Anybody
know the difference between a ceremony and a ritual? Neither did I, until one of the faculty at
the Living School explained it to me. He
said that ceremony is when you do stuff and say stuff that are entirely
predictable, entirely choreographed, it's like Kabuki theater. In a ceremony, you always know what's coming
next, what's going to happen on the stage.
A lot of civic functions are ceremonies, like presenting the key to a
city to a visiting dignitary, maybe a famous hometown actor or something. You know exactly what’s going to happen,
almost down to the second: the mayor will introduce the dignitary, she’ll say what
a wonderful person they are, how honored the city to have this person be a part
of it. Then the visitor will say a few words, saying how honored he is to have
grown up there, how it instilled in him a strong work ethic, the drive to
succeed, et cetera, et cetera. Then
the mayor hands this big giant key to the actor, they pause with it in between
so a photographer can get a picture, and after the ceremony, the actor gives the
big giant key back to await the next honored
visitor, ‘cause it doesn't really open
anything, anyway.
And
that’s the thing about a ceremony: it doesn't really open anything, there’s
very little real meaning or feeling to it. But what if the mayor had followed up her
glowing comments with a recollection about how the last time the actor was in town, he got drunk, took off all his
clothes and swam with a model half his age in the fountain at the downtown
Hyatt? And what if the visitor followed
up his remarks by saying that he
hopes he doesn’t get shot, crime having
gotten so bad downtown since he was a boy? At the very least, it would provide
some amusing news coverage, and maybe, just maybe,
some thought as well about the price
of fame and what to do about downtown crime.
And
that's the difference between ceremony and ritual: ceremony is always
pro-forma, always positive; ritual includes the dark side. It's like the Fourth of July, where we shoot
off a lot of fireworks, listen to a lot of patriotic speeches, but not once do we ever mention that our
country was founded by killing many of
its former owners and putting the rest on land we didn’t want. What we do on the fourth is by and large
ceremony: it doesn't acknowledge the dark side, and is empty of anything but
the most banal, self-congratulatory meaning.
Now,
you’re probably asking: what put a bee up your
bonnet all of a sudden? What does this
have to do with the Baptism of Our Lord, who surely didn't even have a dark side? Well, I’m glad you asked: what prompted me was
noticing that the Lectionary, that three-year cycle of readings that many of us
preacher-types follow, leaves out the
dark side of Luke’s version of the baptism story. So, as a public service, I have put it back
in, but it's not what you might expect, it's not the winnowing and burning part—that
was just pro-forma messiah talk in those days.
If you think carefully about the metaphor, you'll notice that it isn't
Jesus who does the separation of wheat from chaff: it's the wind, aka the spirit
. . . but that’s another sermon.
No,
the part the Lectionary leaves out is the bit about John the Baptist getting
beheaded because he gets crossways with the Herods. They cut out the middle of the passage, and
when that happens, it always makes me
suspicious. Check it out: the lectionary
moves from winnowing the chaff and burning it, thus perpetuating the notion of
the fires of hell, moves straight into Jesus getting baptized, and then ends
when God tells him he’s beloved. And though the implication may be true—you’re gonna get winnowed
unless you're baptized and called beloved—it leaves out the dark side: you can
get beheaded, or at least persecuted,
as well.
There's
a reason Luke puts that little aside in there; it's not because like me he follows
rabbit runs. We’re being warned that
things won’t be all sweetness and light, all milk and honey if you just join
the church. Following Jesus comes at a cost, in the New Testament it
always does that—just ask Paul—and it makes you wonder why it doesn't seem to
be that way these days. Maybe it's because Christians, at least in
this country and the rest of the West, are so assimilated, so tamed that they’re
no longer a threat to the powers that be . . .
Well. Back to baptism . . . I told you I like rabbit runs . . . Luke tells us about Jesus’
baptism in one line: “when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also
had been baptized and was praying” and it's interesting to note that he doesn't
even show it to us, he just indicates that it was done to him along with
everyone else, like it’s no big deal, like it’s to be expected . . . when Jesus
was baptized like everybody else . . . There’s none of this agonized complaining
from John, no “I need to be baptized by you,
and you come to me?” like over in
Matthew. Nor is there a cryptic answer
from Jesus “it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness,”
whatever that means. For Luke, baptism is just expected: everybody gets baptized . . .
And
then there’s the little matter of the coming of the Holy Spirit . . . Matthew
follows the source—we think both he and Luke used Mark’s text—saying “just as
he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit
descending on him like a dove” but Luke modifies it so that the Spirit comes
when he is praying: “when Jesus also
had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit
descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.”
The Spirit comes upon Jesus when he is praying to God, when he is in relationship with the ground of all
being, AKA the one who birthed him (remember the Word was begotten, not made).
Perhaps
this is why Luke and the other gospel writers emphasize that Jesus prayed to
God, whom the ancients called “Father.” And note that he’s not praying to himself, he’s praying to that person of
the Trinity we call “creator,” but my point is that it’s the relationship
between father and son, between creator and redeemer, between eternal Ground
and eternal Word, it's in that
relationship that the Spirit gushes forth.
Remember
in our discussion of the Trinity that the relationship between its members can
be seen as perichoresis, that is, an eternal emptying of the being of one
member into the next and into to the next, and so on . . . Thus, the
relationship is one of a continual flow around and around and around . . . Fourteenth
century theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart describes it this way: the
Ultimate source, who the ancients called “Father” but could just as easily be
called “Morher,” is eternally giving birth of the Word, who we call “Son.” And
in this eternal birthing, the Father empties himself into the Son, and the Son,
in turn, contemplates, or “prays to” the Father, and out of that mutual
relationship, the Holy Spirit flows into the world; among the many names for this
Spirit is love.
So
I think that’s what's pictured here, the Son praying to the Creator, and the
Spirit flowing out of the relationship, and in that moment, the Creator defines the relationship and declares
that it is good: “you are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Or as Clarence Jordan put it in The Cotton Patch Gospels, “I’m proud of you!”
And
for us, Baptism is a sacrament, it’s a means of grace, to put it in theological
terms. In plain old English, it's
something God does for us, rather
than vice versa. We believe that God the Creator establishes a
relationship with us at Baptism, a relationship as of a mother to a son, a
father to a daughter, a parent to a child. We believe that the Ground of all
being tells each of us “You are my child, my beloved; I’m proud of you! No matter what you’ve done, no matter how you
fumble around in your human fragility, in you I am well pleased!”
And
in that relationship, the Holy Spirit dwells within us, and it is through
prayer and—especially—contemplation that we can become aware of it and increasingly
able to access that indwelling. Not in a
childish, trivial way, as in we get the Spirit to give us whatever we want, to
provide special dispensation against the vicissitudes of life. Bad stuff is still going to happen to us,
some of it because we follow Christ, there will always be a dark side to
corporate existence.
That
is why, in our baptismal litanies, we speak of that dark side, which in Scripture
is sometimes called “sin.” Without it, baptism is just an empty, meaningless
ceremony that, like candy, is sweet at the time, but provides no lasting value. But by acknowledging that dark side, and by
deepening our relationship with the divine through contemplation and prayer,
the Spirit “teaches us to pray,” as Paul put it. And increasingly, we see through Spirit eyes, and learn to embrace and accept our own stumbling path toward the
divine. In other words we begin to know—as has the one
who Creates, Redeems and Comforts since before the beginning of time—we begin
to know that we are beloved, and that
in us, God is indeed well pleased. Amen.
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