All Saints, Dorval
February 18, 2024
The Confirmation & Reception class of 2022
Every year in the lectionary, the yearly cycle of scripture readings in worship, we get some version of the story of John the Baptist three times.
First in Advent, when John is the herald of the coming Kingdom of God; then on the Sunday celebrating the Baptism of Jesus, when – as you might expect – John baptizes Jesus; and finally today, the first Sunday in Lent, when the emphasis is on what happens immediately afterward, as Jesus is driven into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan.
This year, our gospel readings come from the Gospel according to St. Mark, a book that’s notorious for its brevity and directness. Mark has no time to waste in telling this story. The word “immediately” occurs eleven times in the first chapter. And so compared to Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of Jesus’ baptism and temptation, Mark’s is almost comically compressed. There is no dialogue between Jesus and John in the river, or between Jesus and Satan in the desert. If we only had Mark’s account, we wouldn’t even know that Jesus had fasted during his time in the wilderness, or that it had lasted forty days. In a mere seven verses, Mark veers us from the baptism through the temptation to the arrest of John the Baptist and the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, as he comes to Galilee, saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
As my colleagues and I discussed this passage in our weekly Zoom sermon prep session this week, we observed that this very spare telling of the story left us with a lot of questions about, or gaps in, the story. Two of those questions and gaps in particular stood out to me, and I think together they point us toward something important.
The first gap or question is the complete absence of any kind of motivation, or what a literary scholar would call interiority, for any of what happens. John and Jesus do this, and then they do that, but we get no insight into what’s going on in their heads when they do; the closest we come is being told that Jesus was “driven” by the Spirit into the wilderness, which really just leads to a host of other questions.
And the second gap or question is – what, exactly, is “the good news”? Throughout the whole long, breakneck first chapter of Mark – which begins “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God” – it’s never specified. Jesus teaches, calls disciples, heals, “proclaims the message” – but we are never actually told what the message is.
So what is the important thing these gaps are pointing us to?
I have had the great joy and privilege, throughout my career and quite frequently here at All Saints’, of meeting people who are coming back to church after a long time away, or who are interested in baptism for themselves or their children, or who have just been feeling the proddings of the Holy Spirit for reasons they can’t explain, and want to know more about this whole God thing.
These conversations are genuinely one of my favourite things to do with my time. And yet, I’m always conscious of a nagging sense of inadequacy. I can answer lots of their questions – what does the Anglican Church believe about this and that, what does Henry the Eighth have to do with all of it, what outreach ministries does your church do, do you officiate gay weddings?
But it often feels like there’s a whole other level of questions that I don’t know how to answer and the person I’m talking to may not even know how to articulate. Questions like “why is God moving in my life?” and “what difference will it make for me if I get baptized or join the church?” and “what are we all actually doing here together, anyway?”
Because all I can really say in response to those deeper questions is, “Keep showing up, and see what happens.”
And I wonder whether, when you get right down to it, that’s the message that Jesus is spreading in the first chapter of Mark. Keep showing up – follow this teacher who’s gathering his disciples and driving out demons – and see what happens. The Kingdom of God has come near, and the only way to find out what that means is to be part of it.
In the Baptismal Covenant, the six questions that sum up what we are promising to do when we are baptized into the Body of Christ, the very first question, the one that is foundational to all the others, is: “Will you continue in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?”
We don’t ask people to make this commitment because we want to take attendance at church services and give them a guilt trip when they don’t come. We ask for this commitment because this is what following Jesus is – to put yourself in the places that Jesus has promised to show up – in the reading of God’s Word in community, in the sharing of the Bread of Life around the altar, in the encounter with your fellow members of Christ’s Body, and in conversation with God in prayer. And then to see what happens.
Throughout Mark’s Gospel, Jesus often tells people not to tell other people about things he has said and done – a weird habit that scholars call “the Messianic Secret”. The general consensus is that Jesus does this because he wants people to wait for the end of the story before drawing conclusions about him, his identity, his work, and his message. And certainly Mark seems to want people to finish his Gospel and understand the book as a whole before they try to answer the question of “what is Jesus’ message?” That message can only be understood retroactively, in the light of the empty tomb.
Today we are enrolling three young women for baptism. Nicole, Victoria, and Liliana* will be baptized on Easter Sunday. You’re probably thinking, “Wait, enrollment for baptism? We’ve never done that before!” And you’re right. The custom of enrollment comes from the concept of the catechumenate, an ancient practice of baptismal preparation from back when most Christians were adult converts, but which various efforts have been made to revive since the mid-20th century.
The prayers that we’ll use for the enrollment of these three candidates are selected and adapted from the version of the catechumenate provided in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Occasional Services. The vision of the catechumenate laid out in that book is one that only a very large church with multiple full-time ministry staff would be able to achieve (or perhaps, a parish of our size with one or two fanatically committed volunteers), but that doesn’t stop me, when reading it, from feeling more than a little wistful about how wonderful it would be to have weekly classes and a whole formal structure for incorporating seekers and the newly baptized into the life of the church, rather than the rather haphazard way that we do in fact do it.
And yet, today’s reading from Mark, oddly, gives me comfort. Jesus wasn’t extensively catechized by John the Baptist. (Or, if he was, you wouldn’t know it from Mark.) He didn’t meet for weeks on end with his disciples before telling them to leave their nets and follow him. If he had a well-developed “elevator speech” that was “the message” that he preached as he called people to repentance, Mark hasn’t preserved it.
Rather, Mark depicts Jesus praying, healing, driving out demons, and traveling around Galilee attracting crowds.
And here, in this place, we invite people who have felt the Spirit prodding in their lives to come to the baptismal font and promise to “continue in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.” Not because we have a definite idea of what difference that will make in their lives, but precisely because we don’t. Because each of us brings something different to this community, and to our ministries in the world. Because God is always showing up in new ways. Because God has promised to meet us, in these odd and wondrous rituals, in these awkward and ancient texts, in the presence of our fellow very imperfect people, and in the prayers, spoken and unspoken, that fill the air.
After church, I’ll be meeting with Nicole, Victoria and Liliana and talking about what baptism is and what it means. But I can never provide an adequate explanation of that question, only an invitation – come, and let us find out together the good news that God has for us in this time and place.
Amen.
*Footnote: it turned out that Nicole and Victoria had the flu on Sunday, so we’ll be enrolling them (God willing) this Sunday, and between preaching this sermon and posting it I’ve heard that two of Liliana’s siblings, Liam and Alicia, also want to be baptized. Praise God!
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