Pastor's Message

“As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven” ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’” Mark 1:10-11

I am reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. What I have found to be most shocking about life in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century is how closely acquainted people were with death. The loss of infants and young children, husbands, wives and friends brought grief into almost everyone’s life. Life expectancy was short. To live 60 or 70 years was considered a long life. Death lurked behind every fever, cough and sniffle. This grief shaped the way people lived and looked at life.

How different for us today. We expect to live actively into our 80s, and most of us know people who have lived almost 20 years – a relatively full life itself – in retirement. That is not to say that we know nothing of death and dying. We too are people who lived with loss and tragedy. We have suffered the death of children and spouses, sisters and brothers. In some neighborhoods in our own state life expectancy is alarmingly short. We too have had to come to terms with death. But more often than not, we are surprised by it. It comes from outside our normal expectations. It is easy to ignore death for long stretches, and in some instances to welcome death as a peaceful, liberating end for a person we love dearly, but who has been confined to suffering.

When Jesus came up out of the Jordan, he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him. What a wonderful summary of what Jesus accomplishes for us in his life, death and resurrection. He opens heaven for us. He reconciles us to God. He brings the Spirit, the divine breath of life to us as God’s gift of love and mercy. Because Jesus has died for us and rose again, we can hear God say to us in our baptism, “You are my child, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” In Jesus Christ, God has removed the sting of death, and brought light and life to all people. It is God’s gift to us, a heaven torn open.

Yet, the gifts God gives in baptism – forgiveness of sins, life, the Holy Spirit – are gifts for living life here and now on earth. Jesus emerges from the waters of his baptism to announce the arrival of God’s kingdom among people, and to engage in a powerful resistance against those forces of death and oppression that cause suffering. Jesus walks wet from the Jordan and into a life, a life lived, died and lived again … for us and for all of God’s creation. When we were baptized into Jesus, we were baptized into his life, for the sake of the world. When we bring our children to be baptized, we bring them to enlist them into Jesus’ life, for the sake of the world.

For years, we have used the promises of baptism to comfort us against the sting of death. But that is only part of what God does for us through the sacrament. By the grace of God, those same promises empower a life of discipleship, a life of resistance, mission and purpose. As we enter another “green season” of life and growth in the Spirit, I pray that God pours out the Spirit on us so we too can live out the promises and the implications of our baptism and proclaim the good news of Jesus in all areas of our life … on the job, gathered with friends, in our home, and, yes … even at the graveside.