Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
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Let us find you again. Amen.” -Henri Nouwen
The story of the God of Israel and the story of the God of Jesus Christ are one and the same: they tell a love story. They both depict a God stubborn for love and jealous for exclusivity. This God doesn’t want just part of us. This God wants all of us. And not just all of me…but all of us all together. And not just all of us humans…but all of creation…alive, vibrant, and full of God’s glory.
So, if this basic premise about Christianity is true, Lent is all about love…learning how to let God love us more and learning to fall in love with God all over again. It’s not really about what we deprive ourselves of. We challenge ourselves and discipline ourselves for something greater…to awaken us to love.
The annual liturgical season of Lent comes, then, bearing a particular grace. It’s the grace of renewal that comes as we focus ourselves on the one thing necessary. By harnessing all our energies and stripping ourselves of all our excess, we get to the root of why we are who we are and open ourselves to experiencing a spiritual power that comes from such focus. We experience it as a grace that unifies our minds with our hearts and our hearts and minds with God’s and such integration causes our hearts and minds to expand and experience the love of God in ways we could never conjure up on our own.
Another truth, however, about our Judeo-Christian tradition, besides this central truth of love…is that we humans aren’t very good at it! Our hearts grow cold and our minds forget. Perhaps the sign of a mature person of faith is one whose faith burns longer, whose mind remembers more and whose heart is steadfast no matter what.
And this brings us to one of the central ideas of today’s lessons: baptism. Baptism, I’d like to suggest, is the central reality of getting us out of ourselves (our lukewarmness and infidelity) and into God (full of love and steadfast devotion).
I once had a professor who said that Christian spirituality is all about living out one’s baptism. This has stuck with me through the years, and I believe it to be true. But what is baptism?
Scripture uses the term baptism to refer to several different acts: it could be the baptism by fire or by water. It could be the baptism of John the Baptist or of one of the Apostles. It could be Jesus’ baptism which we hear about today or the baptism of the Holy Spirit we hear so much about in the Acts of the Apostles. Taken all together, we can say that baptism is a general way of conveying the radical shifting of our identities from the old to the new. The old was what was lukewarm and unfaithful. The new is what is ardent and steadfast. Fire burns and water fills. Fire makes one radiant and water makes one pure and both of these’s source is the Spirit…the super-abundant, self-effusive God of love.
But, if all this is true, why was Jesus baptized? Did he need to be cleansed and purified? No! And this reveals what I believe is central about baptism…it is not primarily about cleansing and purifying…these are preliminary for us who need it. Baptism is primarily about immersing and consuming…or, you could say, about making life full of God. This is what the story of Jesus’ baptism by John seeks to convey…Now is the time of fulfillment…or, to put it another way, now is the time of fullness! The good news that Jesus enters Galilee preaching is just this message about the fullness of life that is now possible. If we are baptized into Christ and don’t experience this fullness at least sometimes in our daily lives, we have tragically misunderstood what our baptism means and something has gone awfully wrong! And it will probably have something to do with not really leaving the old behind and dying in our baptism.
This message of fullness is foreshadowed in the Noahic covenant, the only covenant in the Bible that God makes, not just with human beings, but with all of creation. God’s reach is that far. It knows no limits and God’s promise to fill all creation, which is ultimately fulfilled in the Cosmic Christ of the New Testament, is grounded here in the early pages of Genesis, and the rainbow serves as a sacramental sign of God’s expansive inclusivity.
God’s expansive love is also corroborated in the passage from 1 Peter which mentions Christ, after his death, going to preach the gospel to the spirits in prison, who, in the days of Noah, did not obey. Eight people and a boat full of animals were not enough for God!
To live full of God, then…consciously aware we are right now immersed in divine life and being consumed in the flames of God’s love…this, I submit, should be our Lenten project.
How to live conscious of this fullness is set out for us in the initial sequence of events about Jesus recorded here in Mark’s Gospel. Upon his baptism, the Spirit descends upon him and the voice of the Father from heaven speaks, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” I call this Jesus’ confirmation. Full of God, confirmed as the Beloved, the Spirit drives Jesus into the desert to be tried. And it is through his trials in the desert that he experiences the continual grace of God’s empowering presence, symbolized in the angels who wait upon him. The fullness of God is now amplified through his forty days in the desert, and he is ready to bring this radiating light…the glory of God that fills him…to a people lost in darkness. This is the context in which he announces the Gospel for the first time, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Jesus, here, is not just preaching a theoretical idea about a place far away that we will be able to experience and enjoy after we die. That is not the gospel. He is demonstrating and then instructing us how to experience the fullness of God’s presence here and now. That is the gospel!
In order to know the fullness of God and to remain in that fullness…and even grow in it…in our baptism, we must really die to all that is not life-giving…we must empty ourselves. Then, like Jesus, we must receive the Spirit’s confirmation…the knowledge that we, too, are God’s beloved, and allow that love to fill us. To know that you are infinitely loved and precious in God’s sight bestows the power which frees you to be conditioned by nothing other than this love and to live fearlessly and boldly in the face of adversity. Then, we too, must be tested in the desert. The desert is the symbol of divestment…the continual dying and the stripping away of the illusions which so tenaciously cling to us and give false security and prevent us from a more profound experience of God’s grace. By the act of intentional vulnerability that going into the desert represents, we unlock our own life’s hidden potential…and the knowledge of our blessedness is ratified all the more.
But, perhaps, the greatest blessing of the desert is the way its aridity challenges our limited conceptions of God and grounds our faith in something more than a passing feeling or in a faith based on something more than what we can get from God. God isn’t so much what we feel in the realm of our shifting emotions or only present when we get what we want. In the desert, we discover that God is what we know in the core of our being and is often better encountered when we don’t get what we want! And this deepening of faith allows us to root our lives in a dimension within ourselves where our consciousness of God is undetermined by circumstance. We hit the ground of our being where God is, where we are…come what may!
No one speaks more profoundly of the spiritual fecundity of the desert than the sixteenth century Carmelite mystic, St. John of the Cross. In his words, “Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved. The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of Divine union. For whether it be a strong wire rope or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not, if it really holds it fast; for until the cord be broken, the bird cannot fly.” This may sound severe but certainly no more severe than the cross which Christ bore which gave birth to a resurrected existence…a cross we, his disciples, are all also commanded to bear if, we too, want to live the fullness of resurrected life that Christ offers us. Fullness is impossible without emptiness.
Convinced of this, let us together boldly enter into the desert of this Lenten season being convinced of the good news: that in our baptism God has made all things new and calls us “the beloved” bestowing on us a life abounding in love…and that the trials of life are producing in us a far greater weight of glory than for which we could ever hope. Now is the time of fullness. Become empty that you may become full.
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