Read this first! Mark 1:4-11
When I first started backpacking, the thing that I was most concerned about wasn’t the bears, the possibility of getting lost, the trail rations or the iodine infused drinking water, it was the bathroom. How did that work? You just stopped, wherever you were and dropped your pants and let’er rip? That is what the animals do, after all. The deer and the elk don’t even stop, they just keep moving along, leaving a trail behind them. And unlike my son, who was caught peeing on a tree with his buddy in the grassy field during preschool recess, I am not accustomed to peeing outside. But after the first day of hiking through the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming, as we were pitching our tents and lighting our camp stoves, I finally had to admit what was true: I had to pee. I simply could not hold it any longer. There it was. My bladder’s weakness. I had to do what my body was made to do. But. Where? Where could I go that was private, where I could drop my pants, discretely do my business, (without getting lost, mind you), as quickly and efficiently as possible so that I could come back to camp as if nothing had ever happened, just saunter back in to camp with the hand sanitizer still drying on my palms and join the group in the camp preparations as if I’d never left? Hey guys! Nope. Nobody pees here! What’s up! How can I help?
Now, when you go backpacking, it’s always helpful to set up camp for the night near a river or a stream. Access to fresh water is super important - you know, for staying hydrated, for making the ramen noodles and for mixing with the hot cocoa powder.
So I started to walk uphill, toward the bigger trees and the thicker brush. I was trying to sneak my way far enough from camp that no one would see me, but close enough that I wouldn’t get lost, and, more importantly, wouldn’t be missed.
“Uh, Jenn?” Our wilderness guide called out to me. “You’re gonna want to go downhill, you know, further downstream, it’s just common courtesy, you know?”
So much for discretion.
After a few seconds of confusion, I figured it out. Ahh. Lesson learned. Always pee downstream from camp. Nobody wants to be filling their Nalgene bottles with your nasty pee water.
Point taken. Got it. So I turned around, and went to slightly lower elevation.
You’ll all be glad to know, except for maybe my mom, that I eventually did get over my particular doing-personal-business-in-the-wilderness phobia. I ended up digging “biff”s (that is, “bathroom in forest floor”s) just as well as the rest of them, and almost started to enjoy the quiet, breezy experience that is taking a dump with the panorama of the beautiful Rocky Mountains laid out before me.
But as I hiked, as I saw God’s beautiful, almost-untouched creation before me, and as I took precautions against Giardia by properly filtering and iodine-ing my drinking water, I realized something. We can’t escape it. We are always downhill from something. And. Something, or someone, is always downhill from us.
We are all drinking contaminated water.
And we are all contaminating the water.
We are all doing our best to pee downstream. At least, I hope we are.
And, there’s always going to be someone who is trying to survive downstream from us.
That’s it. That’s what our Christian Tradition calls “sin.”
And John the Baptizer is out in the wilderness getting people to acknowledge this. He’s out there helping people to admit to this: that they’ve contaminated the water. Maybe it’s because their parents weren’t very supportive or never said "I love you.” Maybe it’s because they had to steal the bread in order to survive. Maybe it’s because their first serious romantic relationship tore out their hearts. Maybe it’s because they are complicit in an oppressive authoritarian regime. But it’s always, always, because somehow, for some reason they’ve drunk contaminated water themselves.
That’s the thing about sin. There’s no genesis to it. I know our tradition has this term called “original sin,” and I know that we have this story about Adam and Eve to help explain where sin came from, how it began, so we can have “someone” to blame, but the reality is that we sin, now, today, in our lives, in our world, in our relationships, because at some point, or points, we’ve been sinned against. Somebody, somewhere in our story, hurt us. We hurt others because others have hurt us. But you know what? Those who have hurt us have been hurt by others, and those others have been hurt, too, and so on and on and back and back and back and back. Like the story that explains the creation of the world by saying that it was founded on a turtle’s back, and then the kid asks, “but what’s the turtle standing on,” and you say “another turtle,” and they ask “what’s that turtle on” and you say “another turtle” and then they ask “what’s that turtle on?” And finally you just tell them, “Yeah, sorry kid, it’s just turtles all the way down.”
Y’all. It’s been sin. All the way down. Back and back and back and back. We have hurt others because we’ve been hurt. And those who’ve hurt us, guess what?, they’ve been hurt, too. And on and on. We tend to think of sin in this sort of hyper-individualized way. We confess all the little nitty gritty things we’ve done - we eat too much fast food, we lied, we hurt someone’s feelings - but what I’m talking about is this big, corporate, messed-up system that we are all a part of. It’s the stuff that we benefit from that we don’t even realized has hurt someone else. It’s the brokenness of the air we breathe. It’s the fact that we live on stolen land. We eat food so full of chemicals that the bees are dying. Our economy came from the broken backs of slaves. And we’re benefitting from it. And we’re also being hurt by it.
I don’t know why. I don’t know why the world has been made this way. I don’t know why humans were made this way. There are all kinds of stories and doctrines and explanations and philosophical proof texts to try to infer why humans are the way they are, especially in our Christian traditions. But once you start scratching at them, once you start digging in to the heart of each story and thought process, I really do think you’ll end up with some form of “well, that’s just how humans are made.” And then, you’ll end up asking the ultimate question: “Why in the world were we made that way?” Why were we made to be capable of sin, when it is so very wrong and so very destructive to sin? Why was a tiger created with stripes if he’s just going to be punished for having those stripes? Lots of people argue that it’s for freedom. If we didn’t have the capacity to choose right from wrong, then could we really be free? And I think they do have a point. We should pay attention to the importance of freedom. But I wonder, is that just a false dichotomy, I mean for God, to say that God can’t create a being that is both “free” and “sinless”? Isn’t that, sort of, limiting God, to say that God had to let us sin so we could be free? Couldn’t God have created humans who didn’t need to “pee”? Or couldn’t God have created a world where none of us are ever downstream?
