorps podcast of January 2.[6] “Last summer, Rafael Hameed and his five-year-old son, Ish, were walking to school when they were hit by a speeding car. Rafael lost his leg, and his son was killed. While her sister was awaiting trial for vehicular homicide, Megiddëh Goldston,” a single parent, tried to assist the Hameed family. “Now she visits Rafael and his wife, Heidi, and helps them in their day-to-day life.” The Hameeds also assist Megiddëh and her child, who is the same age as their deceased son. Heidi Hameed recalls how, just days after committing the crime, “the driver reached out to ask her for forgiveness.”

Says Heidi, “My heart broke for her, actually, because I knew that she has to live for the rest of her life with this. And I told her immediately, yes, of course I forgive you.” Rafael and Heidi talk about the sorrow they felt when first meeting Migiddëh’s little boy. In spite of the pain, Rafael says, “We love; that’s how we roll.” Loving this little boy has been “like a tonic” for Rafael. “It’s like if you’ve ever stitched anything together. There’s a tear in the fabric, and we’ve been stitching it.”

Let us follow the path set out for us in Jesus’s baptism and ours, mending the world in the name of Christ, by his Spirit’s power. Amen.

[1] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 147.

[2] Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, 408.

[3] See Michael Rogness, “Commentary on Mark,” http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2313/.

[4] See Rogness, “Commentary on Mark.”

[5] bcponline.org/

[6] Storycorps.org/, “We Love—That’s How We Roll,” http://storycorps.org/listen/raphael-hameed-heidi-hameed-and-megiddeh-goldston/.