Andy James

A Glimpse of Something More

February 15, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 9:2-9 for Transfiguration Sunday
preached on February 15, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

They had been plenty of strange places with Jesus before, so when he asked them to go up the mountain with him, Peter, James, and John were not particularly surprised. It had only been six days earlier that he begun talking his disciples about the journey that would be ahead for him. Right after Peter had recognized him as the Messiah, they learned that he would “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” It was a stark contrast for them all. It seemed impossible that their beloved teacher and friend could face such horrid things, especially considering that he had just been revealed to them as something more than what they had understood before. How could this man they had come to know so well, this man they had dropped their nets to follow, face rejection that would lead to his death?

So as Peter, James, and John ventured up the mountain with Jesus, their heads were surely swirling with questions. They had already started to get a new and different image of him, and what they would see that day on the mountain peak would only change it even more. It was a solitary, reflective journey for all four of them—Mark tells us that Jesus “led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves,” requiring three different words to make it clear how distant they were from their everyday experience and how disconnected they were from any others who might have usually gone with them along the way.

When they reached the top, “he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white.” Something was happening to Jesus before their very eyes, and even if they could not understand it, they would witness it. Then, before they could figure out what was happening, Elijah and Moses appeared there too, talking with Jesus. The disciples were suddenly surrounded by the Messiah, the Law, and the Prophets. The fullness of the Jewish tradition of the past and the emerging witness of Jesus was present with them on the mountain, and they were witnesses to this glimpse of incredible glory.

Peter’s reaction to this incredible sight was pretty strange. Only a few days earlier, he had just become the first to confess Jesus as Messiah, only to make it clear a little later that he didn’t understand what that would mean as he sought to keep Jesus from taking the road of suffering and death. But as Mark puts it, after witnessing the transfiguration Peter “did not know what to say, for they were terrified.” Rather than just taking it all in quietly, Peter broke the silence strangely, mumbling and bumbling and rambling:

Rabbi, it is good for us to be here;
let us make three dwellings,
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

But before any of them could respond to Peter’s incredibly ridiculous suggestion, a cloud came over them, and a voice called out from it:

This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!

As quickly as the voice had spoken out, the visitors from the past had appeared, and Jesus’ clothes had turned a dazzling white, things all went back to normal. When they looked around again, “they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.” The reason for their journey complete, the three stunned disciples and Jesus headed down the mountain, and as they made their way back to the other disciples, Jesus “ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” They had glimpsed his glory and seen the fullness of who he was, and yet they could not describe it to anyone—until it would be visible to everyone.

This story of the transfiguration is one of the most mystical and mysterious in all the gospels, but I think it is probably one of the greatest because it gives us a very real glimpse of who Jesus is. The transfiguration is a rare moment when the veil of heaven is pulled back, the divisions between this world and the next are set aside, and we are given a glimpse of God’s glory. It stands in a line of rare and wonderful moments in the Bible where God reveals God’s self to us: Abraham and the strange visitors, Moses and the burning bush, Moses on the mountain receiving the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, Elijah in the cave encountering God in the sound of sheer silence, and even Jesus in his own baptism by John the Baptist, as a voice from heaven again declares, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” In the transfiguration and all these moments, we see a little more of who God is, sometimes in mighty and powerful ways, sometimes in quiet and mystical ways, and always with a bit of a veil continuing to conceal a portion of God’s glory, leaving us to await an even greater vision of something more than our human minds can comprehend and our human eyes can see.

But I think that the transfiguration may actually be about more than just this. As we discover more of who God is in this moment when we gain a glimpse of Jesus’ glory, I think we also gain a glimpse of the transfiguration that is possible for us. When we see the transfigured Jesus shining in dazzling white clothes, we catch sight of what we will one day be. When we watch with wonder as Jesus gathers with the Law and the Prophets atop the mountain, we see the beginnings of a conversation that will one day be ours to share. And when we hear a voice from a cloud declaring that Jesus is beloved and worthy of our careful ear, we can learn that we too bear the beloved image of God into a world that needs such a gift even in us.

