Star(t)

Sermon

I’ve thought a lot more about time since becoming a parent. There’s never enough time or there’s always too much time and not enough something else. Time has felt swift and short, and time has felt so long, especially right before bedtime. The years that sort of blended together don’t blend as well now. There are more distinct markers: the day of this toy, this milestone, this new change. Every week, sometimes every day, there’s some new thing. When I was pregnant, my wife and I watched some baby documentary that showed there was evidence that babies grow physically, measurably, every day. And then one day your toddler likes pizza, yay! And the next week pizza is a fallen angel—no!

Of course, there are years and seasons like that for all of us, babies, children, pizza, or not. If you’re someone who has been living with an illness, or journeying with a loved one toward the end of life, there are milestones, too. The new year can often mark milestones lost or the first days that we feel a loved one doesn’t exist in the same time as us, a relationship lost or a new way of being in that relationship. And, of course, a news cycle can make hours feel like months. The days can be long and the years short, and at the same time, there aren’t enough hours in a day. And then there are years you can’t wait to have over and done!

Mark’s Gospel is like this, and I have a similar feeling about the other scripture readings for today, and the place we’re at in the church calendar. We have, not entirely by our own choices, packed a whole lot of meaning into today. You get stars, it’s the new year, Epiphany, there’s a creation story, Jesus’ baptism, communion… Today is when we celebrate Jesus’ baptism, the milestone that marks the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. But yesterday, just yesterday, arguably ten-ish hours ago, January 6th, is when the church traditionally celebrates the Day of Epiphany, when the magi follow a star to see baby Jesus. Best guess is Jesus was one or two years old then. And now at His baptism he’s probably 30 years old. And I wonder, too, how much I aged in the 12 days of Christmas!

Welcome to Mark’s Gospel. It feels like this; it is both immediate, in your face, heavens torn open, voices from where, immediate. And it is timeless. There’s always good, liberating news to be found here, and because it’s the beginning of the year, you’ll forget what day it is and probably the correct year.

It’s not unlike a creation story, like our Genesis text earlier. The narrative moves from one thing to the next without much room for explanation or emotional processing. And there are creation-changing events in these very brief sentences in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus is baptized and immediately the heavens are opened. And the very next sentence after Jesus’ baptism is Jesus being sent into the wilderness (which is odd because wasn’t he already in the wilderness, to get baptized?). Next sentence, Jesus is tested by Satan. All we get is a few sentences. Jesus shows up with no narrative or background in this Gospel. It’s almost like Christmas never happened. The first verse of Mark’s Gospel isn’t even a complete sentence! “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ,”—no verb. It’s just a start.

And the lectionary section for today, what most churches traditionally share on this day, didn’t even have the three verses at the beginning. I added them myself as a little treat for us, so we can hear a bit more of John the Baptist’s narrative. We see he is humble, and super into the wilderness, based on his clothing choices and snacks. We know from Advent, which was also like ten minutes ago, that Jesus and John are kin of some kind. But we’re given little here about Jesus at the start of this story. No narrative or snack choices. We don’t know for certain much about Mark either. He’s a friend of the apostles; he’s not an apostle. But Mark’s Gospel was likely first to be reproduced. It makes sense it’d be short and sweet.

And even without a narrative, or complete sentences, we get some signs pointing to who Jesus is: He’s Jesus Christ. Right there from the start, first not-full sentence, no birth story, that’s a whole statement. Christ is the title for the chosen one, the Messiah. He’s the Christ, the chosen one, and yet here He is with everyone out in the wilderness seeking to be baptized and join a movement of friends. This is a big deal. Minimal words, still a big deal! Jesus is the Christ. He doesn’t need to be baptized. So why is this happening? Well, I guess you do need a reintroduction if people haven’t heard from you in 28 or more years (a public baptism, or a very thorough holiday card, may do the trick). And yet, knowing what we know about the sacraments, about baptism and communion, these are for us. God gives us these sacred, tactile, mysteries to remember, to have a moment with God.

