A Fourth Church Sermon by Adam H. Fronczek

January 11, 2009 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

Beginnings

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 29
Genesis 1:1–5
Mark 1:4–11

John Ortberg tells the story of his daughter learning to swim, slipping off the side, and all the way into the water crying—exclaiming—“I drowned! I drowned.” “No honey,” he replied. “You didn’t drown. You were safe the whole time.” Like dad John Ortberg, God knows, even when we don’t.

Faith is about beginnings, not endings. Faith is not supposed to end; it’s supposed to continue, even with doubt. If doubt were to end, there would be no more place for faith. Sermons on “old endings” wouldn’t have as much of a point as sermons on “new beginnings.” So let’s talk about beginnings.

One of the things that impresses me about this passage is its earthiness. We find John the Baptist in the wilderness. We hear about what he eats and what he wears. We know that he’s in a river when he does this baptizing. While the few lines of this passage don’t tell us much, if we sit back and let the words work on us for a few minutes, we can almost feel ourselves in the wilderness with John. What does that wilderness look like in your mind’s eye? Is it a rich forest? Or is it a dry plain? What is the river like? How quickly does the water run? Can you hear it moving by you? How cold is the water? What does the shoreline look like? Are there trees or bushes or wildflowers? Is it rocky? Are there animals about, birds in the trees or on the rocks, fish that pass across your ankles and feet as you stand in the shallows? And John, what is he like? Can you see that clothing of camel’s hair and the leather belt tied around his waist? What kind of eyes does he have, what kind of smile? How long is that beard he wore according to his Jewish tradition?

We can’t know what the historically correct answer to these kinds of questions might be. You could get close, I suppose, if you paid a visit to that corner of the world, the Jordan River. You could approximate some things about the animal and plant life, and you could even approximate John’s appearance somewhat if you consider that he was a Middle Eastern Jew and that he was slightly older than Jesus, so he was probably in his early thirties around the time of this story at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. But I think Mark, our author, leaves out much of that detail in part because he want us to wonder about it a little. In causing us to wonder, rather than giving us all of the answers, the text invites us in, and we can each create a scene of our own, so that in that scene the passage can start to work on us where we need it to. If you came here tonight needing to be comforted, you might have created one kind of picture in your head; but if you came needing to be challenged, the scene might look much different. And that, I think, is the beauty of the earthiness of this passage. The earthiness invites us to consider that the text is here for us, to help us, to challenge us, to encourage us.

People come to worship for all kinds of reasons. Some of you may be here tonight looking for comfort or healing, others for a challenging word, one that makes you think hard or encourages you to make a change or take a stand in your life. Some of you might be here for someone else’s sake, to pray for a friend or a nation or a people. Some of you might be here to give thanks for something. Some of you might be here out of habit.

Something that may not be common to all of you tonight but something that I think all of us experience from time to time is a need to start fresh, to recharge, or to bring a little order back into our lives. When we come to church, we want to walk back out of those doors feeling reoriented to face the challenges of our lives.

The creation story in Genesis, which was our first lesson tonight, has something to do with making that fresh start. The first lines are familiar to us: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” An interesting thing about this text, something that’s often lost in our English translations, is this: if you read the original Hebrew text, it seems to say something more like, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void.” We’ve gotten used to the idea that God created the world out of nothing, but that’s not exactly what it says. There’s an implication here that what it really means for God to create is that God brings order out of the chaos. God separates the light from the darkness and names them both. God takes command over the light and the darkness. God sets aside dry land by pushing back the rushing waters. In essence, God does a lot of things that we can’t do. The natural disasters of this world—the floods and fires and hurricanes and even everyday weather, the blistering heat of summer or the extreme cold that takes your breath away—we can’t control these things. But God can. God separates them and pushes them back. God is the one who brings order from the chaos and takes charge of the things we cannot control. But how does God do it? Well, just like the details of the passage about John the Baptist, that part is left out. It seems that there are some things that are not for us to understand.

One thing seems pretty clear, though. If the whole Bible begins with God bringing order out of the chaos of the world, it stands to reason that God wants to help us bring order out of chaos in our lives. God wants this place, this service of worship, to be a reminder that when life is chaos, when things seem unmanageable, even when you yourself feel utterly hopeless to start over, God can still create something new.

The New Testament starts with that same kind of promise. Jesus goes down to the Jordan River to be baptized. It’s an odd thing, Jesus going to be baptized. Why did he need to do that? Jesus was without sin, the Bible tells us. Yet for some reason it was still important for Jesus to undergo this process of baptism, to be washed clean and blessed by God. It’s the first thing that he does in his ministry as an adult. It’s what prepares him to go out into the world and help other people. And we don’t understand just exactly how it worked.

It’s important for you to understand that, in the way we worship, we’re hoping to create a place where, week in and week out, you can experience newness in your own life. We start our service with a prayer of confession so that we can think about the burdens we bring to worship with us, and then we can give you a chance to be forgiven and let those things go. We are baptized in the church because we are given the same opportunity that Jesus had to be cleansed and renewed and sent out into the world with God’s blessing. We celebrate the Lord’s Supper together because, when life gets the best of us and we need some reassurance about that baptism that we were given long ago, we can receive God’s blessing all over again. We can get food and drink that strengthens us for the part of our journey that still lies ahead.

And notice how earthy it is: The water—you can feel its wetness and its coolness. The bread—you can taste its grittiness and sustenance; you can chew through its substance. The juice, the fruit of the vine—you can taste its sweetness that reminds us of God’s care for us and the bit of sourness that reminds us that caring for what we love requires some work, some energy, some sacrifice. When you come to the table tonight, really taste those elements. They’re earthy. They’re part of life. They are here to meet you, to remind you of God, to send you out with more than what you came with, to create within you a feeling of something new, to bring order out of chaos, light out of the darkness, heaven and earth out of a formless void.