January 7, 2007 - Baptism of the Lord

Baptism of the Lord
7 January 2007
Luke 3.15-17, 21-22
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007


Our Jack, we call him.
No one ever thought he’d be a holy man,
not the upright sort
that wraps up faith in tight little bundles,
so comforting from the pew, not him.
Not the pious guy who shows up expectedly
and prays expectedly
and expects your little group to stop talking
about certain things when you see him.
Not someone who feels better if you admire him,
which people seem to need to do,
if their cleric wants their support.
Not even the evangelist,
who struts back and forth,
spellbound eyes glazing over,
fearful souls seeking comfort that God
has trusted him to impart.
None of it has ever been Jack.

Besides, he was too angry.
He seethed, he sputtered, he
denounced people who called the shots,
their wealth and power somehow giving them
permission to indulge their craving for
the finer things—fine meaning pleasure
only they can buy.
People don’t want a preacher
condemning pleasures he obviously
can’t afford. It’s pettiness,
or seems so.
No, our Jack has this uncomfortable way of
making you feel like God
wants you to change things about yourself,
as if you can’t be both good and happy
at the same time.

Personally, I love it, though, how by the end of
a red-faced harangue about this
fouled up world—and not because of
all the godless heathen but because
the God fearing people make things such a mess—
I love it how he gets hoarse from joy in battle against
the way of things. People shouldn’t like him,
but they do.

Last night, we were throwing the last
sticks and brush we’d scrounged along
the river bank into a fire ring to cook our supper.
Jack had earlier poked hotshot priests
in the eye about their fancy holy costumes and
uncharitably noticed with
admittedly unbridled glee
how their self absorbed wives
and daughters spare no excess
when it comes to a good party. Our campfire was
crackling, and we were cracking up,
retelling his tirade:
“Stone a poor girl for sleeping with a guy to
get food for her kids,” he had roared,
“but any slutty thing goes
if the wine and canapés cost enough and
the guests know how to wink
at a high society indiscretion.” Oh boy,
that got the big shots going. We
couldn’t stop laughing.

But our Jack, baptizing the masses.

To see the truth that’s fun to know
is really all you need,
if you’re the one who runs the show
and never has to bleed.
But if the world is spinning out
and heading straight to hell,
the truth that’s hard to know about
someone has got to tell.

So this morning we were waking up to a
nice day.
And you never know.
Over western hills a dark sky was forming, but that
usually blows away. We hoped for such and
not one of those storms that roll
across the plain, the wadis swelling from
the torrent, people, unsuspecting, swept in dark gray
waters to oblivion—they should pay
closer attention.
We solved that, anyway, turning from the dark horizon,
banishing our dread. See no evil.

Jordan’s reliable current,
color of mud, glided by.
We, Jack’s regulars, watched from our
casual distance. Why so many came out
for these things
I still can’t say. Jack never gave them
much to like. “Repent!” he bellowed, and
we never knew if he meant it a
threatening alarm or a more kindly chance at
relief. People are miserable enough, that’s sure:
Romans in our streets and into our pockets,
Pharisees and Levites wringing our
consciences, never really saying where all
their vaunted standards of holiness
are going to get us. Things just get worse. So
here by the turbid, shambling river of
hard memory—Jacob slept here,
Moses died here—to this shore they
stride (or stray, depending)
day after day
to release themselves from
life and past and weary habit,
to submit to the cleansing power of
a murky mix of heaven’s pure water,
earth’s grit and the output of upstream
human commerce, waste and bodily function.
How that cleans you, hard to say, but they
keep coming; such is the trusting thirst
in their breast.

They kept coming.
The fire burned low.
That dark western sky had hovered all day.

Your earthly days start out with cries,
so someone soothes your mind.
But then the soother up and dies,
and you’re just left behind.
But what if in your soggy soul
a fire unlikely sparked,
and light escaping heaven stole
into your rising heart?

Me, why do I tag along?
It could be enough that Jack is
interesting. He gets angry, I’ve said, but
that’s a sort of gimmick with him, his
rants dredging up ancient resentments.
The rest of us? Our insides
keep twisting through night in
bitter dreams he dredged up in us.
And Jack, he’ll sprawl across his blanket,
tired, snoring softly,
an agreeable calm across his face. Rage serves his
purpose, not the other way round, but me,
I’m a bed of embers and umbrage,
inconspicuous, yet always simmering on the
edge of the fire. Jack, for his part,
flares and cools.

