“He Saw the Heavens Torn Apart”

Mark 1:4-11; Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29

The Reading from the Old Testament Genesis 1:1-5 (p. 1, OT)

1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, ² the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

³ Then God said, “Let there be light;” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

The Reading from the Psalter Psalm 29

¹ Ascribe to the Lord , O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

² Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name; worship the Lord in holy splendor.

³ The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders,

the Lord , over mighty waters.

⁴ The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.

⁵ The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon...

⁷ The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire…

⁹ The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare;

and in God’s temple all say, “Glory!”

¹⁰ The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord sits enthroned as king forever.

¹¹ May the Lord give strength to his people! May the Lord bless his people with peace!

The Reading from the Gospels Mark 1:4-11 (p. 30, NT)

⁴ John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. ⁶Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. ⁷He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. ⁸I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

⁹ In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

The Sermon

In an inconceivably vast universe, in the center of a galaxy whose breadth alone is well beyond the limits of the human mind, on a great rock orbiting a small but significant star 93 million miles away, you have a home.

On the surface of a world, camped on top of unimaginably enormous tectonic plates, among more than six billion other human inhabitants and countless other creatures of the earth, you have a place. You belong.

If ever there was a barrier between us and our Creator—the barrier between the absolute holiness of God and the absolute humanness of our everyday routines, our mortal sorrows and fears, the stresses and strains of trying to do the best we can—

that barrier has now been broken—and not just broken, but torn apart, ripped open.

And now the voice of the transcendent God can be heard by our mortal ears, if only we will listen.

The ancients conceived of the world as kind of a hollowed-out pocket in an eternal sea—a bubble, like a snow globe, one of those little plastic or glass things full of water that you shake up and it looks like it’s snowing at Niagara Falls or wherever. Except in the mind of our ancient ancestors, the water was on the outside, and the blue of the sky indicated a firmament, a dome, holding the eternal waters back, occasionally opening up the hatches to let some through, in the form of a rain shower.

Meanwhile, on the surface of the earth, the great ocean was the place of the unknown.

We could skim the surface of it on our rickety boats, and collect fish from it for our livelihoods and our life; but down in the deep was also the place of fear, and mystery. Monsters were down there, unknown things, down there in the deep, and all those who put out into deep water did so knowing of their own fragile mortality.

And so the earliest known discussions about God, from even before we had the recorded stories of Genesis, told of God as the one who was over the sea, who was not afraid of any of it, but had subdued it, understood it, knew it, reigned over it, who could even stand on it. “The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord sits enthroned as king forever.”

And so, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, ² the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep—the eternal, mysterious, terrifying sea—while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

God was not afraid of any of it, even in total darkness, even over the face of the deep, but sent a wind—the Hebrew word is ruah; it also means breath or spirit—sweeping over the face of the waters.

They didn’t need to know about quarks and supernovas and black holes. The earth was already surrounded by enough awe and terror and amazement, in the endless, eternal waters, beyond the dome of the sky and surrounding the outposts of land on the face of the earth.

This is the God of Mark’s gospel, who, on a sunny and otherwise ordinary day, has sent Jesus to be baptized by John. The same God who was in the beginning as recorded in Genesis is active in the same way at the beginning of Mark, whose first words are, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.”

Throughout Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ acts of power will leave those around him with their jaws hanging open in amazement. They jolt us with the electricity of knowing that once we’ve seen this, nothing will ever be the same again, and it’s all for the better, the inconceivably better, for all humankind, for all creation, for every one of us.

The awesome, powerful events start at the very beginning. Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart, and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

None of the other gospels is that violent.

When the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are sitting around the card table, swapping stories about Jesus, John is reliably kind of holier-than-thou; he likes to say things that kind of soar over the heads of everybody else at the table.

Luke is fixed on the idea that Jesus came as a great healer—just the way Luke, a doctor himself, likes to frame it: everywhere Jesus went, human lives were demonstrably better, not just philosophically, not even just spiritually, but tangibly better.

Matthew meanwhile is always going to great pains to underline how Jesus was specifically the embodiment and the culmination of the Jewish Law, so all the stories tend to revert back to that at one point or another.

In other words, all three of those guys always have some kind of a philosophy to get across.

But the conceivably slightly ADD guy on the other side of the table isn’t quite so interested in the philosophies, the subtleties. As the novelist John Updike once said, of all of them, Mark is the one who is “least prone to wishful thinking” ( http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week812/exclusive.html ). He just tells the stories, and they’re exciting, amazing, terrifying stories.

And even here in the baptism of Jesus, there’s no cute little white baptismal outfit handed down from Grandma.

As soon as Jesus came up from the water—from the mysterious deep, over which only God walks unafraid—he saw the heavens ripped apart.

Now the firmament was open, a gaping hole was torn into it—but the world was not deluged with a great tsunami to fill up and destroy the earth.

Instead, the Spirit of God descended like a dove, just like the Spirit did when the earth was without form and void, and the ruah swept over the face of the deep.

And the Spirit descended on Jesus. And a voice came from heaven—from this gaping hole that has now been blown open in the barrier between Almighty God and our everyday, earthly, human lives—saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

It was an intimate moment between a parent and a child, which we are allowed to witness in amazement, and it was like seeing a mother cradle her baby for the first time—the love and devotion and absolutely eternal unbreakable bond as she says, “You are my child.”

A great barrier has been not just broken, but ripped apart, torn open.

And the breaking of that barrier tells you that in this inconceivably vast universe, in a world among countless other inhabitants of the earth, you and I have a place. Each one of us belongs.

And the same Creator God, who stands over the sea, who causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare; who sits enthroned over the flood as king forever, has ripped open the heavens, and can be heard to say, “You are my child. And in you, I am well pleased.”

If only we will listen.