Go and Listen, Come and See
Second Sunday after Epiphany (CoE Year B)
18th January 2009: 11:45 am and 2:00 pm Said Eucharist
Homily Delivered at St. John’s Cathedral, Hong Kong
Readings: 1 Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20); Revelation 5:1-10; John 1:43-51; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-18

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is all we are. Inflame our hearts with the desire to change, with faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

Several years ago, I was teaching a French class at a community college in the U.S. It was a mixed class—young college-aged people who did not have the academic achievement in high school or the family financial means to go to a regular university, older people already in regular daytime jobs and careers but desirous of the college degree they had not received when young. One was a recent immigrant—he had fled Cambodia during the catastrophic rule of the Khmer Rouge that had killed about 1 in 5 of all Cambodians. He had been a pharmacist in Phnom Penh, had lost all his family in the mass killings, and now as a new refugee in the U.S. was working daytimes but in the evening trying to get an American degree so he could go to an American Pharmacy School and begin again to practice his profession in his new home. He was taking French as an easy “A,” since he had learned it as a child in Cambodia.

Late one night just before the end of class, we were doing a substitution drill: Do you believe in God? Yes, I believe in God. Does he believe in Communism? No, he doesn’t believe in Communism. Do you believe in ghosts? I asked this in turn to the Cambodian student. He paused, and with great emotion said “Yes, I believe in ghosts.” The other students noticed the emotion, and those in the classroom, who had been lethargic and nearly falling asleep, all sat up in the chairs and leaned to hear what came next. “Why do you believe in ghosts?” I continued in French. He replied, first in French, but then breaking into English to make sure his reason was understood by all. He told us this story:

When the Khmer Rouge occupied Phnom Penh in April 1975, I was evacuated from the city along with everyone else. I fortunately had thrown away my glasses; my grandmother had warned me that they would mark me as a class enemy. I saw people shot on the street that first day because they were wearing glasses. I was sent to a labor camp near the Thai border. It was very hard, but I managed relatively well until I realized that there was no hope—they people I would start becoming friends with would get into trouble with the camp leader and then be killed in a public struggle session.

A Khmer Rouge "re-education" camp, depicted in the film The Killing Fields.

I had heard that the swamp between the camp was impassable and full of quicksand, but getting across the border was my only hope. I fled in the middle of the night while it was raining. I could barely see my hand held up in front of face it was so dark and raining so heavily. Almost immediately I lost my sense of direction, the marsh got deeper and deeper, the reeds thicker and thicker, and soon I was in water and mud almost over my head. I lost all hope. But then I started noticing small blue lights—almost like flames—that seemed to call to me. I would follow them—first this one, then that one, and as I did, I noticed the ground under my feet would get more solid, and suck at by feet and calves less. Soon, even though it was still raining heavily, I was almost following a path of blue flames, one line on each side, marking the safe way to walk. As the rain started to calm and die off, I noticed in the water beneath the reflections of the flames pale faces of people. The seemed to be talking to me, be I could hear no sound except the rain. Gradually the rain stopped, the faces faded, and the blue flames gradually died out just as the sky began to lighten before the dawn. I was on dry, solid ground, and immediately was surrounded by soldiers with rifles. But they were ordering me to put my hands up in Thai, not Khmer. I had successfully crossed the border. But the soldiers did not believe that I had come that way through the night, because the swamp there was a dumping ground where the Khmer Rouge had been dumping the bodies of those killed daily at the camp. “It’s haunted by all the dead,” they said, “and the Khmer guards know that no one can get through.”

We all sat transfixed by the story. He continued:

Now I am an educated man. I have studied science and some philosophy. I know that I had low blood sugar, and was under stress. I know that I was probably suffering from hallucinations. I know also that sometimes in swamp areas the decaying vegetation can produce swamp gas that can ignite and cause random flames. Or sometimes there is bioluminescence cause by microscopic plants. I know that all of this might be the explanation of the flames and the faces. But when I think about it, and remember what happened to me, I realize that the only language that can even approach describing what happened to me is that the ghosts of the dead the Khmer Rouge had dumped took pity on me and lead me through the impassable swamp.

