January 10, 2020 (Baptism of Our Lord) – Mark 1:4-11
Mark 1:4-11
Raining Blessing
Baptism of Our Lord – January 10, 2021
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Once upon a time when I was in seminary,
I was sitting at chapel next to my Old Testament teacher Terry Fretheim.
The text for the day was this passage from Mark’s Gospel about the baptism of Jesus.
Dr. Fretheim is perhaps the greatest living Lutheran Old Testament Scholar in North America.
So after the Gospel was read, I leaned over to him and asked,
“If the heavens were torn open, wouldn’t it rain?”
He just laughed and laughed.
And that was it.
I wasn’t trying to be clever. And I wasn’t making a joke.
I genuinely wanted to know.
See, in the biblical worldview “the waters” of creation are held back by the “dome of the sky,”
i.e. “the heavens.” (see my Devotion Moment on Genesis 1 from Monday).
When it rains, God opens tiny windows in the dome so that that the water can come down.
When we’ve had enough, God closes the tiny windows.
For example at the flood:
The windows of the heavens were opened and the rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights.
(Genesis 7:11-12)
Then:
The windows of the heavens were closed and the rain from the heavens was restrained.
(Genesis 8:2)
You get the idea.
Hence my question to Dr. Fretheim.
I never got a straight answer from him.
Still, every time I hear this story I think of that day,
and in my mind I don’t so much hear the laughter as see a tremendous beautiful rain
drench Jesus and
all the others being baptized in the Jordan River with him on that day.
The rain is a wonderful thing. The rain is blessing.
In many cultures, rain brings blessing,
especially cultures in which people are dependent on agriculture for their food.
The rain brings blessings of life, nurture, and strength for communities of people.
In the Jewish Talmud – the compendium of opinions of thousands of rabbis from many different
periods in history – we read this:
The day when rain falls is as great as the day on which heaven and earth were created.
(Masehat Ta’anit 8b)
And here’s the thing: the rain is indiscriminate.
It falls everywhere and on everything and on everyone.
As Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “God makes it rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”
In the story of Jesus’ baptism by John, sure: the Spirit comes upon Jesus alone.
But surely – when those heavens were torn open – the rain fell on everyone that day.
My takeaway: when Jesus was baptized and filled with the Holy Spirit,
blessing came to the whole world.
We know how this will work, of course, in the rest of the story.
John the Baptist tells us as much:
I have baptized you with water, he says, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
As Carolyn reminded us in her Devotion Moment on Wednesday,
Just as Jesus received the Holy Spirit upon his baptism before he went out to do
his Father’s work, we receive first in order in that we may give.
Jesus received the Divine Spirit of loving energy in order to give it to us.
We receive the gift of the Divine Spirit of loving energy in order to give it away.
On this Sunday we reflect not only on the importance of Jesus’s baptism but
on the importance of our own.
This year what I am thinking is interesting is this:
it is well known that Jesus never baptized anyone.
He left that to others, as in Paul’s baptizing of the disciples in Ephesus in the reading from
Acts this week (see again Carolyn’s Devotion Moment on that passage).
Yet the Spirit was very active in Jesus and
through that wonderful Spirit’s energy blessing came to many.
The Spirit energized him to teach and heal and feed and forgive and include.
Yes: the Spirit came to Jesus that day.
And through him and the loving Spirit’s energy in him
blessing rained down indiscriminately on everyone throughout his ministry.
Just so: we received the Spirit in our baptisms.
And so through us, we pray, may blessing rain down indiscriminately on everyone.
Maybe we are like those little windows in the heavens that open up blessing to others.
It’s God who opens the windows, of course, just as it is God who opens us to love and to
loving in return.
We are living in a parched landscape that so needs blessing.
It has been a difficult year for so many in so many different ways.
We feel shut off, literally behind closed doors.
What we need is for God to show us the windows that can still be opened so that
we can continue to bring blessing.
We have to trust that there is still blessing to be brought.
We have to trust that God can always bring the rain.
We have to trust that God has a store of life-giving water that
God is longing to pour out on this world in abundant blessing.
God has abundant forgiveness, abundant inclusion, abundant comfort, abundant healing,
abundant comfort, and abundant love to share.
And much of the time, what God desires is to open us – God’s little windows into the world –
so that the blessing might flow through us.
We receive the blessing – like Jesus – so that we can give it away.
I know this pandemic is in many ways making our worlds smaller and
more separate from one another.
And in some ways this is reflecting a more general separation taking place in our world.
Racism separates people based on the colour of their skin and
poverty separates people based on their income.
This is, in my opinion, making us all sick – and causing many to suffer.
What we need to recover is a vision where God’s blessing falls on everyone,
like the rain on all the people present at the Jordan River at Jesus’ baptism.
Maybe at baptisms at First Lutheran Church going forward,
we can simulate rain falling on everyone as the newly baptized is named,
“Beloved Child of God.”
The water could, you know, then just flow into the moat. . . .
Okay: that’s not going to happen.
But maybe, in your mind’s eye, you can imagine it happening,
just like I did on that day long ago sitting beside Dr. Fretheim.
Maybe at such a time we can all reflect that through the baptism of this one person,
through the gift of Jesus’ Spirit,
and through the addition of this person to our community . . .
blessing will come to many.
Let us allow God to open us to bringing blessing.
Let us be the windows through whom the blessing comes.
Let us be the ones through whom God rains blessing on a parched world at
the intersection of Sargent and Victor.
And let us pray that God may so open our hearts.
Amen
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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