On the mount of transfiguration, as Jesus is transformed before the eyes of the disciples, so we too witness the possibilities of transformation in our lives and in the life of our world. Like Jesus, we will one day be more than we are today. Like Jesus, we will one day participate in transformed life where we will understand the Law and the Prophets in a new and deepened way. And like Jesus, we have heard and will hear again and again God’s voice in the waters of baptism and the food of this table proclaiming that we too are God’s beloved children. In this glimpse of glory for Jesus and us, in this moment when the heavens are torn apart and God’s wonder is revealed, we are strengthened for all the things that are ahead—for the struggles of yet another depressing week of winter, for the challenges of repentance and renewal in this coming season of Lent, for the joys and sorrows of our lives in these days, for living, for dying, and for life eternal.

So as we come down from this mountain and gather around this table, may we be strengthened by this glimpse of what is ahead for us, that all our living might embody the new life we have already seen in the transfiguration and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord so that we might join him and all creation in being made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Marks of Divine Comfort

February 8, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 40:21-31
preached on February 8, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When someone you know and love is hurting, how do you show them comfort? Do you listen carefully to their story of pain and seek to do something to respond directly, assuring them that you care for them very personally and won’t leave them until you have to? Or do you try to explain the technicalities of it all, maybe how an injury or illness triggers a response from the nervous system or how the complexity of the world has set them up for failure, leaving them with no way out but to suffer? I for one hope you aim for the former approach!

Today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah, though, takes something closer to the latter approach. In trying to bring comfort to the exiles of Judah, the prophet sets out to give them a sense of the larger picture and assure them that a mighty and distant God is yet present with them in strange and wonderful ways. The prophet starts out with some rhetorical questions that hardly seem like they might be able to bring comfort and hope.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?

These provocative questions are designed to trigger memory of the past and reconnect the people to what they somewhere deep down know and have heard about God’s presence with them, but they are also painful reminders of the people’s forgetfulness and misunderstanding that stand at the center of their pain and sorrow.

Then the prophet turns to a description of this God that they have known and have heard but yet is very different from what many of us might expect to bring comfort. The God who comforts here is not so much a personal presence amidst pain but rather a powerful, sovereign being who acts with wonder and majesty. As commentator Walter Brueggemann puts it,

The picture of God proposed here is of a God who sits atop the vault of heaven, that is, on top of the earth, in regal splendor, so high and lifted up, so elevated and exalted, that the human inhabitants of the earth are seen only at a distance, as small as insects. (Texts for Preaching Year B)

In our day and age, this seems like a strange way to bring comfort!

Yet the prophet insists that a proper remembrance of the majesty and otherness of this God will bring greater comfort than we could ever imagine. The marks of divine comfort described here are quite different from any of our human comfort, but they are no less real. The prophet catalogs them at great length in these eleven verses. The God who comforts sits above the circle of the earth and stretches out the heavens like a curtain, spreading them like a tent to live in and giving space for God’s people to call home. The God who comforts brings princes to naught and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing, proving that the welfare of all the people matters far more than the wealth of a few. The God who comforts intervenes when life tries to take root in other soils, reminding us that there is no life apart from this great divine presence. The God who comforts knows all of the host of heaven and earth by name and recognizes when even one of them goes missing, proving that even one of such greatness can care deeply about each and every one of us. And the God who comforts does not faint or grow weary and in fact gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless, not holding on to this majesty but seeking to share it for the good of all creation.

In our culture where direct and personal comfort is the norm and preference, imagining that the presence of such a God can bring us comfort is not always easy. I confess that I myself am dismissive of those who seek to comfort others with platitudes describing how God is present amidst pain and suffering, as I find little or no comfort when someone tells me in a time of distress that “God is in control” or that “God has a plan for you in this.” In the everyday struggles of our lives—the pain of everyday illness, the sorrow of loss in our lives, even the uncertainty of most change that we experience as our lives shift and move—we look far less for reminders of God’s great power and majesty in the grand scheme of things and far more for assurance of God’s presence with us in our time of trial.

But when the foundation of life is shaken as it had been for these exiles, reminders of God’s sovereignty and majesty would make a lot more sense, especially considering how much they seemed to have forgotten about God’s presence with them. It seems like that was the real problem here—the people had forgotten so much about God and God’s goodness, not just the ways that God brought them comfort in difficult times but the ways that God’s presence defined the world from beginning to end and brought transformation to every corner of life. They needed the prophet to remind them that God is everlasting, that God’s mind is unsearchable and yet caring, that amidst God’s complete and total otherness God created us and all things and remains ever watchful, that God’s creation did not end in the past but that God’s transformation of creation continues even now.

