Genesis 9: 8-17; Psalm 25: 3-9; I Peter 3: 18-22; Mark 1: 9–13
A homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at The Cathedral Church of St. Paul the Apostle, in Springfield, Illinois on Sunday, February 22, 2015.
“WATER: LIFE-SUSTAINING, LIFE-DESTROYING”
(Homily texts:
Genesis 9: 8–17, I Peter 3: 18-22 and Mark 1: 9-13)
Our three Scripture texts this
morning all have something to do with water:
The reading from Genesis recounts God’s covenant with Noah and with all
of humanity after the waters of the Great Flood had subsided; our reading from I Peter reflects on this covenant,
likening it to baptism; and our Gospel text records Jesus’ baptism in the River
Jordan.
If we think about it, water plays a
central role in our lives. It has
life-sustaining properties and life-enhancing qualities: We drink it in order to sustain life and
health, we use it to clean things, we play in/on it (swimming boating, etc.),
we use it for transportation.
But water also has a destructive
quality as well: The account of the
Great Flood in Genesis[1]
confirms water’s power to destroy both objects and living things. We are all aware of water’s ability to cause
life to end.
In Holy Scripture, water passages
figure prominently. Each account signals
a face-to-face encounter with death, which leads to new life and a new
beginning.
Put another way, each time God’s
people make a passage through water, they stare death in the face, but emerge
safely on the other side. Being willing
to make a passage through water involves risk.
This principle lies at the heart of
Noah’s passage: God tells Noah that the
way he and seven others of his family[2]
will survive the deluge of water that is coming is by riding over those waters
in an ark. As the waters rise, the ark
rises, too. As the waters recede, the
ark comes to rest on dry ground and God establishes a covenant[3]
with all humankind that He will never again destroy the earth and all that
lives on it by a flood.
This principle lies at the heart of
the passage through the waters of the Red Sea as God’s people pass through the
waters on dry ground out of Egypt, out of bondage, and into the Promised Land,
in order that a new birth and a new promise might be lived out. (See Exodus, chapter fourteen.)
Our epistle reading from the First
Letter of Peter ties together the passage through the waters of the Great Flood
and our passage through the waters of baptism remarkably well. In First Peter, we read that baptism isn’t
for the purposes of washing dirt off of the body, but for the saving of God’s
people. The text also brings in the
thread of Jesus’ own resurrection, by which He faced death squarely and
completely on the Cross, conquering death and rising to new life again.
We celebrate and follow a risen Lord
who leads by example.
That is, perhaps, the best way to
describe everything that our Lord Jesus Christ does and everything that He
accomplishes for us. For example, we
read this morning that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptizer in the River
Jordan. If Jesus is without sin, as the
Letter to the Hebrews (see Hebrews 4: 15) affirms, then why did He consent to
be baptized? The best answer is that our
Lord asks us to do only the things He Himself has done.
We would do well to turn to the
business of baptism.
It strikes me that we have lost a
good bit of the importance of water in baptism.
We are largely unaware, it seems to me, of the destructive power of
water in our baptismal rite as we practice it these days.
Our baptismal liturgy is dignified
and beautiful. But it doesn’t seem to
convey very well the fact that water can sustain life and it can destroy life,
both. Both elements are important
factors for us to keep in mind, if we are going to capture the full import of
what happens in baptism.
To revisit this important facet of
baptism, we might do well to go back to the early Church’s practices of baptism: Most often, people were baptized by being
fully submerged under the water in a creek, river or pond or lake. People being baptized were submerged not
once, but three times, one time for each person of the Holy Trinity.
Now consider the dangers: 1.
What if the person doing the baptism slipped and lost their
footing? 2. What if the person being baptized didn’t keep
their mouth shut and managed to gulp in a large amount of water? 3.
What if the person doing the baptism wasn’t strong enough to lift the
baptized person up out of the water?
See the dangers involved?
I suspect that, by doing baptism in
this dramatic fashion, those who were going under the water probably thought to
themselves, “You know what, there’s a real possibility that I might not come
back up out of this water. I might die.”
So, as we reflect on water, we can
see that it has life-sustaining and life-destroying properties.
Allow me to say that the same is
true of the Cross: The Cross has the
power to destroy, but it also has the power to provide new life to all who come
to faith in Christ Jesus.
A wonderful collect (prayer) in our
Prayer Book affirms this reality. It is
found on page 56 in our traditional language rite for Morning Prayer:
“Almighty God, whose most dear Son
went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory
before he was crucified: Mercifully
grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the
way of life and peace, through the same Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.”
[1] See Genesis 6: 9 – 8: 19 for the account of
the Flood.
[2] Noah, his wife and his three sons and their
wives constitute the eight persons who survived the Great Flood. The reading from I Peter confirms eight as
the number who survived. Consequently,
the number eight in the Bible symbolizes new beginnings. As an additional example, consider the fact
that Jewish male children are circumcised on the eighth day of their
lives. (See Genesis 17: 12.)
[3] The sign of this covenant is the rainbow.
