2024.07.28 | Into the Waters

“Into the Water”

Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Tenth Sunday after Pentecost,
July 28, 2024
Genesis 1:1-5 & Mark 1:9-12

In the beginning.

In the beginning, Skywoman fell from a hole in the Skyworld. She fell for what seemed like eternity; eventually, she saw the world below was covered by oceans.

In the beginning, there was sky above and water below. Obatala climbed down from the sky on a golden chain and spread the sand he carried to create the earth.

In the beginning, when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Creation stories from around the world are diverse and have great variation, but there is one motif that is almost universally common across many dispersed ancient cultures: the primeval waters. From the stories of the indigenous people who lived around the Great Lakes of North America, to the Yoruba people on the west coast of Africa, the Judeo-Christian tradition from the Mediterranean, and, as we have been learning this morning, to the Polynesian cultures of the Pacific Ocean, our origin stories tell of a world that began in water.

Not every creation story begins with a watery world, but so many of them do that folklorists and mythologists call the common image of a watery creation the “cosmic ocean.” In the beginning, there was water.

Before I continue with an exploration of our scripture texts for this morning, I want to acknowledge, with humility, that the texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition have often been used not as agents of spiritual enlightenment, but as weapons of colonization and oppression. The beautiful form of hula we are experiencing today was suppressed, in part, by congregational missionaries—by my spiritual ancestors—and for that, I am deeply sorry.

Even today, in the state of Louisiana, the governor has demanded that a sacred text from the Hebrew Bible be imposed on the children in public schools, without acknowledging the sacred texts of any other cultures and faiths in the school. I believe this is done not out of a sense of reverence for sacred scripture, but out of a belief in one’s own cultural supremacy and the continuation of a colonizing mindset. So I share these texts today not because I believe they are superior to the sacred stories of any other culture, but instead with a spirit of exploration and learning, and with a desire for mutual understanding.

When I was younger, I used to get uncomfortable when I read the origin stories that are told in the very beginning of the book of Genesis. I think the main reason for this was that I had been educated in science. I know that the world could not have been created in six days, and I was unwilling to live with the cognitive dissonance produced by trying to believe that both science and the Bible are true. I suspect that I am not alone in this. I suspect that many progressive Christians feel that we must end up dismissing our faith tradition’s origin stories as quaint ancient tales of a naïve people who didn’t understand anything about how the world really works.

But I think this dismissiveness does a disservice to our sacred texts. They were preserved by our ancestors for a reason. And, if we are willing to separate what is true from what is factual, we need not experience cognitive dissonance, and we need not dismiss the stories altogether or treat them as unimportant or as having nothing to say about our spiritual lives and our relationship with our creator.

I do not believe that the Bible is a science book. I do not believe that it contains “facts” as we understand them in science: something that can be proven by the scientific method of exploration and experiment. But I do believe that the Bible contains “truth,” and by that, I mean stories that are not necessarily factual but that are true, because they offer us spiritual knowledge, they offer us a deeper understanding of our relationship with each other, and they offer us a deeper understanding of our relationship with God.

Here are some things that I think are true about the creation story in Genesis. First of all, God created. I don’t understand necessarily how it happened; I don’t understand exactly how the divine spark initiated the creation of the universe, but the truth that we receive from the stories in Genesis is that God is a creator.

Secondly, creation is messy. It’s full of chaos—but it’s also full of beauty. Another truth that we see in the beginning of Genesis, is that God creates movement. One sense of movement is from not seeing to seeing. There was darkness, and now there is light. In the act of creation God brings illumination into the world.

Another aspect of the movement that God creates in this passage is the movement from taking chaos—a disorganized nothing—and creating from it order and substance. The truth here is that God makes a way out of no way. God organizes the chaos, so that we can find our way through it.

Finally, the creation stories of Genesis set up a truth that exists throughout the entire Bible: the truth that our relationship with the Divine is intricately connected with creation, with the wilderness, with Nature (with a capital N). In these first few lines from the Hebrew Bible, we see how that intricate connection begins with our connection to water.

The creation story, where God separates the heavens from the sea and raises land from the waters, is followed by other stories of water. In another story from Genesis, the powerful flood waters wash away the sins of humanity and through Noah, humanity has a chance to renew itself. In Exodus, the Israelites escape slavery by passing through the waters of the Red Sea, and, in the story from 2 Kings, the general Naaman, with the help of the prophet Elisha, is freed from a debilitating skin disease through the cleansing waters of the Jordan river.

