Mark doesn't spend any time on preliminaries.  He doesn't tell us, like Luke does, about John the Baptizer's parents.  You remember that his mother was Elizabeth who was related to Mary, Jesus' mother and his father was Zechariah the priest.  In Mark's version, John simply appears in the wilderness.  Mark doesn't spell it out, but he knows that the wilderness is significant.  It's the place associated with testing, the place that the ancient Israelites wandered for 40 years.  It is also the place where God did mighty acts and wonders.  By John's time, the people looked to the wilderness as a place to meet God, a place where they expected God's final act of deliverance to come.  John's ministry is in the wilderness. 

 

And all the people of Jerusalem and the Judean countryside were coming out to him.  Jerusalem was the religious and political capital.  Why would those people be flocking out to some fringe prophet? What could he offer that they couldn't find at the Temple?  Again, Mark takes longer to develop that part of the story, but it is something to notice.  We get the sense that John's ministry is feeding a spiritual hunger that was going unfed back in Jerusalem.  Something unusual is happening, something unsanctioned by the religious authorities.

 

John is a priest’s son.  We might reasonably expect him to follow in his father’s footsteps.  If he is going to be a reformer, perhaps he would work from inside the system to accomplish that reform.  But John goes out to the Jordan River, the river that the Israelites crossed generations earlier when they first entered the Promised Land.  John is not reforming from within, but instead he is starting over, going back to another beginning point in Israel’s history, to begin again.   

 

Mark doesn’t tell us any of the preliminaries about Jesus either.  There is nothing here about Jesus’ birth, nothing about angels or wise men or shepherds.  Jesus simply appears in the midst of the crowd of people thronging out to the Jordan.  The only clue to Jesus’ identity is that he comes from Nazareth in Galilee. 

 

Nazareth was a small town, numbering somewhere between 30 and 200 people.  It was so insignificant that the name of Nazareth does not appear in the entire Old Testament.  To say that someone was from Nazareth was like saying he was from Nowhereville. 

 

Nazareth was in Galilee, the northern region of Israel.  At the time of Jesus, the wilderness of Galilee was home to rebels, revolutionaries, and thieves.  Galilee was a border land; foreigners lived there and brought their foreign ideas with them, so Israelites from the heartland often viewed Galilee with suspicion and disdain. 

 

Jesus, from nowhere special Nazareth in the notorious borderland of Galilee, is right there in the middle of the crowd.  He does not do anything to distinguish himself from any other sinner. He risks guilt by association.  He’s not back in Jerusalem with the respectable people, but out in the wilderness with the wild man John, with the people who have been tainted by their contact with outsiders, with those revolutionaries and outlaws. In other words, in his baptism, he thoroughly identifies with all of humanity, with all people who need to repent, to turn towards God.  In Mark's story, Jesus identifies with humanity, not by being born like us, but by being one of the crowd and stepping into the waters of baptism.  And God is well-pleased. 

 

Jesus comes up from the water and immediately he sees the heavens being split open and the Holy Spirit descending into him.  The Holy Spirit is often pictured like a dove, cooing softly.  In John’s gospel, Jesus refers to the Spirit as the Comforter.  Those are gentle images of the Spirit.  But Mark does not give us a peaceful image.  The heavens are torn open, not like a door that opens and closes again, but torn in a violent way that leaves a ragged edge so that it can never close quite neatly again.  Mark only uses this word one other time.  It’s at the end of the gospel, at the time of Jesus’ death, when the curtain in the Temple is ripped from top to bottom. 

 

One time a group of teenagers was studying this passage.  Their teacher told them what I just told you, that the skies ripped open in a very dramatic and forceful way.  The teacher said, “Do you get it?  When Jesus was baptized, the heavens that separate us from God were ripped open so that now we can get to God.  Because of Jesus we have access to God – we can get close to him.” 

 

There was one young man sitting in the front row, with his arms crossed, making a fairly obvious display of his disinterest in that wonderful way that only teenagers can do.   But suddenly he perked up and said, "That isn’t what it means."

“What?" the teacher said.

 "I said that isn’t what that means," the teenager repeated. "It means that the heavens were ripped open so that now God can get at us anytime he wants. Now nobody's safe!"[1]

 

That teenager was right – the work of the Spirit is not safe.  Immediately after his baptism, in vs 12, the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness.  Some translations say that the Spirit led him, but a better sense is that the Spirit drive, him, hurls him, throws him into the wilderness. 

 

The work of the Spirit is on the edges, out in the wilderness, not in the respectable, domesticated, official seats of religion, but in the borderlands, where respectability is not necessarily a virtue. 

 

God will not be domesticated, will not be contained in houses of worship or theological systems.  God is on the loose.  The Spirit blows where God chooses.  John and Jesus are leading a reform movement, to reorient people to God.  They are being led by, driven by, the Holy Spirit.  The same Spirit that has blown through the church and around the church and outside the church in myriad ways through history.