One of Cambodia's many memorials to those killed by the Khmer Rouge.

I have often thought of my student’s story of why he believed in ghosts when people ask me how it is that we Christians, living in an age of neuro-science and particle physics, can say we believe in God, and that Jesus was God made truly human. We say that we believe in God and in Jesus as Savior because we just can’t find any other language that adequately describes what we have experienced. The fact of the matter is this—most people who show up to Church on a regular basis (or even on a not-so-regular basis) over their lifetime do so because at some time or another we have had an experience, an insight, a dream, or a deep feeling, where we felt, if only for a moment or if only in a glimmer, that God was speaking to us, that Jesus was embracing us in his arms, or that they were somehow beckoning and calling us. In my experience, this is true even of us Anglicans or Episcopalians, whom other protestants love to make fun of as “the chosen frozen” because we tend to be suspicious of claims of endorsement by the Almighty of any one person’s particular way of seeing things, and find it in bad taste to parade such experiences about in public.

Hearing God’s voice, hearing God’s call, is the theme shared by all of today’s scripture readings.

The claim to have heard God’s voice is a very dangerous claim indeed. Through much of the world, it is seen very suspiciously.

One needs only to think of the horrors that have been justified over the centuries and that are still justified today with the claim, “God told me to do this” or “God commands this.” Calls to holy wars, slavery, child abuse, assassinations, terrorism, sexual predation, the subjugation of nations, or women, or whole classes of people because of something they had no control over—have all at one time or another been put onto the lips of God by people. Some were cynical in their appeal divine authority, others were sincere but wrong nonetheless. To be sure, most people recognize that the voice of God has also been appealed to for many things generally recognized as good: the practice of benevolence and compassion, self-restraint, the abolishment of slavery, ending oppression of women and racial or national groups. But the very fact that God’s voice can be appealed to for obvious good or for obvious evil has itself for many modern thinkers undermined the authority, if not the relevance, of such appeals in principle.

And then there is the spectacle of apparently sincere people—often ostensibly sharing the same religious tradition and language—who argue bitterly—and even split up churches—about contested points of doctrine, church governance, or morals, each side claiming to have heard the voice of God clearly in the matter, whether through scripture, tradition, reason, revelation of the Holy Spirit, or experience.

Another thing that has undermined for some the value of an appeal to having heard God’s voice is the very fact that on the level of observable facts what people call “hearing the voice of God” is often indistinguishable from coming to a conclusion or a new feeling about things through reasoning, through introspection and insight, or through states of altered consciousness or hallucinations, whether caused by ketosis and low blood sugar due to fasting, emotional distress, possible environmental hallucinogens like ergot, or just a genetic predisposition to neurological disturbances.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

In an op-ed piece this week in the New York Times, David Brooks wrote on the death of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, writer on religion and public policy and publisher of the magazine First Things. He noted that Fr. Neuhaus had gone through a near-death experience a few years ago while in intensive care which he had written about in an essay in the magazine. In the experience he saw a light, two personages, and heard a voice telling him about his own death. This is what Brooks says,

“Most scientists today would say that Neuhaus’s vision was the product of him confusing an inner voice for an outer voice. He was suffering the sort of mental illusion that sometimes befalls epileptics before a seizure. Neuhaus took it the other way. While most people might use the science of life to demystify death, Neuhaus used death to mystify life.”

I realize that most of the experiences, warrants, and feelings I can trot out as reasons for my belief can indeed be explained in non-faith terms. I remember well that in Charles’ Dickens’ story A Christmas Carol, when Ebeneezer Scrooge first sees the ghost of Jacob Marley, he argues with him that he is probably just a hallucination brought on by indigestion, “a spot of mustard, a bit of undigested beef.” Most modern secular interpretations of what is called “the phenomenology of religion” take this as a point of departure: mystic visions or hearing of God’s voice or call, they tend to say, are either mere metaphor or are not inherently distinguishable as event from visual or auditory hallucinations. In this view, seeing is not believing, nor is hearing. But despite this, I persist in saying that I have heard on rare occasion God’s voice because that is the only language I can find that adequately describes what I have experienced. The experiences thus described give form, shape, and meaning to all of my experience. I suspect it is the same for many of you.