I do have a hunch that the answer lies somewhere with God’s vulnerability. I think that God is vulnerable, has always been vulnerable, back and back and back and back. And I think that Jesus came as an embodiment of that vulnerability, to show us how very vulnerable God is, to God’s core. And I think that when Jesus steps in to that river to be baptized, he’s showing all of us that he’s in it. He’s all the way in. He is downstream. He’s always downstream. And he invites us downstream, too.
I’ve tried not to pee in the wilderness. And I lasted less than a day. I tried to pee downstream, and then I realized, there’s always someone further down the river.
I’ve tried to be perfect. I’ve tried to eat vegetarian and only organic and get straight A’s and only let my kids play with wooden toys that don’t require batteries. I’ve tried living in the tired, poorer community so that I could invest in that community and be a part of that community and maybe even be a part of its self-determined improvement. I’ve really tried to always “pee downstream”. But then I was a terrible vegetarian and I didn’t get enough protein and my mental health started to suffer. And then I had to make hard choices like “which is a better moral choice, to buy organic or to buy local?” And then I had kids and they needed me and so my dogs didn’t get enough walks, and I had to rush out of my Psalms final in grad school because of morning sickness and ended up with an A- in the class. And I realized that my kids didn’t choose to hear gunshots before they went to bed, they didn’t choose to have nowhere to play outside. Why am I making them suffer for some “moral ideal”? Like Eleanor Shellstrop from the show “The Good Place,” we all come to the realization that the game is rigged. We’ve set up a booby trapped system and we’ve been hurt by AND benefitted from that system.
Maybe sometimes there aren’t perfect right answers. Maybe there are just some answers that are better than others, some choices that do the least amount of damage. Maybe it’s ok for me to eat a factory farmed hamburger or have a chicken salad, even though there are much more moral choices out there. Maybe, you know, we are all just doing the best we can in the crazy, broken system. Maybe even sometimes, maybe in very rare situations, it’s morally ok to go through the Chick-fil-A drive thru, and that doesn’t have to mean that you hate gay people.
There is always going to be someone else downstream from me. And I am always going to be downstream from someone else. And it totally sucks.
But Jesus is also in that stream. Jesus is with us in that stream. Jesus came to Earth and said, “well, none of this is my fault, but I’m going to be a part of this mess anyway. I am going to enter in. I am with these messy combinations of flesh and spirit, sinner and saint, with these idealistic skeptics. I am with these pee-ers, in this river of life.
I think, ultimately, that’s what baptism is. It’s an acceptance of what is. We are a part of this broken system. We’ve participated in breaking this system. We’ve been hurt by this broken system. And we’ve hurt others in this system. It totally sucks. But Jesus is here. We are broken people in a broken world AND that isn’t the end of our story.
Baptism. This is where Jesus chose to go, the first steps he took as part of his official ministry on this earth. He entered in to the river and said, “Me, too. I’m coming along. I’m going to let myself be hurt. I’m going to let myself live downstream. And maybe, just maybe, I can teach others how to do the same. I’m, at least, going to give others the opportunity to join me downstream, with the hurt and the broken and the lost and the forsaken. I’m going to show them how to live in this messy world full of sin, and it’s going to kill me.”
But there is something, something on the other side. The story doesn’t end there. There’s freedom, somehow, from this reactionary cycle of sinner, sinned against, sinner, from this hamster wheel of victim, perpetrator, victim, and back and back and back and back.
We saw a glimpse of that this week. After the horrors of the siege on the Capitol, Andy Kim, a Democratic congressman from a predominately Republican district in New Jersey, came out of his office, some time around midnight, and surveyed the damage. And then he asked for a trash bag. And in his suit and tie, in his fancy polished leather shoes, he bent down and started cleaning up the place. He said, ”It was really just kind of instinctual. I didn't really like think about it, I just wanted to do something, I just really felt like I needed to try to play a role in just fixing this mess that had occurred.” He had had no part in the mess that was made, but he went downstream and started cleaning up the place just the same. Maybe he didn’t properly sort the recyclables. Maybe his suit wasn’t fair trade and made with organic fibers. Maybe he did it for reasons other than altruism. Maybe he neglected some other important aspect of his life in order to stay and help clean up. But he stayed. He took a stand. He grabbed a trash bag and did the next best thing he thought was right. He felt like he “needed to try to play a role in just fixing this mess.” He took a small step in stopping the cycle.
And I think that’s what God calls us to do, as humans, especially in this tumultuous time. We are called to “play a role in fixing this mess.” And that means we have some trash to pick up, some responsibility to take, even if we didn’t directly have anything to do with the problems all around us. We did our best to pee downstream, and yet, and still, there was someone else, further downstream. There are turtles, all the way down. And Jesus went there. Jesus went all the way down. Back and back and back and back.
God just calls us to enter in. To go downstream. As far downstream as we can. We will still mess up. We will still sin. And we will also most likely get peed on ourselves. But that’s where God is. With the hurt and the oppressed and the broken and the forsaken. Jesus went downstream. And entered in.
Let’s follow him in.
Thanks be to God.
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