A few years ago I was visiting Southern California. I was in Palm Springs, famous for its mid-century glamor and its classic Hollywood chic. You can almost feel the ghosts of the celebrities from the 1950s moving through the town. And while I was there, I visited a street market full of stalls, selling things I didn't even know I needed, like glass pebbles that burn, making a cool centerpiece on your dinner table, fashion accessories for your dog, $400 sweaters.
But what really filled me with awe and wonder was a product that didn't just take the biscuit, it stole the entire trivia baker. Spray on mud, fake mud that comes in an aerosol that you apply to your SUV to make it look like you take it off road for 14.95 A can. You will never again feel embarrassed by your spotless SU Subaru forester. No longer will your outdoorsy neighbors smugly shake their heads at you because you only drive it down the shops. Now you can make them think. You drive it up and down the mountains every weekend. What's that saying about consumerism buying things we don't need with money?
We don't have to impress people we don't like. Yeah.
Baptizing your car in mud. And speaking of mud, have you seen the river Jordan? I have not, but I've seen pictures. It's not a chlorine enhanced swimming pool. It's not a font of clean, fresh water from a faucet. It's full of mud and not the kind you get from a can. When we read about the baptism of Jesus as we do this Sunday, every January, it's possible to form a sentimental image of Jesus being baptized in the water company's finest product.
Every generation tends to read the Bible through the lens of its own experience, and so we modern Western Christians read the story of Jesus baptism through our own baptisms in clean, sanitized, safe water. But it wasn't like that when Jesus emerged from the Jordan. He was probably dirty. He had mud on his clothes and on his feet, gravel in his hair and ears, sand between his toes.
If Jesus were to come to that exact same spot today to be baptized, he'd need a tetanus shot. Today, that spot is little more than a bacteria infested creek. Christian pilgrims still plunge into the brown water, despite the fact that it is so infected with bacteria that the Israeli government has banned people from baths.
Environmentalists on Bromberg of Friends of the Earth, middle East explain if you drink the water, you are likely to get very sick. And if you have a cut, you will probably get a rash baptizing in mud, washing in sewage, putting your clothes in the washer, and instead of a tide pod throwing in a shovel of dirt--maybe I've missed something.
But if baptism is a sign of washing away your sins, the symbolism breaks down rather if you end up dirtier than you were when you started.
In the 32 years I've been ordained, I have never quoted a country song in a sermon. But to show you that my baptism into the culture of the Deep South is almost complete. I'm going to quote a Trace Atkins number.
18 wheeler dropped me off that city limits sign Sunday morning. Sunlight hurt my eyes. It's a long way from where I've been back to my hometown, but there's a man in me I need to drown. Baptize me in that muddy water, wash me clean. In amazing grace, I ain't been living like I oughtta Baptize me in that muddy water.
What do Trace Atkins, John the Baptist, and Jesus know that I don't? Well, maybe it's this to be real. You have to go where the muck is. To be a faithful Christian, you have to get down and you have to get dirty. If you are going to follow Jesus, you need to get in the mud straight. After his baptism, Jesus goes on retreat into the desert to pray, to fast, to endure the angry flame of temptation.
40 days later, he returns to society and is confronted by bewildering mess of human need, sickness, poverty, alienation, despair. He begins to make his way to Jerusalem and the muck of betrayal, the trash of suffering, the grime of an unjust death, but he goes there with a garbage sack. And he loads it to the top with the worst of mankind's mud, the hate, the violence, the lies, and he clings to it as his wrists are kissed by nails.
To be real, you have to go where the muck is. To follow Jesus, you need to get in the mud. You have to see that included in that sack of dirt are your sins.
When you look back on your baptism, what do you see? I know that most of us were too young to literally remember our baptism, but I ask that you look at yours with a different kind of memory from the one in your head. You see, your baptism was a vital moment on a crucial day. It made you who you are now, God's chosen, God's heir, God's beloved adopted child.
But there was more to it than just passing from gloom to light, from death to life. A call was placed on your soul. A plan was hatched in the mind of God for who you would become, for what you would be, for how you would become a coworker with God in the renewal and salvation of the world. You were set apart and given a noble and holy task, one that no one else can perform.
God is proud of you. Those words of God proclaimed over Jesus at his baptism. This is my son, the beloved with whom I am well pleased. God says those words over you. You are my daughter, my son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased. So let's be clear what this job is that God called you to when you were baptized.
It was the call to get down and dirty, to be deeply invested in the murky lives of men and women, to be intimately involved with God in influencing the culture of your workplace, your family, your social network, changing lives, transforming society, cleaning the dirt. I wish I could tell you that at your baptism, God called you to a life of comfort.
I wish that every child that has been baptized in that font will be free of conflict and struggle. I would love to reassure you that we can live in glorious isolation from broken dreams, broken hearts, broken families, our own and those we love, but I can't. Our task as God's beloved children is to get stuck in and get our hands dirty.
Take Angus for example. Angus was a fifth century king. King Angus of Munster in Ireland. At that time, St. Patrick was on his mission to take the good news of Christ to the Irish people. And one day in the year 455, he visited Angus's Kingdom news of Patrick and his God had reached the king's ears, and he was intrigued.
He'd heard about this God and he wanted to know more. His heart was warmed by the news of the Christ preached by Patrick, and so he came out to meet the evangelist and his majesty asked to be baptized. So there they were, Patrick and King Angus standing by a pond close to the king's castle. Patrick gripped his shepherd's crozier, which he carried on his missionary journeys, and the liturgy began.
Do you believe in God the Father Almighty boomed Patrick. I believe, said Angus. Christ Jesus was born of a virgin, called Mary. He was murdered by Pontius Pilate. He died, was buried, and on the third day, rose again. Then he ascended into heaven, where he sits at the right hand of God the Father. Do you believe this?
I believe. And do you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, I believe. And in his excitement, Patrick lifted his crozier and thrust it down into the ground next to him, sending its sharp end, sinking into the moist soil. Except he didn't. He actually missed the ground and thrust the spike through the center of Angus's foot.
The king stifled a cry of agony. Patrick, oblivious to the pain he was causing, kept on praying. When he finished, he passed the crozier to an acolyte and stepped into the water up to his chest. He turned to beckon Angus to join him in the pond. And only then did he notice the king's wounded foot. Patrick was horrified at what he'd done.
How do you apologize to a king for driving a stick through his foot? Yet Angus was resolute, ignoring the pain. He limped into the pond and Patrick baptized him. At the end of the ritual, Patrick fell to his knees and begged the king's forgiveness for injuring him. And he asked why Angus hadn't said anything at the time.
He replied, I thought it was part of the ceremony.
And maybe it kind of is. Maybe this initiation into the life, death and resurrection of Christ does pierce us and wound us from now on? King Angus would have a physical, tangible sign of his baptism, one that hurt, one that could literally, uh, men meant the shedding of his blood. Our baptisms were not so dramatic and painful, and yet there is some truth here isn't.
Richard Rohr has studied many initiation ceremonies around the world, and he says that the point of those ceremonies is to force a young person to experience five difficult truths. Life is hard. You are not that important. It's not about you. You are not in control and you are going to die. Our modern Western culture is really bad at helping young people become adults.
Our secular initiation ceremonies are usually only about celebration parties and consumption, and of course, initiation into the Christian Church. Baptism is most definitely an occasion for a party and a celebration. But on this feast of the baptism of Christ, we are forced to remember that our baptisms are a mark of mud, a pierced foot, a call to step off the comfortable embankment and get into the murky water to get involved in the dirt and the pain of life.
May God find us ready and eager to get our hands dirty and our feet pierced. Amen.