The Sunday of the Baptism of Christ '04

The Rev. Andrew J. Walmisley

A couple of weeks ago I took Jonathan and the children to one of my favorite spots: the confluence of the Klamath and Salmon Rivers at Somes Bar, known in the Karuk language as Katimiin, believed by the native people to be the center of the world. Here, where the Klamath spills over mighty rapids at the base of a huge sugarloaf mountain, the divine beings who peopled the earth before the arrival of the Indians, made the laws that govern human existence. Here the most sacred ceremonies of the people still take place: the elaborate White Deerskin Dances in the fall that "remake" the earth afresh through entering into sacramental time, the age of the divine beings, drawing from their energy afresh to renew the salmon run and acorn harvest.

Katimiin is one of those "thin places", as those in the Celtic tradition have called sites that have a remarkable sacred resonance, where somehow that veil that separates human and divine is lifted, where the membrane between heaven and earth seems transparent. We have known many such places in our various journeys of the spirit, places that ground us, renew us, or even terrify us. These are numinous places, where as the theologian Rudolph Otto put it, we come face to face with the "mysterium tremendem et fascinans." "Take off your shoes," God said to Moses from the burning bush, "for the ground on which you walk is holy." Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religion, suggested that we require sacred place and sacred time to make sense of the truth that all time and space is sacred: only in defined holy places can we gain access to the sacred and enter into it, have a relationship with it. We need doors to pass through. It makes lots of sense, then, that the California Indians frequently believed that there literally was a doorway in the sky into the upper world. Sometimes this door was guarded by fiersome rattlesnakes or had toothed jaws that opened and closed making passage through perilous. Mortals and sacred beings ascended to this door on gossamer thread spun by Spider, another version of the ladder on which the angels of God ascend and descend in Jacob's dream at Bethel: "How awesome is this place - this is none other the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."

We need to find our own sacred time and space and enter in if we are to renew ourselves. Like the Karuk People, we draw from this energy to ground ourselves and to unleash afresh the creative spirit that gives life and meaning. We need to find the potentially dangerous door into the sacred, enter in and find sustenance for our journey. The Chumash shamans of Santa Barbara County saw such doorways in unusual caves and crevices, odd rock formations, and mysterious pools of water. Cracks in the rock were literally believed to be little entrances into the underworld and around such openings the shamans painted amazing representations of the sacred beings encountered in their journeys to the other side. Big rock fonnations and boulders were seen to be the abode of these beings, not all of whom were benign - they had to be handled very carefully!

"Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily fonn like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." When women and men encountered Jesus, they weren't quite sure what had hit them! All they knew is that they had through him a powerful meeting with God, that somehow because of him, they entered into the divine. No wonder they called him the door, the gate, the way! This was for them a fulfilment of Jacob's dream: "This is none other than the house of God, the gate of heaven." And what they discovered to their astonishment was that this relationship with the divine through Jesus wasn't about personal enlightenment, nor about the manipulation of sacred power or energy, but about discovering their own identity as daughters and sons of God. Meeting God in Christ meant meeting themselves, or at least the women and men God created them to be. In and through Christ the early Christians discovered the powerful truth that our identity lies not in what we possess or the power we wield, but in the degree to which we let go of power. We live into the truth of who we are meant to be when we offer ourselves to one another in love as Christ offered himself, indeed, as God has offered herself since the beginning of creation. As such, baptism for the early Christians was not about becoming children of God (what a preposterous idea!), but rather it was an affinnation of our true identity as daughters and sons of God. The voice breaks through the gate of heaven, through Christ himself, and cries out to you and to me, "You are my Son/Daughter, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." It seems clear to me that when we speak of Jesus as the "only begotten Son of God", this makes sense insofar as we understand his divine sonship as the lens through which we see our own.

Jesus, then, is our "thin place" through whom all the thin places of this world are given meaning. I have spoken before about the beautiful mosaic in the narthex of a gem-like Byzantine Church pf Our Saviour in Chora in Constantinople: the compassionate face of Christ with the words, "Jesus Christ, the homeland of all the living." He is our home; he is the door to the sacred; he is the one through whom we know the realm of God to be the abode of undying love and compassion. And we are only truly home when we live lives that reflect this compassion. This amazing season of Epiphany is about the celebration of Christ as the ultimate "thin place". Through him the godhead blazes forth and all creation glows with divine beauty. Through him (and this is the most startling of all) you and I become thin places, too, and doors to heaven, as we live into the full meaning of our true identity as lovers. You, then, my sisters and brothers, are none other than "the house of God and the gate of heaven."