“The Heavens Opened”
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A sermon preached Readings: Genesis
1:1-5, Mark 1:4-13 |
Mark 1:10 “He saw the heavens open”
John the Baptist comes offering a baptism of repentance and cleansing for sinners - and Jesus comes for baptism.
Why? Jesus wasn’t a sinner, he had no need of repentance.
Why did he come? Let me try and begin to answer with a story. This is a story in the paper a year or two ago about a 16 year old boy called Mark Busse. Mark went to school in Washington State in the US, one of a class of 25 students.The local paper ran a lead story about Mark and his mates – and showed a picture of the class – every one of them totally bald.
And the newspaper story under the photo read as follows:“Mark Busse, 16, of Reardon, Washington, poses with classmates from his high school in this eastern Washington state town.
His friends shaved their heads to show support for Busse after his hair fell out following chemotherapy for inoperable lung cancer.
His buddies said that they didn't want him to stand out in the 180 student high school.” Jesus did not have to be baptized. He did have the sickness we have. He was not a sinner. He had no cause for repentance. He had no need to undergo the baptism of John. Yet he did. Why? Because he wanted to give a sign that he was with us – he wanted to say – you are not alone in the trials and tribulations of this world –
I will enter your world of sin, I will submerge myself in the waters of death, and be at one with you.
Thank God that when we were deep in sin and death, Christ came and plunged into the icy waters to share our death and to bring us with him back up to new life with him.
A little girl is drawing a picture of the baptism of Jesus – she has John and Jesus and the River Jordan –
but she has for some reason drawn the whole scene in a torrential thunderstorm –
you can hardly see Jesus and John for the rain coming down in stair-rods.
Why have you made it rain, asks her teacher?Because it says so in the story, says the little girl – it says “And the heavens opened” Well what did it mean when Jesus saw the heavens open?It means simply that Jesus suddenly saw an extra dimension to reality – yes, he still saw the reeds and the river and cousin John –
but now he saw the same old things in a new way –
in the context of God’s eternal power and coming rule.
It is an experience many of us have at key points in our lives – The truth is that heaven is always there surrounding our everyday lives – but for most of the time we are so wrapped up
in the shopping and the bills and the phone calls and the emails
that we fail to notice heaven about us.
It is like there is a thick wall between earth and heaven. The Celtic Church speaks of some places as being “thin places” – by which they mean places where
the barrier between the ordinary life and heaven is very thin,
and you can sense the life of heaven in the midst of everyday life.
The Jordan where John baptised was such a place for Jesus. We need to find thin places in our lives. If life sometimes seems claustrophobic and directionless and godless – If we think we are safe and unseen in our sinsOr lost and uncared for in our sorrows – Don’t believe it – Persevere and keep your eyes open – for we are surrounded by heaven – await the time, look for the thin place -
and always remember that even when you cannot see heaven,
it is there about you, and waiting to break in.
Imagine you are out on a walk following a dense forest track which seems to go on for mile after mile.
You have quite lost your bearings and any confidence you may have had about your position or your likely destination.
Suddenly turning a corner you see that the track is rising up an incline, and before you know it you have emerged onto a small rocky outcrop above the trees -
and suddenly you can see for miles and miles –
the river, the forest, the sea, the distant hills – all mapped before you.
And as you plunge on back into the forest you do so with new confidence, new awareness, new direction –
The forest track is set in the perspective of the wider picture. For Jesus at the start of his ministry, this is what happens – he suddenly has that vision of what God’s great plan is for the world and for him.
And as followers of Christ, that is an experience which we too can share. We may spend many days in the dark forest track – but in Christ’s power the day comes when we realize that
our path on earth can only be properly understood
in terms of the topography of heaven.
“Only at rare intervals does the deeper and vaster world come trough into conscious thought, but they are the memorable moments of life.
It is then, if ever, that the door of the invisible world swings silently open, and something of the greatness and wonder of the spiritual universe is flashed upon the soul”
(AN Whitehead) And we do live in the midst of heavenly voices and visions, if we did but know it - In Bernard Shaw’s St Joan, there is a famous passage where Joan is talking to the Dauphin and explaining how God speaks to her through the bells -
and the Dauphin gets annoyed and petulantly replies:
"Oh,
your voices, your voices. Why don't the voices come to me? I am king, not
you."
And Joan replies: "They do come to you; but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings you cross yourself and have done with it; but if you prayed from your heart,
and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stop ringing,
you would hear the voices as well as I do."
And do you look for heaven’s opening?Do you listen for the voice of God?And what does the voice of God say to you? I’ll tell you – it’s just what he said to Jesus himself – For the wonder of salvation is that Jesus comes into the waters of death and sin to be with us and then draws us up and out with him to life.
And so we too may gaze into the sky and hear the word of God – Because we are incorporated into Christ, we can hear the very words he heard:“You are my beloved son – in thee am I well pleased” –or in the modern translation,
“You are my wonderful child – you make me very glad” Sadly there are many many people in this world – I suspect more than a few here today – who have never heard their earthly father say anything like that –
either because their father did not feel the love,
or because he was too shy and uptight to articulate it –
If you have not known a loving earthly father, this may not be so easy to get your head around,
but the good news of the gospel is this –
that God looks at you and me,
and sees us not as we are (miserable sinners) but as we are in Jesus –
and he says “You are my dear dear child, and I am delighted I’ve got you”.
In his recent commentary on Mark, Tom Wright says”Try reading that sentence slowly with your own name at the start, and reflect quietly on God saying that to you,
both at your baptism and every day since.”
[Tom Wright, Mark for Everyone, SPCK 2001, p5] So you might like to close your eyes for a moment and listen, and at the beginning of the sentence add in your own name,
and hear God speaking to you personally:
For God speaks to you today, and this is what he says:“……., you are my dear dear child, and I am delighted I’ve got you”. That is why Jesus dived into the waters of Jordan – To be with us,To have us alongside him,So that together we might emerge to hear God’s words of love for us all. So are you drowning in sin or sorrow,Are you lost in the jungle thickets of life,Do you feel orphaned or unloved? Well hear this - Christ has come for you, God has called you by name And just a final final thought- Earlier in the service before the young people left we were talking about what job we’d like to do,
and whether we’d rather be librarians or lion tamers.
Well, after his baptism, scripture says that Jesus went out into the desert and was with the wild beasts
and the angels ministered to him.
So maybe we are called to be lion tamers after all! But once you have seen even a glimpse of heaven’s power,nothing on earth can really scare you again.