Speaker: Sarah Martin
Text: Mark 1:1-8

I’ll be honest: I’ve never really loved this story.

It’s just, well, kinda boring. Many Bible verses inspire or comfort me, from “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” in Genesis, to “Behold, I am making all things new” in Revelations. And literally none of them are in here. Or even anything close. It’s just a story about some people getting dunked in a river. Captivating, I’m sure.

Also, the whole scene just reminds me of a tent revival meeting. Like the people are all there to get “saved” by “accepting Jesus into their hearts” or whatever. I know I’m projecting concepts anachronistic to the original participants here, but I can’t help it; it’s just what comes to mind. This story feels like just more fuel on the fire for problematic theologies that boil redemption down to some sort of cosmic math equation, with humanity’s badness on one side and Jesus’s very real human blood on the other.

All this is why I asked if someone could read the poem Lily just read, which I found while flipping through my phone bookmarks trying to decide if I should say yes to speaking today. Maybe it’s a bit of a cop-out, talking about a poem in a sermon. But sometimes some non-Bible writing can shed new light on a Bible story. I’m sure Becca Lachman, at least, is so happy right now. Hey Becca, if you’re listening.

One connection between this poem and our story today is that it starts with someone changing their mind. This is something I thought about after Joel reminded me that “changing your mind” is a broader meaning of the word translated as “repentance” in this story. “Don’t be foolish,” the poet says. Seems like good advice. Then they instantly change their mind: “No, be foolish.” Why? Because, “of course your journey is impossible.” Okay.

We aren’t told why droves of people went to see John. (The Bible, in general, doesn’t tend to go too hard exploring the psychology of its characters.) It’s easy to wonder if they ever felt a bit silly, seeking out such an eccentric messenger. Remember, John the Baptist lived in the wilderness and ate bugs. I can picture any of his audience as this poem’s speaker, telling themselves it’s okay to be foolish because sometimes the best path looks impossible at its start.

What I love most about this poem, though, is that it’s about delight. Joy. Awe. Well, to me. I make no claims on the poet’s intent, but we have to see things through our own eyes, and that’s what I feel when I get to the end of this poem.

If delight’s connection with today’s Bible story is not instantly clear to you, you’re probably not alone. Because it’s less in the text itself–which as I said is pretty sparse on psychological detail–and more something that exists in my own head. But I’ll try to explain.

After Joel reminded me that “repentance” could also mean “changing your mind,” I did head to Google to see if there were any other relevant linguistic oddities I could exploit. There wasn’t a whole lot, but I did learn that when John talks about “baptizing with water” and “baptizing with the holy spirit,” the word he’s using really just means “immersed.”

Of course this seemed incredibly obvious as soon as I read it. But I love how much more evocative John’s words are, if you replace the word “baptized” with the more literal word “immersed.” “I’ve immersed you in water,” John says. “But he”–meaning, Jesus–“will immerse you in the Holy Spirit.” 

He will immerse you in Holy Spirit.

This story suddenly seems a lot less boring.

I’m not entirely sure what it means to be immersed in the Holy Spirit. Is that the sort of thing one can ever really be sure about? Probably not. But my best guess after 28 years on this earth is that it has something to do with being able to find joy and beauty and goodness in the world. AKA, delight.

Maybe this is just because delight strikes me as being closely connected to love. After all, delight is an emotion, a perception, which draws you out of yourself and your own quest for survival. If you’ve ever been delighted by something–and hopefully you have–if you’ve ever been captivated by a story, or beautiful music, or laughed so hard you couldn’t breathe, then you know the power of delight to make you both less and more of yourself. More yourself, because what delights each person is somewhat unique. Less yourself, because delight focuses you entirely outward, on the object of your delight.

Which seems like a pretty good summary of what love is. And we like to talk about God as being Love, about God’s love being the foundation of existence itself. So delight seems important.

Also, one of my favorite Bible verses talks about delight, so there’s that. This is Proverbs 8, where the anthropomorphic character of Wisdom tells us all about how she was made as, quote, “the first of God’s works”. Then she tells us, “I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in God’s presence, rejoicing in God’s whole world, and delighting in humankind.” I love this passage, because it’s as if the first creature herself was delight embodied. As if the wisdom of God is delight.

I owe my musings about this concept of delight embodied partly to one of my favorite characters in The Sandman, which is a fantasy show I just finished watching. (And a show which my dad called “creepy” and said it “didn’t make any sense,” based on the first four episodes he watched, so, it might not be your thing. But that’s okay. I tell him the same thing every year when he tries to get me to read any of the sequels to “Dune” by Frank Herbert.) Anyway the show follows Dream, AKA the Sandman, the immortal King of Dreams who’s not so much a god as much as like, the embodiment of the concept of dreaming itself. But there’s also his siblings, who embody their own concepts, including Dream’s sister Delirium, who, we are told, used to be Delight, back at the beginning of the universe. We don’t get the full history of her story, but I love the implication that if you lose your capacity to find joy in the things of this world, you go insane. That seems pretty true to me. And fairly important to remember.

