Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7 | Acts 10:34-38 | Mark 1:7-11

Almighty, everliving God, who when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan, and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your Beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit, may always be well-pleasing to you.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s impossible to celebrate this idea of being baptized from anything that has to do with the way in which Christianity takes root inside of a human being, even though we realize now that the idea of needing to be baptized is not so literal as we first thought, that you had  to be baptized.  At least as Catholics, we believed, unless you were baptized in the Catholic faith, you didn’t have any chance of being infused with grace and power from God.  We know that the ritual is not that crucial to be received by someone as much as it’s the mystery of what this sacrament represents that is essential.  The Catholic Church talks about a baptism of water in a church.  It also talks about a baptism of desire.  When a person lives a good life, they feel the presence of God in them.  A baptism of fire, where someone gives their life over to the truth, those are all ways in which we can celebrate the fact that God enters into human beings.  It’s his will.  It’s his desire.  It’s the plan, God living in you, God living in me.

From the beginning of the story of God working with human beings, even from the Book  of Genesis, there’s always this image of a promise of someone who’s coming who will crush the enemy, will get rid of whatever it is that we are struggling with in this world.  Throughout the Old Testament, there’s the promise of this Messiah who is going to come, who was considered at first to be a person who would be in charge of the way the world works politically.  It would be a political leader and not a spiritual leader but eventually evolves, no, this is about a kingdom that is not of this world but a kingdom that is eternal, and so we have a Messiah who’s going to come and teach us what it means to enter into life — to enter into life.  I love the image in Isaiah when it says that the Lord is going to grasp us one day by our hand, and he’s going to form us into this people.  And this people are going to be described as enlightened.  That means they’re going to be wise, and this enlightenment opens the eyes of everyone to see what’s real, to see the truth.  And what we’re going to find in that truth that we see for the first time is that the darkness that is part of the world is a place where we can get caught and be destroyed by the darkness, or we can pass through it.    And the idea is, when God’s wisdom enters into you and to me, it opens our eyes, and we see darkness very differently than we could without this grace of wisdom.  Darkness is not the enemy we thought it was.  Darkness puts us into a situation where we have to look at what the real enemy is.  It is not that the world isn’t what we think it should be.  It’s not that I’m not who I wish I was.  It’s not that I wish all the people in the world that have impacted me  in a negative way wasn’t there.  It’s nothing as simple as that.  It’s saying that, when there is darkness, there is a way through it that brings life and light.  In fact, there is no way, it seems in Christianity — unless you go through darkness, you can’t enter into light.  What does that mean?

One of the things that’s powerful about this set of readings to me is the reading from John.  We know that John is always the mystic in the group, and all of us are called to mysticism.  What is mysticism?  It’s a way of realizing that God has a desire to directly communicate with us, and a mystic is nothing other than someone who is listening attentively to God in all the things that are happening around them.  They believe that God is there with me, in me, teaching me, showing me, and a mystic is a person who’s listening attentively to everything going on around them and trying to see something in them that’s a pattern, a pattern that Jesus has taught us through his very life.  And what is the pattern that we’re looking at?  It’s celebrated in baptism. 

So let’s look at the life of Jesus for just a moment.  What is it that was his greatest struggle and his greatest teaching?  We know that he came to the world blessed.  He knew that he was chosen for this work, so he had a sense of his own destiny, as we should all have a sense of our own destiny.  And he did what we all do.  He grew in age and wisdom over a long period of time, and then he engaged in the work of his life.  That’s when we become adult, and we find ourselves in relationships that are committed, and they’re complicated, and we have to look at all the aspects of those things.  Let’s call that life, and so when Jesus is in the midst of his life, he’s living the work that he’s longed to do.  He’s there to speak the truth.  He’s there to heal, to transform, to do all these mysterious, marvelous things that imply that he’s there as a lover giving life to people.  And then the enemy sees it all and says, “We have to crush him.”  The enemy wants to destroy goodness, and that enemy is still with us.  He’s been conquered, but he hasn’t stopped working or she, whatever it is.  Evil is there in the form of darkness.  Something isn’t the way it should be, and when we’re caught in darkness, as Jesus was in the moment in which he realized that his Father was asking him to surrender to evil, surrender to the darkness — let it kill you, and you’ll find light.  It doesn’t make any sense to the ego.  What normally the ego would do, when Jesus was caught in the situation he was in, where all this evil was there trying to destroy him, even when he was on the cross, he realized, “If I wanted to, if I was giving into my ego, I would do that, and I would say, ‘God, take all these people and wipe them out.’”  And then he could have destroyed them all, and then Jesus would have gotten off the cross, and we would have thought that his life would have been so effective, but it would have been a disaster, because he would have been teaching that we who believe in God have the power to overcome all darkness just by destroying it.  You can’t destroy darkness.  You can’t destroy sin.  You can’t destroy people in the world that come into the world with evil intent.  I don’t say they come into the world that way but turn out that way. 