It’s been a weird day. Our Jack has been
changing. For one, he says things feel
stuck. He’s been preaching the same old sermon,
chafing spiritual sores till people give in; he
baptizes them; they
go away; others
come for their dose of spiritual balm.
Then
life goes on about as ever.
And it’s gnawing at him.
“I’ve started something,” he sighs, “that I
don’t know how to finish.”

“I convince someone the world needs cleansing,
‘starting with you,’ I say. They splash
into the stream. I dunk ‘em.
It’s as far as I get.
They dance away washed; they feel better.”
His voice trails off: “But things are not better.”

Funny, to me, because just now
is about when the mocking
priests have stopped calling him
Wacky Jacky Water Boy
and now almost defer to him as
John the baptizer. It’s a movement.
So people take him seriously, and suddenly
he can’t stand it.
Now that he knows he’s for real,
it isn’t enough. You see it
eating at him. You hear it. Something’s
snapped.

“So it’s up to YOU,” he starts shouting at
next morning’s gathered hopeful, almost
first thing—way off message.
He has stopped reading
from the cue cards.
“You come to me like I’m the one gonna
clean up Dodge,” he fairly whines, by now,
“but the answer to this sad, broken world
is gonna come from YOU!
From YOU will come the power,
from YOU the fire.
This washing you with water, what good is it?
But fire! When out of YOU rises
the sight and strength and courage
to burn pure this world,
to sweat out its fever, then it is
that heaven’s salvation comes.
YOU!”

I think, at first, he’s railing at me,
personally. But it might be
the group of us. Or someone in
particular, and he hasn’t said, not yet.

When God decides it’s time to tell
you what comes next and speaks,
and sense—touch, sight, sound, taste and smell—
ascend their neural peaks,
suspended, then, twixt heav’n and earth,
your next heartbeat unsure,
a vision blinding true breaks forth,
a hope you may endure.

And just then—I’m not making this up—
someone wiggles out of
the knot of the now bewildered spectators And
this guy walks up to Jack,
or John, I guess John.
And John just stands there.

“Baptize me,” says the guy.
John shakes his head. I think,
“That’s it, he’s through. No more
preaching, no more
baptizing, no
changing the world.
Not anymore.”

But the guy wades in up to his knees,
stops,
stands with his back to the shore—
to John, to all of us—stands and waits.
Very still.
Maybe something rumbles out of the
gloomy west, hard to say,
maybe a flash of light and
brighter blue just above. Could be.
You’d think I could
remember better. Anyway, sound and light
and we all of us shuddering. All
except John, and the man.

The two of them, back to back, and
John looks more still than a statue,
shoulders smoothed into soft curves,
eyes glinting gold from late afternoon sun
or something. Steady,
like a dancer, John turns
a graceful arc, leaves the shore,
each foot-stirred shimmer of water
reflecting light out of
nowhere, and as he passes the man and
their shoulders brush, we on the shore
all seem to be standing in
darkness, darkness everywhere.
But there around them, where some strange
glow evanesces out of the very water,
light.

John turns back after he’s waist high
in the river. He stretches out his arms;
the man moves into them. John
wraps the man’s shoulders
hard around till his fingers grip into the man’s
sides. So hard, they’re red with
something like blood, though
it could be just the light. But blood in his side
is what it looks like.

The two sink under the surface. All the light
is swallowed up with them. We all
stop breathing. I try to think but think of
nothing. I try to
see, I try to
speak. There is
no sight, there are
no words.

They rise;
light returns;
the air makes sounds, something
like a voice there is; and something
like a pulse beats
against our feet,
the earth coming alive, maybe;
we breathe out,
breath in.

One by one, we submit to
the water in John’s arms, the light
still alive across the surface,
as if stars were there,
until the last of us is standing
dripping on the shore,
and a spinning body dives from straight up
beyond our sight, crying for
its beloved, its joy and pleasure
a silence that falls
upon the man and all of us,
washing over us and into the water,
gathering under stones on the
bottom of the river, holding there
the peace of the world
until the work of peace be
fulfilled, all of us made ready.

The gurgle of the river returns.
The light shines again from the sun.
The voices again are ours.
The wind chills our wet bodies.
We feel hunger.
We feel tired.
These things so familiar,
everything changed.

The red sun settles toward the western hills.
The darkness between them has, if anything,
widened.

Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
let not our fate come down at last
to death’s procession’s drum.
Let waters wash and fire burn
away our dirt and dross,
that hearts may feel and minds may learn
your hope and love and cross.

Amen.