blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

This past Sunday was the time in the Christian year when we remember the baptism of Jesus. Well, I preached but I don’t think it went too well. I don’t know… It was just one of those times when the words just didn’t sound right. My own words exhausted me; they annoyed me. A quote from Sebastian Moore overshadowed every sentence I wrote and every word I spoke: “He is opening up before the thirsty wanderer the mirage that is the final exacerbation of thirst.” (Read this post for more of the quote, and another from Emerson). I’ll try to post the sermon soon; I basically preached an Orthodox icon. I’ll give myself points for creativity… but it’s just that it was the same old thing.

That’s enough for my pity party. What I wanted to post was a wonderful quote I discovered as I was preparing for my sermon. Whenever I preach, I go look up my passages in the index to Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and see what light he brings to the texts. He usually has wonderful insights that I then pretend are my own. Well, I tried to preach something of what Barth said in this quote on baptism:

“When the community baptises, and when its candidates are baptised, they are on the way into that strong tower, on the way to the One who enters Jerusalem, the Lord, their Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer. One might also think here of the virgins who go to meet the Bridegroom with their lamps (Mt.25:1f). Knowing of Him, inviting and appointed thereto by Him, they desire and seek His presence with all that this implies. Baptism is a going forth to Jesus Christ…. [I]t is a going forth in the strict sense in which it is said of Moses in Ex.19:17 that he ‘brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount.’ It is a going forth in the strict sense which it had for Paul as the essence not merely of the beginning but of the whole of his apostolic existence: ‘Not as though I had already attained, or were already made perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended by Christ Jesus’ (Phil.3:12).” (CD IV/4:94-95)

Baptism as the going forth out of the camp to meet with God—that’s right on. It brings to my mind the vision of the wandering people of God given in Hebrews. Baptism is the beginning of our wandering journey with the community of God in whose womb our faith is birthed. And we ask Barth, but where are we going? And he tells us that its a journey that begins with steps of faith—hope in what is not yet seen—that venture outside the familiar, outside the camp, to the nether parts. And this journey of faith into the unknown is a going forth to Jesus Christ. It’s a journey guided by the blinding light of Christ that beckons our spirits to follow despite our darkened eyes. And where we go we do not know; but all we can do is go further, dig deeper, and grow desperate: “Knowing of Him, inviting and appointed thereto by Him, they desire and seek His presence with all that this implies.”