Full Immersion.

Mark 1:4-11

I.

            John the Baptizer appears, we are told, in the wilderness.  Wilderness was a loaded term for Jews.  The wilderness of Sinai was where most of the Torah, the first 5 books of the Bible, takes place.  It was the place where the people met God, and where God slowly and painfully shaped them into a nation.  The wilderness is where God gave them the Laws by which to live.  The wilderness is where God sustained them with miraculous food and water.  They spent a whole generation out there until they were ready to assume possession of the Promised Land.

            The wilderness is the place where people were closest to God.  The prophet Elijah went into the wilderness to meet God.  Other prophets like Jeremiah lifted up the wilderness as well.  Jesus himself will go farther out into the wilderness and meet the devil right after his baptism.

            Wilderness was also away from civilization.  It was wild and undomesticated.  It was dangerous.  It was largely outside of the jurisdiction of the Roman/Jewish political and economic regime.

            And the wilderness was a hideout for revolutionaries and dissidents, beyond the easy reach of the Roman army.  If you’re part of an urban, imperial society, good things do not happen or come out of the wilderness.

            John is proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  Christians have always wondered why, if Jesus is sinless, he had to go through baptism.  He had no sins to forgive.  He had nothing to repent of.  At least according to orthodox Christianity.

            But repentance means both a turning around and a change of mind.  When Jesus is baptized it also represents for him what it meant for everyone else who came out from Jerusalem and the Judean countryside.  It means a turning away from their regular lives, controlled and dominated by the rules and values of the Roman Empire.  And it means a changing of your mind so that they no longer think according to the way the Empire wanted them to think.

            And if forgiveness means “release,” it means they are to consider themselves set free from the matrix of sinfulness which characterized existence under the heel of the Empire.    

            We don’t have to enter the rather pointless and theoretical theological debate about whether Jesus personally committed any acts that would be considered sins.  The fact is that living under the Empire made sinning unavoidable.  The normal acts of daily life, no matter how innocently undertaken, involved a person in the system of oppression, exploitation, and injustice that the Romans and their allies imposed upon the Jewish people.  Buying and selling, paying taxes, working at a job, even worshiping at the Temple, was all a tacit participation in this system.  You couldn’t separate yourself from it unless you literally went to a place where you had no contact with the economy: the wilderness.

II.

            This is why people needed to be cleansed and purified, and why it had to be out in the desert that this happened.  Just participating in the imperial system was defiling.  It involved slavery and economic inequality and supporting a brutal military regime and subtle forms of idolatry.  Just existing in this system left you symbolically soaked in the blood of oppressed people.  You went out to John to get this washed off of you.  You went out for forgiveness, that is, to be released from this bondage.   

            The little description of John tells us of his radical non-participation in the Roman economy.  He didn’t wear their clothes; he didn’t eat their food.  He lived on what God, not the emperor, provided, even out in the desert.  It was all about bugs, leather, camel-hair, and so forth.

            This would have reminded people of the prophet Elijah again, and the fact that Elijah’s career was one of steadfast resistance to the corrupting regime of King Ahab.  Ahab also worked to assimilate and accommodate the Israelite faith to the religion of the economic elite, which was based on the agricultural fertility god, Baal.

            The content of John’s actual proclamation is: “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.  I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

            He says that someone stronger than he is coming.  John is only strong enough to resist the system by separation.  He can’t confront the rulers directly; when he does he gets arrested and it costs him his head.  John is able to wash people symbolically clean of their complicity in the system; but that is only temporary.  The people will eventually have to go back home and immerse themselves in the sinfulness of life under the Empire again.  What John does for them does not really last; but it does provide a preparation for what is to come.  When they go home they have this memory of this experience.  And even if they are back in the system, they are increasingly ready for something else, something new, to emerge.

            This new person, the One who is coming, will take the battle out of the wilderness and into the towns and villages of Galilee and Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem itself.  He will organize these people who participated in John’s movement and establish new communities based on God’s values, and this movement will blow through the nation and through the whole Empire, spreading like wildfire.  He will be the agent of God’s Holy Spirit.

III.

            So, Jesus comes down from his home in Nazareth, which was a place nobody expected anybody important to come from.  He comes from the region of Galilee, which was not only looked down upon by sophisticated, urban Jerusalemites because it was so full of Gentiles and dominated by Greek culture, but was an infamous source of political rebels and revolutionaries.  This is where Jesus comes from.

            And he comes to John in the wilderness, at the Jordan River.  Now the Jordan River was not insignificant either.  It was the river that the Israelites had to miraculously cross when they entered the Promised Land after the exodus.  It was the boundary of the Promised Land.  That’s where John goes, to the place representing the liberation and independence of the people.                         

