Epiphany 1A/Baptism of Our Lord
Just after Christmas, my family and I decamped to a rented house near Yosemite. We packed for cold weather and had grand dreams of stomping around in snow with a granddaughter in a puffy snow suit and cute mittens, but instead we got rain. And lots of it… y’all know what I mean! An atmospheric river, as I suspect we all know by now, is a thin plume of moisture high in the heavens that stretches from the tropics or subtropics into higher latitudes. On a weather map, it looks like a benign band of clouds. But when you’re in the midst of it, it’s a torrent. An MIT meteorological study estimated the moisture flux of an atmospheric river is roughly the same as that of the Amazon River. That is, about 176,000 tons of water per second.
There’s a passage of scripture that I deeply love, from Habbakuk, that goes like this: “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” Habbakuk was a 7th century Old Testament prophet who is known both for his sassy backtalk to God and his poetic manner of expression. So while I’ve always loved his image of waters covering waters, I assumed it was a rhetorical flourish. Until I saw the Yosemite Valley in wintertime, inundated by an atmospheric river. Rain falling from the sky, snow on the ground, clouds of mist cloaking granite cliffs, and the plume of Bridalveil Falls crashing through the fog. Glorious. Waters upon waters, as relentless as the glory of the Lord, which will surely the fill the earth in the fullness of time.
I think it’s safe to assume that Habbakuk, dwelling in the desert near Jerusalem, never experienced an atmospheric river. So we can’t know exactly what he had in mind when he used the image of water covering the sea. Except to say that he was describing a hyperabundance of water, which is actually an uncommon image in the Old Testament. Habakkuk used a deliberately startling metaphor for the glorious hyperabundance of God. Which is a common denominator in all the scriptural stories we hear in the season after Epiphany. “I am the Lord… who created the heavens and stretched them out,” as Isaiah heard it said to him. “The Lord who spread out the earth and what comes from it… my glory I give to no other.”
And today we meet Jesus standing at the edge of the waters of his own river baptism, which rends the very heavens as the evangelist reports it. Uniquely to Matthew’s Gospel, we also find Jesus negotiating with his cousin John about whether he actually needed to be baptized. Commentators over the ages have belabored the meaning of Jesus’ insistence that he enter into a ritual that John understood as an enactment of repentance. The best theological answer, as far as I’m concerned, is that Jesus’ baptism was an immersion in the human condition, which God affirmed and blessed as beloved.
And there is no element that better represents—in fact is integral to—the human condition than water. Science and theology equally bear witness to it. Our sacred stories begin with the Spirit of God sweeping over the face of the waters, and the Book of Revelation ends with a description of river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God. In between, water fairly leaps off the pages of our Bible, cleansing, healing, and slaking the thirst of a desert people. These stories would have been well known to Jesus and John, but so would the intimate relationship of human embodiment and water. Recall that their very first meeting, when John leapt in his mother’s womb at the presence of a pregnant Mary, occurred when both of them were immersed in amniotic waters.
From conception, our individual and communal survival is mediated through water. And seventy percent of the earth is covered by water. The sheer volume of the water we live amidst is both a blessing and a risk. We Californians have been inundated this week, reminding us that our landscape is vulnerable to both too little and too much water. We can build dams to store it and aqueducts to carry it, but we cannot make more water than the heavens give, any more than we can prevent torrential rain. And we are fully capable of contaminating the water that we need for life, and of destroying the sanctity of that which the Spirit of God swept over and called good.
We know all this about water: it is necessary, it is vulnerable, and it is also dangerous. Our scriptures remind us of that, in stories of the flood and Jonah and the Red Sea crossing. And getting through dangerous waters may be only the beginning of a risky journey, which Matthew’s narrative makes plain when Jesus goes directly from the Jordan into the desert of his temptation. But sometimes the only way through risk is by means of immersing ourselves in it.
We learn so much from water: from hearing stories about it, from being around it, from being in it, from being made of it. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons Jesus needed to enter the water of baptism was simply to comprehend the 60% of his embodied self that was water. We have to assume that he was just as attracted to water as most humans are, and just as subject to the rules of fluid dynamics as any of the rest of creation.
One principle of which being that water moves to find its own level. We see the fruits of this in the dramatic reshaping of landscape that can occur when water interacts with geology. Consider the Grand Canyon, or the equally dramatic actions of glaciers—frozen water—that sculpted the Yosemite Valley. In similar manner, baptism reveals the powerful sacramental interaction of water and words. When in baptism we renounce that which corrupts and destroys God’s good creation, and we affirm our commitment to conform ourselves to Jesus Christ, we might say that baptism is our call to level up, and be reshaped in the process. To be made over in the image of God, whose glory is manifested through water; in birth and in baptism, from creation to revelation.
Martin Luther once said baptism is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that takes our entire lives to fulfill. And if we’re honest with each other, we’d have to confess that it’s sometimes a messy fulfillment. If we’re really doing the work of renouncing things that our culture affirms, and affirming things that our culture denies, living into our baptismal identities will be no less dramatic than the wildness of Yosemite waterfalls in a rainstorm. Like a river falling over a granite cliff, we will run into obstacles and we will change the landscape around us. Consider, for example, the residents of Jackson Mississippi and Flint Michigan, still fighting for clean public drinking water. To defend the integrity of our water and the natural and manmade systems that bear it is to defend the rights of the marginalized and, indeed, the integrity of the earth itself.
Which is why we gather on days like today to remember our own baptisms. We need to remind each other, and be reminded that—while baptismal life is our deepest human truth—it is also hard. And that we are not alone when we accept the risk and the reward. And that Jesus has done it before us. And that we ourselves—birthed in water, baptized in water—are sufficient to cover the world in a sea of goodness. With God’s help, of course. Because every time any one of us again say “I will” to our baptismal identity, the glory of the Lord is revealed anew.