C.S. Lewis in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, talks about the question of whether mysticism and “hearing God’s voice” can be reduced simply to natural processes that would make “hearing God’s voice” simply hearing echoes of ourselves in the emptiness of a meaningless universe. This is what he says:

I do not at all regard mystical experience as an illusion. I think it shows that there is a way to go, before death, out of what may be called “this world”—out of the stage set. Out of this, but into what? That’s like asking an Englishman, “Where does the sea lead to?” He will reply, “To everywhere on earth, . . . except England.” The lawfulness, safety, and utility of the mystical voyage depends not at all on its being mystical—that is, on its being a departure—but on the motives, skill, and constancy of the voyager, and on the grace of God. . . . I shouldn’t be at all disturbed if it could be shown that a diabolical mysticism or drugs produced experiences indistinguishable (by introspection) from those of the great Christian mystics. Departures are all alike; it is the landfall that crowns the voyage. (pp. 67-68)

The prophet Eli and the boy Samuel.

Today’s Old Testament reading, from First Samuel, is set in a period when “The word of the LORD was rare, . . . visions were not widespread.” The word translated by “rare” here actually means “precious,” or “highly valued due to its scarcity.” Its use is somewhat ironic—the prophet Eli is presiding over the YHWH cult at a time of great decline, and the cultic and moral corruption of his own sons, together with his own unwillingness to deal with the problem, have lead to a time when few hear God’s voice anymore, though they give plenty of lip service to its value. Eli himself is characterized as losing his own eyesight, and in the next verse we read that this scene is taking place a night, before the “lamp of the Lord” went out. The young boy Samuel, who has been pledged to the shrine as a helper in gratitude by his mother for his otherwise unexpected birth, is tending the light near the Holy of Holies lest it go out. The prophet Eli is asleep in his chambers nearby. Samuel hears a voice calling him, wakes, and understandably goes to Eli. Eli says, “I didn’t call you. Go back to bed.” The word he uses here for “Go back” is also the standard Hebrew word for “repent, change.” There is an edge of correction to his voice, “don’t bother me, child, I am trying to sleep.” It happens a second time, with similar results, though this time Eli softens his reproof by adding the gentle “my son.” But the third time, Eli, who from previous experience understands something about God’s ways, “discerns that it is YHWH” and tells Samuel so. He says this time not “Go back” (repent) to bed, but rather, Go, and listen with an open heart. Say, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” And he asks the boy to report to him what God says. God’s word is precious through scarcity, after all.

What Samuel hears is not something that will be welcome to Eli. YHWH is planning the destruction of Eli’s family’s reign as high priests because of his sons’ bad behavior. No amount of sacrifice or reform at this point will change it.

Samuel, though a boy, is nobody’s fool. He lies awake all night worrying about whether he should tell Eli news that is bound to make him angry with or at least suspicious of Samuel. Samuel is afraid to tell the vision to Eli, but Eli calls Samuel and says, "Samuel, my son" before encouraging on an oath to tell him all the details. Samuel sees how Eli is on his side and actually yearning to hear the voice, if only just repeated to him, that he has so long not heard. He tells him everything. Eli, sits back. This message sounds like what Eli himself used to hear. It is a familiar voice, perhaps, but with a very unwelcome message. He says, coolly, "It is the LORD; let him do whatever he thinks is good.”

Note here that this is in an age like ours—not a lot of vision or hearing of God, but a lot of talk about how valuable God’s word is. The voice of God is a bargaining chip that people use in their establishment of power over other people. In this environment there is plenty of reason to be skeptical about anyone claiming to hear God’s voice. But despite the unfriendly background, God speaks. Here, he speaks to a child, a powerless child at that.

