Show Don't Tell: The Messianic Secret in Mark's Gospel

Mark 1:21-28 (Or the whole Gospel of Mark, really)

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. Somewhere deep in my basement, I have a box of journals full of half-written stories, terrible poems with forced rhymes, and self-indulgent reflections on the dramatic emotions of a preteen. As I grew in my skills as a writer, or at least, I hope I’ve grown, there is one piece of advice I learned early on and have tried to be true to stick to ever since. The piece of advice was “Show. Don’t Tell.” It’s considered the “golden rule” of writing, and it basically means that when we write, stories, concrete examples, sensory illustrations and literary techniques like similes and metaphors go a lot further in conveying our ideas than just sheer exposition. Entering in to an experience is so much more powerful than just talking about it. So, for example, if, say, I wanted to express to you my exhaustion, I could say something like, “I was really tired.” Or I could show you how tired I was by saying, “I was so tired I put the baby in the bathtub with his socks still on.” Now you have a clearer idea of how very tired I was. Or, how my husband says, “I love you,” every day, not by just saying “I love you,” but by making the coffee, pouring it into a mug, and presenting it to me bedside. See? Show don’t tell. 

This is an important rule for most of life. Saying “I love Jesus,” doesn’t have quite the impact as, say, serving a meal at a homeless shelter. Saying, “I care about my kids,” doesn’t have the same weight as taking out loans so they could all go to college. If you’re trying to tell your boss that you’re a hard worker, you’ll be much more convincing if you show up to work than if you just said, “Hey. Believe me. I’m a hard worker.” As the saying goes, “Talk is cheap.” 

During the time that the Gospel of Mark was written, there’s all sorts of cheap talk going around about who this Jesus character might be, or might have been. Was he just a guy who was a pain in the butt to the religious elite? Was he an insurrectionist that was executed by the Roman government? Was he a miracle worker or a great physician or just some Jewish peasant that duped a lot of other Jewish peasants into thinking there was some hope in this world? The Gospel of Mark sets out to answer this swirling question. Who is - or was - Jesus of Nazareth? But strangely, Mark doesn’t seem to want to tell us. Or at least, Mark presents us with a Jesus who doesn’t want us to know.

There’s this motif throughout the Gospel of Mark that scholars call the “Messianic Secret.” If you sit down and read the gospel all the way through, and I really encourage you to do it sometime, you’ll start to notice that each time someone publicly identifies Jesus as the Messiah, he tells them to be quiet. He shuts them down. This starts with the “unclean spirits” in our reading today. And this is fascinating to me, because the demons, or spirits, or whatever we want to call them that are tormenting this man get the Jesus question right. In this the first miracle recorded in this Gospel, this is Mark’s chance to tell us who Jesus is. And instead of telling us of Jesus’s greatness and holiness and set-apart-ness, he gives us the answer from the mouth of a demon. And then Jesus shuts him up. 

And instead of one of the disciples or the most faithful or the truest followers of Jesus being the ones to tell us who Jesus is, Mark has them wandering around consistently getting the question wrong. There are a few exceptions, but they’re all private encounters. God tells Jesus that he is God’s son as he is baptized, but Mark presumes that Jesus is the only one to hear it. God announces Jesus’s sonship at the transfiguration, but only three disciples hear it. Peter confesses it in a moment of fleeting brilliance, pretty much the closest that any human comes up to now to naming who Jesus really is, but then it’s immediately followed by a failure and a startling rebuke from Jesus.

In Mark’s Gospel, the supernatural beings have an understanding of who Jesus is, but the humans are, for the most part, completely clueless. Why does Mark do this? Why does he give the “right” words to the wrong spirits? And anytime anyone gets it right, Jesus prohibits them from telling a soul. If Mark’s goal is to tell us who Jesus is, why does he spend most of the Gospel hiding it from us? Why does Mark depict humans as complete failures to get the Jesus question right, or, at best, the humans only partially or imperfectly seem to understand who Jesus is?