So what does this kind of word bring to our lives and our world today? What are we to hear and understand in the prophet’s reminders to the returning exiles? What significance can we attach to these things in our world that does not find value in the marks of divine comfort?

First, these words of Isaiah remind us that we must be people who remember. We are called to remember the gifts of God in our lives and in our world. We must remember how God’s presence matters not just for our individual lives or for our church or community or country, but for the whole world. And we must remember how we are divinely insignificant and yet deeply loved by God, for we inhabitants of the earth are like grasshoppers even as we are known and loved by name.

Beyond all this, though, Isaiah’s words can remind us of God’s great power to transform our lives and our world. God is not afraid to disrupt the order of things as it is now so as to make it better for all creation. God’s concern is far less with preserving the here and now and far more with opening up new possibilities for the powerless and hopeless of the world. And God’s power will not be used to prop up the powers and principalities that exploit this world but will instead displace them and strengthen the powerless to lead us to a new way.

And finally, Isaiah’s words help us to understand the myriad ways that God is beyond our understanding. This strange attention of an all-powerful God to those who are powerless just doesn’t make sense to our human minds. The ways that God stands so high above everything and yet remains very much present with us aren’t easy for our minds to fathom. And the incomparability of God and our experience of God to so much of our human experience makes it difficult if not impossible to do anything more than simply stand in awe.

So in the midst of such human pain and despair, the marks of divine comfort are exactly these strange and wonderful things: the memory of God’s presence and being, the power of God’s transformation, and the wonder of a God who is beyond our human understanding. From these marks of comfort, we are assured that those who wait on this God “shall renew their strength,” “mount up with wings like eagles,” “run and not be weary,” and “walk and not faint.”

These promises mean all the more in our world where forgetfulness of God’s presence is the norm, where nothing seems to really change for the better, and where human understanding seems like everything. Yet these marks of divine comfort show us that these are marks of the world that will be set aside, for God comes to us beyond our expectations and transforms us in ways that we could never imagine, opening us to a new way of thinking and believing and living that brings us a different and yet greater comfort than we could ever understand.

So may God show us these strange and wonderful marks of comfort so that we might know this comfort in our lives and our world, share it with those who need it even more than we do, and join in the transformation and new life that come from this God here and now and always. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Food, Freedom, and Faithfulness

February 1, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Corinthians 8:1-13
preached on February 1, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

About ten years ago, author A.J. Jacobs set out on an interesting journey to, as he puts it, “live the ultimate biblical life, or more precisely, to follow the Bible as literally as possible.” He is not a religious person at all—he grew up in a culturally Jewish home here in New York with “a Star of David on top of our Christmas tree,” lived next door to a Lutheran minister, and attended some bar mitzvahs and funerals. Still, when he decided to learn more about religion, he decided to do more than just study it. He decided to take the whole thing seriously as best he could imagine, by spending a year “living biblically.” He set out to follow the various biblical commandments and laws as best he could, everything from loving his neighbor to avoiding shaving his beard to keeping his distance from his wife at certain times of the month! It led to some interesting trips all around the world, a number of very funny stories about other people who weren’t quite as enthusiastic about his project, and a lot of thoughtful reflection on what it means to live in a modern-day context while following an ancient book.

I’m not exactly sure what A.J. Jacobs would do with our text this morning from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It seems very much like the kind of outdated instruction that we so easily ignore and that would be great material for a comedian—from the moment it opens talking about “food sacrificed to idols,” you know it is not going to be easy to connect to our own time! And one commentator I read on this even said, “In all my years of listening to sermons, including my own, I don’t believe that I have ever heard one based on this text.” (V. Bruce Rigdon, “Pastoral Perspective on 1 Corinthians 8:1-13,” Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 1) Still, I think there is something here for us to hear today.