In this and many other stories, God speaks to human beings in a voice that of necessity we recognize as human. Because of this, Samuel mistakes the voice of God for the voice of Eli, his teacher, his religious leader, his surrogate father. But we must not let this get in the way of our recognizing the voice of God when we hear it, whether in a scripture passage, the counsel of a friend or parent, or even a view of the natural world.

Samuel had confused God’s voice with that of Eli, and he needed help. It was only the experience of Eli that equipped Samuel with what he needed to recognize the voice. One of the reasons we read scripture, pray, come to Church, and seek religious formation is to help form us so that we can recognize God’s voice.

Note that at the end of the story Eli does not automatically write off Samuel’s unwelcome message as some self-seeking fraud he has cooked up. But he also does not embrace the message with a fundamentalist’s “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” Based on his experience, he wisely reserves judgment—“If this is YHWH, he will do what he thinks best, regardless of what I want. Let’s wait and see what happens.” He sounds very Anglican to me, with his reserve and parsimony, the slight touchiness he clearly has about his own position, and with kind pastoral care he has for his young charge.

St. Nathaniel, a man "without guile."

The Gospel of John reading tells of Nathanael hearing Jesus’ call. Philip finds Nathanael and tells him he believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the hoped for Messiah. Nathanael, not one who is able to hide his feelings or manipulate others, reacts to this by somewhat rudely quoting a local proverb, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Philip, who knows Nathanael well enough to know that he just says whatever comes to his mind, says simply, "Come and see." Jesus’s ability to tell Nathanael what kind of man he is, and details about his life makes Nathanael think that maybe there is something to Philip’s claims. Jesus tells him that this is just the start. Though Nathanael may have been impressed with these little signs of who Jesus is, Jesus predicts that one day, Nathanael will see Jesus as if he is the ladder dreamed of by the Patriarch Jacob—a gateway between heaven and earth.

Like the voice of God in Samuel’s case, the voice of God to Nathanael moves from the small, easily explained away, to the more central, clear, obvious voice of God. And this despite—or perhaps because of Nathanael’s failings. The idea that Jesus is the gateway to heaven, the ladder on which the angels pass between Earth and Heaven, is parallel to the main idea in the reading from the Revelation of John.

The Revelation of John is a key-word-laden and coded exhortation to Christians in Asia Minor about to be persecuted by the Roman Emperor Domitian, written about 100 CE. This scene is a key to the structure of the Revelation. The plan of God, with what was going to take place soon and with the ultimate triumph for the persecuted ones, is portrayed as a sealed scroll. Opening the scroll and reading it will let you know what God’s plan and intention is. But God’s intentions and plans are unclear to everyone. No one is worthy to open the scroll save the Resurrected Lord himself, “the Lamb that was slain.” Jesus opens the scroll, and then reads it. The rest of the Revelation of John tells what God has in store.

The point is this: for all the competing claims of God speaking here and there, for all the differing views of what God’s voice says, there is only one standard to know what really is God’s intention: it is Jesus himself. In traditional Christian theology, we affirm that Jesus Christ was and is the definitive revelation of God. Our doctrine of the Incarnation states that Jesus of Nazareth was wholly God and wholly Man. This means that what the historical Jesus said and did is extremely important and serves as the ultimate standard for us to judge other claims about God’s voice. To be sure, this is all mediated through scripture, tradition, and reason. But the ultimate standard is Jesus himself, not the scripture, tradition, or reason that mediate him.

Madeleine L'Engle

God does speak. Many of us have heard his voice, though often we mistake it for the voice of friends or of nature. This is how the American writer Madeline L’Engle describes an experience she had from which her faith began to grow:

I sense a wish among some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so he’s easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don’t want that kind of God. What kind of God, then? One time, when I was little more than a baby, I was taken to visit my grandmother, who was living in a cottage on a nearly uninhabited stretch of beach in northern Florida. All I remember of this visit is being picked up from my crib in what seemed the middle of the night and carried from my bedroom and out of doors, where I had my first look at the stars.