Right. Thank God. I do need a reminder to stop and “do this”… we do this, as Jesus says, and we repeat: “Do this in remembrance of me”… and I love that in Mark it’s really hard to tell who the voice from heaven was for. I came across the Common English Bible translation for it for the first time this week. The voice says there: “you are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.”

I love getting to witness this special moment for Jesus because it must be a voice for us, too, or why would someone who writes so little write it down? And there aren’t a lot of places in our interpreted scriptures where you find happiness, which I usually appreciate, because the word happy often rings shallow for me—because of our American Dream understanding of happy—I often hear the things society says we should have to be happy, not this happiness. But here it’s simple yet mysterious, not unlike our sacraments. You make me happy. This makes me happy. This heavenly voice, this happy remembering, is for us, too.

And as beautiful as that it is, we have to remember then that we may also be immediately sent into the same wilderness. This is a good reminder for the start of the new year; perhaps you, like me, are often tested in the wilderness of American happiness or “wellness,” where we are tempted with the idea that there is a body, and an ability, a balance we can achieve and sustain, a spotless home, husband, or child, and healthy eating habits, learning a new language or instrument, and being the nicest neighbor or the very hardest worker anyone has ever seen! Don’t hear me wrong: wellness, happiness, and balance are worth pursuing, but I’d argue, especially with a child, we get little moments of it, maybe half-days, new starts, and start agains, of happy, of knowing we’re loved and happy.

And how might we change if we made new year’s resolutions, started the year and our ministries turning to God and hearing, “I love you and in you I find happiness”? Joining this liberating baptismal movement, of course, means that you get this happiness. But you also get some wilderness. That balance perhaps looks more like a child balancing, and there are big spills. God and the person of God in Jesus Christ certainly encourage us to enjoy, to take, to protect these moments of peace. And by the end of the first chapter of Mark, and what we read isn’t even the half of it, after all this immediate-ness, Jesus does take a break. And if you’re still looking for a good new-year task, I can recommend reading any of the gospels and circling wherever Jesus goes off alone. Spoiler alert—it’s a lot.

God takes breaks, a lot, with creation. God is with us in the wilderness. She celebrates. God rests and is happy and says so, but there’s no idolatry of happiness or wellness here, no sort of special balance that is a constant unchangeable norm to retain. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ is not a full sentence. It’s only the beginning. We get to add our own breaks and big spills.

I love this season of Epiphany. It’s easy to forget that it’s an entire season because of how fast our calendars, our time, often seems to move. The season of Epiphany is truly a continuation of Christmas in many ways; even without a birth narrative, this is a season of realizing who Jesus is and in turn knowing more about God, and in turn knowing more about ourselves. And I feel like I will lean more into the season of Epiphany for the rest of my life now, because I don’t know that I’ll ever be able hear the date January 6th again and think of the Day of Epiphany first thing. I don’t know that most Americans will. The last time that the Gospel of Mark started right after Epiphany like this was three years ago. There were three days between Epiphany Day and the first Epiphany Sunday then. All of the news cycles were immediate and life changing and timeless. How much did we age in those days after the storming of the Capitol? And in the three years since?

The Epiphany light shows us Jesus, but the light also shows us things we may not want to see, things that need to change, and a voice in the wilderness calls us to repentance. The word “repentance” simply means to turn. And as we turn to God, we also turn to each other, because Jesus is among the people here, friends seeking to join a liberating movement. The good news of Jesus Christ, out in the wilderness, was counter to the news of political power, when Jesus was 1, 2, 30, and the many bedtimes later. The heavens opened, and there is a voice.

How might we be different if we heard that voice at the start? Those two voices, really. If we heard a voice calling out in the wilderness, for us to join a movement of liberation, of repentance, and the voice of God telling us: you make me happy. Would we live differently? It’s never too late to start.

Amen.