Journey's Weekly Homilies

Baptism Of Our Lord, Year B
January 12, 2003
Homily by Jim

Gen.1:1-5
Acts 10:34-38
Mark 1:7-11

"You are my beloved son; in you I am well pleased."

For a  long time between Vatican II and my arrival on the doorsteps of Journey  a few years ago,  I  studied  with a  Hindu swami.  He died a few years ago at the age of 99.  If he had looked at  this radiant passage from Mark's gospel today,  the one about the baptism of Jesus,  he would probably have said, "Ah, yes, another demonstration that God becomes human so that  humans can become god." Notice that I say God, not gods; he didn't expect to find a bunch of little gods running around.

He would have seen this story about God coming down and speaking to Jesus as a perfectly recognizable sign that Jesus was in truth the son of God, just as most of us do.  He was a Hindu, but he accepted that Jesus was an incarnation of God.  However to be  honest, he also accepted several other persons, male and female, as incarnations too.
He was quite liberated.  We don't quite go so far as he, but we can take some satisfaction  in the fact that people can stand here and talk to you about Hinduism and not be thought a heretic for trying to make pagans of all of you.

The swami and all of those studying the Vedanta philosophy, as it is called,  teach  that we humans are  potentially divine. The word potential is important here because, as the swami would say, we have not yet realized our connection with divinity  The word "REALIZE" --to make real--is a big, important word in Hinduism; it means that we 'realize'  in essence  we are soul mates of  God.  No one cannot tell where I end and God begins. Try  this experiment for yourself: Draw a line that shows where you end and God begins. It can't be done.  In most Eastern religions, this closeness is thought to be an identity with the godhead.
 
All Asian religions--that I know of--insist that our relationship with God--whatever it is--must be felt; our whole body must recognize the truth, but what does it mean?  A few days ago I heard for the first time a reading from  Paul in 1 Corinthians where he asks the question "Do you not know that your bodies are physical parts of Christ?"    We cannot get to be like Jesus, if we are only half a person--the soul .  Jesus, in distinction to Christ, is more than soul--he is body too, or we could not say that he is perfectly human. 

We have grown up in a church where the body was considered bad, with the strong implication that sex--any kind of sex--was sinful.  We are still getting over that one, but we've learned in the meantime what a liberating experience--'liberation' is a synonym for 'realize' in this context--what a liberating experience exercise can be.  Anyone who's exercised regularly knows what changes occur in the body; how lifted up, expanded even cosmic we become--I will even say we are 'deified'. If you swim, run, play tennis, dance -- engaging in every systematic exercise would go on this list--then you already know something of the body's experience of the holy, at least I interpret it that way .And it is this very sense the East means that the body is not only in touch with the truth, it becomes The Truth.

If all of us could realize  this holy instance I've been speaking about then our lives could  change dramatically.  If all of  us could realize that we are God's children in the flesh,  then we  could receive abundant spiritual support.  I can put it more sharply than that:  You've heard Lincoln's expression "a house divided cannot stand"; well, for the moment make it read "a person divided into body and soul" cannot stand.. But even if we can't be completely unified and so liberated, we can discover some measure of holiness in all our activities.

A father is putting his small daughter to bed. The girl is whimpering, afraid. The father says, "Don't be scared, dear; God will watch over you."  The girl replies, "Yes, daddy, but I want a God with a skin face." She wanted God to look and feel like a human--how charming is her demand, and how right, for that's what we all want actually. We want a whole divine person to be our God and we want to be a whole person in the presence of God.

If we can discover that we are not alone, that would be bliss itself. That same voice that spoke to Jesus at the river can speak to us. That voice has a bodily counterpart, and I must sense it in my own body.. A few days ago I wrote out this line (You are my beloved son . . . )  from Mark on a  floppy disk label and stuck it to my shirt and wore it around all day hoping thereby to remind myself every minute  that I was a son of God--and I wanted to feel that truth too!

Listen carefully to your life as if you were standing in the River Jordan. Listen to the flow and rush of the water, see the rocks and whirlpools, and with grace we will hear that  message of the Spirit. It may come as a whisper, it may come as a shout, at time like a mumble, but the message will always be here, because it is a message to you that God does not withdraw or change. What God does is keep saying it, whether or not you choose to listen: "You are my beloved child; with you I am well pleased."