In the Beginning... [Baptism of Our Lord B]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Genesis 1:1-5

In the beginning...

In the beginning... That's how it always starts. A few words on a blank page. And every possibility – an indefinite future stretching across the expanse of infinity, juggling hope and failure, tragedy and triumph, mingling laughter with tears until all that is left is just life.

In the beginning... God. The Creator: like a prepubescent boy, eyes like saucers, trembling with excitement, mind bursting with ideas and dreams, staring down at a huge heap of Legos – ready to turn chaos into a masterpiece. The stuff of dreams and futures and “it is good” was all there. This creation did not come from nothing. It was creation by organization. Taking the formless void and the covering darkness and the face of the deep and making sense of it – and then sweeping it alive with the wind from very lungs of God. Turning chaos into a masterpiece. And then shining a light on that masterpiece – like a work of art perfectly illumined.

Perfectly illumined but without the velvet ropes. Creation was only the beginning. A few words on a blank page. And every possibility, laid out like limitless space. Like a clay pot never fired, always malleable. A God who cannot get enough of the creative process. A God who is infinitely curious. And so the masterpiece shapes and re-shapes itself. Always under the watchful eye of the Creator but still granted such dangerous freedoms as one with less self-confidence would never dare grant – the freedom to destroy and change and even to make good into another kind of good. The Creator watching to see what future the creation will make, not watching passively, at a distance, but always close enough, attentive enough, to step in as salvation when necessary.

Which, of course, is what the most recently completed Church season reminded us: God likes to start at the beginning – beginnings within beginnings of stories within stories. Even the step-in salvation started small and then grew. Never believe that God is distant or unaffected. God snuck into the world on Christmas, the Creator fully immersed in the creative process, as a newborn baby – reliant, vulnerable, entirely affected. God as one of us. God as beginning.

It was like Creation all over again: it came together in the dark, watery deep, in the space of the womb – cells organized in the void and animated by the very wind of God. An “In the beginning...” that would find its way into a world of straw and shepherds before ending up back in the water for yet another new beginning.

Baptism. We celebrate today that God got down into the deep, swallowed by the same watery chaos that God once tamed, that the spirit danced upon, way back in the beginning. There was enough wild left in the creation that spirit-ed things still happened. New could still be found. Creation was still mysteriously active.

God in the deep: it is there in the watery depths of the creation that we meet Jesus. We find him under water. In the place where baptism happens, where creation is still mysteriously active, where new life can still be found. Baptismal water: it is like water imported from that magical time in which things were still made of dreams, like in the beginning. And it is thick with Spirit – Spirit dancing on those waters, life riding the wind, that ancient wind from the lungs of God.

Incarnation and baptism have this is common: there is God at every beginning.

The Spirit is always and forever filling the void, sparking in the darkness, moving through the water like a sleek, mythical beast. First the water in the womb – giving the breath of life to tiny, new beginnings. And then the water in the font – breathing new life into those who come to meet Jesus under water, those longing to begin again.

Baptism is another “in the beginning...” - a blank page upon which our creative God prepares to write a masterpiece, to speak into the world another round of infinite possibility. Baptized Christian, God is watching and waiting, ever and infinitely curious, ready to see what you do with the life stretched out before you. You are made in the image of a good Creator – a creator who dares to endow God's living, breathing masterpieces with hopes and dreams and visions for a future yet unrealized. The Creator watches and waits, hoping that you will fill creation with goodness – that you will follow in the footsteps of the one who made you and called you and loves you and names you good.

Know this, God does not watch and wait from a distance. Baptism, like Incarnation, is another path God carves into the heart of creation. God is always finding ways to get closer. God is always finding ways to sneak in – into this wild world, into your beating heart.

In the beginning... That's how it always starts. A few words on a blank page. And every possibility – an indefinite future stretching across the expanse of infinity, juggling hope and failure, tragedy and triumph, mingling laughter with tears until all that is left is just life.

And God. The God who was there at the beginning. That same God finds a way in. And sticks around. Through the laughter and through the tears. There at the beginning of your story and there still long after the story ends.