Sermons

“Well, Excited and Scared”

Psalm 29; Mark 1:4-11 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – January 11, 2015

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that our hearts might be opened to your life-changing invitation into new life in Christ. We pray it in the name of Jesus, Amen.

Some of you know that I enjoy musicals. And by “enjoy,” I mean memorize all the words to all the songs. So when we learned that “Into the Woods” – one of my favorite musicals – was coming out on Christmas Day, I really wanted to see it. And Todd agreed to go with me, on one condition. I wasn’t allowed to sing along. I guess you win some and you lose some.

For many of the characters, “Into the Woods” is a coming-of-age story. One of my favorite characters is Little Red Riding Hood, who in this version of the story, dispenses some hard-won wisdom after her ordeal with the wolf. “When he said ‘Come in’” she sings, “with that sickening grin, how could I know what was in store? Once his teeth were bared, though I really got scared – well, excited AND scared…” And therein lays the tension of what Red is learning to balance. She’s discovering that some scary things need to be dealt with, and that some scary things we bring upon ourselves, through the consequences of our own actions. But she’s also figuring out that what we learn through these scary but exciting experiences can be its own gift. Her song concludes with a question she answers for herself: “Isn’t it nice to know a lot? And a little bit not.” Would she want to go back to being the little girl who’d never wandered off the path and had to deal with a hungry wolf? Just a little bit, but not mostly. Her world is a lot bigger now, and she is much better prepared to handle it.

The writer of Psalm 29 knew a little bit about appreciating scary things. This was back in the days before climate science and meteorologists, when all the crazy things the earth can unleash upon us seemed to come straight from God. We find hints of all sorts of dramatic weather in here. Is it just a thunder and lightning storm? Could be. But you could also argue there are intimations of earthquakes and wild fires and hurricane-strength winds. What is interesting to me is that there is no indication that these storms are a source of fear, nor is it suggested that God is using the severe weather to punish anyone or express wrath, like you see in some other psalms. It’s more like the psalmist assumes that God has God’s reasons for knocking down the trees and the rest of it, and it’s really not our business, other than to be impressed. The being impressed is the point of the psalm in the end.

Storms are scary. Exciting sometimes, but scary exciting. They can be dangerous and destructive. But it seems like the psalmist here is writing not from the middle of the storm, but that later moment – when the wind and the rain have stopped, and everything is still, and you step outside, and everything is still dripping, but rather than it being scary, you have a moment of gratitude, because it’s like everything has been cleansed and made fresh and new, and we all get to start again. The truth is that, deep down, we know that sometimes the thing we need to go through to get where we need to be is the thing that scares us the most.

As a Midwesterner, I’ve always been a big fan of lightning. When I first moved to California, I was amused to learn how frightening many Californians found lightning. How many of you would say you’re at least a little scared of lightning? The consequences, of course, are different here, so I’ve gained a new respect for lightning. In the West, it is simply silly to say I’m not afraid of lightning, when in fact, I am terrified of wildfires. I haven’t been through nearly as many of these as most of you, and none of them very close, but yikes. I really prefer for the fire to stay up in the sky. And yet, even with the terror and the destruction and the lives lost, we know that wild fires are also part of the cycle of nature. There are trees whose seeds won’t germinate until after they’ve been through a fire. There are plants that can only thrive if the fires clean out all the dead stuff in their way. The forests come back, and they’re healthier for it.

Which brings us back to the passage we heard from Mark 1. Which do you think was scarier – a smelly, dirty, bug-eating, animal skin-wearing desert prophet, or confessing your sins? John was offering a baptism of repentance, but the water was only the symbol of cleansing. It was how the ritual was made visceral. The actual cleansing of the soul came from the confession. Were all those people coming out to the desert because it was scary? Because it was exciting? Because it was a little bit of both? To encounter God with your whole self – the nice bits and the ugly, awful bits – is indeed a exciting but terrifying prospect. Sometimes it takes something dramatic and a little frightening – like a grizzly, weird guy out by the river – to push us into the thing scary, good-for-us thing we’ve been avoiding.

The kind of confession that goes with repentance can be very scary. We’re not just listing all the things we’ve done wrong; we’re asking for help not to do them anymore. And for a lot of us, that means a shift in our very nature; it means becoming a somewhat different person. What could be more frightening? And yet, even as it scares us, there is also something deep within us that senses we’re moving in the right direction, that more than abandoning who we’ve been, we’re becoming who we’re supposed to be. And that’s exciting.

If the waters of baptism are going to wash us clean, we’ve got to bring the dirt up to the surface first. It may be scary. It may be painful. It may cause us to stretch in ways we never thought we could. Come to think of it, it’s probably good practice for following Jesus. Baptism itself is a way of following Jesus. Ours will never be quite like his, of course, it seems pretty obvious that we need it even more than he did. And there is that moment there at the end. I believe it’s a moment we can share. I believe that in our baptism, God re-affirms that we are beloved children, naming and claiming us as God’s own.

Here’s a crazy idea. What do you think that moment was like for Jesus? It’s easy to just give it a superficial, sentimental read and assume that voice from the sky filled him with confidence and warm fuzzies. But doesn’t it also seem possible that it was a little daunting? A little scary if exciting? Sure, he might not have had any sins to confess to John before going under, but he was still fully human, so this declaration from the heavens, while inspiring, could have also felt like a lot of pressure. “You’re pleased with me now, but what happens next? How do I make sure you stay pleased? Where is this going? Are you always going to be talking to me like this, so I know if I’m on the right track?”

My point today is not that our faith should be full of fear. You’ve heard me say over and over that the primary message of the Bible is “Do Not Be Afraid.” I’ve written about how fear rather than hatred is actually the opposite of love. So perhaps the point today is not fear but courage. Because our faith will take us places we would rather avoid. Being faithful will make us look at things – out in the world and within ourselves – that we’d rather turn away from. Just being faithful to our own true selves can be scary, but there is no other way to follow Jesus.

And Little Red Riding Hood is right about this. Following Jesus has a lot of scary moments, but moving through those scary moments with Jesus beside can be very exciting. Becoming a wiser, more faithful person is mostly a very good thing, though we may have nostalgic moments when we wish for simpler, easier times. The very act of baptism, and certainly the confession that precedes it, can be a sign of the simultaneously scary but exciting nature of following Jesus. What a terror and a relief to bring our whole self before God and find ourselves declared beloved. Thanks be to God. Alleluia and Amen.