If Mark’s goal is to show us who Jesus is, what’s up with this Messianic Secret Motif that he plays throughout the gospel? 

This is just a guess, but it has me thinking. My guess has something to do with the difference between showing and telling. 

The demons tell us who Jesus is. 

But the story shows us.

The unclean spirits tell us who Jesus is.

But Jesus wants to show us.

It’s one thing to confess that Jesus is the Son of God.

And it’s another thing to experience his healing in your life.

It’s one thing to get the answer right.

And it’s another thing to live the love of God for yourself and for others.

Mark uses the messianic secret to show us that just because we get the answer right, doesn’t mean we really understand. And just because we struggle to understand, doesn’t mean that we’re left out in the cold. It’s quite the opposite, actually. Jesus wants to keep his identity hidden throughout the Gospel of Mark, but he is quite open about the suffering he must undergo. Jesus rebukes them when they talk about his glory. But he will shout about his suffering from the rooftops.

Mark takes us on a journey. Mark shows us who Jesus is. Mark emphasizes the importance of a relationship with Jesus, far far more than just giving the right answer to the Jesus question. Even the demons get the Jesus question right. But what the demons don’t do is show us what it means. The unclean spirits are incapable of showing what it means that Jesus is the Son of God. Only Jesus can do that. And he does it in a very strange way. Jesus shows us who he is through his suffering.

Mark tells story after story of folks failing to get Jesus right. Mark tells story after story of the demons getting it right, but Jesus shutting them up as soon as the words are said. And when a human finally does get the Jesus question right, it comes from the person you least expect, exactly when you least expect it. The only full, complete confession of who Jesus is in Mark's gospel comes from the Centurion, at the moment of Jesus’s death on the cross. We are shown who Jesus is, not when he’s fixing everything, or commanding the elements, or defying the laws of nature, but precisely at his weakest moment. Jesus is there, on the cross, bleeding and sweating and breathing his last, and the Centurion guard is the one who finally gets it. He says, “Surely this man was the Son of God.” Jesus shows the centurion who he is, and the centurion is the one who finally gets it.

So what does it mean that Jesus is the Son of God? Well, according to Mark, it means that he will not come riding a flying chariot through the sky, he won’t zap people with lightning bolts from on high, he won’t snap his fingers and make suffering go away. Rather, he will enter in to the suffering of the world, he will become part of the suffering of the world, he will suffer with the world, and when you see that, when you’re shown that, not just told, but really shown it, then you know you’re on your way to understanding who the Son of God is. Mark tells the story where the demons “tell” who Jesus is, but Jesus himself, through his sacrificial suffering on the cross, through his full participation in the human story, shows us who he is. 

So this will sound a little crazy, a little counterintuitive, but maybe we need to work on keeping the messianic secret...? Maybe we need to work on showing who Jesus is, rather than just telling? It’s not enough to say that Jesus is the Son of God, even the demons do that. What might be enough is for us to enter in to the Jesus story of suffering and struggle and redemption for ourselves, so that we can show the world what it means that Jesus is the Son of God. 

Saint Francis is often attributed as the one to have said, “Preach the Gospel. When necessary, use words.” 

In other words, like Mark, “Show. Don’t tell.” 

Even the unclean spirits can tell.

But we are the hands and feet of Christ. We are the ones who are invited into the fullness of who Jesus truly is, by entering a suffering world, by suffering with the world, and by participating in its inevitable resurrection. That’s how we show, not just tell, the good news.

Thanks be to God.

Where to Start the Story?

  Avengers  Disciples Assemble!

Mark 1:14-20

The Gospel of Mark was written sometime around the late 60’s or early 70’s. It was written somewhere between 30 and 40 years after Jesus’s death. Mark is the earliest Gospel we have, so these are the first preserved words written about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. 

