The theme of John's preaching was, "One more powerful than I is to come after me. I am not fit to stoop and untie his sandal straps. I have baptized you in water. he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit.

During that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized in the jordan by John. Immediately upon coming up out of the water, he saw the sky rent in two, and the spirit descending on him like a dove. Then a voice came from the heavens, "You are my beloved Son. On you my favor rests." (Mark 1:6-11)

Or if you are a reader of Gothic novels, in a sense it's a Gothic novel, or have seen the movie "Rebeccah," Daphne DuMaurier, that great opening line of the movie which is the opening line of the novel, "Last night I dreamed I was at Manderlay again." And as the story unfolds, it's all told from the viewpoint of this young girl who has become the wife of Maxim and everything that happens. And of course being a first-person narrator, she's limited. She doesn't know what's happening, she doesn't know the background, she doesn't know the history, and there's always something that lurks in the background. So she has limitations as a narrator, because we only get her point of view, and we realize that her point of view, any first-person narrator's point of view, is always defective, it's always limited.

Or you can have what we call a third-person narrator, a he or a she who narrates the story. And again theirs is a very limited point of view, because they do not understand the characters, what the characters will do, they only know what the characters are going to let them know. And as the story unfolds, even a third-person narrator begins to be informed.

But there is another kind of narrator, what we call the omniscient narrator, or the all- knowing narrator. This is a narrator who tells the story who knows absolutely everything. He has perfect knowledge of every character in the story. He knows exactly how they're going to act, in what kind of circumstance, and what kind of situation.

Now Mark's gospel is unique; it's the first gospel, but it's unique in that it's first-person narration. But what is unique about it is that Mark is telling the story not from his, Mark's point of view, but from the point of view of God. You can't have a better authority, can you, than God. So what we see in Mark's gospel, the way that Mark writes, is not what Mark thinks of Jesus, but what God the Father thinks of Jesus. And that's unique. And as I say, you cannot get a better authority than God (I don't think). And what does God tell us? Immediately we have a revelation from God about Jesus in the second half of our Gospel this morning, and it's a two-fold revelation.

It's first of all a visual revelation, and it's secondly an auditory revelation. In other words, God first paints a scene as though on a blank canvas, and then God speaks. So you visual, you have auditory, and both tell us something about the same thing. Now the visual revelation is twofold. The sky is rent apart, the sky is torn apart. Any of you women will know what that means if you've ever taken something like a bedsheet or a piece of material, and you want to make two of it and you don't want to cut it, what do you do? You make a little incision with a pair of scissors and then you rip the thing apart. And that's the force of the Greek verb here: the sky is just ripped apart. And when the sky is ripped apart, then the spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove. That's visual. I wonder how Cecil B. DeMille would do that. I imagine he would do a tremendous job.

The whole implication is that here is something unusual, and here is a person who is unusual, to have the sky just pull apart. It's not just the clouds parting, but the whole sky for Mark just comes apart. It's hardly imaginable. and then the spirit descending in the form of the dove.

Then you have the auditory revelation: "You are my beloved son, on whom my favor rests." You are my son--God identifies his son. There's no birth of Mary in Mark's Gospel. There's no Annunciation except the annunciation which God himself gives, and there's no question for Mark, who is telling us the story from the viewpoint of God, there's no question of who Jesus is--God's very son.

Now there are certain things that Mark does in his Gospel. Mark is a great master of repetition, and he will repeat things twice, or better yet three times. And the first thing we have that he will repeat twice is this rending or tearing apart of the sky. When that happens, Mark of course imagines that we are going to hear the gospel all in one sitting. When that happens, Mark wants us to think of Chapter 15, and Mark wants us to think of what he says happens when Jesus dies on the cross--the Temple curtain is ripped, torn apart. The curtain that kept the people from seeing the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the covenant and the Tablets of the Commandment were, where the glory of God rested in the Temple. It is as if we have the sanctuary here completely enclosed and you never saw anything, and then once a year we kind of rent that curtain apart, and the only one who ever went in the Holy of Holies in the religious religion was the high priest, who went in once a year to sacrifice the Sacrifice of Atonement for people's sins.

Now what Mark is saying here is that that separation between God and humanity is rendered nothing by Jesus. There is no longer any separation. There is no longer any distance. Jesus in his baptism destroys that distance, destroys that lack of accessibility of God to God's people, once and for all. And Mark is also saying that the Temple is no longer useable; it no longer functions; it no longer has any power.