It must have been an unusually clear and beautiful night for someone to have said, “Let’s wake the baby and show her the stars.” The night sky, the constant rolling of the breakers against the shore, the stupendous light of the stars, all made an indelible impression on me. I was intuitively aware not only of a beauty I had never seen before but also that the world was far greater than the protected limits of the small child’s world which was all I had known thus far. I had a total, if not very conscious, moment of revelation: I saw creation bursting the bounds of daily restriction, and stretching out from dimension to dimension, beyond any human comprehension. I had been taught to say my prayers at night: Our Father, and a long string of God-blesses, and it was that first showing of the galaxies which gave me an awareness that the God I spoke to at bedtime was extraordinary and not just a bigger and better combination of the grownup powers of my father and mother.

This early experience was freeing, rather than daunting, and since it was the first, it has been the foundation for all other such glimpses of glory. (The Irrational Season, pp, 19-20)

As L’Engle suggests, “hearing God’s voice” can only be experienced, as it were, from the inside, and does not make itself readily available for rational understanding, let alone apologetics.

George Herbert

Let me close with one of my favorite poems by the great Anglican divine George Herbert, entitled “Dialogue”, from his collection The Temple (1633). The two voices are George Herbert himself and God (God’s speech is here marked by italics). Herbert is in despair, since he feels completely undeserving of God’s grace, and can’t see why his own life should have any value for God. God speaks twice, but then Herbert interrupts when he just can’t bear hearing it any longer. The poem, I think, captures what many of us would call our own dialogues with God, including the sad fact that we usually care bear God’s voice for only so long.

Sweetest Saviour, if my soul
Were but worth the having,
Quickly should I then control
Any thought of waiving.
But when all my care and pains
Cannot give the name of gains
To thy wretch so full of stains,
What delight or hope remains?

What, child, is the balance thine,
Thine the poise and measure?
If I say, “Thou shalt be mine,”
Finger not my treasure.
What the gains in having thee
Do amount to, only he
Who for man was sold can see;
That transferr’d th’ accounts to me.

But as I can see no merit
Leading to this favour,
So the way to fit me for it
Is beyond my savour.
As the reason, then, is thine,
So the way is none of mine;
I disclaim the whole design;
Sin disclaims and I resign.

That is all, if that I could
Get without repining;
And my clay, my creature, would
Follow my resigning;
That as I did freely part
With my glory and desert,
Left all joys to feel all smart—
Ah! no more: thou break’st my heart.

We need not fear God’s voice. It is the voice of a loving savior, a dear friend. Eli tells Samuel “Go and listen.” Phillip tells Nathanael “Come and see.”

May we all do so when God calls.

In the name of God, Amen.

A Change of Direction, Change of Heart

First Sunday of Epiphany
11th January 2009 6:00 pm Evening Prayer
The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
Readings : Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 3:13-17

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

Today is the first Sunday of Epiphany. We in the churches that stem from Western Christianity, when we hear of the Feast of Epiphany on January 6, tend to think of the star leading the Magi bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Perhaps we think of Three Kings cake on the Twelfth Night of Christmas. Occasionally we may tend to miss what the Church of the Eastern Roman Empire intended when it began using the Greek word epiphaneia—manifestation or making clear—to describe the season between the Feast of the Nativity and the start of the Lenten fast. While the Feast of Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, Epiphany as a whole season celebrates the light that shines clearly in the darkness, God in Man made manifest in the in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

I once lived in a parish in the United States that began and ended Epiphany each year with the hymn “Songs of Thankfulness and Praise.” In the revised form of the hymn sung there, the words tell us what the season is about and refers in passing to many of the Bible passages that we read just before, during, and after the season: the nativity of Christ, the star and the magi, the baptism of Jesus, the first miracle—the turning of water to wine at the wedding at Cana, then Jesus’ struggles with the devil in the wilderness, the healings of body and mind during his public ministry, the transfiguration, and the preparation to go to Jerusalem for the crucifixion and what came after:

Songs of thankfulness and praise,
Jesus, Lord, to thee we raise,
manifested by the star
to the sages from afar;
branch of royal David's stem
in thy birth at Bethlehem;
anthems be to thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.

