At the American Museum of Natural History in New York City there is a permanent exhibit called The Cosmic Pathway, a 360-foot-long walkway that spirals through the 13-billion-year timeline of the universe. You begin with the Big Bang and wander along viewing displays and artifacts of cosmological history; each step you take covering millions of years. And at the end–the last display–is one tiny line, the width of an eyelash. It depicts the length of the human era relative to that entire span of time. The width of an eyelash.

It’s mind-blowing.

When I first saw it, I was tempted to curl up into a fetal position upon pondering the prospect of humanity’s cosmological insignificance. But as people of faith in a Creator, to quote St. Bonaventure, “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” –a Creator whose power is beyond imagination and yet who numbers every sparrow and each hair on our heads—rather than curling us into a fetal position, this can break us open to sheer wonder. Everything matters to God—every atom. And it has done so from the very first divine utterance.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light.”

…and it was good.

We’ve been here before in the last couple of weeks. In his Christmas sermons and in his recent epistle Mark has commented on how these words from Genesis are reflected in the prologue to John’s Gospel– “In the beginning was the Word”—describing Christ’s presence at the beginning of time: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” During this season when we celebrate Jesus’ Incarnation, Epiphany, and Baptism we can’t help but be confronted with the juxtaposition between the immediacy of a babe in a manger and the long grand spiral of Creation history. Where is God to be found in all of it? Creation, Incarnation, Cosmology; these are the big themes of theology that help us ponder: Who are we? Whose are we? Why are we here? What is ours to do?

John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

The people who came to John at the Jordan were not unfamiliar with rituals of purification. Everyday Jewish practice involved ritual washing after contact with what biblical storyteller Richard Swanson calls the “holy mysteries” of blood, reproduction, and death—all normal parts of daily life, but so closely tied to the sacred nature of life itself as to point beyond the everyday into the extra-ordinary. So, the Jewish rites of washing came to be a way of re-orienting a person back into the ordinary responsibilities of everyday life.

But that’s not what John was doing as he baptized at the Jordan. He was doing the opposite. His baptism pointed people to the inbreaking Kingdom—to the Messiah. Repent, John says, the one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; the world is about to change, and you are called to be part of the unfolding of God’s Dream. So, rather than re-orienting people from the extraordinary to the ordinary as would be the usual purpose of ritual washing, this was a baptism that, as Swanson says, “…allow[ed] people to cross over to the truly extraordinary act of re-balancing the world, which is a holy mystery if ever there was one. Washing [was] the gateway.” 

The gateway to creating a more just and compassionate —beloved–community.

But, as John proclaims, it’s not just about water. And it’s not just about a simple stepping over into the extraordinary—it’s about blowing through the boundaries between the divine and earthly.

“…he will baptize you with the Spirit.”

What does that mean? And what does that mean for us?

Let’s return to the grand themes of Genesis: “…a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

In Hebrew, this is the ruach of Elohim—the breath of God, present at Creation. The breath of God first blown into the nostrils of the first human. The very same breath of God, we might imagine, that raised Jesus from the dead. In other words, the breath of God that defies the power of death.

Jesus will baptize you with that Spirit.

Swanson writes about this possibility: “This same breath now creates new life not limited by death in all those baptized into Jesus’ death and gives gifts that create a new experience of life for all those who have this [“ruach”] blown into them…’being washed in the Breath of resurrection’ does indeed mark a momentous crossing between ordinary and extraordinary…” [which] opens to us a world in which [earthly] Power does not have the last word.”

What John proclaims to the people at the Jordan is that Jesus offers a baptism with the life force of Creation, against which the principalities and powers of their day will ultimately not prevail. Not that the principalities and powers won’t try, and even succeed in the short run. And that will be the challenge of baptism, then as it is now. 

So, Jesus comes to the Jordan and is baptized by John—a typically understated Markan description of a momentous event. This simple exchange is at the same time a breathtaking encounter with the Divine: As Jesus breaks the surface of the water the Spirit tears, rends, rips the heavens open. This rending of the veil between divine and earthly is not meant to be mended, but leaves behind gaps and thin places for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. 

I was delighted to learn that the translation of the word, “dove” for the bird that descended upon Jesus might easily be “pigeon.” I prefer to think of the Holy Spirit as a pigeon—not an image that is idealized or softened, but gritty, ubiquitous, and pesky. A gentle dove can be frightened away, but you can’t get rid of pigeons. C.S. Lewis was reputed to have noted that the Holy Spirit isn’t lighter than matter, but actually heavier…the real substance of God acting in Creation

And it is this same gritty, pesky, substantial Spirit who will immediately drive Jesus into the wilderness for forty days of temptation by Satan. But, crucially, not before he has been claimed by God– as Beloved.

This story, this encounter at the Jordan, like the Cosmic Pathway at the Museum of Natural History, is the intertwining of the intimate and the all-encompassing, the ordinary and extraordinary……the comforting and the disturbing. And this is what draws me to Baptism as a sacrament. The water, even setting aside its rich symbolism, and that tender moment with family and community—these are visceral and immediate—even elemental aspects of Baptism.  And then the movement of the gritty, pesky, pigeonlike Spirit is a thing of joy, and also of challenge. Because the Covenant that we proclaim–to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to work for justice and peace, and to respect the dignity of every human being—these are not just words. They point to the long spiraling arc of God’s Dream, and most important–and even a little bit scary–they point to our extraordinary call to be part of the unfolding of that Dream. 

Our baptism, like the baptism of John and of Jesus, should be as disturbing as it is joyful. It does not insulate us from suffering, or from the suffering of our neighbor, whether next door or half a world away. Rather it equips us with community and through the Spirit to be part of the healing and repair of the world. And through it all, God claims us, irrevocably, as Beloved.