The church in Corinth to which these words were originally addressed was an incredible group of people facing the questions of faithfulness to Christ in a very distinctive culture. The Christian church in Corinth welcomed a cross-section of people from the city. Some had experience in the broader religious community of Corinth where animal sacrifices were common and so sought to eliminate these past practices completely, but others had no connection to these temples and so carried no mental baggage with the sacrifices that were made there. Some were well-off and could easily afford to include meat, usually from the temples, as part of their diet, but others were less affluent and so were more accustomed to a simple, mostly vegetarian diet. Some were outspoken and very much ready to instruct their fellow believers in exactly what they believed was the right thing to do in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but others were less confident in their voices and beliefs and so remained more quiet. In addressing the issue of food sacrificed to idols, Paul was not just looking at what to do with a particular food—he was encouraging the Corinthians to think more deeply and broadly about the nature of their community of faith and how their commitment to one another ought to be expressed in things as mundane as food.

Paul actually sets aside the issue of meat sacrificed to idols pretty quickly. He makes it clear that idols really don’t exist, for God is so great and one that there is no other god worth paying any attention to, even to the extent of spending time to deny its existence! For us, he says, “there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” The matter of eating meat sacrificed to idols, then, is ultimately a matter of personal decision, he says: “We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.”

While there is no direct theological reason to eat or not to eat, Paul makes it clear that there still may be good reason for the Corinthians to avoid this meat, not because the meat itself is bad but because some others might not fully understand this. The freedom to enjoy this meat, Paul insists, is not freedom to get in the way of the faithfulness of others:

Take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block.

For Paul, it seems that the rightness of the act of eating meat—or obeying any law, in fact—is beyond a simple determination of theological correctness and instead rooted in understanding how attentiveness to that law impacts others’ lives and grounded in the deep relationships that emerge among those who encounter one another as sisters and brothers in faith.

This is where these words about food sacrificed to idols start to touch our lives. We may not emerge from this chapter of 1 Corinthians with a clear rule about whether or not Jesus demands that we all be vegetarians, but we do learn here a few deeper truths about what it means to be in Christian community. First, we are reminded that our actions impact others. Everything we do, right or wrong, has an impact on others, for good or for ill. We cannot so disconnect ourselves from the community around us that we will not have an effect on those who journey with us. And so from this text we are called to consider the impact of our actions on others at every step of the way. This does not mean that we avoid doing things out of fear that we will offend or discourage the faithfulness of another. However, it does mean that we approach the freedom that we have with care, considering at every step of the way whether what we do will encourage or discourage others in their walk of faith.

Finally, this reflection on food, freedom, and faithfulness reminds us that relationships truly do matter. We cannot know how others will respond to a particular exercise of freedom if we do not know them. In calling the Corinthians to consider the ways that their exercise of liberty might become a stumbling block for others, Paul calls them as well to something that was likely even more challenging, to reach across all the lines of difference and division and get to know one another. This was not easy—the Corinthians’ primary community for worship and fellowship was in neighborhood house churches, and they only occasionally came together from these smaller gatherings to a big feast involving the entire community of Christians in the city. In our day and age at least, in situations like this, the tendency is to stick together with the people we already know, who likely share similar lives and stories and backgrounds. But Paul’s deeper point here is that they were not excused from getting to know one another in the broader group and shaped beyond their natural communities of life and faithfulness.

So we too face the difficulty of getting to know people who are different from us as we determine whether or not our actions taken out of freedom will get in the way of their faithfulness. And this call to relationship is truly two-way. One side cannot demand that the other must come fully around to their side, for the commitment of life in Christian community is that we learn from each other and are informed by the other’s experiences along the way.

We in this place are not quite as divided by geography and circumstance as the church in Corinth, but there are plenty of places and ways that we need to get to know one another better. There are relationships that we could develop better within this congregation, reaching beyond the natural connections that we have and the people that we like to learn more about one another and seek to support each other in our walk of faith. And there are relationships that we could develop beyond the community of this congregation, discovering more about our sisters and brothers in the faith in our local community, across our city, and around the world to learn about the things that get in the way of our mutual faithfulness and seek a new way of life together.