30 to 40 years have passed after they crucified Christ, and these are the words Mark feels are the most important for Jesus’s followers to hear. It’s written to mostly Gentiles, maybe in Rome, although that’s debated, and although his Greek is better than mine, he won’t win any awards for his syntax or grammar. I imagine him as this guy who looks around at all these terrified people who have lived the stories, or at least heard the stories, and are trying to find a way forward with this new faith in this treacherous world, and thinks, “Geez. Somebody ought to write this down.” So he grabs a couple of bar napkins, bums a quill off the bartender and sets to work.

But where to begin? How do you tell this story? What do you include? A scroll, or a bar napkin, as the case may be, is only so big. Only so much will fit. There’s only so much ink in the pot with which to tell the story of this Son of Man who will perform miracles, and feed thousands, anger the Roman leaders and upend the Temple traditions, all this to such an extent that it will result in his death and mysterious empty tomb. How should he start the story?

Mark’s Gospel is the shortest Gospel. Mark wants to get to the heart of it all as quickly and efficiently as he can. It’s a wild ride, full of immediate actions and sudden developments. Mark’s Gospel is the precursor to the 40 character Twitter limit, or the 3 minutes on TikTok. The word “euthus” - translated as “immediately” is used 41 times in this short Gospel. Mark has a story to tell, but he wants to tell it fast, all in one act, with no filler, no flowery embellishments, no commercial breaks, no intermission for snacks or a trip to the bathroom. 

So, if Mark wants to get right down to business, how should he begin? We don’t get a birth narrative. There’s no stable or shepherds or wise men. We don’t get any stories about his parents losing him at the Temple. Joseph isn’t even mentioned in the whole story. When Mark begins, Jesus is all grown up. Mark starts with a crazed lunatic out in the wilderness who wears camels’ hair tunics and eats locusts and honey. He’s wandering around baptizing people in preparation for the one who is to come, the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. So, like we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Jesus gets baptized, he sees the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him, is named God’s Son, and then he gets thrown out into the wilderness where he’s tempted by Satan with the wild beasts for forty days and the angels tend to him. All that is in the first 13 verses of Mark’s very first chapter.

So far, Mark has spent more time and given us more details about this wild-haired slightly off-center John the Baptist than he has about Jesus. Mark chooses to start this expedited story with John, while Jesus seems to be this passive receiver of the events. Things happen to Jesus  at the beginning of Mark’s story, but Jesus hasn’t really done much of anything. 

So imagine you’re Mark. Maybe you knew Jesus personally. Or maybe you heard the stories at the knees of your parents or grandparents. As far as you know, no one has written down the whole story, and you’re about to put pen to paper, you’re about to chronicle the very first actions your Savior takes in his time in this world. What’s the first thing you’re going to write about? What’s the first thing you’re going to describe him doing? An exorcism? A miraculous healing? How about a scene of him defying nature or shocking the leaders in the synagogues?

Mark has set the table. John the Baptizer has sent out the invitations. Jesus’s gotten all cleaned up. He’s been sent to the wilderness to test his metal. Things are about to get started. Everything is lined up, all things are prepared. The path has been paved. Make way for the coming of the Messiah. There will be healings. There will be exorcisms. The paralyzed will walk. Sins will be forgiven. Hands will be restored and storms will be calmed. Children will be brought back to life, and thousands upon thousands will be fed. Jesus will walk on top of the water and bring sound back to deaf ears. Jesus will show power over demons and spirits simply with his prayers. All this is going to happen. 

But first, before any of that, Jesus’s first act is to ask for help. Before the meal can be served, before the healings and the feedings and the casting out of unclean spirits, before Jesus’s ministry can begin, Jesus goes out into the world and asks for help.

Now just think about this. 

If you were to write the story of the person you loved most in the whole world, how would you begin? If you’re like Mark, you don’t have time to bury the lede, you don’t have the patience to walk through birth stories or childhood antics, you want to start strong, you want to grab the audience from the beginning, get the story moving, and go straight to the action. You want to start with the most important things.

And Mark has Jesus start, first, with asking for help.

