B Epiphany 1 BFC 2018
Mark 1:4-11
January 7, 2018
As I have shared, I grew up
in a small town just outside of Peoria, Illinois, that was right on the cusp
between being a rural, farming community to being a suburban, bedroom community
for the headquarters of the declining transnational corporation of Caterpillar
Tractor company. Metamora was the small
town, football giant, taking on some of the Peoria area schools and beating
them and, eventually, then becoming part of a conference with them. Those were primary narratives for my
life. When our team moved through the
playoffs onto its first State Championship, our organist, to the delight of the
congregation, played the school fight song as the worship postlude one Sunday.
My family could not be
totally on board. My dad was the high
school baseball coach, the only head coach who was also not an assistant
football coach, so his job seemed at risk.
At risk especially after the strongly Christian head football coach
targeted the varsity track coach for dismissal and replaced him with an
assistant football coach. Year round,
weight training needed to be done by the football team. It was important that everybody be on
board.
I watched my dad as he
struggled with his faith during this time, Moderator of the Church Council,
but, at times, refusing communion as the tray was passed through the pew. I knew that he didn’t really sleep for
several weeks in a row as people would stop him on the street to tell him they
were sorry. They had heard he had been
fired. He struggled as he was ordered by the school
principal to start football players over other baseball teammates who were
outperforming them.
My dad also knew too
much. As football player after football
player gave credit to Jesus for stellar performances, my dad knew the football
coach was, on the sly, telling baseball players they would not start on the
football team unless they lifted during baseball season, and, the highly
Christian football coach was also having an affair with the varsity women’s
basketball coach leading to her refusing to name the child’s father.
I had serious doubts about
Christian faith and its real impact on the world. My dad had his faults but I experienced him
as a man of integrity, and, well, my dad.
I was really ready to throw the baby out with the baptismal bathwater.
As I was being pushed to
accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior by the football Christianity
that pervaded my small community, I was also being peppered with questions from
my father about Christianity’s claims.
On long car rides with the family, he would ask, “Jesus says, ‘Just ask
and it will be given to you,’ do you really think that is how it happens? All you have to do is ask? Maybe I’ll ask for a new car next week.” I tried my best, as a Junior High son, to be
the defender of the faith. But I had
doubts of my own.
I was the only one, of
thirteen confirmands at my local UCC church, to turn to my pastor just before
confirmation and say, “I’m not sure I believe all of this stuff. I don’t think I should be confirmed.” I remember thinking that if theology and
Christian faith were really about what heaven looked like, whether the fanciful
and violent prophecies in Revelations were of primary concern, and figuring out
the details of heavenly beings like cherubim and seraphim, maybe I just wasn’t
cut out for it. In particular, as
pimples, sexual desire, and my inadequacies as a teenager all broke upon me at the
same time, maybe I just wasn’t good at this Christianity stuff. Let me make clear. None of those things were being taught by my
local church pastor or shared with me in confirmation, but that’s what I heard
from the football Christianity taught in my local community. Give my life to Jesus
and the anxiety over those things and all life questions would all go
away? That seemed, at the very least,
suspect.
As I have developed a
different lens for Christian faith, that concern for the ethereal and
otherworldly seems not only suspect but blasphemous. Biblical faith is strongly based in the
material. I think our inability to
recognize that, as people of faith, is killing us and allowing our relationship
with the very basis of faith to be cheapened in favor of the unearthly realm.
The baptism of Jesus begins
with the description of John the Baptist which grounds both Jesus and John in
the material and their relationships to the good earth. John is described in the Scripture passage as
wholly dependent on God and as a man of righteousness--not through some aura or
supernatural sign but in listing four different relationships he has with the
material world. He wears camel’s hair
and a leather belt. He eats locusts and
wild honey. As I have related in
previous sermons, this not only grounds John in the material world, it shows
that his spirituality and livelihood does not depend on the bread and circuses
of the Roman Empire. He does not eat the
Roman meal. Yes, he eats bugs for
lunch.
Jesus is then baptized in
the muddy rivers of the Jordan but also has the skies break open and the Spirit
of God alight on him like a dove. The
water, skies, and the dove are all signs from a God invested in the material and
signals that Jesus, too, is not invested in the Roman story but in something
more heavenly, spiritual, and transcendent.
Let me say that again, God’s investment in the material earth is a
foretaste of Jesus’s ministry being more heavenly, spiritual, and transcendent
than Rome’s gospel. Rome justified its
violence and domination through otherworldly battles where Jupiter and Roma
conferred divine power to its emperors.
In fact, Augustus Caesar conferred himself the title Pontifax Maximus, the chief priest of
Rome, and head of the Collegium Pacificum,
the high priests in the land. Augustus
brought back many of the traditional social rules and religious rituals, the
family values, all to make Rome great again.[1]
God sanctioned Jesus through
the material world. Rome sanctioned
emperors through the otherworldly.
This is not some new thing
in the Bible with the arrival of Jesus.
Way back in the book of Genesis, God creates, looks out over all
creation, and declares the material world “very good.” God owns the land and gives the land over to
human community for the prospering of all of creation. Rome claims ownership of the land and gives
it over to the elite, wealthy, and ruling class believing that this this will
prosper all of creation. These are the
two narratives that run headlong into one another in the First Century, making
the Jewish people a dangerous lot over and against Rome’s empire. Who owns the land?
That is not just a First
Century conflict. That is a tale, to
borrow a Disney song, as old as time. It
continues, in Biblical order, with the Ten Commandments. We have often heard the second commandment as
not making any idol or image which we call god or primary priority to which we
give our worship or bow down before.
