St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church

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Living the "Baptized Life"

Mark 1:4-13

January 15, 2006        (Click this link to see the bulletin)

1. If you have your Bible with you, or have access to one, look up the Gospel of Luke. The second chapter begins with Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus. Twenty verses. Then he tells the story of the day Jesus was dedicated to God when he was eight days old. We read that last Sunday. Twenty verses later, Luke writes "The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him." Forty verses about his first eight days. The very next verse collapses 12 years into one sentence. "Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover." No account of his childhood exist in the Bible, except for the next ten verses about time he was twelve, and his family went to Jerusalem for the Passover. They accidentally left him behind; he was having such a good time learning from the rabbis. And at the end of Chapter 2, Luke writes, "And Jesus matured, increasing in wisdom and in favor with both God and people." In the space between chapter 2 and chapter 3, Jesus grew up. But there is absolutely nothing written about what he was like as a teenager or twenty-ager. The third chapter opens by telling about the work of John the Baptizer, and follows with Luke’s account of Jesus’ baptism, saying Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his work. Okay, you can put your Bibles away, if you want to. I’m going to read the story of Jesus’ baptism from the Gospel of Mark, since that is the gospel we read during Year B, which began the first Sunday of Advent. Read Mark 1:4-13.

2. Today is the day we remember the baptism of Jesus, and it closes our seven-week period of preparation for and celebration of Jesus’ birth. The color is still white; our stoles and the paraments remain the color we use at both Christmas and Easter. But next Sunday you will see a big change. Not only will the color change, Jesus will have changed, too! Actually, Jesus began changing the moment he was born. Jesus grew, as all of us grew, from his first day until his last. Growth and change happen to all of us. And probably the most difficult part of growing and changing is the pace. It takes forever – it takes a lifetime! And there is not much we can do to step up that slow pace.

3. There was a man once who actually tried to hurry that slow pace of growth. Not his own, mind you, but a butterfly’s. He had found a cocoon. Even though he couldn’t see through it, he knew what was going on inside. Metamorphosis was taking place. A caterpillar was changing into a butterfly. He decided to watch it’s progress. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could, and it could go no further. So, to help the butterfly, he took a pair of scissors and snipped off a little bit of the cocoon. The butterfly popped right out! But it looked funny. It had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would expand and away that beautiful butterfly would go. He watched, and he watch, and he watched. But it never happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a huge body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

4. The man, in his haste, did not understand the life and times of a butterfly. He did not know that the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening of the cocoon were God’s way of making the butterfly strong. The effort to wiggle its way out of the cocoon was actually forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings. The more the butterfly fought within the confines of the cocoon, the stronger he became until he would finally emerge ready to fly. It is that struggle that ultimately transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly.

5. Now, transfer what you know about the birth of a butterfly to the birth of a Christian. Some people think Christians should become Christ-like the very moment of their baptism, when they are re-born into Christ. But Christianity is not a magic act, where the magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat that was completely empty. Christianity is more like metamorphosis. And we Christians are a lot like butterflies – we have to struggle what too often seems to be the confines of the Christian life until we become strong enough to live like Jesus lived. And it’s hard work. Life can be very difficult! You younger Christians have struggles that we older ones never experienced; and we had hard times that were quite different from yours. But the truth is that, young or old or somewhere in between, it is not easy being a Christian in a world where other-than-Christian values are so strong.

6. Jesus had his struggles, too! Mark compresses his first big struggles into one verse: "He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts" (1:13). Matthew and Luke devote a whole paragraph to those struggles, which we’ll address them more fully during the Season of Lent. But today it is enough to say that we cannot expect to sit back and take it easy, just because we were baptized once upon a time. We must constantly stay on guard. And staying on guard means we have to make decisions. Should we, for instance, buy something we really want, if it means getting deeper in debt? Or, if someone invites us to go somewhere over the week-end, does it matter that we’re absent from worship? Will anyone notice? Will God know? You and I all have more struggles than these. We need some reinforcement!

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