In these conversations and through these relationships, our eyes are opened to new experiences, our ears exposed to different voices, and our hearts transformed by the stories that we share. We will certainly hear of places where we need to think differently about the implications of our faith and action. We will be challenged in our thinking that our relationships with people who are different from us are just fine. And we will quite likely be called to a new embodiment of justice for the poor, a new understanding of what oppression and privilege mean, and a different pathway to peace in those places where conflict endures.

When we’ve begun this, though, we will gather around this table hearing the call to food, freedom, and faithfulness in a new way, joining together with all our sisters and brothers, those who agree with us and those who disagree with us, those who eat meat and those who abstain, those who follow the Bible as literally as possible and those who are a little more loose about it, as we seek to recognize the presence of Christ among us. When we gather here, at this table, we remember God’s welcome to all people and recommit ourselves to sharing it in words and actions, to listening to and learning from one another, to giving everyone who joins us here the space they need to walk the journey of faith in their own way so that we can all share the joyful feast of this table as we gather to meet the risen Christ here.

So my friends, may we find food, freedom, and faithfulness as we take this journey together, building up one another in love each and every step of the way as we follow Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Day on the Lakeshore

January 25, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 1:14-20
preached on January 25, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

They were just ordinary fishermen doing their jobs on an ordinary day by the lakeshore, but before this day was over Simon and Andrew and James and John would be taking quite a new and different path. Jesus had just begun his work of proclamation and teaching in Galilee, and right away he invited Simon and Andrew—and soon also James and John—to join him along the way.

This was not all that unusual in that day and age. A lot of teachers and preachers wandered the countryside with bands of followers in those first century days, and even some prophets of earlier times had developed similar groups of devotees as they offered their words of comfort and challenge. These groups would wander the towns and villages of Palestine, sharing their varied messages and inviting others to join them along the way.

I suspect that most of these disciples chose who to follow somewhat carefully. Some of them might have had family connections to their teachers, and others probably were had been among the audience for the teacher’s teaching before setting out to roam the countryside. But Mark’s record of the call of Simon, Andrew, James, and John to be Jesus’ disciples implies that there is no such “trial period.” The way Mark tells the story, the disciples had no idea what they might be getting into when they set out to follow Jesus except that something was so compelling about the way he invited them to join him on the journey that they could do nothing other than follow.

Jesus’ message that he had begun to proclaim around Galilee was a curious and strong one:

The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God has come near;
repent, and believe in the good news.

These fishermen on the lakeshore don’t seem to have heard this message, had any history with Jesus or any other similar teacher, or even seemed to have been tired of fishing and looking for a change of pace for a while. Mark simply tells us that Jesus called out to them as he passed by and invited them to join him on his journey:

Follow me and I will make you fish for people.

Then, “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Why did they do this? What was so compelling about this man, his message, or even the way he talked with them that they would leave their nets and follow? How did Jesus so easily convince these two sets of brothers to leave behind their nets, their boats, their careers, their families—everything, really—to join him in wandering around the countryside to proclaim a message that they had barely even heard that might get them in trouble with nearly everyone?

We can’t know the real answers—Mark simply keeps the story too brief—but even this silence speaks volumes about what was going on. It matches up very well with the general mood of Mark’s gospel, where everyone—especially Jesus—seems to be in a big hurry, for the kingdom of God is coming, not just someday far ahead but soon. I think somehow this immediacy and urgency was clear to Simon, Andrew, James, and John when Jesus spoke to them, and they knew that it was the right thing to follow him right away. So these four fishermen responded to Jesus’ urgent call to join him in fishing for people and proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God.

Just as Jesus’ call settled on the lives of these ordinary fishermen on an ordinary day by the lakeshore some two thousand years ago, so it echoes among us too today. I suspect that we don’t hear it with quite the same ears, though. We likely don’t share the same sense of urgency that things need to change as seemed to permeate the world that Mark describes for us. Many of us today struggle to change little bits of our lives to follow Jesus, let alone drop the nets of our lives and leave behind our families and livelihoods to go into an unknown future with him. And so many today are far less open to the kind of radically transformative message that marked Jesus’ proclamation.

Yet Jesus’ call to follow him and join in his proclamation of a time fulfilled, the kingdom of God come near, and the urgency of repentance and new life is still so very strong in our world. It is not easy to figure out what this call means in our lives. It took Simon, Andrew, James, and John three years with Jesus to figure much of anything out about it, and even then they weren’t particularly good at it!

