In Bodily Form like a Black-Necked Stilt
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’
It’s the first Sunday after Epiphany, so we’re talking about Jesus’ baptism and this revelatory confirmation that Jesus is indeed the fully human, fully divine son of God. The story of Jesus’ baptism is one of the few stories that’s in all four Gospels—so it’s especially interesting that early Christians were actually embarrassed by Jesus’ baptism. Early opponents of Christianity used Jesus’ baptism as a way to discredit Christianity—after all, if Jesus is indeed perfect and sinless, why would he need to repent and be baptized? This may be why in Luke the actual act of Jesus’ baptism is almost an afterthought. There is a great deal of emphasis on making it clear that John the Baptist is not the savior people are seeking, and there’s a lot of emphasis on the literal voice of God making an appearance. But I think there’s something to be said for the fact that the actual baptism itself is barely mentioned. I think there’s something to be said for these quieter moments. There’s something really beautiful about the fact that Jesus’ baptism is so simple in Luke in particular. As Linda Johnston so perfectly put it at Bible study last week, “Luke doesn’t make it into a halftime show.” Jesus humbly stands at the back of the line, with the rest of the regular folks who want to repent, who want to sort of reset and focus on their relationship with God and with God’s world around them. It seems to me an act of solidarity—of the fact that Jesus is indeed fully human, and willing and able to take on the imperfections that make us all fallible and human.
Even more specific to Luke in this version of the baptism is that Jesus prays after his baptism. This is the first of many examples of Jesus praying in the gospel of Luke, in particular during and after momentous events in the life of Jesus. There is an emphasis on prayer in Luke that just doesn’t exist in any of the other three gospels.
I’ll be honest with you all—one of my greatest weaknesses as, not just a pastor, but as a Christian in general, is my private prayer life. I just have such a difficult time quieting my brain and really focusing on prayer outside of this building, outside of rituals like communion, outside of responsive hymns. It’s always been an issue for me.
Here we are, back on Zoom for the time being—back to our church doors being closed. I know it’s frustrating, but it got me thinking of something I really emphasized back in the Advent season of 2020, when we were still unvaccinated and fully isolated. I proposed that maybe we could take that quiet Christmas season as an opportunity to treat Advent the way it was supposed to be treated before the sensationalism, the consumerism, and the secularization of Christmas happened—as a quiet and contemplative period to be patient and to wait and to discern what Jesus coming to us really means for us.
Well maybe, now that we’re in isolation again, we can take this as an opportunity to take advantage of the quiet of this post-Christmas lull. Maybe we can work on our prayer lives and figure out what forms of prayer and meditation make sense to us, are meaningful for us.
I know it might be a cliché, but one place outside of church where I can actually successfully focus on my prayer life is out in nature. I was reading a book of essays Vesper Flights by the author and naturalist Helen Macdonald, and one of her essays really spoke to me in this regard. In her essay “Winter Woods,” she writes of a tradition she has in which she makes it a point to take a walk in the woods every New Year’s Day. She writes,
Because life is less obvious in a winter wood, where it does subsist, as bright stars of moss, or fungal fruiting bodies enduring winter frosts with antifreeze-packed cells, it demands attention…And the lack of obvious life in winter reminds me of the limits of my own human perception. Most life here is too small for me to see, or exists underground. Beneath my feet, an intricate network of mycorrhizal fungal threads links plant roots to each other and the soil. They not only grant trees access to crucial nutrients, but give them a means of communication.[i]
So, if we want to see God’s beauty in the world, when everything around us feels kind of dead uncertain, and wrong, we have to make it a point to really pay attention. The winters here in Vermont are cold and bleak and white and brown, but when we stand in the cold quiet on a windless winter day, we can focus and we can think of our relationship with God, and our relationship with nature. We can quiet our minds and find something to pay attention to—the crunch of long-dead leaves under our feet, the never-ending green of pines that surround us, the juncos that miraculously finds comfort and warmth in the icy northern winters. I really do feel God’s work in those moments, standing in places where life should be impossible, but it’s somehow not. It’s then that I can feel that presence and feel that comfort and warmth despite, or maybe rather, because I’m standing in a barren, nearly silent, seemingly lifeless, but deceptively life-filled place.
