The Re-configuration of Our Souls
Epiphany 1B
Gen. 1:1-5; Mark 1:4-11
1/11/2009
Jim Melnyk

I learned to swim much later than my friends. I think I was something like eight or nine years old before I made the decision to give it a try. I was a bit younger – probably around five years old – when we visited some close family friends for a pool-side barbecue at their home. They were the sort of friends that one called “Aunt” and “Uncle” even though they're not really kin-folk.
        
It was a hot summer day and all the kids were running around like crazy. I was having a great time until I ran too close to the edge of the pool and somehow found myself falling toward the water – one of those slow-motion sorts of things. I remember panicking when I hit the water – even though I probably knew somewhere deep in my brain that the water wasn't really too deep at that end. Seconds felt like hours. I lost any sense of where the bottom was, and so I had no idea where to try to plant my feet – until I noticed the bright, sunny day overhead through the clear water of the pool. Blue sky and leafy-green trees rippled above me and helped me get my bearings. I shot to the surface, breaking free of what must have felt like a watery grave – had I the metaphorical language to give it a name at that age – gasping for the sweet, fresh air that filled my lungs.         
        
I recalled that day as I thought about Jesus standing waist-deep in the swirling waters of the Jordan River, pushed under the flowing current by his slightly older cousin, John. Was Jesus a swimmer? Did he ever hang out around water growing up? Nazareth is in the mountains, some fifteen miles as the crow flies from the Sea of Galilee – probably much further by foot as one wanders through the mountain coves to find a route down to the great lake. Perhaps he knew some mountain streams or lakes. Perhaps this was his first experience being plunged beneath the surface of a lake into a world alien to our way of living – beautiful – almost weightless – but also void of breathable oxygen; like going down into a watery tomb only to come back up to the surface – back up to life – gasping for breath – gasping for Ruach – the breath of God which sustains us – which gives us life!
        
I can imagine him praying, “Oh, sweet God, it is good to feel the breath of life in my lungs again! Ah, is this how the first human felt when you breathed your Ruach – your breath of life – into its lungs?” As a child growing up with asthma, I remember more than one struggle to feel the breath of God alive within me – a struggle we all too often take for granted.
        
As we recall today the baptism of Jesus I find myself asking: Just what does my baptism mean to me? What do our baptisms mean to each of us – to the world – to God? To be baptized into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is to be baptized into the in-breaking of God's kingdom here on earth – it is to be born into the hope and promise of God for all of creation. To be baptized is to breathe into our lungs the Ruach – the spirit wind – the very breath of God! It is rebirth. Baptism is a re-configuration of our souls! It is a re-wiring of our bodies, our minds, and our hearts – it is re-creation, renewal, and call – all wrapped up in the power of God's Holy Spirit. Baptism is the heart of God made flesh within us! Baptism is the mind of God made clear within us! Baptism is the hope of God proclaimed in and through our lives. Baptism is the dream of God made real in our lives! Baptism is the claiming of our birthright as children of God – and it is the moment that names us not only as God's own, but the moment that names the world as God's own world – and which names us as those whom God would have reclaim this world as God's own!
        
Author and UMC pastor Bill Wylie-Kellermann, writing for Sojourners Magazine a while back put it this way, “Need it be said unequivocally that baptism is the base authority for all Christian ministry? Not ordination. Baptism,” he writes, “baptism authorizes our freedom to be who we are uttered in the Word of God to be” (Sojourners On-line, 1/11/2009). He goes on to say that our baptisms “authorize our freedom to speak and act and witness” to the purpose and love of God “in whatever situations we may find ourselves.”        
        
Something I was reading about this Sunday's lessons led me to an excerpt of a speech given back in 1968. I found the speech on the web and read through it – it overwhelmed me. There was a sound file, and so I listened to the speech as I read along – and then I listened again – it was mesmerizing! The speech was giving on April 3, 1968, the night before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. He was addressing striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN. I am compelled to share a part of that speech with you this morning.

King proposed to his listeners, “If I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, 'Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?'…Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, 'If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.'
        
Now that's a strange statement to make,” said King, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that [people], in some strange way, are responding.
        
“Something is happening in our world,” King proclaimed. “The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee – the cry is always the same: 'We want to be free.'
        
“And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period,” said King, “is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to grapple with the problems that [human beings] have been trying to grapple with through history…. Survival demands that we grapple with them. [People], for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's [a choice between] nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today,” said King.
        
Now, we are not living in the late Sixties of the last century. We have in many ways moved beyond some of the issues that King addressed, but we haven't reached the promised land that King proclaimed was in sight that night. It is incredible that in just a few days from now we will witness the inauguration of a President whose father was a black African. Politics aside – it is an incredible thing. But that doesn't mean the racial battles King fought are finished.
        
The violence of Viet Nam, with its unbalanced number of poor and black soldiers carrying the fight, has ended, but war is still a horrific reality for us today in Iraq and Afghanistan – with the same group of folks bearing the brunt of the fighting and the dying. And violence rages in Africa, and in Israel, and along the Gaza Strip – and that animosity between that small strip of land and Israel dates back to around 1,000 BCE, something we looked at this morning in Adult Ed while talking about the book of Judges and the rise of Israel's monarchy.
        
The battle for a living wage that sparked the sanitation strike in Memphis and other movements made a difference in this nation, but business failures, home foreclosures, and unemployment all tell us that the world is still messed up, and our nation is still all too sick for all too many people.
        
But as King once said, “only when it is dark enough can you see the stars,” and I remember the brilliance of the blue sky and the leafy-green trees through the rippling water of a pool so long ago. And I remember that we are the baptized children of God – human beings with the Ruach – the spirit wind – the very breath of God filling our lungs. I remember that we have been baptized into the in-breaking of God's kingdom on earth – that we have been born into the hope and promise of God for all of creation – and I am filled with hope. We can stand fast in our faith and act with courage in a world that needs our witness and our work.
        
I remember that our baptisms mean we have been reborn in this world – that there has been a re-configuration of our souls – a rewiring of our bodies, of our minds, and of our hearts – a re-creation, a renewal, and a call – all wrapped up in the power of God's Holy Spirit. I remember that we have been granted “inquiring and discerning hearts, the courage to will and to persevere” (BCP, 308), and I know that together we can make a difference in this world. I remember that in our baptisms and in our lives, like in the life of Jesus the Christ, the heart of God is made flesh – and the mind of God is made clear – the hope of God is proclaimed – and the dream of God is made real! Amen.

©2009 Jim Melnyk