As we struggle to respond individually to this call in our lives, I wonder if it is time for us to think differently about Jesus’ proclamation and invitation, to listen to it less one by one, independent of one another, and to consider how Jesus might be calling all of us together to follow him from the lakeshores of our common life out into the world. There is still of course an imperative for each of us to follow Jesus along the way, to respond to his call out to each one of us on the lakeshore, but the possibilities of transformation that emerge when we collectively respond to Jesus’ call to follow can be far greater. So Jesus calls out to us as his church on the lakeshore, inviting us to put down the nets of our tradition and routine, summoning us to join him in proclaiming that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, and calling us to follow him beyond these walls and out into the world to proclaim and embody the way of repentance and new life each and every day.

Today is a wonderful day to hear this call again as we join together for our annual congregational meeting after worship. When we gather every January to hear reports and take a few votes as we do, we are doing the sort of institutional work that looks a lot more like the routines of fishing that these new disciples left behind. Too often we can pay so much attention to our traditions and institutions that we miss the opportunities to proclaim and be a part of the kingdom of God. But when we are at our best, this meeting today can also propel us forward into something new as we join with those first disciples and countless others since to proclaim the new thing that God is doing.

We have struggled to figure out exactly how to do this over the years. Sometimes we have become distracted by the challenges of maintaining a church building or keeping up the basic elements of our life together. Many times we have scratched our heads wondering how we can find enough people to make the journey worth our while. And other times we have looked so hard for a common missional focus that we have become frustrated when one did not emerge for us.

Yet all along the way, we have kept our eyes and ears open for ways that we could join in the work of proclaiming and embodying the kingdom of God in our midst. We have joined others from around the presbytery in rebuilding homes destroyed during Superstorm Sandy. We have been a consistent support and presence in the work of the Grace Church Food Pantry. And we have reached out to others through other projects brought to us by members and friends who need our support in living out their call to follow Jesus.

In recent months, as we prepared to move into this new year and respond to God’s call to follow Jesus in this time and place, the session looked at all this mission we are already doing with fresh eyes, and rather than trying to replace it all with a unified vision or a single magic project, we decided to embrace the places where we are already working, to recommit ourselves to supporting the emergence of the kingdom of God by supporting this mission in new ways and to work toward deepening and broadening our missional commitments as we look for new places to use our limited resources most effectively. We can’t support anything and everything that comes forward—we have a group already working on setting up some criteria to help guide us in the choices that we make—but when a project helps us to better proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God together, we can support one another in living it out along the way.

So as we journey along the lakeshores of our lives, as we hear Jesus inviting us to follow him, may we leave the nets of our lives behind and join him in proclaiming and embodying the coming of the kingdom of God in this world until he comes to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Over the Face of the Waters

January 11, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 1:1-5 and Mark 1:4-14
preached on January 11, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Beginnings are important moments. How you tell the beginning of a story changes how the rest of it is heard. If I start with “Once upon a time,” it will be really hard for you to hear anything I say as much more than a fairy tale. If I start with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” you’ll expect me to launch into Charles Dickens. And if I start with “So-and-so was born on such-and-such date,” then you’ll be ready for me to give you a full biography.

The beginnings of moments in our lives are important, too. First impressions can make a huge difference in how we interact with one another over the long term. The first time we do something, we set a pattern for how it is done that is often very hard to shake later on. And more and more we are learning how the things we do in the earliest months and years of our lives make a difference throughout all our days.

So today, our texts point us to two beginnings in the Bible—first the beginning of the beginning, the opening words of Genesis that tell of God’s creation of the world, and then the beginning of the story of Jesus, the dramatic shift of a relatively ordinary guy from a relatively ordinary town in the backwaters of the Roman empire to being the one who proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of God and was executed for doing so. More than anything, these beginnings set the stage for how the rest of the story is told and heard, and we do well to let them shape our thinking and understanding of everything that follows.

The beginning of the creation story in Genesis sets the stage for the rest of the Bible. This story seems far less concerned with the exact details or process of creation and far more concerned with making it clear that God is at work in all of it. In this beginning, God creates light where there was none, the first step in the process of transforming the formless void of the earth into something new. And that is the real point of this beginning, to show how God acts to make something out of nothing, how God is in the business of transformation from the very beginning, how the world begins when the voice of God sweeps over the face of the waters.

