Earth Day

Monday, January 13, 2020

Baptism of Christ, "Being the there there," January 12, 2020


A Baptism of Christ BFC 2020
Matthew 3:13-17
January 12, 2020

        Returning to Oakland, California, the place where she was raised, Gertrude Stein famously wrote that there was no longer any “there there.”  The things that had rooted her in Oakland, the material sights and sounds and things and activities that had characterized her childhood were no longer.  How she defined Oakland and the meaning it held for her were gone.  In the same manner, Native writer Tommy Orange riffs on Stein in his award-winning historical fiction book to talk about how this is life for Native people everywhere, but particularly for Urban Indians.  For centuries the material sights and sounds and things and activities that might have given a place meaning and rootedness, have all been swept away.  There is no “there there.”[1] 
          Happening ever more rapidly, we are all quickly losing through climate change the historical things that make a place a place, carrying with it meaning and rootedness. 
          In the Scripture verse read for us today, John the Baptist depends on Jewish people coming out through the wilderness to the Jordan River with a memory of the there that is there.  The wilderness was the place of preparation, of fasting and prayer, to get the liberated people ready for life in the promised land.  The Jordan River was the irrevocable crossing the Jewish people made that committed them to be an alternative people, living an alternative creed, living  in the promised land.[2]  John wants the people to remember how the material water, land, and wilderness shaped and formed them into the Beloved Children of God. John the Baptist depended on the wilderness and the Jordan River being a there there. 
          John did not want the people to know themselves as Rome and its Caesar saw them.  Romans called the Jewish people “porcupines” and referenced them as “atheists” and “non-believers” because the Romans could not comprehend an invisible God with no visible caricature or idol to worship.[3]  Julius Caesar . . . he was the Divine One.  He was the one to be worshipped, along with his adopted son, Son of the Divine One, Octavian, later to be known as Augustus Caesar.   Sometimes people of authentic faith are the atheists over and against imperial rulers who make divine claims. 
          In Jesus’s baptism, the word “fulfill” is used over and over again to suggest that what God had planned is being acted out in John’s baptisms, and, in particular, in the baptism of Jesus.  John lends authority and relevance to Jesus.  And, in turn, Jesus lends authority and relevance to John’s ministry by allowing the meaning and message of his baptisms to happen through him.  In an ongoing way, people are being liberated from the Roman point of view to see themselves as God sees them. 
Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, allusions are made to Jesus as the second Moses.  In this account, the skies tear open, God breaking into one of the thin places in our world and says, “This is my Son, the Chosen or the beloved.”  In Hebrew Scripture, son of God was a title given to angels, pious people, and kings.[4]  But “son of God” is also in Hebrew Scripture or the Old Testament as the whole community of Israel.[5]
          As done with several stories in the Gospel of Matthew then, what the author could intend is that we see Jesus both as second Moses and the whole community of Israel.  The past, present, and future are collapsing in one moment in time to say that the Exodus happened in the past, is happening now, and will continue to happen as God delivers the people from bondage and oppression.  John’s baptisms fulfill their purpose to create rootedness and meaning, a there there, for the Jewish people.  See, the author is saying, the wilderness and the River Jordan.  See . . . this leader whom I have alluded to as the second Moses as  also wearing the mantle of the chosen, the beloved, the community of Israel.  Now know that God the Deliverer is at work in our time to bring us out of bondage and into a new identity that is not as slaves to Egypt or to Rome. 
          What John hoped was that the material nature of place reminded the Jewish people who they were and who they are so that they might take that with them in their living out of a faith not steeped in some false image of God but in values strongly rooted in the material bases of life.  These material bases of life were not dropped down on high by Rome like they did with bread at one of their diversionary circuses.   No, a benevolent Creator shared locusts, wild honey, and water from the ground up, across the table.   John wanted that story on repeat in Jewish heads and hearts so that, when confronted by Rome’s violent story, they would courageously live as the Beloved Children of God rooted in steadfast love, justice, and righteousness. 
          In baptism, we are rehearsing the radical story over and over again so that we might become radically free to fulfill God’s purpose.  We repeat it over and over so we know our story and song, so that we own for ourselves God’s intent for fulfillment=that all of us might live as the Beloved Children of God, in a broad and spacious place.