But the whole of the second commandment is a prohibition against bowing
down and serving idols with your possessions or produce—your land, your salary,
your capital—in service of that idol.
Do not give material to the immaterial.
This commandment was a direct response to Pharaoh’s extractive economy
of taking people’s possessions to impoverish them. In contrast to Pharaoh’s extractive economy,
the Ten Commandments are about developing a social-economic relationship of
neighborliness so that families and communities might thrive through the
sharing of resources like land and possessions.[2] The divine is found in the material bases of
life and how the material bases of life are shared.
Christian origins scholar,
Richard Horsley, believes that the apostle Paul continues in this great Jewish
teaching. He wrote, “Paul repeatedly
exhorted the assemblies to withdraw as much as possible from dealings with the
local imperial ecomony, ‘the [Roman] world’ of supposed ‘peace and security’
that was ‘passing away.’ In contrast to
the vertical imperial extraction of resources, Paul pressed for the horizontal
sharing of their meager possessions among subject peoples, working for ‘the
good of all . . . .’”[3]
The material nature of
Biblical teaching does not let us break off the political, economic, and the
spiritual into separate categories which can bend and twist words like
liberation and freedom into words fit only for the individual soul. The material nature of baptism as evidenced
by John with camel’s hair and leather belt for his clothing and locusts and
wild honey for his diet, and water, sky, and dove for the association of the
divine with his practice, is made even more strongly material when we recognize
that Christ’s baptism is done embodied.
The baptism of Jesus is a “material body” experience, not some dusting
or sprinkling, but an immersion. One of
our two holy sacraments in the Protestant tradition, baptism is a materially
embodied experience.
Two years ago, the great
Hebrew Scripture scholar, Walter Brueggemann, published a book titled “Money
and Possessions.” In that book, he
argued that the “Bible is relentlessly material in its focus and concern” and,
he goes on to write, “[e]verywhere the Bible is preoccupied with bodily
existence.”[4]
By relentless, Brueggemann is trying to
make clear that the Bible will not be sidetracked by a concern for the
supernatural and otherworldly. The
Biblical mythologies, when deciphered, take us right back to material concern
and a preoccupation with bodily existence.
As I said earlier, one of
the primary Biblical statements is that God owns the land and gives it to the
whole community for its welfare, benefit, and livelihood. That is a counter-narrative to all imperial
claims. In Ezekiel, chapter 29, verse 3,
that is made abundantly clear. “Thus
says the Holy One, the Living God, I am against you, Pharaoh, king of Egypt,
the great dragon sprawling in the midst of its channels, saying, ‘My Nile is my
own; I made it myself.’”
Kingdom and pharaohs, empires
and caesars, multinationals and presidents, may try to make you believe they
are self-made and owners of creation. The
fact is, Pharaoh did not make the Nile.
The Nile made Pharaoh and his empire.
Those statements, that God
owns the land and that the Bible is relentlessly material and has a preoccupation
with the body, Brueggemann believes, find their foundation when the Priestly
writer in Genesis, Chapter 1, has God look out over all creation and declares
all of creation very good.
And that is the point I want
to remind us of today. This good earth
is the body in which we move, live, and have our being. There is no ethereal, otherworldly place
where our faith is acted out. The lakes
and rivers are its blood.[5]
I am part of the UCC Council
for Climate Justice and this month we are promoting across the whole United
Church of Christ 1000 sermons for climate justice in solidarity. We are doing this in solidarity with 21
children and young adults who are suing the federal government over climate
change. Their case will supposedly be
decided the first week of February. We
need a movement. And we need it
yesterday to turn the tide. We need to
remember the material nature of our baptisms (leather belt, camel’s hair,
locusts, wild honey, shell, evergreen bough, water, sky, dove, and full body),
and the gifts we have been given as a trust in land, water, animal. As the president declares his intent to drill
in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we need to remember our baptisms and
turn the tide.
The convener of the UCC
Council for Climate Justice, Brooks Berndt, sent out a staggering quote from
climate justice scientist, Camille Parmesan.
In an interview with The Guardian,
dated New Years’ Eve, Parmesan said, “Things will shift to the extremely
negative in the next 50 years. Climate scientists are doing decadal projects
and it starts really shifting about 2070-2090. That is in my children’s
lifetimes. They will have to deal with it. That’s what makes me angry.
Policymakers are mostly in their 50s and they will be dead by then. The worst
impacts will hit their grandchildren.”[6] The worst impacts will hit my
grandchildren.
Today I ask you to keep both
the material baby and the bathwater and remember your baptisms. John the Baptist was out in that wilderness
dressed in camels and cows, eating the stuff of bugs and bees. He baptized Jesus with signs of water, sky,
and dove. Remember the material stuff of
faith to help start a movement. We have
been given this good earth as a trust and sacrament. May we be faithful. Amen.
[1]
“Augustus,” The Roman Empire in the First
Century, http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/augustus_religion.html.
[2]
Richard Horsley in the Foreward to
Walter Brueggemann, Money and
Possessions, Interpretation Series (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), pp.
xi-xii.
[3]
Ibid, citing I Corinthians 7:29-31, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, and Galatians 6:10,
p. xv.
[4]
Ibid, but this is Brueggemann, p. 11.
[5]
A theological statement directly from Standing Rock.
[6] “Camille Parmesan: ‘Trump’s extremism on climate
change has brought people together’,” The
Guardian, December 31, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/31/camille-parmesan-trump-extremism-climate-change-interview.
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