Manifest at Jordan's stream,
Prophet, Priest and King supreme;
and at Cana, wedding guest,
in thy Godhead manifest;
manifest in power divine,
changing water into wine;
anthems be to thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.

Manifest in making whole
palsied limbs and fainting soul;
manifest in valiant fight,
quelling all the devil's might;
manifest in gracious will,
ever bringing good from ill;
anthems be to thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.

Manifest on mountain height, shining in resplendent light,
Where disciples filled with awe
Thy transfigured glory saw,
When from thence thou leddest them
Steadfast to Jerusalem
Cross and Easter Day attest,
God in man made manifest.

The Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Epiphany is the story of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus in the River Jordan. This story told in the three Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and referred to in passing by the Fourth Gospel, John. It is one of the events told in the Gospels about Jesus that almost all biblical scholars and historians agree probably took place—the very fact that the early Christians preserved a story about Christ seeking a religious ritual from another suggests that it probably took place, since the story clearly was something of an embarrassment for some of them.

When we look at how the story was told by the differing Gospel writers this becomes clear.

Mark, the earliest Gospel and a primary source used by Mathew and Luke in their Gospels, tells a relatively unadorned story about the appearance of the prophet John, who, as Mark puts it, appeared in the Judean desert near where the River Jordan flows into the Dead Sea, and preached a “baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.” Huge masses of people respond—all the Judean countryside, and “everyone” in Jerusalem go out to John to receive this full immersion ritual washing. Standing in the queue is one Jesus of Nazareth, whom John baptizes along with the rest. But when Jesus comes up out of the water, “he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’” Jesus immediately leaves, being sent by the Spirit out into the Judean desert for forty days, where he will be tempted by Satan, threatened by wild beasts, and where angels will strengthen him. The appearance of John and his baptism of Jesus, says Mark, is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Matthew’s telling of the story—the one we read this evening—is somewhat different. St. Matthew adds the dialogue between Jesus and John—John says “I need to be baptized by you, not you from me.” Jesus replies that it is necessary for Jesus to get baptized “to fulfill all righteousness.”

Many people when they notice how Matthew has changed the story in Mark wonder whether Matthew has added this little detail because he is wondering why Jesus, who according to Christian faith was sinless, seeks and receives baptism from John. After all, why should a sinless person seek a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins? The fact that Matthew has deliberately left out this characterization of John’s baptism—Luke leaves it in—suggests to me that this is indeed the problem for Matthew. The reason Matthew’s Jesus gives for the baptism, “to fulfill all righteousness” reflects Matthew’s concern for Keeping God’s Law—Jesus does not need baptism here because he needs his sins to be remitted—he has none—but rather because he needs to go through the forms required by God’s Law. He thus shows solidarity with sinners like us who do need baptism for more than just “good form.”

In contrast to Matthew, who adds the dialogue between John and Jesus to explain away the potentially embarrassing historical fact of Jesus seeking spiritual assistance from John, the Gospel of John simply deletes the fact. In the prologue of John, the Baptist appears purely as a witness to Light, the word made flesh. John bears witness of the one who is to follow, and identifies him as Jesus. Later, Jesus goes out to Jordan to baptize rather than be baptized (John 3:22-4:3). Though the Baptist is quoted as bearing witness that he saw the spirit descend on Jesus, John’s Gospel is silent about the fact that Jesus was actually baptized by John.

Given the fact that one of the Gospels explains away the problem implicit in this story and another Gospel actually passes over a story that it has obviously heard, it is almost certain that the historical Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. But what does this mean? What did John’s baptism represent, and what would it have meant for our Lord?

Khirbet (ruins of) Qumran, center; Wadi Qumran (gulley of the scrolls caves) foreground; Dead Sea in distance.