But this isn’t like Tony Stark gathering up the Avengers to save the universe with their technical skills, expertise in combat, or their superhero superpowers. He doesn’t recruit experts in the Hebrew Scriptures, or leaders in the Synagogues, or insurrectionists with guerrilla warfare experience. He doesn’t scour the district for millionaires to fund this new political movement.  He asks for help from Simon - who will be called Peter - Andrew, James and John. Four guys sitting in their boats, fishing and mending their nets. And spoiler alert - if you keep reading Mark’s Gospel, these guys aren’t much to write home about. Another spoiler alert - if you keep reading, they’re going to turn out to be pretty useless. They’re going to fail to understand what Jesus is saying. They’re going to be confused by his words and his actions. They’re going to harden their hearts and refuse to hear the truth of Jesus’s words. They’re going to fall asleep when Jesus needs them most. They’re going to run away when Jesus is arrested, and aside from Peter, in Mark’s Gospel, that’s the last we’re going to hear about them. And that first guy Jesus picks, Simon-now-Peter? He’s going to be rebuked and called Satan just a few short chapters from now. 

Are you following me? Connecting the dots? For Mark, Jesus’s first act, before the miracles and the feedings and the defying of the laws of physics, before Jesus does anything else, his first act is to ask for help from a bunch of uneducated working poor. His first act is to ask for help from these guys who will fail him in every way.  This is how Mark chooses to begin his Good News. 

And what does Jesus say to them? Essentially, he says, “I need your help. I need your help gathering others because I need their help too.” “Follow me,” Jesus says, “And I will make you fish for people.” “Come. Help me gather more people. More people who can help me.” And these four guys drop their nets, dump their father, leave the hired hands, and abandon the only way of life they’ve known to follow Jesus. To help him. To do what he asks them to do.

Mark knows the whole story. He knows everything that is going to happen. He knows the failures of these weak and bumbling men. And still, that’s where he chooses to start the story. That’s what he gives Jesus to do as his very first act, at the very beginning of his ministry, before anything else, Mark has Jesus ask for help.

If Jesus’s first act is to gather a bunch of rag-tag, spiritually klutzy, quick-to-leave-their-dad-with-all-the-work idiots around him, what does that say about God’s invitation to us?

I think maybe it means that God needs a little help. 

I think maybe it means that God refuses to do anything without our participation.

I think maybe it means that God is calling us to be a part of this radical movement. 

I think maybe it means that Jesus’s first and most important act is to invite us to the table.

There are no miracles before you join. 

Nobody walks on water until you show up.

No lives are changed until you start with yours.

The table is not complete until you take your seat.

No one eats until you’re there.

No one drinks until you’ve passed the wine.

God won't get started without you. This is how God chooses to work in the world.

Saint Teresa of Avila wrote, “Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, Yours are the eyes, you are His body. Christ has no body now but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours, Yours are the eyes with which He looks compassion on this world."

You. You who will fail to understand. You who will harden your heart. You who will fall asleep and run away at the first sign of danger. You. Welcome to the table. We can’t do this without you. And that is such good news.

Thanks be to God.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Peanut Butter Burger

1 Samuel 3:1-10

John 1:43-51

 It happens the first time the almost teenager sleeps in. This kid who has woken up at six in the morning every day of his life suddenly sleeps until ten. It happens when the eight year old tells you he chose a salad at school for lunch today. It happens when the sun is shining in January, or when you dip apples in cheese fondue and the tart crunchiness complements the smooth gooey cheesiness to chef’s kiss perfection. It’s when the t-shirt from Walmart lasts longer than the designer one from Macy’s. Or when the waiter tells you to trust her and just try the hamburger with relish and peanut butter and blackberry jam, medium rare, with a side of sweet potato fries. (Seriously, try it, it’s so good.) It happens when you find out that the person you adore votes for the guy on the other side of the aisle. Or the guy with the offensive bumper sticker lets you cut in a line of traffic. Or when, once in awhile, the female pastor with all the tattoos and the radical economic ideas says something that you might even agree with. It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it’s all around us. It’s when things don’t seem to make sense, when two plus two somehow equals five and you’re just thrown for a loop for a moment. You have to stop and say, “wait, what?” When this happens, you have to do two things. You have to take a breath, and you have to make a choice.

