Introduction to the reading of the Gospel:

How did your life on this earth begin? Have you ever been told your "birth story"? Maybe you came early and surprised everyone before your due date. Or perhaps like me, you were late and made everyone wait…and wait. I arrived three days late. But in my case that was a good thing, so the story goes, because I was due on Christmas Eve. Being the fourth child, my mom was very grateful that I waited to be born two days after Christmas, so that my siblings and dad could have Christmas with mom at home and not in the hospital. That’s about the whole story that is ever told.

Now these days, if you ask new parents about the birth of their child, you may hear more than you really wanted to know: when the water broke, how many hours of hard labor there were, how much pushing was required and other overly graphic details. We learned from our oldest daughter, Emily, the word for this is "overshare," meaning the moment when someone starts sharing way more personal detail than you ever wanted to know. Birth stories told in this generation can definitely shift into "overshare" all too quickly.

Our Gospel story this morning, Mark 1:4-11 is Mark’s birth story of Jesus. There are no angels, no shepherds, and no wise men; there is no mention of Bethlehem, an overcrowded inn, or of Jesus’ mother, Mary. Just imagine, if we only had Mark’s Gospel in our Bibles, we would have no "Christmas in the Cathedral" service at Westminster.

Mark chooses to begin his story of Jesus’ birth at the river Jordan. He begins at the moment when the heavens were torn apart and the Voice from heaven spoke: the instant when the barrier between heaven and earth came down like a dove. Mark identifies this moment as the beginning of the incarnation: the moment when the Word became flesh in a way that we could recognize. It is Mark’s birth story and epiphany story all wrapped into one moment signaling this amazing truth: God was now on the loose in this world in the man named Jesus. This was the day the Good News of Jesus Christ began in Mark’s Gospel.

The other three Gospel writers, like other family members telling their own version of the same birth story, begin their stories much earlier. Matthew starts with Jesus’ genealogy, tracing his roots through Joseph, back to Abraham. Luke begins with the announcement of John the Baptist’s birth to his father Zechariah. John’s Gospel, rolls the birth story of Jesus all the way back to the beginning of creation, "In the beginning was the Word." All of these birth stories emphasize different and equally important truths about who Jesus was and is. Now let’s consider Mark 1:4-11.

Can you picture Jesus standing in line by the river’s edge, waiting to be baptized by wild and crazy John the Baptist? Do you wonder why the Son of God would need to do that? After all, if he were without sin, what was he doing standing in the sinner’s line? Very strange indeed. This King of Kings and Lord of Lords, standing by the water’s edge, waiting his turn, like the rest of us.

From early on, the Christian tradition has never been very comfortable with the baptism of Jesus. Matthew, Luke, and John spend more narrative time than Mark trying to make sense of it. Matthew builds on Mark’s story, adding conversation where we hear John trying to talk him out of it. If you look at Luke carefully, he doesn’t actually say that it was John who baptized him. And in the Gospel of John, even though he describes the dove descending, he doesn’t actually mention Jesus’ baptism with water at all.

Lucky for us, good old Mark, true to his quick take MTV style, cut to the chase. He was the first Gospel writer out of the box and didn’t try to explain away the strangeness of John or the odd reversal of John baptizing, "The One who is more powerful than I." For Mark, Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan was the first moment of truth, of revelation, of epiphany: a truth for Jesus to hear with his own two human ears, and for the rest of the world to hear as well: "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

Life-giving, life-sustaining words were still reverberating in Jesus’ heart and mind, even as the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. Far, far away from the river Jordan experience, Satan would try to mess with Jesus’ mind, his sense of self, and the power within him. But Jesus had already been sealed by the Holy Spirit in his baptism; Jesus knew water. The human side of Jesus could lean on the truth of words that he’d heard and the water that he had felt run down his body. The truth locked deep in his heart.

So what does Jesus’ baptism have to do with us and our baptism: we who belong in the sinners’ line? Like Jesus, our baptism also marks us as God’s own. Our baptism tells us with water and word that we are also God’s own child, "sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever." Like a watermark, as permanent as a tattoo, sealed with the image of Christ.

