Sermon – Stepping into the Deep End
Psalm 29; Mark 1:4-11
Farmville Presbyterian Church
January 14, 2024
– Hearing God’s difficult voice in Baptism
If you have ever seen the movie Babe, you will agree with me that it is a delightful, fun, and endearing picture of a pig and its farmer realizing their love and appreciation for each other. In order to avoid being made into food, the young pig Babe dedicates his life to being useful like the dogs in herding sheep. Then, he will be safe from becoming lunch. After the misadventures that follow his decision, the pig ends up competing at the sheep herding trials against other serious sheep dogs, and spoiler alert – he wins. It is worth the watch, even with the spoiler. You know he would win. The line that has stayed with me ever since, though, is the reply of the farmer to Babe after his amazing herding run. The farmer looks to Babe and says, “That’ll do pig. That’ll do.” Just going back to that movie clip, again, brought tears to my eyes. It is sweet and heavenly with the sun breaking behind the farmer’s head, making him seem like some small picture of God. It is the sweet, accepting affirmation that we all want from someone so important to our own story. And it is also exactly how I have pictured the scene from Mark’s story of Jesus’ baptism for years.
Jesus rises from the serene water, disturbed only by his slight movement. The focus of the story is on him, no other human voices competing for attention. There is a hush across the crowd. God regards Jesus with heartfelt, fatherly devotion. These are the most sympathetic and kind things God utters across the entire Bible. This is all about love. All is right in the world; all is peaceful in the world; all is as it should be in the world for at least this moment.
And, of course, I am completely wrong.
When God speaks, things happen. Big, dramatic, and scary things happen. When God speaks, lives change, the world changes, everything changes. It does not matter if God is saying, “Good morning.” Nothing escapes God’s spiritual lips without creation reeling from the shock. In creation, as we saw last week, God brought things into being and order by simply speaking them into existence. As Psalm 29 emphasizes, God’s speech causes all kings of great and calamitous things. It is majestic and terrifying all in the same breath. Please, someone show me where God speaks and nothing dramatic happens. Lives, peoples, histories are all radically altered when God utters. The voice of God is earthshattering and holy.
So, let’s do justice to God’s words. The people across Judea are all in upheaval. Mark says everyone from city and country is running to the water to find this crazy looking prophet shocking people with news they desperately wanted to hear: God is ready to do something big. John the baptizer looks like Elijah, the greatest of the Jewish prophets and the herald of the Messiah. John’s message was driving a change so shocking that the leaders executed the same Messiah a few years later. For Mark, the story of God’s good news begins right here when Jesus arrives to be washed into this amazing change like everyone else. Literally, the heavens are ripped open. I have no idea how that could have been anything but absolutely terrifying. And that’s when God speaks – that same God whose words created and shaped the world. God’s voice booms words that, again, change history for all time, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” It is a tremendous affirmation of Jesus. He is not just Messiah, the anointed one, but God’s chosen Son. Jesus is announced to the world in a way no one had ever been, but the words also sign his death warrant. In Jesus’ trial on the night before his death, this is one thing the religious leaders threw into his face. Jesus was known to be the Son of God which sounds like sacrilege for anyone else. ***If Jesus is so loved by God, what does this say about the nature of God’s love? If this is what God’s love looks like, and Jesus ends up on a cross in such a brutal time, what does that mean about God’s love for the rest of us? Or do any of us think God’s love leaves anyone in comfort and luxury?
Finally, God is also pleased with Jesus. Jesus has been good and faithful to the call. The Son of God has come to the water in humility and meekness. He has submitted to a baptism for repentance, and this has pleased God. Jesus has lived in righteousness and honored God to this point, but before the stamp of approval has even dried, Jesus is literally thrown into the wilderness to be tempted in starvation for 40 days. That is the very next verse. Jesus’ approval in the Jordan River by the words of God means the Holy Spirit throws him into the wilderness to be terribly tested – pressed beyond human understanding.
If anyone thought following Jesus into the deep end was going to be easy, go ahead and make your way out. I may get in trouble for this, but the call, following the voice of God, is one of the hardest things we can do. I need everyone to have both eyes open right now. The love of God is eternal, but it is not easy. When we are baptized, we are accepting this call, just like Jesus. When we reclaim our baptism, we are remembering that we are still in the fight. When we recall our baptism, we are doubling down on the lifechanging power of God’s voice for us all. No one gets through this as the same person you were when you started, and that is the point. No one can hear God’s words and remain the same.
My middle daughter sometimes enjoys getting a rise out of others. One family dinner she was threatening my wife’s father, her grandfather, with getting a tattoo. As you might expect, this made him nervous. And he was somewhat a more anxious man than most by nature. She was having a good bit of fun with him, however, and informed him that she would get “I am Ernest Robertson’s granddaughter” tattooed across her forehead. There might have been a second there when he thought she was being serious, but thankfully, he saw the fun she was having with him and found the humor. That does not mean, though, he did not come back to that very idea in worry later, but imagine how much it would change your life to have something like that written across your forehead for all to see: I am a follower of Jesus Christ and a child of God. Baptism is God’s call to take up that idea. The goal of every believer should be that our lives would not be any different to have that written across our faces. God’s call, God’s voice should have already brought us to that open, outward way of living. It should make no difference to anyone to have it spelled out for all to see. They should already know.
God’s love is not easy, but it is beautiful, faithful, compassionate, and true. It is more than enough to get us through the trials of this life and to lead us into our growth as God’s children. Nothing worth doing is easy. There is a challenge to even getting up in the morning, especially getting up with gratitude and grace. How much more is listening to God? It takes our commitment and recommitment to follow the voice of God wherever it may take us. In a moment, you will have the opportunity to find the voice of God stirring in your own life, again. You will have the invitation to find yourself in the waters of life, reconnecting to the gift of God’s love in this physical, tangible way. The Son of God has given us this water and hearts for service. The Holy Spirit is ready to send us out renewed, but do not enter the water lightly. You cannot hear God’s voice, the Spirit’s stirring, and dismiss it without risk. The course of history changes when God speaks. Our own lives change, too, when we step into deeper waters. So much of this world cries out for the best that we can offer. With the words of our God ringing in our hearts, it is up to us to answer. To God be the glory. Amen.