First, you have to take a breath. You have to stop and notice that what you’re experiencing doesn’t really make any sense. You have to pinch yourself to make sure that you’re not dreaming. It’s really real that the guy driving the hybrid car works at the oil refinery. It’s totally true that the guy with the NRA membership also donates to the world wildlife fund. Peanut butter and jelly can be brilliant condiments for a burger. You have to pause and look around, blink a couple of times, shake your head clear, be a little astonished at what’s right there in front of you. 

Then you have to make a choice. Will you choose to believe in the reality that has been set before you? Is it real that this kid wearing fishnet tights and black lipstick is actually reciting Shakespearean sonnets? Is it true that this chainsmoker is also a vegan? The woman who works in the laundromat has a PhD? The bottled water has more micro plastics than the stuff we get from the tap?  You have to stop and ask, “Wait, is this real?” And then, after doing some research and a little introspection, you finally conclude, “yup, it sure is” or at least, “it very well could be.”

Now, there’s this other human phenomenon, called cognitive bias, that happens when we refuse to believe the reality that our dissonance is telling us. When it’s just too uncomfortable to think that the single mom on food stamps isn’t squandering her paycheck, or it’s too painful to believe that the faith leader cheats on his wife, we refuse to go any further. We refuse to believe or accept or even see what is right in front of us. It can’t be true that the man with the Costco sweatpants is actually a millionaire. It’s impossible that the warming temperatures are a sign of a climate in crisis. There’s no way that the homeless man made all the right decisions and just ended up on the streets out of sheer bad luck. It’s impossible that a police officer or a doctor or my favorite politician might lie or cheat or make a mistake. Or worse, that a police officer, or doctor, or politician might get something right once in awhile. 

So cognitive dissonance is super common. It’s this experience that we all have when we encounter two or more things that just don’t seem to match or jive or go together. We get this funny feeling like something is off, something isn’t making sense, and we have to make a choice. Do we believe what is right there in front of us, or are we made so uncomfortable by this experience that we simply can’t believe it; we have to go back to our preconceived notions because they are easier or simpler or not as disruptive to our reality? When we decide to refuse reality, when we insist that our experience is the only true experience, and when we refuse to wrestle with the dissonance that is right in front of us, we enter the world of cognitive bias. And with cognitive bias, there’s nothing that can change your mind, even if scores of scientists were to show you countless academic peer-reviewed studies that prove that the earth is warming at an unprecedented rate, and it’s human activity that’s the main culprit. With cognitive bias, we believe that our truth is the only truth, even when we’ve been given evidence that proves our truth isn’t the truth at all.

And before we think that somehow we’re exempt from this most human of conditions, God brings this cognitive crisis right to our doorstep. Our two stories today are about folks who are forced to see things in a new way, and about what they decide to do with it.

When Samuel hears the voice of God calling him in his sleep, he just assumes that it is his master calling for him. Three times he runs to Eli, ready to attend to whatever his need may be, and three times, he’s wrong, it isn’t Eli calling for him at all. Eli tells him that it’s something else, it’s someone else. "Go back to bed,” he says, “and if you hear the call again, try something new, try a different tack, try shifting your perspective, try asking God what it is that you should hear.” How could it be that God is calling Samuel by name? It just doesn’t make sense.

Samuel is just a kid, born to Hannah who was barren until old age. One day she goes to the temple and prays so hard for a baby they think she’s drunk. But Eli hears her wailing, tells her to go home, and God answers her prayer. She dedicates Samuel to the temple, and leaves him there for Eli to raise. How could it be that God is calling this orphaned son of a barren wife by name? It just doesn’t make sense. 