So what are we looking at?  Somehow in the mystery of the life of Jesus, we’re learning that there is something about giving into the darkness.  What does that mean, that we don’t care, that anybody can do negative things to us, anybody else, that’s all right?  No, no.  It’s nothing like that.  The key is in the words of John when he said, “This is what it is.  Jesus came into the world to do something, to show us something.  Open your eyes and look carefully at the life of Jesus.  He comes into the world, and the one thing that is clear from the very beginning — it’s clear in the baptism of Jesus — that he is anointed.  He is called the Anointed One.  God’s Spirit enters into him.  He has truth living inside of him.  He is empowered to see reality exactly as it is and to surrender to the plan that God has for us in this world, which includes dealing with evil.  If you think that God does not plan for us to have to deal with evil, then you must be very confused as to why God hasn’t been more effective in destroying evil.  If God allows evil in the world, darkness in the world, it’s for a purpose, because everything that he allows in the world is for you and for me.  He’s a lover, and his promise is that he, just as he entered into Jesus and gave him wisdom, he will promise, if you open your heart to him, he will come in and give you the wisdom you need to have in order to know how to deal with the darkness.  And how was Jesus taught to do it?  It’s water.  It’s baptism.  What is water and baptism?  Not a cleansing of the outside, not getting rid of all our bad habits, not training our wills to do what’s right so that we do everything right, so that we don’t ever do anything offensive.  No, that’s not it.  No, it’s not the cleaning of the outside.  It’s a death to something inside.  It’s a dying.  You get held under the water as if you’re dying, and you come out of the water a new person.  What dies when you’re being baptized?  What is it?  This strange, mysterious way in which the ego decides that I, I, I will make the world into basically my world, what it needs to be, and I will not fail, and if I do fail, I’m filled with shame and guilt, and if I surround myself with people who won’t fail me and will never do anything harmful to me, and if they do, I will kill them.  If I’m in that way of thinking, I’m in darkness. 

It’s the darkness we all know.  We find ourselves angry over things that are not the way they should be, and when we’re angry, we seek someone to blame or someone to destroy.  That’s the great enemy, not that there is evil, but that when we encounter evil, we attack it.  And then we feel like, “Ah, we’re justified.”  And that hatred that the world, imperfect as it is, creates in us is the greatest evil in the world.  So what it means is we have to learn how to deal with the darkness, meaning all the things that we’ve done that we’re ashamed of, everything that has happened to us that we’re angry about.  If we can surrender to that and knowing that somehow if I allow it to be what it is and forgive it, then I’ve found life.  So the Spirit, the water and the blood are God’s wisdom telling us exactly what the world is like.  It’s going to be dark, supposed to be dark, and the darkness is supposed to teach us how to surrender to it without retaliation, without anger, without attacking.  And then blood, when Jesus dies on the cross, he said, “I’m forgiving all these figures in the world that have done this to me.”  And then he rises, and he’s unstoppable, and he knows, and he lives and teaches for 40 days in a way that he never could have taught before.

So what’s the key?  The key is understanding that this great baptism celebrates an event in the life of Christ, which is his surrendering to reality and never turning it into something where he decides he’s going to be after the people that caused it, destroying them.  The way this works most insidiously is that we find in our own selves, when we fail to live up to what we think we should do, when we’ve done horrible things to other people and we decide that we need not to learn from this wisdom, but we don’t have this wisdom, but we decide, “All right, somebody needs to pay for this thing that is done,” then we attack guess who — yourself.  So if you have difficulty in forgiving something you’ve done in the past, pay attention to this teaching of Jesus, because he’s saying unless you can surrender to that reality — you are human.  You do this.  We all fail.  If we’re living our lives and struggling, we’re going to fail miserably.  The harder we try, we’re going to fail miserably at times, and when we do, there’s only one response to that kind of darkness, and that’s surrender and forgiveness — surrender and forgiveness.

I’ve had the weirdest thing happening in my house.  These last couple of days, there’s been this red bird who keeps attacking herself, and it’s a reflection in the mirror, or rather in the glass.  And every day for the last seven days, this bird has been out there at times, not all day but every now and then, every day, she’ll come and beat herself up trying to attack herself, attack herself, attack herself.  I’m sitting there wondering, “What is that about?  That’s never happened in my life.”  I’m working on my homily this week, and then you’ve got this bird constantly beating itself up on my window.  So what’s that about?  And it just dawned on me when I was preparing.  I said, “Oh, it’s about shame.”  It’s the insanity of shame, that when you’ve done something wrong and you can’t surrender to the reality that that’s what we do — human beings do wrong things, and so you forgive it, not in the sense of saying, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.  I’ll do it again.”  No, no.  It does matter.  It’s wrong, and you know it’s wrong, but what you really don’t ever want to get caught up in is the constant living in a self-attack mode of beating yourself up every day.  That’s the greatest danger and the greatest enemy that shows up in my life and in your life, and that’s shame.  And it does more damage to take us away from the peace that God has won for us, but the key is to understand what the baptism represents, the most essential teaching.  We have to believe in it.  Believe that surrendering to the way things are, without trying to find someone to blame or someone to attack, and forgiving it is life.  It’s enlightenment, and it always leads to peace. 

Father, when your disciples ask you to increase their faith, you imply that there is not so much a case of degrees in faith.It’s either you believe it or you don’t. Help us to believe in the greatest of all these mysteries that you share with us, the idea that our goal in life is to surrender, most especially, to the reality of our life that you have created for us, and help us not to fall into the trap of resisting and fighting and blaming and attacking things that we don’t think should be there. Give us a great faith of surrender and acceptance to those things that we cannot change, and then we believe — I know we believe that you are who you say you are, and so keep us close to your promise of, when we trust in you, we find the fullness of everything. Help us to have a lot of faith in you. Amen.