It is very quite.
The day is just waking up. That silence when the morning light first starts softly sifting through the darkness, long before the sun comes up.
A cool mist is rising from the ground, and from the water of the lake.
An old wooden dock wanders out over the water.
Suddenly there is the sound running feet, bare feet, softly thudding on the ground,
heavy breathing, then the feet pound the wooden dock, hammering out over the water.
Someone screams out, jumps into the air, and flies out over the water and with a resounding belly flop they burst the still waters, the air fills with a splashing, raining thunder storm.
The person jumps up out of the water struggling to breath, their eyes wide open, awake like never before.
To run and jump into a lake first thing in the morning we have to be pretty awake, but once we hit that water then we know what it means to be really awake, like never before. We might think we were awake before, but we were really still asleep, compared to what happens when we come up out of the water.
We thought we were alive until we saw someone who was really alive, then we knew we were dead, that we had been dead a long time, never having really lived. The living dead, walking around, wounded, crippled, maimed and never knew it until we saw someone who was whole, alive.
It is a harsh judgment for the dead to wake up, suddenly seeing what they are, compared to what they could be.
Jesus is grown up.
That cute little baby who escaped into Egypt has come back and has grown up, and the first thing he says, his first words in Matthew’s Gospel are of fulfilling righteousness.
Jesus comes out of the water, the Spirit of God descends like in the Creation when the Spirit brooded over the waters, announcing a new creation just beginning, that judges the world and wakes the dead.
We thought we knew what our lives were about, we thought we knew what we wanted, what we were supposed to do, and Jesus comes up out of the water and we see for the first time what it is to be alive and we see that we are dead, God’s Judgment is upon us and we see ourselves for what we are and we know that we have never known what is meant to be alive until we finally see some one who is life itself.
That is what is happening in the Baptism of our Lord, the end of the world has begun, we see what we could be but never were, that water pours over us and wakes us up, and the dead begin to live, waking up to the first day of creation starting over.
God’s judgment is much more rude that the trite paying out of awards and punishments for the naughty and nice. That kind of judgment we can understand and define, it is something we can control.
We often try to pin God down with that cosmic police force mentality.
But God’s judgment is much more of a mystery. The ultimate result isn’t so much that the world is divvied up into the good and bad as it is the world wakes up and lives for the first time, gasping, screaming, breathing for the first time like a new born.
It is a rude awakening to see that we have been dead and that we could have been so much more, God’s Judgment wakes us to this fact and then drags us kicking and screaming into life like new born babes. Here we thought we knew it all and now we see we haven’t even started.
The resurrection is our judgment. The dead live for the first time, a rude awakening, a splash of cold water.
We are part of God’s judgment upon the world.
By right of our baptism into the body of Christ we are part of the waking up of the world to its own deadness.
That is what the Church is, the life of the resurrection invading and waking a dead world.
Everything about our life together as a parish, the worship, the fellowship, the outreach, the study of the faith, the working of the institution itself is called to be faithful, to fulfill righteousness, to be exemplary, to be fully alive an awake.
An institution that reaches out to the world, that reaches out others calls into judgment every institution that is only self serving rather than serving the world.
A community that is responsive to everyone, both inside the fellowship and outside the fellowship calls into judgment all communities that are nonresponsive, that are dead for all intents and purposes.
An individual who is fully awake, fully alive who knows the ways of love, who has interest and curiosity and attention for the lives of others and for the world beyond their own issues and agendas calls in to judgment all other individuals who are not awake, not fully alive not capable of showing attention beyond their own lives.
We are called by our baptisms to wake up and be born into this world, where we can live for others, because the life of Jesus is Life itself given for others, because the God who is revealed in the baptism of Jesus is the God who is for others, the God who brings judgment to wake the dead, who brings resurrection that the dead may live, who brings life that the world may be created anew.
Jesus comes up out the water, out of breath, with eyes wide open like never before. The waves circle out further and further, bringing life to the dead.
It has begun.
The waters are upon us.