When I think of delight embodied I will also forever think of my tiny almost 3 year old friend who I nannied for two years before she had to move on to other things earlier this fall. And also the most perpetually delighted person I’ve ever known. I know toddlers are generally more excited about the world than adults, since everything is new to them, but even among the other toddlers I’ve known, her exuberance stood out. Like to the point of sometimes having a truly deranged amount of joy in the world. It’s hard to condense a whole person down to just a few stories, but for example, I once saw her observe an older kid fall over and laugh while running, and then she spent like an entire half an hour running, intentionally falling over, and cackling wildly to herself. Over the course of the two years I knew her she went through this process many times of finding something that delighted her and then doing it over and over again for, apparently, the sheer joy of it. Like spinning, or jumping in puddles, or throwing rocks into the stream near her house. Or any Disney song she wanted to listen to over and over, and sing along with at increasingly loud volumes as she got older. People say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I don’t know what doing the same thing over and over, and being delighted with the same results every time, is the definition of. But I imagine it’s a sure path to enlightenment, if you can figure it out.

Soon after she learned to string words together, she also went through a phase where she would just walk around randomly declaring to me that she loved various things. “I love chocolate,” she would say. “I love snow.” “I love mommy.” “I love Elsa.” (That’s one of the Disney princesses, for the uninitiated). Or, “I love you.” Feel free to imagine me getting a tiny bit emotional at that last one, because I totally did.

Of course she was an ordinary kid in every way, and there were plenty of moments dealing with ordinary kid stuff like meltdowns or scraped knees or trying to get her to eat vegetables–one of the few things that did not delight her–when I did not feel particularly immersed in the Holy Spirit. But I still think maybe the Holy Spirit is like a very young child who is delighted with everything, and wants to tell you about it. And this particular kid is a special person to me because I feel like every day I spent with her, she shared a little bit of her delight with me. And it reminded me, a little bit, how to find my own delight in the world again.

But let’s return to our story from Mark. In case you forgot, this story starts with a prophecy. Specifically a line which my Bible says is from the book of Malachi chapter 3: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way.” I did go back and read the chapter this is from, but it turns out it’s also a bit boring, because it’s mainly your standard prophetic speech concerning economic injustices the people have been doing to the vulnerable among them. God says, predictably, stop doing that; the people respond, predictably, good things happen to bad people all the time, so why bother being good. Which is, like, 90% of the conversations between prophets and the people in the Old Testament.

But there was one part of God’s half of this conversation that caught my eye, because it actually has the world “delight” in it–an Easter-egg-type discovery which I found, well, delightful. It goes like this:

“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. I will prevent pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not drop their fruit before it is ripe…Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land.”

“Yours will be a delightful land.”

It would probably be ridiculous to suppose that whoever translated this passage made a super conscious choice to use the word ‘delight’ here instead of any similar word. But all the same, I do love that it shows up here too. Because everyone knows we don’t get an answer, in this life, to the question of Why Good Things Happen to Bad People, and vice versa. But we do get this vision, which is comforting to me, of a land overflowing with delight. We do get this wager from God that if we try to live with justice and mercy among ourselves, there will be enough delight to go around. If you prepare the way, like Mark says, the Holy Spirit will show up.

I’m not really sure how to end this sermon, so I guess I’ll end with another observation about our original story, which is that there’s no Jesus in it. There’s just the people, and John, and a promise of the Holy Spirit. I think this is where we imagine ourselves to be, a lot of the time. Like Jesus obviously isn’t here as a physical person anymore, so we have to do the hard work of fixing the world ourselves.

And that’s certainly important to remember. But what this story, and all the other stories I’ve told you today, suggest to me is that whatever we do or don’t do, Holy Spirit is still all around us. All we have to do is make space in our lives to notice it. This also seems like an important thing to remember, especially during this Advent season when our theme, I have been told, is Spacious Faith.

Of course it’s not that simple. This world can be so hard, and contains so much grief. I think it’s hard to invest your delight in this world when you know that every lovable thing on this earth will end. So you will forget. But when you are ready, the spirit of love–the spirit of delight–will still be there waiting. In you. In me. In the face of every child awakening to their own delight in the world for the first time. As it’s written, “to us a child is born”; the Christ child, and any child, and every child. Jesus is no longer present to us as a physical body, but the Christ light is inside each of us. Everything we know ends, and it’s a mystery exactly what lies “on the other side of oblivion,” as the poet has written. But we are the ones who are alive now. And we are immersed in the Holy Spirit.