I was asked to preach on January 11, 2015. The texts for the day were from Genesis 1, Psalm 29, and Mark 1. These were my thoughts.
Once, as a child in Kansas, playing with neighbor kids in their yard, we watched as heavy clouds rolled across the sky toward us. They were so thick, with such a defined edge, I remember us childishly speculating if this was how night came.
Then our neighbor’s mom tore out the back door. She yelled at us to run, run home as fast as we could. As we crossed the alley, my parents hurried out to meet us and to get us into the basement. We made it just as the storm hit, with weeds, branches, and debris tumbling past our basement windows.
“The voice of God shakes the wilderness …,”
writes the Psalmist. “The voice of God twists the oaks,
and strips the forests bare.
And in God’s temple all cry, ‘Glory!'”
In the age of Sandy and Irene, we no longer perceive divine power within a storm. We understand even the most capricious winds as meteorological events, capable of human explanation. A TV evangelist may may rail about God’s wrath in the wake of a hurricane. But the degree of his awe may be measured by the fact that he does not fall to his own knees, but only calls on others to do so.
Psalm 29 is not the only scripture to speak from a place of powerful disruption..
The story of creation in Genesis 1, also calls on such imagery. God’s spirit broods over chaotic emptiness, the face of the waters. God creates a great sky dome—the firmament—to separate waters above from waters below. Between great waters—reminiscent of chaos—God makes space for creation. Earth and all creation exist between turbulence. Light shines between potentially destructive forces and life follows, precariously making it way in this divine middle space.
But creating new space entails great risk. Fast forward to Noah. In God’s mind, all had gone wrong. God broke open that firmament and destroyed it all in order to create anew. Today, we see the rainbow as a bright emblem of freedom. But in the flood story, God repents of the destruction and vows, “never again.” And God sets that bright bow in the clouds with the implicit arrow pointed up—straight at God’s own heart to remind God, “never again.”
Embracing chaos, breaking things apart, is always risky. It doesn’t always work out. But we must do it nevertheless. The friendship that is never broken by conflict, has no chance to deepen. The society that is never broken by agonizing protest and social change, never reaches its potential.
In Mark 1, John the Baptist appears “in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem [go] out to John, and [are] baptized by John in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”
The wilderness, an uncontrolled place beyond civilization, lies outside the spiritual and political center, Jerusalem. People flock there to repent, to turn their lives around (which is what repent means), leaving their sins, the weight of their wrong, their encumbrances, behind. Like their ancestors before them, they go through Jordan, to re-enter the land in a new way. The old must be washed away to create space for a new reality of justice and wholeness.
Jesus comes, too, to turn around, to plunge beneath Jordan’s waters, and emerge anew. Traditional theology bristles at the notion of Jesus undergoing a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” We don’t know what encumbrances Jesus had to leave behind, what he had to repent of or turn away from in order to move forward.
But Mark tells us that “just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, Jesus saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove…”
Whatever happened in Jesus’ turning around, it was sufficient to break open the heavens. In advent, we prayed with the prophet Isaiah, “O that you would tear open the heavens!”
At Jesus’ baptism, God tears them apart to make way for the Spirit.
The past year has been a year of disruption: cancer, dementia, close encounters with dying, breaking definitions of sex and gender, turbulence in the wake of Ferguson. We have yet to discover if the disorder will open space for new creation or leave us with new opportunities to repent. I can say this, prostate cancer forced new explorations of myself, sex, and my sexuality. Dealing with the dementia of a loved one revealed resilience and created bonds in the face of much loss. At the edge of death there were encounters that deepened the experience of living. And confrontations with entrenched gender definitions and racism are pushing us to greater depths of self-examination as individuals and as a society. What fruit that will bear has yet to be seen. Perhaps more must be torn apart before hope can emerge. Perhaps God’s voice will need to shake things up further.
In the wake of disruption, living in spaces between chaotic waters, God’s spirit moves, creating space for light. We often are left on our knees, crying, “Glory!” But the new year inexorably emerges, shining with risk and opportunity. And we must move forward to engage the tasks at hand.