            It is as if he is saying, just as our ancestors made the final crossing from slavery in Egypt to liberation in Canaan here at this river, so now those who come to me here will re-experience that liberation by being immersed in the same river.  God’s redemption, God’s forgiveness and salvation, is figured in being baptized in these waters.  It is about repentance: turning away from the injustice and oppression of Egypt; it is about forgiveness, release from bondage, escape from the murderous, exploitive sins of Pharaoh, escape even from the faithlessness of the people in the wilderness.  The water of the Jordan meant all that.

            That’s why John went there; that’s why Jesus goes there.  And he chooses to participate with these people, and with us, in this water ritual of immersion.  When he goes down into the water, it reminds us of the way he has come down from heaven, to the earth, becoming flesh to dwell among us; and when he emerges from the water it is a foreshadowing of his resurrection, when he will be lifted up from death and from the earth.

            This motion of baptism, the simple movement of going down and coming up, now becomes the enduring pattern of the Christian life.  To follow Jesus means to follow him in conforming our lives to this pattern.  Just as he comes down into the world, so we follow him when we embrace humility, identifying with the needy of the world, realizing our own profound need for his healing and the release from our own habits and actions and their consequences.  This is what he means when he tells us to take up our cross; it means nothing less than following him to death.  Baptism is a symbolic dying and rising again to new life.  In baptism we die with him and we are raised with him in a resurrection like his, says Paul.

IV.

            When Jesus goes down into the water, and reemerges into the sunlight, we are told that: “He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Jesus has come down from heaven, the Word of the Father, by whom all things were created at the beginning.  But he doesn’t start his ministry until he first performs this visible ritual.  It kind of ratifies and makes public the truth of who he is and what he has come to do.  In him and in this act of being baptized, Jesus summarizes the whole of the Scriptures and the entire story of salvation.

            If we are going to be his disciples, we are going to have to follow him.  Following him means we realize that we are in the world for a purpose.  And that purpose is to witness to the new community that Jesus calls the Kingdom of God.  This new community is a rejection of the powers and systems that rule the world under sin, in its separation from God.  Jesus restores the relationship between Creator and creation, and he invites us to live together in the power of this new relationship.

            In his ministry he will plant seeds of new hope and trust in the soil cultivated and turned over by John.  He will heal, and liberate, and teach, and feed, and welcome, and bless, and proclaim God’s Kingdom.  His communities are places where those practices and values reign and flow and shine. 

            May we also remember how in our baptism we follow him into the world, choosing to live with and cherish the broken and the lost, the rejected and the outsider.  And in following him down, we also follow him up, in the new life of liberation, peace, redemption, and release.

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Death Eaters.

            Apparently, some presbyteries fund their administration/operations by using an endowment based on the liquidated assets of closed churches.  I find this despicable.  It is part of the larger pattern in our declining denomination: living off of dead people. 

            There is no way to avoid the perception that, in taking this approach, a presbytery is basically closing churches in order to reduce the per capita assessment, by which it supports the presbytery administration.  Bluntly put: it is to feed off dead churches.  Some presbyteries are actually able to keep their per capita very low because they close so many churches.  How lucky for them to have so much death around them!  It’s a buzzard’s paradise!

            There’s so much wrong with this practice that I don’t know where to begin.  First of all, I know for a fact that small churches are often already paranoid about the motives of their presbyteries.  They tend to feel that the presbytery is just waiting for them to fail and close so it can swoop in and gobble up their property.  I have had to reassure many small churches over the years that the presbytery has no designs on their property, that presbytery does not want to close any of its churches, and that selling property is something the presbytery does not need the hassle of bothering with.  How can I give churches this reassurance if is the explicit policy of a presbytery to use the income generated by closed churches to keep the per capita assessment on larger churches low?

            Secondly, it is another reason to keep the administrative costs of a presbytery inflated beyond what the presbytery really needs or wants to pay for.  If we valued it, we’d pay for it directly.  Since we don’t want to pay for it, we clearly don’t value it; but the powers-that-be come up with a scheme to pay for it anyway, using someone else’s money.  This is ass-backwards and wrong.

            Administration is the death of mission.  Yes, mission requires a certain minimal degree of administration to keep going.  But the trend in our society and in our institutional churches is that administration automatically gets bloated, and even assumes control over the mission, at which point it stops being Jesus’ mission and become the self-serving administration’s mission.  When administration is allowed to define mission, “mission” is almost always reduced to mere institutional self-preservation. 

            In the current environment, churches are going to be closed.  The assets of closed churches will go to presbyteries.  What should they do with that money? 

