After all the people had been baptized and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in a bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3.21-22)
When my dad got baptized, it was because of a girl. If memory serves me–since I wasn’t there and his telling the story the only thing staying with me–he and another teenage boy went to a old time revival, not to find religion so much as to impress a girl or two, and when the preacher begged folks to join him in the riverbed, he jumped in, recklessly, on a dare, you could say, one eye on the preacher, the other eye on the girl.
Coming out of the water, his vision blurred and his shirt soaked, the bottom of his jeans mud-caked, he made his way back to solid ground, pleased with himself for catching the eye of the girl, at least for a moment or two. I don’t think he caught the girl in the end. Well, I know he didn’t, because he married my mother, who was nowhere in sight when he found Jesus.
Later, when he caught my mother’s eye, he had a redo of his baptism, this time to convince her parents that he was the real deal, no soaked shirt necessary for a good Catholic, just a few drops of water sprinkled on his head, and he was good to go. I think baptism for him got muddled, for good cause, associated with getting a girl more than getting the Lord.
Luke, on the other hand, preserves a different story of a different baptism, this one anything but the ordinary aspirations of a teenage boy. As he tells the story, a man from Galilee goes to the Jordan where a popular preacher of the day called John was doing baptisms for a living and, like others in the crowd, the Galilean goes into the deep for a few seconds, comes to the surface, and all hell breaks loose.
Not literally, but who knows, because no sooner is the man’s feet back on solid ground and the heavens open, a dove descends, and an ethereal voice speaks, quite a show, we’d have to say, even for a busy day at the Jordan. “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” So says the voice and, with those few words, life takes a turn for this young man.
When Luke says heaven was opened, describing the unusual moment for us, the words he uses are ripped apart. Heaven was ripped apart, not a subtle, sleight-of-hand, silent maneuver that might have been understandably missed by everybody else, their eyes on the guy in the camel’s hair cloak, but more like a loud, explosive firecracker going off.
The other time we find the same phrase is at the end of the story, when the man from Galilee is crucified on the cross outside Jerusalem and we’re told the curtain in the Temple is ripped apart, again, nothing quiet in the action, these two instances of the same words forming bookends holding the story together, reminding us the two episodes are connected, not miles apart.
As we often see in the Christian texts, there is some generous borrowing from the Hebrew scriptures, the image of a closed and opened heaven one that crops up several times in the ancient writings. After forty days in the ark, Noah and his animal menagerie are ready for a break, and God apparently agrees, deciding it is time to shut the faucet, so we’re told, “God made a wind sweep over the earth and the waters began to subside. The fountains of the abyss and the floodgates of the sky were closed and the downpour from the sky was held back.”
Later, when Moses urges the Hebrew slaves to listen to the voice of the Most High God, he tells them that turning a deaf ear will cause them immense pain. “The heavens over your heads will be like bronze and the earth under your feet like iron. For rain the Lord will give your land powdery dust, which will come down upon you from the heavens until you are destroyed.”
Once the slaves have entered the Promised Land and became a bit too comfortable, not heeding the advice given to them by Moses, we’re told that “during the time young Samuel was minister to the Lord under Eli, the word of the Lord was scarce and vision infrequent,” clearly meaning the heavens were shut tight and nothing, no voice, no vision, was coming down from the skies.
Years later, Solomon the King stood in the brand spangled new temple he had built and said to the Most High God, “When the heavens are closed, so that there is no rain, because they have sinned against you, but they pray towards this place and praise your name, and turn from their sin because you have afflicted them, listen in heaven and forgive the sin of your servants.”
So, it is a big deal when the heavens are opened and it is just as big a deal when the heavens are shut, an opened heaven generally signifying a happy God, a closed heaven signifying an unhappy God. And as the old cliche goes, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” The displeasure of God, which we bring upon ourselves, is a force to be reckoned with.
Building on this rich substratum of symbolism, Luke now uses the same literary device to connote the pleasure of God, for here, in the Jordan, stands one who will hear the voice of God, one who will obey the will of God, one whom he calls his beloved Son. The heavens are ripped open when the still- drenched Galilean stands in the riverbed and prays to the high heavens, seeking direction and purpose for his life.
Luke, not one to avoid redundancy when it works well, has the Galilean use the same image in his first public address, speaking to the townspeople back home in Nazareth, finding resistance to his message and telling them, “No prophet is accepted in his own native place. There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the sky was closed for three and a half years and a severe famine spread over the entire land. It was to none of these that Elijah was sent, but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon.”
His point is clear. People choose to listen or not to listen to God. For young Samuel, who heard the voice in the dead of night and answered, “Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will,” and for the young Galilean, who heard the voice in the Jordan and answered, “Not my will, but your will be done,” the Spirit of the Most High descends upon them and they are emboldened and emblazoned, messengers and mouthpieces of heavenly intent.
It is important to remember that the Hebrew word for spirit is ruah, translated in different ways, sometimes as spirit, sometimes as wind, sometimes as breath, all invisible, but each significant, suggesting force, movement, life. When wind blows, it can gently nudge us in a direction or it can push us in another direction, depending on its gale force. But either way it would not have us stay where we are.
It is like the story of the time two miners in England got lost one day in one of the deep underground passageways. The lights on their helmets went dead and they were in total darkness. After stumbling in the dark for a while, they sat down and one of them said, “If we sit still we should be able to feel the way in which the air is moving because it always moves toward the shaft.”
So they sat and waited until one of them felt a bit of air on his cheek. Jumping up, the men moved in the direction in which the air was moving, leading them towards the central shaft and on to light. The same can be said of the spirit that we, like the Galilean, received upon our baptism, a breath, a bit of wind that moves us away from the darkness and towards the light, so long as we follow its lead.
For much the same occurred at each of our baptisms, as words were uttered and prayers were said and water poured upon us one way or another, the heavens opened and the spirit descended upon us, the breath of God entering our lungs, urging us to live anew like his son or his daughter, prompting us to move in the world as children of the light, not as children of the darkness.
For many of us, the day is not remembered, at best stored away in a photo album, a moment captured, little different from our first step or our first day in kindergarten. The fault is not entirely ours, since we were babies held in our parents’ arms, too small to know much, except we didn’t like the water poured over us and we probably voiced an opinion.
But the moment was significant, very significant, because anytime the heavens open it is a special moment, as scripture makes very clear both in today’s selection and in the many similar texts that preceded it, reminding us that when the heavens open, the spirit of the Most High God enters into us, changing us, making us something more, guiding us on the right path.
Of course, the thing to remember is that our baptism, while it was one day, it is also every day, the invitation coming to us as the new day begins, calling us to become what we are meant to be, sons and daughters of God, made in his image, put upon the earth to manifest his love, co-creators who recreate the world, returning it to its original goodness.
And, with each day, and with each answer we give to the day, we decide if our baptism was something special or if it was just another day. Richard Lischer, a preacher and professor at Duke Divinity School for 38 years, once explained baptism well with these words, “The minister seems to be asking, do you have any idea of what you are in for? Do you understand that with this act you are not joining the world but breaking with it? Do you realize there is such a thing as evil and that you have just enlisted in the fight against it?” Lischer then writes, “The Christian life begins with a declaration of war.”
If he is right, and I believe he is, then we probably shouldn’t wear our grandmother’s old, yellowed baptismal gown that’s been in the family for generations, but maybe we should be wearing military body armor. To do the work of God in a world deaf to the voice of God means to fight a never-ending battle, the price of losing too high to consider, the possibility of winning a cost we’re willing to pay.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 