Christ Descends into the Formless Depths - The Baptism of Our Lord (Epiphany 1)

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on January 7, 2024, The Baptism of Our Lord (The First Sunday after The Epiphany).

“The Voice of the Lord is upon the waters, the God of glory thunders. The Lord is upon the mighty waters.” We hear today those words from Genesis, in the beginning. In the beginning, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. A wind from God, God’s spirit, God’s own breath, sweeps over, exhales over that watery expanse, into chaos and deep darkness God enters in and creation, life, light begins, permeating and suffusing this watery primal darkness. “Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. “The Voice of the Lord is a powerful voice, the voice of the Lord is a voice of splendor.” God calls life out of the deep, out of that zone of all that is unknown lost or in chaos, unordered, diffuse. There are sea monsters in there, after all! As some icons of Jesus’s baptism show, the snaky scaly outline of all that walks in the paths of the sea… Jesus goes down into that deep, that void, “Descends below all things that he might ascend above all things and fill them with his presence.” Or as Jurgen Moltmann puts it, “In Christ, God has invaded Godforsakenness.” Every region where we think God is not, every suffering, pain, or bleak emptiness, every formless void we think separates us from love and life—for each of these, into each of these, Jesus is baptized. Whatever most scares you: God goes there. God is invading Godforsakenness. The one through whom all things were made is coming into the world; the Creator enters into creation in the person of Jesus, so that we would know ourselves as beloved with an indissoluble love from which nothing can separate us. So that we might be able to pray in those gorgeous words of our Eucharistic Prayer D, “Fountain of life and source of all goodness, you made all things and fill them with your blessing; you created them to rejoice in the splendor of your radiance.” “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his Name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.”

            Mark’s Gospel emphasizes the radical, this-moment nature, interrupting intervention of the proclaimed gospel, breaking into our self-enclosure. For Mark everything happens “immediately” and in the present tense. A wild man appears in the wilderness, clothed in camel hair. In the baptism account, I am captured by the zoomed-in quality of that moment just as Jesus is coming up out of the water, just then he sees the heavens torn apart and the Holy Spirit descending like a dove. Annie Dillard in her brilliant novella Holy the Firm writes about watching a baptism out in the bay on Puget Sound, as she is walking to town. She captures something of the microcosm of this moment when Jesus breaks the surface of the water:

“He lifts from the water. Water beads on his shoulders. I see the water in balls as heavy as planets, a billion beads of water as weighty as worlds, and he lifts them up on his back as he rises. He stands wet in the water. each one bead is transparent, and each has a world, or the same world, light and alive and apparent inside the drop: it is all there ever could be, moving at once, past and future, and all the people. I can look into any sphere and see people stream past me, and cool my eyes with colors and the sight of the world in spectacle perishing ever, and ever renewed. I do; I deepen into a drop and see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds and all the earth’s contents, every landscape and room, everything living or made or fashioned, all past and future stars, and especially faces, faces like the cells of everything, faces pouring past me talking, and going, and gone. And I am gone.

For outside it is bright. The surface of things outside the drops has fused. Christ himself and the others, and the brown warm wind, and hair, sky, the beach, the shattered water—all this has fused. It is the one glare of holiness; it is bare and unspeakable. There is no speech nor language; there is nothing, no one thing, nor motion, nor time. There is only this everything. There is only this, and its bright and multiple noise.” (Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard, 67-68)

There is only one glare of holiness, the holiness of God in Jesus, into which we are all being drawn by the Spirit. Good news for pack mule perfectionists breaking our backs working so hard to achieve holiness of our own merit—it can’t be done, and it doesn’t need to be. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus shares his holiness with us, sanctifies us by his Spirit. Holiness rolls off of him in each eternal drop of water as he breaks the Jordan’s surface and God takes a breath. This is why the sinless Son of God goes to be baptized by John. Gregory of Nazianzus says, “As man he was baptized, but he absolved sins as God. He needed no purifying rites himself—his purpose was to hallow water.” Or Ephrem the Syrian writing in the 4thcentury: 

“The Lord says, By my baptism the waters will be sanctified, receiving from me fire and the Holy Spirit….See the hosts of heaven hushed and still, as the all-holy Bridegroom goes down into the Jordan. No sooner is he baptized than he comes up from the waters, his splendor shining forth over the earth. The gates of heaven are opened, and the Father’s voice is heard: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” All who are present stand in awe as they watch the Spirit descend to bear witness to him. O come all you people, worship him! Praise to you, Lord, for your glorious epiphany which brings joy to us all! The whole world has become radiant with the light of your manifestation.”

His purpose was to hallow water, and by his baptism the waters are sanctified. God has gone into the dark and murky depths of the formless void and rises breaking the surface to share with us the breath of life and the light of the world. We can rest easy: God is redeeming creation by entering into it fully, without reservation, suffusing everything with the light of divine holiness. The Holy Trinity is revealed in this Theophany at the Jordan as God for us, the God who loves the world God has made and sent his Son to save us. “You are my son, the Beloved,” Jesus hears the voice of the Lord say, and that love is proclaimed over each one of us, too. Each person—you, me, your neighbor, your enemy—each chosen and named and saved and claimed, each called beloved. The same powerful voice that creates and gives life and calls into being at the beginning also speaks each one of us into being, calls us into becoming, right on this radical breaking-the-surface-of-the-waters leading edge moment now. “You are my Child, the Beloved.” “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedar trees; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.” The voice of the Lord calling us Beloved breaks every idolatrous tall tale of who we think we have to be in order to be worthy of love. Every sky-scraping cedar of Lebanon image of earning a holiness of our own gets stripped bare, leaving there at the water’s surface indissoluble belovedness, the one sure thing, God’s faithfulness to us, that will never melt into chaos or formlessness. Our firm foundation, even at sea: You are my Child, the Beloved. “The Lord shall give strength to his people; the Lord shall give his people the blessing of peace.” Peace only comes as a blessing. As St. Augustine comments, “The dove is not for sale; it is given gratis. Hence it is called grace.” God reaches out to us in prodigal mercy and saving grace, tenderly watching over each heartbeat, extending second chances and third chances and tenth and millionth chances to respond to love with love, in a world not left in darkness but illumined radiantly from the beginning. “Let there be light.”

Amen.