            I propose that all such legacies and any income generated from them be designated for the planting of new congregations, the redevelopment of present ones, and educating people for this work.   

The Future of Stated Clerks.

            Under the old Presbyterian Form of Government it was often the job of the presbytery Stated Clerk to interpret, uphold, and clarify its detailed rules.  In this role, the Stated Clerk had to be able to give balanced advice uncontrolled by whatever the agenda might have been of the presbytery or its entities, like the Executive Presbyter, or the Committee on Ministry, or the Presbytery Council.

            Now, however, the new Form of Government, emphasizes flexibility and permission giving.  This means that there is less daylight between what the Book will permit, and what a presbytery decides it wants to do.  In the new Book, more authority and responsibility is given to local councils (presbyteries and sessions) to organize themselves and undertake actions according to their sense of their own mission in their specific situation.  This means that the Book of Order has a more general and less immediate influence on our daily work, while we will be more directly governed by the details of the administrative manual of the local presbytery.  Thus we see that the role of anyone charged with mediating between the Book of Order and the presbytery is greatly diminished.

            As a Stated Clerk I see the need quickly to rethink and retool for this new way of operating.  For we clerks do have skills and expertise that presbyteries will require as they reorganize for mission in new ways.  But we have to see ourselves less as “canon lawyers” and more as functional and critical enablers of mission.

            For one thing, we carry the institutional memory of the body.  While it may no longer be expressed in terms of detailed legislation to be enforced, where we have been as an institution is still relevant to the decisions we are making today.  This is true even if our awareness of our past tells us more about what not to do and what didn’t work, or at least won’t work today.  Having this longitudinal scope is essential if a presbytery is going to avoid some mistakes of the past.  The Stated Clerk is the one person in the structure of a presbytery who has this awareness and access to this data.    

            Stated Clerks and session clerks, are, in a sense, storytellers.  We keep the story of the body.  We maintain the coding which constitutes the presbytery’s identity, it’s “dna,” if you will.  On one level, this story is written in the Minutes of the presbytery.  But on another level, presbyteries have what we might call an “oral tradition:” the collection of anecdotes, memories, habits, and even legends of the council.  Stated Clerks, especially those who have been around a while, are the ones most likely to have access to this awareness and insight.  We maintain and integrate both the written and oral history of the body, making it available to inform the body’s current witness.

            Stated Clerks also have extensive knowledge about organizational structures and relationships.  This means we give cogent and sometimes pointed advice about the promise and the consequences of particular arrangements and decisions.  Instead of saying, “The Book says you can’t do that,” now we can say, “That might work, but here are the pitfalls and liabilities of such a course of action; and here are some examples of where that sort of thing worked well and how they did it.”  Now we have to have the presence of mind and communication ability to say the presbytery should determine its actions, not just because of what the Book and its history of interpretation says, though that information is important to have.  We have more importantly to ask the questions concerning the degree to which a course of action is effective, efficient, fair, authentic, biblical, or faithful.

            In other words, the role of the Stated Clerk is quickly evolving into one that has more to do with assisting a presbytery in turning its vision into actual structures, procedures, and practices that work.  We are moving from being referees to being advocates for best practices.  In addition to interpreting the streamlined Book of Order, we will be more about interpreting, organizing, and structuring the mission of the presbytery.

            Over the past few decades presbyteries have evolved a staffing pattern that normally includes two professional leadership figures in our presbyteries: the Stated Clerk (usually part-time, but who may serve for many years) and the Executive (usually full-time, but who doesn’t always last that long in any one place).  Under the new Form of Government (and, unfortunately, prodded by diminishing finances) many presbyteries are combining these jobs.  But merely folding the responsibilities of the Stated Clerk into the job description of the Executive will not be successful.  This approach does not take the Stated Clerk role seriously.  Rather, it thinks of the clerk as a mainly secretarial, bureaucratic position.  Still worse, some Executives seem to think they are removing an obstacle to progress when they assume/eliminate the Stated Clerk’s job.

            Leaving aside the question as to whether many Executives have any clue about progress, Stated Clerks have in the recent past served as obstacles to initiatives that went against the old Form of Government.  We are still called to serve as obstacles to initiatives that violate the spirit of our polity or the Scriptures, or are just plain dumb.  But more important is the emerging positive role of the Stated Clerk.  He/she is the figure in the presbytery best equipped to oversee organizational development and transformation.

            In a more general sense, this role remains faithful to the Stated Clerk’s calling to interpret the Constitution.  It’s just that now the Constitution, at least the Form of Government section of it, is different.  The old Form of Government was often interpreted in a regulatory manner.  But now, to interpret this Form of Government faithfully will have to do with helping a presbytery discern and organize itself for mission.