Jesus is walking along, heading toward Galilee. He calls to Philip, who seems to have no qualms following a man from Nazareth. But when Philip calls out to Nathanael, Nathanael has an experience of sheer cognitive dissonance. Nathanael hears words from Philip that simply do not make sense; he doubts them, he questions their truth, simply because this new thought had never occurred to him before. How can something good come from Nazareth? It just doesn’t make sense. Cognitive dissonance. 

Nazareth is a podunk backwards town full of podunk backwards people. Nazareth is a nothing town, it’s where the bandits and the desperate and the lazy folks come from. Nazareth is behind the times, the exit you drive past even though you have to stop to pee. Nazareth is the last place to get running water or trash collection, the last to get a Starbucks or internet access. Nazareth is a nothing town. It’s not mentioned once in the Old Testament. It’s the backwoods. It’s out in the sticks. Farthest from the farthest suburb. How could it be that the Son of God, the Messiah of Israel, the Savior of the nations, could come from such a place? It just doesn’t make sense. Cognitive dissonance. 

Both Samuel and Nathanael have a choice to make. They can stay stuck where they are with what they’ve always known, or they can step into something new, with this new information, even if it seems completely implausible. They can choose to step in to this cognitive dissonance, or they can choose to cement themselves into cognitive bias. 

Both of our characters in these stories are presented with a choice. They can go along with what they expect, or they can choose to see something new, look at something from a different perspective, maybe even change their minds.

“Listen again,” Eli says to Samuel. Ask God for clarity about this thing that doesn’t make sense. 

“Come and see,” Phillip says to Nathanael. Enter in to this thing that doesn’t make sense. 

Enter in to your cognitive dissonance, before it turns into cognitive bias, before we’ll miss all the things God has in store for us.

It’s not a call for blind faith. It’s not a demand to “drink the kool-aid,” we aren’t asked to leave our reason behind; rather, it’s an invitation to learn more, to open our eyes to what we might have missed before. Just put the peanut butter on the burger and try it. Experience it. See how it tastes.

And what’s wild is that in both of our stories, when Samuel asks God to speak, and when Nathanael decides to come and see, both of our character’s lives are changed. Samuel becomes a prophet and a judge who leads the Israelites into a new way of seeing themselves and relating to the world. Nathanael has a dramatic conversion out of a seemingly mundane encounter. His eyes become so open to the sacred all around him that he is astonished when Jesus simply calls him by his name, when Jesus simply notices him sitting there, under the fig tree. 

Because when we enter in to our cognitive dissonance, when we “come and see” what’s really going on, instead of just relying on our assumptions, or rejecting what doesn’t seem to make sense, we begin to see the world with new eyes. Suddenly, when we look deeper into what seems strange, we find the holy everywhere. When we take the time to ask the questions and wrestle with the ideas and see the different perspectives, we begin to be astonished. God becomes present in all these strange, conflicting, confounding, and wonderful ways, in all these strange, conflicting, confounding and wonderful everyday encounters of our lives. When we step beyond the bounds of our cognitive biases, we see differently, we can see the holy, we can see the sacred, even in the strange contradictions and quirky incongruities that we encounter in people every day. Instead of judging what we don’t understand, we become curious. Instead of assuming we know what is going on, we ask more questions. When we “come and see,” Jesus tells us, “Do you believe because you wrestled with this tiny paradoxical thing? Keep looking. Keep entering in. Keep asking questions and being curious. Keep holding back your biases. Very truly, I tell you, when you let go of your biases, when you lean in to what doesn’t immediately make sense, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” You’ll experience the ecstatic tastebud explosion that is the Peanut Butter and Blackberry Jam Burger.

Thanks be to God.

Peeing Downstream

 

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, (I mean, without the pants) 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 was 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 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.

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 realize 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. Our clothes are made by six year olds in sweat shops. Our exhaust pollutes the air of our children. 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. All the way down. 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 into 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.
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, you know, we are all just doing the best we can in the crazy, broken system.

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. There's more than just sin, all the way down.

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 he entered in.

Let’s follow him in. 

Thanks be to God.