Water that Destroys, Water that Demonstrates, Water that Dampens: A Reflection on the Lectionary Readings for 10 January 2010

I don’t know that I’ll do this every week, but one thing that I’m going to try to do more this year is write about the Bible, and I figure one way to do that is to write about the lectionary readings for the week.  My reflections will not be polished sermons in their own right, but I’ll be going through the same sorts of thought processes as I do when I write for the pulpit.

I always preach one or more of the lectionary texts when I preach, and I generally go to Vanderbilt’s Revised Common Lectionary Page to get the texts.

Isaiah 43:1-7

Psalm 29

Acts 8:14-17

Matthew 3:15-17, 21-22

That Jesus was baptized made little sense to me when I was a new Christian; after all, my own tradition insisted that baptism was for salvation from Hell, and as far as I could tell, Jesus was one person who was in little danger of that.  When my teachers attempted to interpret Matthew’s “to fulfill all righteousness” as purely exemplary (Jesus getting baptized so that he could provide an example for sinners), I only became more confused: after all, would not that act be one of deception, a pretense of sin-that-needed-to-be-forgiven where there was innocence and thus at the very least visually dishonest? And would not such a deception itself be a sin on the part of the one who was called “without sin”?

(I was a legalistic little booger back then.)

Honestly, I didn’t think much about the scene until I came to study the New Testament in a formal setting in college, and scholars like N.T. Wright helped me immensely to see baptism not primarily as a temporally universal ritual but as apocalyptic, an act that signifies an end of an age, a renewal of Joshua’s Jordan-crossing when the Hebrews were coming into Canaan.  I learned that John the Baptist was not by any means the only apocalyptic preacher to start popular movements on the Jordan, and I came to realize that beginning with the Exodus when I thought about baptism helped greatly when I attempted to make sense of Paul’s images of death and rising, the practice of baptism “in the name of” the virgin-born Joshua, and Peter’s insistence upon baptism in Acts 2.  (We Christian Church folks like Acts 2 a great deal.)  In other words, I found that a bit of scholarship is a handy thing when one undertakes to read the Bible.

Now, a good fourteen years after I started my training in academic New Testament studies and five years into my adventures as people’s father, I appreciate more than ever the weight of the grand stories as I live out my own life, with student loans and coworkers and Deacons’ meetings.  I understand why a regimented world such as the one that already existed in James Joyce’s time makes so much more sense with the myth of Ulysses mapped over it, and I appreciate that my own tradition still insists on dunking people in a historical moment with far more irony to it than apocalyptic fervor. We still insist that everyone coming into this adventure we call Church is, following our own apocalyptic Joshua, entering into a struggle so that God might grant us the promised rest.

I also find solace in the vast diversity of roles that water plays in the Bible.  Just in this week’s readings, Isaiah praises God as one who protects the Servant from the waters, then the gospel reading recounts Jesus’ ministry as initiated by immersion in water, and finally a moment in the strange sequence in Acts involving Water and Spirit.  In those incidents, at one end Peter tells the people of Jerusalem to be baptized for the reception of the Spirit, and at the other a group of Gentiles exhibit the Spirit and thus need Baptism, and in the middle (this week’s reading), the apostles need to lay hands on a group of Samaritans because they’d been baptized but had not received the Spirit.  In other words, even in the text of the Bible (especially in the text of the Bible?), God’s activity is nothing to be predicted or systematized but received always ad hoc, in the kairos, as a gift.

As I look at the week’s weather report and realize that any gift of water to Georgia in the next few days is likely to fall as flakes rather than as drops, I remember my own baptism, and I thank God that I’m from a tradition inside of which I can do that remembering.