It’s not just in silent frigid climates that I can really be in touch with the Holy Spirit. When I was in the California desert last week, it really was amazing to me that in that hard, rocky, dry, orange soil, strange and beautiful Joshua Trees and cholla cacti thrive. And even more moving was my visit to the Salton Sea—a place that was once a giant, ancient oasis, then a dried up basin, and for a short time, a resort destination, is now, because of poisonous agricultural runoff creating toxic waters and toxic dust, a desolate, almost postapocalyptic landscape that smells of ammonia and death. What’s moving about that, you might wonder—I was absolutely shocked by the dozens of species of shore birds thriving. Plovers and stilts sprinting along the shoreline, looking for their next meal of a mollusk or minnow, ducks floating in that salty water, sparrows perched in the surrounding shrubs... These creatures have found a way to live in this place that we have destroyed. On the quiet, still waters of the Salton Sea, I saw God at work, and I now imagine Jesus being quietly baptized in a similar place. Not with the toxic agrarian runoff, but surrounded by desert, surrounded by a parched and precarious landscape where life should not exist and yet it does.
In “Winter Woods,” Macdonald writes of her experience exploring the woods in the new year, “Now the trees are leafless, wildlife is more visible, but so am I. I’m often met by the alarm calls of jays, nuthatches, robins, grey squirrels, harsh noises designed to inform me that they know I am here. Being sworn at by woodland creatures is disquieting, but comforting too.”[ii] In Luke’s story of Jesus’ baptism, while Jesus prays in the wilderness, presumably discerning what this ritual means for his relationship with God, “…the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’” In the bodily form of a dove in the harsh wilderness is the way the Holy Spirit makes its presence known to Jesus and to the people around him.
Church, I can’t promise that praying in the wilderness will lead us to hearing the literal voice of God, but I think it’s telling that God’s presence does become known in an unassuming but harsh place, during a quiet moment of contemplative prayer.
God’s voice is quiet again, I think. Jesus’ compassion feels far away right now. The Holy Spirit’s presence is difficult to sense in this time. We have to be creative. We have to look for ways to commune that work for us, that help to inspire us. Prayer, meditation, mindfulness, whatever you want to call it, won’t look the same for everyone. I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from the movie Harold and Maude—Harold asks Maude, “Do you pray?” Maude responds, “Pray? No. I communicate.”
I’ve been trying to find ways to improve my prayer life. Recently, I’ve taken a page from Flannery O’Connor and I’ve started a prayer journal. I’ve always been awful at keeping up with journaling, always been so bad at making time for prayer outside of church, but combining the two seems to be working—writing has always been something I love, so writing out my prayers, my attempted communications, if you will, with God is proving to be extremely helpful. Thinking about prayer and mindfulness in a different way has helped me too—with this in mind, I want to read you one last excerpt from “Winter Woods:”
So often we think of mindfulness, of existing purely in the present moment, as a spiritual goal. But winter woods teach me something else: the importance of thinking about history. They are able to show you the last five hours, the last five days, the last five centuries all at once. They’re wood and soil and rotting leaves, the crystal fur of hoarfrost and the melting of overnight snow, but they are also places of different interpolated timeframes. In them, potentiality crackles in the winter air.[iii]
Forcing myself to try to be in the absolute present moment is, I really do believe, impossible for me. So I love this notion of being in the present but contemplating the past and having some hope in the future. There’s an image that really sticks in my head from the Salton Sea—there was a tire a few feet out in the water, about a quarter of the tire was poking out above the surface. Atop that tire was a beautiful black-necked stilt using that tire to get a better view of its surroundings to get its next meal. And I wondered about the days when this body of water was a paradise, an oasis for the indigenous people who lived on that land. I wondered how those tires, this literal garbage ended up on this lake’s shore, that now seem to be part of the landscape. And wondered how God’s creatures continue to make a life in this place despite the wreckage we modern humans have wrought. And I believe in that moment, that black-neck stilt perched on that piece of trash was my version of the Holy Spirit making itself known to me in bodily form.
The Salton Sea is still toxic. I’m still in a pretty dark place right now. But I’m finding that looking at the world differently and finding God at work in the ugliest and most toxic of places is bringing me back a little. And I know a lot of us are discouraged right now. I know a lot of us are tired and overwhelmed and just done.
But I hope we can take advantage of this time of another quiet isolation, and find different ways to pray, to meditate, to be mindful, to communicate. I hope we can take some pressure off of ourselves and know that there’s no wrong way to communicate with God. There’s no wrong way to be mindful. We can be fully in the present while discerning the past and seeing potential in the future.
I hope you’ll join me—let’s challenge ourselves to think of prayer and mindfulness and being in the present in different ways. Let’s be creative and curious and focused. Let’s find God in the bodily forms of one another. Let’s find God in the quiet, unassuming moments. Let’s find God in the ugly, toxic, confounding times. Let’s be still and know that God is here. Amen.
[i] Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2020), 71.
[ii] Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2020), 70.
[iii] Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2020), 72.