John preaches in the wilderness of Judea, near the north of the Dead Sea. He is within a few kilometers of the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there are clear links between him and that community.

The Judaisms of the period all agreed that ritual and moral impurity could be driven away by following the prescriptions of the Law of Moses—for many of these the remedy was to wash in pure water and wait until sundown. As a result, mikvehs, or ritual baths are common objects in the Jewish archaeological sites from that period. Since there were many gentiles interested in Jewish monotheism, and some of these wanted to become Jews, the various schools of Judaism apparently began to practice washing purification rites for people desiring to join to God’s people to purge the general impurity of living as a gentile. This was in addition to circumcision for men. Such proselyte baptism, attested to clearly only in later Judaism, was basically another kind of ritual washing provided for in the law, albeit one practiced for the first time and as an initiatory rite.

Ritual bath (mikveh) in the Qumran ruins.

The Dead Sea Scrolls sect at Qumran rejected the validity of the Temple priesthood and sacrifices, and as a result practiced their own washings and purity rules. Simply being born Jewish wasn’t enough, you had to accept the right belief system and practice the right ritual system. As a result, it appears that they practiced some form of washing as an entry rite for even other Jews who joined the community. There is even a passage in the Qumran Manual of Discipline that says that this washing had to reflect a change of heart in the person if it were to be valid. It states that a person cannot become clean if he fails to obey God's commandments in addition to following the cleansing rituals. "For it is through the spirit of God's true counsel concerning the ways of man that all his sins be expiated," observes the Manual, "and when his flesh is sprinkled with purifying water, it shall be made clean by the humble submission of his soul to all the precepts of God."

John was baptizing in the Jordan just a few kilometers from the Qumran mother House. The fact that both John and the Qumran covenanters fled to the desert to escape what they saw as the corruption and false religion of Jerusalem stems from the importance of the image of the desert in Hebrew biblical history. It was where God met with his people and/or with the “man of God” to help form and shape him into the one God had called him to be. God meets Moses in the desert (Exodus 2:11—4:31), and purifies his people there as they wander for 40 years after the Exodus. He meets Elijah there (I Kings 19:1-18).

It is here that John appears, nearly as a wild man, clothed in camel hair and a leather belt, eating wild honey and locusts. He preaches what Mark and Luke call a “baptism of repentance unto the forgiveness of sins.” A better way to translate it, I think, would be, “a washing or immersion signifying your change of heart that results in the setting aside of your sins.”

It is something like what the Qumran sectarians practiced, but popularized and meant for all, not a hermetic ritual into an exclusive sect. People flock to Jordan and crowds accept his teaching. But he is not preaching a cheap grace. In the Gospel of Luke, in particular, there is a rigorous ethical and social teaching on the lips of the Baptist. He charges the people he has thus washed to “go out and produce fruit worthy of repentance.” What he is saying is, “Go and produce tangible evidence in your acts that you have indeed had a change of hearts, a change of direction. It is only thus that your sins can be set aside by God and by you.”

In the gospels in Luke and Matthew, he is quoted as giving examples of what such tangible evidence is—if you are a soldier, don’t commit unnecessary violence and take advantage of people; if you are a tax revenue agent, only collect what is required and don’t skim the proceeds to line your own pocket.

I wonder what John the Baptist would say today if we asked him to give examples in our society of tangible evidence of a change in our hearts. Would he ask us to stop walking past beggars without assisting? Would he insist that we stop paying less than living wages to those we employ? Stop abusing spouses and children? Belittling employees or subordinates? Stop making fun of those who differ from us? Would he ask us to stop frequenting enterprises or buying goods that are based on the exploitation of others? Would he simply ask us to stop doing things that bother our conscience?

John applied this need to have a change of heart, a change of mind, a change of direction, to all, regardless of condition or family background. He says (again in Matthew and Luke) “Repent! Being Abraham’s children is not enough—God can raise up children of Abraham from the very rocks if he needed to! What is needed is a change of heart!”

