Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
January 25, 2009
Mark 1:4-11

Defining Moments

Last summer, Kim and I sold the house my parents had built in Governor Francis Farms in the 1950s and bought a little cottage in Oakland Beach overlooking East Greenwich Bay. I don’t know what the compulsion is to be on the water for so many of us, but it’s there. Perhaps it is that our bodies are mostly water, and we are coming home. Perhaps, as the aquatic theory of evolution goes, it’s that our species spent millions of years on the coastline, learning to stand upright in deep water, losing our warm fur and adding the insulation of body fat to keep us warm. Perhaps, deep in our subconscious, is the realization that we are not perfect, and we long to be washed clean. Whatever the motivation, it is powerful.

So much of our Biblical mythology centers on water. Before the world had shape or form, God moved over the waters to bring forth the earth, we read in our baptismal service. In the time of Noah, the flood waters washed over the earth, and the ark of salvation bore a new beginning. In the time of Moses, the people of Israel passed through the Red Sea on the way to the promised land. In the fullness of time, God sent Jesus to be baptized by John, to become living water to a woman at the Samaritan well, to wash the feet of the disciples, and to send them out to baptize all nations by water and the Holy Spirit.

Why, do you suppose, Jesus went to his cousin John to be baptized in the River Jordon? Had his mother told him stories about his unusual birth? Did his family tell stories about the three wise men who had come looking for him, expected something of him? Did he grow up thinking there was something he was supposed to do? Maybe Jesus been planning this all along – to stop to see John on his way to a wilderness retreat? Or did the baptism give rise to his trip to the wilderness – in the way that Mark says, “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”

At any case, Mark treats Jesus’ baptism as a defining moment: He says Jesus sees “the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him, and a voice ... from heaven, “You are my son, my Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” We know that the baptism is a defining moment for Mark – for with this story, he launches Jesus’ story.

And what of Jesus? Where had he been all these years, before he comes striding onto the Biblical scene. Was there an incident in Nazareth that compelled him to take action? Had he had enough of Roman occupation and the temple’s complicity? Or perhaps he and John had grown up together, studying the prophet Isaiah, waiting for the promised One who was coming to save Israel. John had grown up in the temple, remember? His father Zachariah was a priest and his mother Elizabeth, a devout Jew, and it could not have been so far from Nazareth that healthy boys couldn’t spend time together, dreaming of the restoration of Israel.

There is evidence that Jesus was one of John’s prophets, and when he comes out to the Jordan to be with John, he has an unexpected experience of God. Did John know that Jesus was the messiah? Apparently not, because, when John is imprisoned and hears what Jesus is doing, he sends a message to Jesus, and asks, Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Matt.11:3, Luke 7:19)

It is helpful to know what baptism in the River Jordan was about. John’s baptism is a baptism of repentance –which has a distinctly different meaning from our Christian sense of being sorry, or remorseful, or penitent. In ancient Judaism, repentance had two meanings: First, to return, as to return from exile, to follow the way of the Lord that leads from exile to the promised land; and a second meaning, “to ‘go beyond the mind that you have’ – to go beyond conventional understandings of what life with God is about.”1 This kind of repentance is like the prayers we heard around the water a few minutes ago – prayers about needing to change our perspective, about looking at the world a different way, about starting again.

What, do you suppose, brought Jesus to this kind of repentance, to this defining moment?

Now, the word “beloved” can also be translated as “chosen.” Did Jesus know he was chosen? Or did he, too, like his cousin John come slowly to this realization? I’ve always thought, when he asked the woman at the well, “Who am I?” he really wanted to know, that he’s not sure, that he is still discerning his destiny. Nevertheless, this baptism of John in the Jordan appears to be a defining moment for Jesus, a realization that God is doing a new thing, a sense that life will never be the same again.

What of our defining moments?

Many years ago, I attended a workshop for people in the field of volunteer administration, a few months before I went to work for Volunteers in Action, now the Volunteer Center of Rhode Island. The agenda included some value clarification exercises, and we were divided into small groups and given a task: Each of us was to decide whether we were a deep pool, a babbling brook, or a swamp. Water metaphors again....

Hmmmm. A deep pool? What is a pool like? Still? Dark? Quiet? Am I a pool? In guidance class at Warwick Vets, when the teacher said, “It’s the quiet ones we have to watch,” everyone turned around and looked at me. Maybe....

Or a babbling brook? Noisy? Busy? Tumbling? Exciting? Clean? Going somewhere? What is a brook like? Am I a brook? Well, maybe....

A swamp? Dark? Stinky? Shady? Scary? Sinister? Creepy and crawly? Could I be a swamp? Who am I really?

After some thought, we were asked to share which we were – and why. I still remember what I said. It was a defining moment for me, when I learned something about myself. And several months later, when I was being interviewed for the position as executive director of the Volunteer Center, several of the Search Committee members who had been there that day, told me they remembered hat I said – and it was one of the reasons they hired me. I still think about that day – a defining moment for me. This is who I am, even 30 years later. As we age, I believe we become more so of who we really are.

What are some of the defining moments in your life? Did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up? How did you know? Did you grow up in the city? Or in the country? When did you know you had met the one you were going to marry? What caused you to be who you are?

Were there one or more defining moments in your life? Did you have an injury as a child? Or an illness? Maybe you grew up in an alcoholic home? Or with a mentally ill parent? Were you abused? What was your family’s story? Had your father or brother or aunt been in the war?

What was your church experience like? Did you have one? Did you have a loving Sunday School teacher? Or someone who made you afraid? Did someone take you under her or his wing, believe in you, trust you, give you a chance? Was there a significant emotional event that you can point to?

What shaped you? What are your defining moments?

And, I wonder, do you suppose we can create our defining moments? Surely we do that for our children. We send them to summer camp, treat them to art classes and piano lessons, make their dreams come true, if we can. When my oldest granddaughter Marina was 10, I took her to the Florida Keys to swim with the dolphins. At the time, she thought it was the best day of her life. And now she is in college studying ecology.

As adults, do you suppose we still can create our defining moments, at least one or two? Do you suppose Jesus had this nagging idea that he was destined for more than carpentry?

And you and me? Perhaps the Holy Spirit is waiting to rest on us, hovering over us, ready to say, You are my beloved, my chosen one, in whom I am well pleased.

Knowing that I was playing with these ideas, Kim wrote a poem for me, entitled,

If I Could Be Baptized Again
© Kim M. Baker, 2009

If I could be baptized again,
I would first be immersed in fiery verse,
in poetic language of rebirth,
then doused with the ineffable affection
of God and my parents dripping
affirmations of the glory of my
one uniquely extraordinary self.

If I could be baptized again,
I would select a hectic time
in my ordinary life, when strife
and stress compress my patience
and confidence and compassion,
then I would lean my head beneath the
redeeming drops of All Shall Be Well.

If I could be baptized again,
I would draw all my loved ones
around the font of my essence,
each saturating me with stories
of what it means to be alive in
a community striving to rise to
the occasion of their human grace.

Come. Be baptized with me again,
lie down at the gentle river of rebirth,
bow to the sacredness of every seed
and mountain and shadow, float
along the surface of fear knowing
all of us are near, saints of our one
wild and precious life,2 and drown with me

forever in God’s love.

Amen.

1 See Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, New York, HarperCollins, 2006, pp 117.

2 " Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver