I have to admit, I am particularly excited about Epiphany this year as a new homeowner. I can’t wait to take my piece of chalk and write Christe mansionem benedicat on the doorpost of my own home. I suppose I could have chalked the entrance to my apartment, but that seemed a little weird. And when I lived in LA, I rented a room in someone else’s house, and I didn’t think any of my landlords/housemates would want me writing on their walls, even in chalk. This is the first time I’ve had a place that was really my own.
I’ve been reflecting this week on the day I bought the house. My realtor and I took a final walkthrough, I followed him over to his office, signed my name what seemed like a million times and handed over a cashier’s check for the largest amount of money I’ve ever given someone in my life, and then he gave me a set of keys, and that was it. I was a homeowner. It was sort of anti-climactic; there was no test or anything. I went back to the totally empty building that I now owned and just laid on the floor staring up at the ceiling thinking, “this is my home, I own this home, I am a homeowner.” A friend and his family came over with pizza, and his four year old daughter spilled Parmesan cheese all over the floor, and I didn’t care because the floor was dirty anyway, and there was absolutely nothing else in the house, and besides, it was mine. I could spill cheese on the floor if I wanted to. Eventually I went back to the apartment where all of my belongings were, and went to bed, still with this sense of surrealness. I didn’t feel any different, I felt like the same person I’d been when I’d gotten up that morning, but now I had apparently reached the American Dream and joined the ranks of home-ownership.
That surreal feeling lasted exactly until I got up the next morning, went back to the house, and had to face the harsh reality what owning a home really meant. I immediately had to deal with the fact that the house was too filthy to actually live in, requiring a solid three weeks of serious on my hands and knees scrubbing, in addition to the normal joys of moving. Then there were, of course, the whole host of other quirks the inspector had somehow missed. Like how the ductwork for the second floor was cut in the basement, so the second floor had no heating or A/C. Or that the “new windows” were not new, and the one in the upstairs bathroom fell out if you opened it from the top. Or the time a few months into living in the house when I came downstairs one rainy morning to find it raining in my kitchen. I really love the house, don’t get me wrong, but I do have to confess the “honeymoon phase” was over after the first hour of bleaching the kitchen floor.
I got to thinking about this because in addition to Epiphany, we are also celebrating Baptism of our Lord Sunday this morning. And because of the way we sometimes read scripture sort of jumpily to get it to fit with the liturgical calendar, we miss the really weird juxtaposition of what happens immediately following Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. Let me read the last two verses of chapter three again, sixteen and seventeen, and then I’ll read the first verse of chapter four, so you can see what I mean. “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ [pause] Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” Did you catch that? That’s the story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, which, spoiler alert, we will read on March fifth, the First Sunday of Lent. Because the lectionary cycle sticks the entire season of Epiphany between these two stories, we often don’t realize they actually happen back to back. The image of the Holy Spirit in my mind is like one of those old cartoons, like Wylie Coyote, or something like that, you know where the Roadrunner is chasing him off into the sunset. I imagine the dove descending from heaven onto Jesus, and then immediately driving him out of the water and off into the Judean wilderness as the scene closes. The lectionary cycle gives us this long space to reflect on the baptism of Jesus, what it meant and how we understand it. Jesus himself had no such luxury. The story went from water to voice from heaven to wilderness, just that fast. Which at first seemed like a pretty raw deal for Jesus. He just had this huge heaven opening, dove descending moment, and then the dove turns out to be kind of a bully who chased him out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. What gives, Holy Spirit!
But here’s a couple of thoughts on that. First, we can’t try to psychologize or come to some sort of metaphysical understanding of Jesus’ “baptismal experience.” Matthew, and more importantly, Jesus, really wasn’t interested in that. Jesus’ baptism wasn’t the moment in which Jesus became the Son of God. Remember the genealogy? This thing has been in the works since literally the beginning of time. What happened at Jesus’ baptism wasn’t that he became God’s son, but that he was declared to be God’s son, which, by the way, he already knew. Matthew makes it clear by starting the story with Jesus coming to John the Baptist in the wilderness and basically forcing John to baptize him, that Jesus was the one controlling the cards here. While the crowds might have been amazed at the voice from heaven declaring, “This is My Son the Beloved,” Jesus wasn’t. Jesus knew that already. He knew he was God’s Son, he knew he was beloved; he knew that with him God was well-pleased. Jesus didn’t get baptized in order to undergo some sort of great conversion experience. He got baptized “to fulfill all righteousness,” basically because God wanted him to. Our baptisms are this moment of joining ourselves into God’s family, but Jesus didn’t need to be joined, he already was, he was God’s son.