And so the beginning of the story of Jesus in Mark also sets the stage for everything else that follows in the story of Jesus’ life. This beginning is much like the beginning of Genesis, as both point us to the transformative power of God that becomes so very clear when the voice of God sweeps over the face of the waters.

As he begins his story, Mark skips over so much of the stuff that we usually associate with the beginning of the Jesus story. There’s no mention of angels, shepherds, kings, or even Mary and Joseph. Jesus’ background and upbringing are unimportant and perhaps even distracting to Mark’s version of this story. Instead, in Mark’s telling, Jesus just sort of appears out of nowhere to be baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. John himself had just appeared in the wilderness to proclaim a message of baptism for the forgiveness of sins. People quickly identified him as a prophet, but John knew that his biggest role was to point forward to another who was still to come:

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.

And so when Jesus was baptized by John, God’s transformative power was revealed once again. The heavens were torn apart, and the Spirit descended like a dove upon Jesus. Then a voice moved over the face of the waters, announcing to Jesus,

You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Jesus’ beginning was not quite over yet, either. After a brief interlude of forty days of temptation in the wilderness that we’ll hear more about in a few weeks, Mark continues setting the stage for everything else in his story of Jesus. “After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God,” bringing a message of transformation:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

As the one whom John said was coming after him, Jesus took John’s message of repentance one step further. There was more than an individual change of heart going on here—God’s transformative power was coming into its fullness in Jesus’ presence, and everyone was called to join in. All this became clear for Jesus in the waters of his baptism, in that moment when John held him under waters of the muddy Jordan River to symbolize repentance and new life. It was then, as he came up out of the water, that all the dots of his life connected for the first time. When Jesus experienced the heavens torn apart, the Spirit descending like a dove upon him, and a voice proclaiming his identity once and for all, he understood his mission and call in a new and complete way. This was not a total surprise to him, but as that voice called out over the face of those waters, he entered fully and completely into the work of fulfilling the time and embodying the kingdom of God.

In the waters of our baptism, we see much the same thing emerging around us. There is certainly nothing magical in those waters even as they mark the beginning of our lives of faith, and we are very unlikely to have a vision of heavens torn apart and a dive-bombing Spirit dove, let alone a heavenly voice offering a loud and clear declaration of our beloved status. But when our very human voices move over these waters to affirm the vows of repentance and new life for ourselves and to pray for God’s presence, the heavens are torn apart as God joins us here, the Spirit descends upon us to seal God’s love and grace upon us in a new and different way, and a voice moves over the waters to tell us that we too are beloved children of God. And so we too are called with Jesus to join in fulfilling the time and embodying the kingdom of God.

From his baptism, as the voice moved over those waters, Jesus was called to live this kind of life of transformation, to declare and embody God’s reign. This was not an entirely new thing. Jesus followed after a long line of those who had prepared the way. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Miriam, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and countless other women and men carried God’s message across the generations. And Jesus followed very much in the footsteps of John the Baptist and even other similar, now-unknown prophets of his own day who were setting the stage for this message and this life. From the beginning, Jesus was called to proclaim and live the fullness of God’s new thing that already had been taking hold for generations, guiding others to the light of this new day so that they too could live in justice, peace, love, hope, and grace each and every day.

And so we also are called by the voice of God over the waters of our baptism to live lives of transformation as we declare and embody God’s reign in our lives and our world. We too follow in a long line of prophets and saints who have gone before us to prepare the way and make it clear that we are not doing this all alone. We too have companions on this journey who set the stage for the message and life of transformation that stand at the center of the coming reign of God. And ultimately, as our story begins at this font, we too are called to proclaim and live the fullness of God’s new thing that had been taking hold for generations, guiding others to the light of this new day so that they too could live in justice, peace, love, hope, and grace each and every day.

So today as we remember Jesus’ baptism and reaffirm the promises made in our own baptisms, may God’s voice move over these waters once again to remind us that we are God’s beloved children and to encourage us to continue proclaiming and living the reign of God until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Amen.