Jack Hardaway
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Being born is a pretty traumatic experience.
So I hear. I don’t remember it myself.
Though I do remember my three children seemed to find it pretty upsetting.
There was this silly movie years ago, Look who’s Talking, where the babies talked, Bruce Willis was the voice over for the main character.
When he was born he just kept screaming, “Help! Put me back!”
Born into the world.
Baptism.
The waters of new birth.
Being born again is a pretty traumatic experience.
Mark’s Gospel uses sparse language, filled with urgency and immediacy as he begins the good news, and it begins with Jesus being Baptized. There is no Nativity scene, or shepherds or Magi, or a cosmic poem of the Word becoming flesh.
In Mark the birth story is Baptism.
The Sky is torn open.
And the Spirit immediately drives Jesus into the wilderness.
Born again into the world.
There are other stories, other accounts of Jesus baptism, retellings of the event from later in history, that Christians eventually chose to ignore and set aside.
One is the Gospel according to Phillip, where Jesus comes up out of the water laughing in scorn at the world.
There was this bad idea that being spiritual, being spirit filled, was to be set free from the corruption of the physical world. It is the original heretical impulse that always persists in the life of faith.
It is the temptation to escape.
It is very understandable. Life is painful, disappointing, enraging, terrifying. Relationships, families, community life, they are all frustrating, and they make us want to wash our hands of the whole mess, like Pilate at Jesus’ Passion.
Escape into distraction, despair, violence and scorn, addiction.
Forsaking the full hearted hope that bids us embrace the pain of life, forsaking that life, and taking up the thin tasteless hope of a pleasant ghostly afterlife.
But the faith of Jesus always pulls in the other direction, deeper into the world rather than out of it.
Most religions and all heresies are about escaping the material transience of creation.
I sometimes think Christianity at its deepest and truest isn’t really a religion, because it pulls us into our bodies, into the world, into the mess, and tells us that is where God is found.
There is no higher spiritual reality than being flesh and blood humanity.
We follow the incarnate God.
Who endured the death of the cross.
Who takes on our death.
Who rises physically, who ascends physically, who eats with his friends, whose body bears the wounds of torture.
Who is known and tasted in bread and wine.
We give our hearts to the resurrection of the body, and the renewal of creation, not its abandonment.
Creation is the Child of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit brooded over her nest at the beginning, at the very beginning, from the Genesis reading this morning.
Life in the Spirit, life anointed by the Holy Spirit binds us to Jesus body as he goes into the world.
Not laughing in scorn, but embracing in love.
This life of always being born anew into the world can be traumatic.
It is tempting to escape from it.
But the Spirit pulls us back into the mess.
Find God here. Find love here.
For real, for true.