Some of us may like to point to the Protestant Reformation as a great leading of the Spirit, but it is also true that the Catholic Church has always had internal reform movements.  Many of the monastic orders came about because of a movement in a specific area like spirituality or social engagement.  Outside the church, we look at movements for human freedom like the abolition of slavery or the prohibition of child labor.  Looking back, we may identify the Spirit at work.  But at the time, these did not feel like the coming of peace, and people did not necessarily recognize the wind of the Spirit.  When our Baptist ancestors followed the Spirit’s leading into the novel practice of baptism by immersion, others were sure it was of the devil. 

 

In 1646, a church leader named Daniel Featley said this about the “Dippers” in England:  "They preach, and print and practice their Heretical impieties openly....  They flock in great multitudes to their Jordans and both sexes enter into the River, and are dipt after their manner with a kind of spell...containing their erroneous tenets....  And as they defile our rivers with their impure washings, so the presses sweat and groan under the load of their blasphemies."[2]

 

I suspect Mr. Fealty didn’t know that in the first century Christians went into the baptismal waters naked.  I can only imagine what he might have said about that! And if someone today proposed that baptisms be done in the nude, would we think that person was being led by the Spirit? Sometimes too much talk about the Spirit makes people nervous.

 

Several years ago, the Rev. Barbara Lundblad was asked to speak at a gathering in Buenos Aires.  She was asked to speak on the theme of "Come, Holy Spirit.”  Two days later, some young seminary students came to her.  They were very agitated about what she had said.   "Your speech was too emotional," one of them said. "With that kind of talk, you could sell washing machines." She kept listening to them.  Finally, they got to the heart of the problem: the Holy Spirit. Even though that was the conference theme, they were very uncomfortable with such talk. "No one has ever seen the Holy Spirit," one of them said. Another joined in, saying, "The Holy Spirit could be anything!" Then banging his hand on the table, he shouted, "The Holy Spirit could be this table!"

"No one has ever seen God," she responded, "so could God be this table?"

"That's why we have systematic theology!" he said, and all three of them walked away.[3]

 

John preached a baptism of repentance.  In Judaism, repentance was associated with returning from exile; to repent is to follow the way of the Lord that leads from exile to the Promised Land, to return from a condition of estrangement to the presence of God.  Scholar Marcus Borg says that the Greek roots of the word suggest an additional meaning – “to repent is to go beyond the mind that you have” to go beyond conventional understanding of what life with God is about.” [4]

 

It’s hard to go beyond conventional understandings, hard to understand things outside our experience.  But that seems to be the way the Spirit works sometimes, dancing out on the borders, hurling us into the wilderness, bringing us to the edge of our knowledge and comfort zone into new experiences, new awareness of the presence of God. 

 

For a number of years now, church leaders have been moaning and groaning about the loss of membership and attendance in mainline churches.  There’s a lot of wringing of hands and longing for the good old days.  I expect that the Temple leaders might have done the same thing when their flocks went out to the River Jordan.  And so, instead of gnashing our teeth, I wonder if we should be testing the wind, discerning where the Spirit is blowing now and going out to that wilderness. 

 

A generation ago, the Spirit blew through the church and started a whirlwind of ecumenical activity.  Baptists and Methodists started working together and Catholics and Protestants even talked to each other.  It was no easy thing and some were sure we were going to be contaminated by those foreign ideas. 

 

Much of today’s young generation pays no attention to denominational labels.  How you pray or what you believe a about doctrine is insignificant compared to the common cause of following Jesus.  It seems that the Spirit is throwing some Christians into conversations and social justice projects with Muslims and Jews and Buddhists.  Instead of an ecumenical wind, there are interfaith breezes.    

 

Some churches are finding vital new ministries. A pastor friend serves a church that can only afford to pay her for 1/6 time ministry.   She has developed a ministry to homeless people, providing Sunday worship and communion in a local park. From her descriptions, it seems that there is more authentic community, more practice of the presence of God in those services than the ones in the church sanctuary.    Or there’s the church in Philadelphia that established seed money to help its members pay off their debts and then pay off someone else’s.[5]  Or a monthly event called Messy Church in Great Britain where people of all ages meet in a church hall, do arts and crafts and learn together and then share a meal.  Or Revolution Church in New York City which meets in the back of a bar.  They have room for a maximum of 50 bodies, but they podcast to 10,000 people.  People are joining virtual churches, while some of us are not yet convinced that the Spirit of God even exists in cyberspace. 

 

 

 

God is on the loose.  The Spirit is blowing in our time. We are not safe. 

We might be hurled into the wilderness, danced to the edge of what we know and trust. 

And if we are, let us ride the wind and join the dance,

knowing that in the beginning,

this same wind swept over the dark and the deep,

bringing light to the darkness,

bringing order out of chaos,

and God said that it was very, very good.  Amen.