Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
1 Peter 3. 18-22; Mark 1. 9-15
“repent ye, and believe the gospel.”
We see all sorts of patterns in the universe that repeat on vastly different scales. Most famously the swirl of water down the bathplug has the same pattern as that of the clouds in a big storm system coming in off the Atlantic to batter us – like last night’s – and that of the impossibly slow swirl of stars in the arms of a distant spiral galaxy.
Snowdrops and raindrops six Februarys ago at Winterborne Kingston, Dorset. © Gerry Lynch
The evidence of order in the universe is everywhere. At this time of year, we are particularly aware of the natural world following the pattern of the seasons. The flowers have arrived early in this exceptionally mild winter – we have not only the snowdrops but the violets and daffodils and even some of the blossoms. In very different climates, something similar happens. I have been on the South African/Namibian border in August, when the spring rain comes and briefly turns that parched landscape into a riot of multi-coloured daisies. There as here, what we see is new life following death.
In today’s readings, we see this pattern of new life following death, as part of an ordered universe. Jesus, God made human, does not start His earthly ministry until he has been baptised by John the Baptist. John was a great man but still a human being, so this Gospel reading is saying something very powerful—God puts Himself under human authority here, and respects John’s own distinct calling.
Baptism is rich in symbolism—a symbolic drowning before a rising to new life, a drowning of hate and selfishness and contempt and all the sins that keep us from loving God and our neighbours as we should. Our Epistle reading, from St Peter, looks back to the story of Noah’s Ark as a something that pointed towardsbaptism—the flood marks the close on an old and wicked order, a terrible but necessary death so that new life could begin.
St Mark’s Gospel was the earliest of the biographies of Jesus to be written. In it, we hear nothing of Jesus’ origins, whether human or supernatural – no stories of angels or shepherds, Mary or Joseph, no mention of any divine Word who already was before the beginning of time. Mark doesn’t start his story with Jesus at all, but with John proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. This morning’s passage comes just a few lines later, and this where Jesus enters the tale—we jump straight into “Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”
This beginning shows how central baptism, with all its rich symbolism, was to the story told by the earliest Christians.
We need stories about the universe and human naturethat we share with other people so we can make sense of our lives. The world is far too complex a place for any of us to understand it entirely from our own intellectual resources. You might hear the fancy term metanarrative used to describe these shared stories, although I prefer to talk about a mega-story, which is a bit less technical. These mega-stories are what form our sense of right and wrong, our understanding of the meaning of life and what it means to live a good life, of the great mysteries of birth, death, creation, and the web of life. Of course, each of us has ideas of our own, but we are profoundly shaped by those we live among, and also those with the power to set the cultural and religious agenda for the whole of society.
In our culture and time, there are two great stories competing for our allegiance. One is that of Christianity, and the other that of the post-Christian Enlightenment. These two stories have influenced one another profoundly, and nearly all of us, in the West in the early 21st Century, will draw our understanding of the world in part from both of them.
There are other important mega-stories in the world, most obviously that of Islam. Communism, or Marxism-Leninism if you like, was another one of these mega-stories, which once seemed to represent the future of humanity, yet collapsed suddenly and with staggering speed when I was a schoolboy.
The Enlightenment says that the universe, and the place of human beings in it, can only be understood by logic and reason. The way to a better future for the human race is through more scientific knowledge and technological power, which will able us to satisfy more wants of more people. Some variations believe that scientific knowledge might even help people live morally better lives, less prone to treating others badly—but that sort of thinking is much less common today that it was in the 1960s, and vastly less common than it was in the decades before the First World War when people really believed that, crime, for example, would simply eradicated as the frontiers of knowledge advanced.
The Enlightenment mega-story is lovely one, promising a utopia for the generations which follow us. So did Communism, but both are deluded about the darkness that is only part, but an unavoidable part, of human nature. Both also share the idea that all our problems can be solved by more knowledge, power, and technology. To always grow more powerful, to have ever greater dominance over the environment that sustains us, to recognise no limits to our growth—this is the model of the cancer cell. It is no great surprise that Communist and Capitalist societies alike have had the same sort of influence on our planetary body as cancer does to the human body.
The Christian alternative is that the universe has a pattern and an order set by its creator, which humans are free to try to exceed or circumvent, but doing so has consequences. Central to this pattern is that all things are finite and must die, but that new life inevitably follows death.
Many of you are frightened of the present state of the world. So am I – but will throw in that although we’re inclined to forget this, it felt worse in the 1980s, when nuclear war constantly seemed around the corner. We got through that era. But let’s say things do go wrong—go back to that story of Noah, which Peter says points towards baptism. Just as that cataclysm was the birth of a new world, should some cataclysm befall us in our time, while life is short for any of us individually, it would also be the birth of something new, perhaps even the Second Coming of Christ – we’ll come back to that in a moment.
Of course, the Noah story is a myth: many myths tell truths that cold facts cannot, as they lack sufficient insight into the human condition. Myths are central to these mega-stories which we use to make sense of our world, including the mega-stories that claim to be entirely rational. The Noah myth is truly one for our times, an era when our wickedness and greed may well lead us to destruction by the rising waters.
Unless, of course, we repent. Repent is a very loaded word, but it just means stopping doing bad things and trying to do good things instead. For our civilisation, repentance may mean to stop trying to act like gods and once more follow the true and living God, who is Father, Holy Spirit, and the Son, Jesus Christ. This Jesus Christ submitted himself to His own divine pattern of creation, of death before new life, of respecting human authority and autonomy. So, Jesus’ return to reign with a degree of justice and freedom we could never manage for ourselves is something we should long for, not fear.
This same Jesus promised eternal life to all who believed in Him. So, “repent ye, and believe the gospel”!
Amen.
Top banner image – spring flowers in Namaqualand, South Africa, August 2011. © Gerry Lynch