But unlike Jesus, we forget. We let the words run off us, just like water off our backs. We don’t drink in the living water of Christ who came to show us just how beloved by God we really are. Instead we listen to other voices—voices not from heaven. You know what I’m talking about—those voices of doubt, insecurity and guilt. The voices that tell us we’re no good. I’m here to tell you, these voices are not of God.

And I will take this truth a step further: when we are the voice that is telling someone else that they are no good, we are contradicting the voice of God. Whether we think it, or actually say it out loud, when we start to think that somehow we are better than someone else, or some group of people, somehow more enlightened, more deserving, more beloved, we’ve missed the point of our own baptism. The message here is clear, even if it’s not always loud. Even if we let other voices drown it out. Like a tattoo or a watermark, it’s still there. We are still God’s beloved children.

Yes, you are God’s beloved child. And so is the person sitting next to you. And so is the person you don’t like or just don’t understand. You are named and claimed as God’s own—but so is every man, woman, and child all over God’s creation. The children whose pictures are in our wallet and the children who died in the crossfire of political unrest and violence in Kenya, Pakistan, Darfur, and Iraq just this past week.Whether we count them or not, God does. And so should we, if we dare to call ourselves Christians.

Our baptism is an entry point into the "counter script" as Walter Brueggemann calls it in his book, Mandate to Difference (pp.199-200). Our baptism, a bold counter-act, is our entry point into a stream of promise that is free, but not cheap. This counter script—counter to the script of our dominant culture—is one where all people are equally beloved in the eyes of God. This counter script where everyone is our neighbor; and especially the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely. If we know water and the word, we know, at least in our heads, that this is our script. God’s unconditional love and grace for all her creation.

This is one of the reasons we practice infant baptism in the Presbyterian church. It is a way we try to mediate, with word and water, this truth that God loves us as we are before we do anything right or wrong—before we are even vaguely aware of who God is. We are already God’s own. This is our birth story, too. God births each of us with a glorious beginning—no matter the story of our physical labor and delivery into this world from our mother’s womb.

This is the part of our birth story that we "undershare" rather than "overshare." This is the part of our birth story that maybe no one ever told us in a way that we could hear or understand. This is the part of our birth story that God wants us to remember—not only for our sake, but for the Kingdom’s sake. When we are able to get in touch with our own chosenness, then we are freed to love others as we are loved. When we are able to get in touch with our own chosennes, we begin to be able to see the chosenness in all God’s children.

How can we get in touch with our own chosenness? One practice that Henri Nouwen suggests in his book Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World is this. Whenever we find ourselves surrounded by our rejections, "Keep unmasking the world for what it is…rip apart the lies from the truth about you. Every time you feel hurt, offended or rejected, dare to say to yourself that these feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling the truth about you. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is this: ‘I am the chosen child of God…Precious in God’s eyes… Called the Beloved from all eternity… and held safe in an everlasting embrace.’"

I will end this sermon about birth stories – Jesus and ours – God’s glorious beginnings – with a true story about the power of the waters of baptism. It happened the night before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and was recorded in the book A Testament of Hope. It’s about Dr. King’s response to the fire hoses that Bull Connor turned on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. He said, "There was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. We had known water. If we were Baptists or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodists, and some others (like Presbyterians!) we had been sprinkled, but we knew water." With these words King converted an attack on the reign of God into a sacrament. How could he do that? Because as he said, "We knew water."

Do you and I know water? Do we, Westminster Church, know water? There are so many people in our communities who don’t know water. Some of them we know. And many more, we don’t. So many people whose souls are parched for the living water of this Good News. People who never heard this part of their birth story: that God our Maker, made them, birthed them, names and claims them as God’s own. This is a birth story that cannot be overshared. This is the birth story that can change the way we live every day.

It started in Genesis 1: the poetic birth story of our universe, "In the beginning, God. And God saw that it was good." Our God is the one who stands waiting, always ready for us to make new beginnings, glorious new beginnings—no matter what other voices we have been listening to, no matter how far we may feel we have run. These "glorious beginnings" glorify God.

Remember the most important thing about your birth story: it’s not whether you came early or late, or how many hours your mother was in labor, or whether your dad was there or not. The most important thing about your birth story is this: you are God’s beloved child—and in the creation of you God is well pleased.