There is a tribe in East Africa in which the art of true intimacy is fostered even before birth.  In this tribe, the birth date of a child is not counted from the day of its physical birth nor even the day of conception, as in other village cultures.  For this tribe the birth date comes the first time the child is a thought in its mother’s mind.  Aware of her intention to conceive a child with a particular father, the mother then goes off to sit alone under a tree.  There she sits and listens until she can hear the song of the child she hopes to conceive.  Once she has heard it, she returns to her village and teaches it to the father so that they can sing it together as they make love, inviting the child to join them.  After the child is conceived, she sings it to the baby in her womb.  Then she teaches it to the old women and midwives of the village, so that throughout the labor and at the miraculous moment of birth itself, the child is greeted with its song.  After the birth, all the villagers learn the song of their new member and sing it to the child when it falls or hurts itself.  It is sung in times of triumph, or in rituals and initiations.  This song becomes a part of the marriage ceremony when the child is grown, and at the end of life, his or her loved ones will gather around the deathbed and sing this song for the last time.[6]

This is what we hope we have been doing with Naomi Marcella Moyer since she first stepped foot in this church building.  We hope and pray that we have been rehearsing a song with her that she has learned well enough herself to take out to her school and further out into her community.   We hope and pray that the imperial songs which are forever blaring at her on the airwaves, she begins to discern as false idols—songs which tell her that she will need to buy this product or learn this beauty secret to be loved; songs which tell her she will be saved only by violence against people who are not like her;  songs which tell her she will need to hoard and secure wealth and popularity so that she might know she is worthy; songs which suggest that all people may be created equal but some, let’s face it, some deserve to be a little more equal than others.  Day after day, these are the imperial songs which target the prophet, Naomi Marcella Moyer, to unseat her confidence and to distract her from the fulfillment of her purpose.   These imperial songs distract Naomi from her path, are empty of meaning, and provide a dead-end direction.   Imperial songs are solely about entertainment, the buzz, and power over to create such vanilla and same and banal that color and character are lost.  They so desecrate places that we end up with no there there.
          As a community of faith, we respond in turn to say to her, “Naomi, you are already a Beloved Child of God.  You are enough.  And you are strong and courageous and beautiful in your own right and you are wonderfully and fearfully made by a God who is good.  We baptize you because we know that the world is too long divided between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female.  And we want you to live bravely into the beautiful diversity of God’s good earth.  We want you to regularly preach God’s color and character in the beautiful diversity of the world.  Creator did not intend divisions, power over, between race and ethnicity, economic and social status, gender or sexual spectrum.  We want to affirm there are many authentic paths to the one God.  We want you to know, we want it to ring in your ear that ancient Exodus story so you will never forget God’s will for all of us to live in community-in a broad and spacious place.”   
          May we not only remember the story but also teach her the right song which will accompany her, bolster her courage, and remind her that she can step out courageously into the world because there will always be a people in Billings, Montana, who know that song and promise.  May we hold her by singing the words to her throughout her life when the imperial narrative threatens to block out all else.  May this place, Billings First Congregational Church, be Naomi’s “there there,” the place which helps her keep the tune and remember the words as one who is firmly rooted and full of meaning.  So that when Naomi hears her song for the last time, she will know she has been, is, and always will be, a Beloved Child of God.  May it be so.  Amen.  


[1] Tommy Orange, There There (New York:  Vintage Books, 2018), pp. 28-29ff. 
[2] Borrowing from language to describe what it meant for Julius Caesar to cross the Rubicon.
[3] “Julius Caesar and the Jews,” Jewish History Blog, January 10, 2011, https://www.jewishhistory.org/julius-caesar-and-the-jews/. 
[4] Aherne, Cornelius. "Son of God." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 12 Jan. 2020 http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14142b.htm
[5] Hosea 11:1-2
[6] Jack Kornfield, from A Path with Heart:  A Guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (New York:  Bantam, 1996).

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