Did you hear about that priest at St Ambrose? St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church, that is. He went viral on the Internet last Holy Week when photographers took a picture of him with a plastic water gun, spraying parishioners with holy water in remembrance of their baptism. Many of my friends had a good laugh at this story. I received a flurry of photos of this priest in his mask, holding a neon green water gun, squirting little bits of water into car windows during a drive-through procession.[1]
He
looks pretty silly, doesn’t he? He seems to symbolize the epitome of the church’s
desperation in these pandemic times! I myself wouldn’t have chosen a gun of any
sort as a reminder of our baptism, but this photo got me thinking, as well as
laughing. Here’s what I’m wondering now about baptism: Do the sweet little
silver shells of warm water, spooned gingerly over foreheads at a traditional Episcopal
baptism, represent St. John’s kind of baptism any better than that water gun?
I’ve
seen the Jordan River, and believe me, it’s neither a marble font nor a silver-plated
shell. I know that the Jordan held more water in Jesus’ day, before human
industry sucked it dry. But the Jordan is a brown, muddy little river, flanked
by brown, sandy banks. Imagine scraggly John the Baptizer standing waist-deep
in the brown, muddy water, waving his arms and shouting about sins like some
revival preacher. Imagine his unkempt hair and long beard flapping in the
breeze. Imagine dozens of down-and-out folks in shabby cloaks and worried faces
milling around on the brown, sandy banks. It wasn’t the wealthy elite who were
hanging out at the river with the prophet John. It wasn’t the powerful
politicians, or the holy Temple priests, or the educated scribes. It was the
poor and the distressed, the sick, the outcasts, the political radicals, the
desperate ones, loaded down by their sins.
In case we get ideas of grandeur about Jesus himself, the
evangelist Mark makes sure that we understand where he comes from. Mark makes clear that Jesus comes “from
Nazareth of Galilee.” Nazareth was a small, unimportant village that no one
would have heard of before Jesus appeared there. One scholar says that we could
translate Nazareth as “Nowheresville” today. Galilee, on the other hand, was a
place that people would have heard of. But for all the wrong reasons! Galilee was
a notoriously poor region, full of unholy gentiles, cut off from the rest of
Judea by the land of the ornery Samaritans.[2]
Mark wants us to picture a baptism about as far from decorum as you can get, in
worldly terms. Here’s a man from unholy Nowheresville striding into a motley
crowd of poor, sick sinners. Jesus stands among the others on the brown, sandy banks
and, in turn, hikes up his robes to be washed in the brown, muddy waters. It is
this Jesus for whom the heavens open. It is this Jesus on whom
God’s Holy Spirit descends.
For Mark, the Good News begins with such a baptism. Mark
doesn’t begin his Gospel with stories about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. He
leaves out the angels and the shepherds and the kings. Instead, Mark begins the
Good News with Jesus’ baptism—and he ends it with the story of the Crucifixion.
Mark holds up these two images very deliberately, like bookends. In today’s Gospel
lesson we see the Spirit-dove descend on Jesus; we see the heavens ripped open;
and we have the voice from heaven that proclaims Jesus as God’s beloved son.
And at the crucifixion, we have the exact same pattern. On the Cross, instead
of receiving the spirit, Jesus breathes out his spirit. Instead of the heavens
being ripped open, we have the curtain of the Temple, the separation between
humans and the Holy, torn in two. And at the crucifixion, in a parallel to God
proclaiming, “You are my beloved Son,” the Roman Centurion proclaims, “Truly,
this man is the Son of God.” In using a pattern like this as bookends for his
Gospel, Mark makes it clear that Jesus’ baptism points to his death on the
Cross, and his death on the Cross echoes his baptism. In baptism, Jesus is
taking his first steps on his path toward the Cross.
It’s
a strange, risky Love, then, that God pours out upon his Son at his
baptism. In the Eastern orthodox iconography, we see Jesus submerged up to his
chin in turbulent waves of water, while John and several onlookers lean in to
watch from the safety of the shore. Deep within the river, under Jesus’ feet,
are sea monsters—the mythological representations of chaos, the face
of all of the dark, dangerous forces that threaten the order of creation.
In his baptism, Jesus not only takes his first steps toward the cross, but he fully
enters into chaos itself. He goes under the raging waves with the all of the
powerful forces that seek to unmake the world.[3] He
submerges himself in all of the inner turmoil and bedlam of our world.
Early
Christians portrayed the dangers of baptism better than we do. They had no marble
fonts and silver shells. They entered the chilly waters of deep baptismal
pools, built over springs of running water in dank, dark caves. Stripped naked,
they were dunked completely underwater by the priests, Southern-Baptist-style.
Emerging choking, spluttering, and blue with cold from an experience much like
drowning, they were clothed right then and there in new white garments, wrapped
in a new life in Christ. It must indeed have been a very dramatic—even
frightening--sacrament.
When
we remember our baptisms, we need to remember that we are baptized into the
life of the One who came from Nowheresville, the One who stood on the banks
with outcasts and sinners, the One who faced chaos, pain, shame, and death so
that we might know of his Love. We are baptized into a Love that is anything but
weak, into a Love that is anything but safe. Bishop Curry writes just this week
about this kind of love, the kind of love into which we are reborn in baptism,
the kind of love which we are called to proclaim in this chaotic world of ours:
“This way of unselfish, sacrificial
love, it is the way to redeem a nation, to save a world. It is the way of hope
for us all. But do not make the mistake of thinking that I speak of a
sentimental and emotional love.
... This way of love is the
way of sacrifice, the way of unselfishness, the way of selflessness, that seeks
the good of the other as well as the self. And that is the way of the cross,
which is the way of life.”[4]
With our Lord and Savior,
we too are baptized into the way of the Cross, which is also the way of Life.
When I was looking up
the photo of the water-gun priest at the other St. Ambrose, I found out that
clever folks across the Internet had a field day with this water-gun baptism, with
a little help from Photoshop. We see our masked priest standing on top of Doom
monsters with his neon-green water pistol, like Jesus stands on top of the sea-monsters
in those ancient icons. We see him standing with Clint Eastwood on a movie
poster titled, “The Good, The Bad, and The Holy Spirit.” And perhaps my
favorite: we see him standing before a blazing fire, surrounded by firemen with
powerful hoses. Courageously, he aims that little plastic gun at the fiery
inferno, as if he knows its hidden strength. As we stand before the infernos of
hatred and the monsters of injustice, may we too remember the power and the
strength of the new life of love into which we are baptized in the name of
Jesus Christ.
[2]
Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of
Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 128.
[3] Rowan
Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 3.
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