But something did change for Jesus at his baptism, the Holy Spirit descended on him. I think our image of it, or at least my image of it, is like clouds parting out of a blue sky, and rays of golden light shining, maybe some trumpets, and a shimmery white dove coming down in the light rays. But I think maybe instead of picturing the Holy Spirit as rays of light, or a dove, or wind, we ought to picture the Holy Spirit more like glitter. And you know how with glitter, when it gets on something, you can never get it off again. You know how you go home after doing something with glitter, and you wake up the next morning, and you take a shower, and then you go out, and someone is like, “hey, is that glitter in your hair,” and that happens for a week? The Holy Spirit is kind of like that.
And if we think of the Holy Spirit as glitter, it totally changes how we imagine Jesus’ time in the wilderness. Jesus was in the wilderness, forty days and forty nights, tempted by the devil, no food, it was hard, don’t get me wrong. And when we read this story, I wonder if we don’t think of it as some great test on the part of Jesus, a sign of his amazing ability to pull himself up by his bootstraps, or, sandalstraps, I guess, and get through. Because he’s baptized now, and he’s got this. And then how easy is it for us to take the next logical step along that track and think, well, we too are baptized, and so when we are in the wilderness, all by ourselves, we then, like Jesus, should pull ourselves up by our own metaphorical bootstraps and get it done. God helps those who help themselves, right?
Except, here’s the thing, he wasn’t alone in the wilderness, because he had the Holy Spirit with him, stuck to him like glitter. Shining in his hair, sparkling in the day, catching rays of the moon by night. Maybe Jesus’ time in the wilderness was less some great test of his ability to resist temptation, and more a reminder that wilderness isn’t about an individual struggle, it is about faith lived out in community. God’s people are constantly finding themselves in the wilderness, and they are never alone. God sent Abraham to Canaan to make a great nation, he had Sarah, and some strange visitors, and eventually a kid. The Israelites wandered forty years in the desert, and not only were there a whole nation of them, but God in the form of a pillar of fire led the way. The Babyonian Exile, you’ve got a Babylon full of Israelites, and random prophets popping up every so often to remind them, hey, God hasn’t forgotten about you.
So what does any of this have to do with my house? I tell you what, it felt, still feels sometimes, like a wilderness time. There were days where I sat alone in the totally empty living room and thought, this place will never be clean enough to live in. Or stood in the kitchen, staring up at the water pouring through the ceiling, informing the yeowling cat that he was no help at all. But I’m learning I don’t have to solve these things alone. The horrible mess I moved into? Turns out I have a friend who uses cleaning as stress relief, she spent six hours in the upstairs bathroom. It’s blue; I thought it was gray. I chatted it up with the Sims guy when he came to inspect the furnace, he figured out the heating duct was cut and jimmied it back together with a length of wire and a piece of wood. Val from the Co-op, her son does roofing; he made it so it no longer rains in my kitchen. My friends came to visit over the summer and got my box spring through the window, my dad helped hang things while he was here. Even the cat is useful at times, turns out he likes stick his nose where it doesn’t belong, which turns his whiskers into a spider web removal system. These tasks, which felt so insurmountable when I looked at doing them alone, became easy when I realized others could help.
Dear friends, faith is like that. That’s why we come together every Sunday. It’s not because God needs some certain number of people assembled in a space in order to feel sufficiently worshiped. No, it’s because we need some number of people in a space in order to feel sufficiently connected. We need to be reminded that living a life of faith, that being people of God, is not a solo activity. We have not been baptized just to be dumped out in the cold to figure out on our own. We were baptized into a community. And that Holy Spirit community is sticky, like glitter. You can’t get it out of your hair, no matter how much you try. Which means, you are not alone. You are never alone. Because God, through the alighting of the Spirit at your baptism is stuck to you, sending out little rays of light every time you move. And that sticky, glittery Spirit is bigger even than this place. Since Advent, and all through the rest of the year, we will be praying for places on our map where the sticky, glittery love of the Spirit has spread. So, when you find yourselves in what feels like wilderness, you can come here, or to any of the people here, or you can just look at this map, and maybe you will see that slightest hint of glitter twinkling back at you. Because you are God’s child, Beloved. And you cannot shake that off; it’s like glitter for your soul. Amen.
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