So why would a thirty-year old Galilean carpenter/builder be interested in this, especially if he fairly could not think of any sins he had committed against God or his fellow? As a Jew, he would have been unable to avoid incurring ritual uncleanliness in the course of day-to-day life. But the regular washings prescribed by the Law would satisfy that. Why undergo a washing to signify a change of heart?

I think the key here to understanding is to realize that Jesus was moving here from one part of his life to another: from his private life with his family and friends, his assisting in the carpentry/house building business, his preparation, to his public ministry. It is certain that he had been quite a dutiful family member before this: we read in Mark 3 a story about Jesus’ family trying to get Jesus to come home and start acting normally after he began his public ministry. They do this because they believe he has gone insane—he is no longer acting like the Jesus they had known before.

Jesus sees in John’s baptism a call to refocus, to reorient, to redirect his life. This does not mean he was in any way of need for God’s forgiveness of sin. For others, “fruit worthy of a change of heart” would be an amendment of life and abandoning past evil ways. For him, it would be the living out of the task to which God was calling him.

Hebrews 4:15 describes Christ in this way: He is wholly able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he was tested in every way, suffered every trial just as we—yet remained without sin.

The Christian doctrine of the incarnation, the doctrine that the second person of the Holy Trinity took on flesh, and became truly human, is somewhat shocking and usually surprising to the average Christian. Throughout history, pious people in the Church have repeatedly oversimplified it. Even today, there are many church members who think they are giving a highly ortho­dox answer when they define the Incarnation solely in terms of "The Divinity of Christ." But this is really heresy, and was so branded by the early Church.

What the Incarnation actually affirms is that the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was known to his disciples as a fully human person, sharing the limitations and temptations of ordinary men, was also in a unique sense the self-expression of God. This became clear to them when after his horrific and unjust death, he reappeared to them in bodily form—they knew that whatever it was they were seeing, it was not a ghost. They also knew, as St. Paul says in Romans 1, that it was by raising Jesus from the dead that God revealed just who this Jesus actually was. The clearest expression of the idea in the New Testament is in the Gospel according to St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

The idea has been put in many other ways over the centuries: Jesus was truly man, and at the same time truly God, is "God living a human life," "the manifestation of God in human terms," and "the fullest expression of Divine personality that is possible under the conditions of human life."

It is the very completeness of the man Jesus’ acceptance of God’s will, the totality of his self-denial without any whiff of ego-driven drama, the purity of his following God’s calling that was the hallmark of the manifestation of God in Jesus. Just as we paradoxically feel the most free and empowered when we surrender to God, Jesus’ total submission made him most free and most empowered.

I think there is a lesson for us in all of this.

As sinners, we obviously need, unlike Jesus to not just have a change of heart and direction, but to repent of our sins. But often, it is the very burden of guilt that makes repentance and amendment of life seem impossible. If we have an addiction or obsession, it is the very disgust we feel for ourselves or shame we feel from others that serves as a trigger for relapse or acting out. Changing our ways begins to appear as hard as trying to defy gravity, or to hold our breath forever.

But the example of Jesus in his baptism provides us a way out, an authentic way to truly find the way to amendment of life, recovery, and repentance.

He was not burdened by guilt. But he simply had a change of heart and heard where God was calling. So he took a step in the direction of the voice. By going to Jordan, by seeking baptism from this bizarre, camel-skin wearing preacher in the desert along with thousands of others, he did the thing God had set in front of him to do.

It is an iterative process, a journey on a road. When Abram was called out of Ur, he left his home and nation, not knowing where he was headed. So too Jesus. He went to Jordan knowing that this was the next right thing.

Coming up from the water, he hears God’s voice, quoting the Psalms and prophets, “You are my son, this day I have fathered you. I love you, you make me happy.”

He then leaves for the struggles with the devil in the desert, where he will sort out things before he begins his work.

If we take a small step toward God, he will take giant steps toward us. If guilt and shame weigh you down and make it hard, then lean on Jesus and let him take on that particular part of being human. That’s why we call him savior, after all.

In the name of God, Amen.