These stories of the Hebrew Bible show the importance of water ritual to this ancient culture. Before there was Christian baptism, there was Jewish tevilah, or total immersion in water as an act of purification. The tevilah was required in many different ritual circumstances—before marriage, or after returning from war, for example—and as part of the ritual for conversion to the Jewish faith.

With a culture so steeped in stories and ritual practice with water, it really is no surprise to come to the beginning of the New Testament and find the prophet John the Baptist standing in the sacred river and ritually immersing or pouring water over those who wish to repent and receive new life. And it’s no surprise that this ritual became a core practice of those who followed Jesus.

Of the two primary sacred rituals mentioned in the New Testament —baptism and communion— baptism is the only one that appears in all four gospels, and is mentioned more times throughout the other New Testament texts than the ritual of the Eucharist. It’s apparent that it was very early on the way both Gentiles and Jews were initiated into the path as followers of Jesus. And in the early years of Christianity, that ritual of baptism happened the way that it’s described in the gospels—out in the wilderness, in flowing water.

One of the things that has happened in the intervening 2000 years is that we’ve domesticated baptism. Rather than engaging in baptism the way our Christian ancestors did, by being immersed in living, flowing water in the wilderness, we’ve brought baptism into the human-built environment, and now we sprinkle a little bit of water onto a person’s head, careful not to get them too wet.

And because of this domestication, we’re missing one of the most important points of baptism: Jesus’ immersion into water is not only a ritual that initiates him into a new relationship with God and into a new ministry with God’s people. It also initiates him into relationship with the wild river and into intimate, vulnerable union with the living world.

I recently learned about a grammatical nuance in the baptism story as it’s told in the Gospel of Mark. Bear with me here, because I’m going to get a little nerdy with the biblical translation. This is how the grammatical nuance is described by Victoria Loorz, author of Church of the Wild:

Mark used the preposition in [...] to locate the particular place where John was baptizing people: in the river Jordan [the Greek word used is ἐν: “in, a location”]. The people were baptized in [ἐν] the river. [...] Jesus, on the other hand, was baptized into the river [the Greek word used here is εἰς: “into, a penetration of or union with”]. And then a wild bird descended into Jesus [usually translated as “onto,” but the Greek word again is εἰς], who is then sent into the wilderness. The Greek preposition εἰς is not positional. It is relational.

This distinction in the Greek is akin to the difference between being from a place and being of a place. It’s the difference between “I am from California“ and “I love, care for, depend on, and am an integral part of a particular place that is in California.” It’s the difference between hiking to a waterfall by hiking along a trail in the forest and consciously walking into a forest by investing time and attention to really get to know the waterfall, season after season, and establishing an authentic relationship. [...] There is an unmediated presence of God that can only be experienced outside the human constructs of civilization when we enter into reverent relationship with the natural world.

So Jesus was baptized in the same location as the others: the river Jordan. But the writers of the sacred story used this word εἰς, into, to emphasize that the baptism of Jesus was different. It initiated him into relationship with the wild river. Into, [...] union with: these are mystical [...] words of deep connection, words that take seriously the call to love and belong to a place. Baptism into a river is a wilderness immersion that initiates an intimate, vulnerable union with the living world. (1)

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth; in the beginning, the Big Bang exploded the elements of creation across an ever-expanding universe. Whether through our faith tradition, or through science, we understand that the planet we inhabit, and the universe that surrounds us, is astounding. We hear the call of creation into sacred relationship with our achingly beautiful planetary home.

One atom of hydrogen, two atoms of oxygen—bound together to form the essence of life: water. Here’s a place where the world of science and the world of sacred scripture agree—water IS life! We are born in water, and water reminds us of God’s creation in both our holy rituals and our daily use of this precious element. Water invites us into the sacred.

What if we started thinking of baptism—indeed, all of our interactions with water—not as perfunctory ritual, but as intimate immersion into the living world? What if we saw each interaction with water as an invitation from capital-N Nature into the sacred? “Jesus was baptized into the full wildness of the world, and we are invited there too,” as Victoria Loorz says:

No longer is this simply a baptismal commitment to your own private spiritual journey or even to the spiritual connection with those within your religious community. This is an immersion into the waterfall, into real relationship with all the creatures of and in the actual waters of one’s baptism, and into a commitment toward the thriving of the whole creative and alive planet.

Friends, I hope that this week, as you perform the water rituals of daily life—washing our hands, cleansing our bodies, quenching our thirst—we will see each interaction with water as sacred. Allow yourself to feel immersed in the wild river that our water came from and say yes to God’s invitation to intimate connection with creation.

1) Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (Minneapolis: Broadleaf, 2021), 58-59.
2) Ibid., 60.

Brenda Loreman