Peaceful Waters

We can’t say we weren’t warned: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division,” or occupation. Some baptized Christians have failed to see the irony in Jesus’s words and have taken them literally, as license for division by forceful means. But Jesus wasn’t calling for division. Fourteen times in this Gospel, Luke speaks of Jesus as a peace-giver. But as Jesus – by his words and actions – challenges peoples’ presumptions of a God they assume is on their side and in their pocket, then they will cause division by rejecting his peace for all, not just for some.

Those who seek the living God have always been tempted to think they have found God, and having found God, pocket God. So God has had to remind us that they are in nobody’s pocket: “Am I a God near by, says the LORD, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? Says the LORD.” Of course there is no part of God’s creation off limits to its creator. Yet, through the prophet Jeremiah, God begins with a question, “Am I a God near by?” Or have the king and the priests and the approved prophets taken God’s presence for granted, as near by as their dreams? “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, "I have dreamed, I have dreamed!" In this case, those so-called prophecies were exactly what Sigmund Freud said that most dreams are, wish-fulfillments. Wish-casting isn’t new under the Sun either,

So, sometimes God has to recede out of our sight, out of our hearing, and let our false prophecies of power and triumph be exposed for the lies they are. But there are no “secret places” to hide from God. So if, sometimes, God seems to be unavailable, God is never unavoidable. In the meantime, those who truly seek peace and justice and love are in the same world as those who have brought division by their rejection of Christ’s peace – the same world that perhaps God has had to recede from?

If the divisions that Jesus has brought by his rejection are as close as the families of our blood, then the pain of those divisions shows us how hard that baptism was that Jesus was having to endure — I have a baptism to be plunged in, and how much pressure I’m under till it’s accomplished! — This better captures the ordeal that this baptism was for Jesus. Before the Greek word baptizo became synonymous with the Christian ritual, any object that was “baptized” was submerged. For Jesus and for all who have been baptized in his name since, to be baptized is to drown, and to rise, but drown first.

Hardly any of us, however old we were, fully understood what we were doing when we were dunked or had water poured on us in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Those administering the Baptism in the Trinitarian formula – which almost all churches claiming to be Christian do – may not have fully understood either that in the water of Baptism, we are buried with Christ in his death; by it we share in his resurrection; and through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.

But in that rebirth, we did begin a journey of learning what that rebirth means. And that baptismal journey has led you here. And that journey will continue for ever in the dying and risen life of Jesus Christ our Savior. From Jeremiah’s time to ours, God might sometimes have not been as available as either we or those we believed were enemies of Christ’s peace wanted God to be. But what Jeremiah and Jesus both tell us today is that God is never unavoidable.

August 17th, 2025

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 15, Year C

The Rev. David Kendrick