But what else is Mark saying here? "You are my beloved son." Mark repeats that three times in his Gospel, at very crucial points in the Gospel. He states it here, "You are my beloved son; on you my favor rests." He will state it again in the Transfiguration scene in Chapter 9, in the very middle of the Gospel, "This is my beloved Son. Listen to him." And it will be repeated again at the foot of the cross in another form, by the Roman centurion, "Truly this man was the Son of God." Now what Mark wants us to see by that, too, is that by the centurion saying that, at the climax of Jesus' life, is that Roman power is not the answer, just as Jewish power is not the answer. The Roman empire is not the answer; the Jewish religion is not the answer, but what takes over now is this new community, this new society, which Jesus himself has established by his baptism, by his death, by his resurrection.

But Mark tells us more about this and about Jesus' baptism, and for Mark the baptism of Jesus is of eminent importance. It's interesting if you go to the Greek, which is the oldest text we have, that the people who come to John, and incidentally they come from Judea and from Jerusalem, which is down south, and Jesus comes from Nazareth in Galilee, which is up north. But they come to John and the Greek tells us in translation, "They are baptized in the Jordan." But the Greek tells us that when Jesus comes to John to be baptized he is baptized into the Jordan. We don't make the distinction in English, unfortunately.

You know, if I had a tub out here and stood you up in it and baptized you and poured water over your head, you see, I would be baptizing you in the tub. But if I had a horse trough here and if I baptized you by immersion, I would be baptizing you into the water. And one of the connotations of baptism in Greek is "death." And so what Mark is saying by that Greek construction is, "Jesus is baptized into death and rises into life." A whole new person. A new individual. The free, the fully liberated individual. And therefore one of the things that Mark is trying to tell us about Jesus' baptism is that by being baptized into death, and coming into life new, free, fully liberated--is the fact that Jesus conquers the last enemy of humankind, not just Roman imperialism or any kind of imperialism, not Jewish power or any kind of misdirected religious power, but Jesus conquers the last enemy of humanity, death itself. And so Paul could say, "Oh death, where is your victory? Oh death, where is your sting?" And what is the force of death? Fear. The fear of the unknown. And in Jesus' baptism, as well as in his birth, you see, Jesus destroys that. Now that is what takes place in our own baptism.

We always think of our baptisms as a kind of initiation into the church, into the Christian community. But Paul says, "Are we not baptized into Christ jesus?" It means that the same thing takes place in our baptism that took place in jesus' baptism. That we die and rise new people. We always think we're waiting for eternal life, but in baptism we have eternal life if only in the downpayment. And what Mark would say is that, as Jesus has done it, so must we do it, and so must we live a new life, because by our baptism we are new people. And part of our task--yours and mine in life--is to conquer the fear of death, which is the last enemy that any of us has to face. And yet how we fear death. And yet in the past weeks how we have been given an example of a person who can say, "I have no fear of death. I embrace death as a friend, as a gift." That's what faith does. Faith gives one the courage to face life and to face even the greatest enemy of life, because one knows that something is after it, because one knows that Jesus took his life upon himself and did it perfectly, fully, completely, and that each one of us is to follow in Jesus' steps. That's what Paul meant when he said, "Put on the mind of Jesus Christ."

So all of this is seen in these few verses, sort of embryo form. And the rest of Mark's gospel will be an unfolding of God's view of Jesus, of how God looks upon his own son, and how we in turn are to look upon the son, and how we--you and I--are to so conduct our lives, as Jesus conducted his life. We should have no fears, we should have no anxieties, and most of all, no fears or anxieties about death, because Jesus has conquered death. Notice that Jesus never says that we will not die, but he says death is not the end. Life goes on, but a life that we cannot imagine, a life that we cannot imagine. So let us ask for that deepening of faith, let us ask for the realization of what our baptism truly means, that we walk as new people, born again into Christ, born with eternal life, divine life which is given to us always as a gift, freely, gratuitously given. The only thing that God asks is that we accept the gift. It always seem to me somewhat ironic that as powerful as God is--he can control nature, he can cure disease, he can do anything--but he will never violate the human heart. He will never force the human heart, he has that much respect for us. How will we respond to the invitation of Jesus, to the invitation of the Father. Will he be able to say of us, "You are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased"?