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Texts: Acts 19:1-7; Luke 3:15-17; 21-22
The liturgical year begins with Advent,
the time of preparation for the celebration of the Birth of Jesus at Christmas.
Over the past few weeks, we have heard and told the great stories of the marvelous events
that surrounded the birth of this wonderful child:
Gabriel the announcing angel appearing to Zachariah, and Mary, and Joseph;
the choir of heavenly angels proclaiming the good news to the shepherds,
the mystical star attracting magi from a far country,
the warning angel appearing to the magi and to Joseph to protect the child.
But only two of the Gospel writers even give any accounting of the birth of Jesus,
and those two tell different stories,
which seem in some ways to contradict each other.
This opens up the question whether these birth narratives were literally true,
or whether they were legends & myths that arose
in the early Christian communities to underscore how intimately
God was involved in the birth of this sacred child.
In either case, the stories surrounding the birth of Jesus
would really elicit the question, “Who IS this guy?”
“Who IS this child? Who will he become, and what will he do?”
Now, after Christmas, the Sunday readings turn quickly to the stories of the young adult Jesus.
And here, all four Gospel writers agree about how he came on the scene.
Jesus has an encounter with the radical social prophet John the wild man,
who lived in the wilderness and dressed in rough-woven garb and ate bugs.
John assailed the political powers, preached repentance, and offered a baptism of cleansing.
And when Jesus came to John for baptism, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus,
and a divine voice proclaimed God’s special choosing of him,
and then the Spirit drove him into the wilderness
on a 40-day trail and vision quest.
On this Sunday of the feast of the Baptism of Jesus,
I’d like to offer one interpretation of who Jesus was,
and how he was perceived in his lifetime.
This understanding was well articulated by the teacher and author Marcus Borg
in his books “Jesus, a New Vision” and “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time”.
Borg’s first insight into Jesus is that Jesus was a spirit person, and a mediator of the sacred.
What does that mean, that Jesus was a Spirit person?
Perhaps there are other terms that we are more familiar with, that mean the same thing,
such as “holy man” or “swami” or “sadhu” in the Hindu tradition,
or the “shaman” found in many different cultures.
Marcus Borg prefers the term “spirit person” because it’s gender inclusive,
(and some sadhus and shamans are female)
and because the emphasis is not on the “holiness” of the particular individual,
but on their openness to the Spirit.
A spirit person has direct experience of the Spirit.
For the spirit person, the sacred is an experienced reality.
You might say they live in the “thin places” between the realm of the ordinary
and the realm of the sacred – or at least they spend a lot of time there.
Spirit persons have visions of the numinous; they see beyond the veil of the material world.
They have a sense that there is a realm beyond everyday sight and sound
and touch and consciousness.
In fact a spirit person is a “thin place”
– one in whose presence others experience the sacred as well.
Because they are so in tune with, and in communication with
the realm of the spirit, they become mediators of the sacred.
Sometimes they mediate this spiritual power through healings or exorcisms,
sometimes through visions and prophecies.
Now we live today in a very material, scientific world, and there are some who say,
‘if I can’t see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it,
or prove it by scientific methods, it doesn’t exist.’
They believe that world is completely constituted and explained
by matter and energy within the space-time continuum.
But the experience of the spirit person suggests that there is more to reality than this.
This modern world-view is too one-dimensional.
The spirit person knows a multi-dimensional worldview.
There is a non-material level of reality.
Even though non-material, it is actual, and it is charged with energy and power.
That is the realm of the Spirit.
And this realm of the spiritual is not “somewhere else”
It is all around us, and we are in it.
In William James’ words, we are separated from it only by filmy screens of consciousness.
When those screens of consciousness momentarily drop away, the experience of Spirit occurs.
The spirit person is one in whom the screens of consciousness are unusually permeable – compared to most of us, who mostly live our everyday in the material, conscious world.
Now, what evidence does Marcus Borg offer that Jesus was such a Spirit person,
or that this was a central feature of his identity?
And even if it was so, what difference would it make for us,
as contemporary Christians in the church?
Well today’s gospel is a first example.
At his baptism, Matthew Mark and Luke all tell us, Jesus had a vision.
He saw the heavens opened, and the spirit descending upon him like a dove.
Then Jesus is driven into the wilderness, where he had other visions
– the temptations are really a form of vision quest,
where Jesus discovered who he was meant to be and what he was meant to do.
And in Luke’s Gospel, following this wilderness encounter,
Jesus comes back to his home town, goes into the synagogue of Nazareth,
and begins his first sermon by quoting words from the prophet Isaiah
and applying them to himself;
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’
From there, Jesus goes out to the other towns in his region,
and begins his ministry of healing and teaching,
calling others to walk with him along his way and become disciples.
Like spirit persons in other cultural traditions, Jesus was great healer.
More healing stories are told about him than about any other Hebrew prophet or holy man.
He also followed spiritual practices like fasting and prayer,
and he taught these practices to his disciples.
He would pray for hours at a time, praying through the night sometimes.
Prayer for him was about having a close personal relationship with God.
And Jesus had a very intimate sense of connection with the Holy.
In a religious society and culture that considered the name of God
so unspeakably sacred that they could not utter it directly,
and used only the most formal terms of address to speak of the Holy One,
Jesus called God “Papa” ‘Abba’ “Daddy’
Another example: Again and again the Gospels tell us,
the people who listened to Jesus were amazed, because he spoke ‘as one having authority’
– though he has no such training or position of authority.
His words and teachings rang true spiritually,
not because they were based in ancient law or tradition,
but because they were deeply rooted in Jesus’ own spiritual experience.
And, as I mentioned before, Jesus was one in whose presence others experienced the sacred.
Around him the spirit was palpable and contagious.
His very being was a “thin place”
And so his disciples learned from Jesus how to access the realm of the Spirit.
Jesus taught them how to pray and fast, and they gained some power to be healers as well.
And I think that is why, in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles,
Paul stresses that new Christians aren’t just baptized as a ritual.
They are to receive the Holy Spirit – that is, have a direct experience
of the energy and power of the Spirit in their lives
— if they are truly baptized into Jesus Christ.
I am very attracted to, and intrigued by, this understanding
of who Jesus might have been, for a couple of reasons.
First, this insight doesn’t identify Jesus as “unique in all the world”
the one and only way to God, as the church and the churches have often taught.
Rather, this understanding sets Jesus in a cross-cultural tradition of spirit persons,
one of many mediators of the sacred.
This is not to take away from the power of Jesus’ message.
In fact for many of us, it gives it greater credibility.
As Borg says “There really are people like this – and Jesus was one of them.
There really are experiences of the sacred, of the numinous, of God
– and Jesus was one for whom God was an experiential reality.”
Marcus Borg also suggests that this understanding could offer some insight
into how we might think about God.
Most often, for many in our churches,
and many who have turned away from our churches,
the common understanding of God is deist or supernaturalist.
The deist image conceives of God as a supernatural being “out there”
who created the world a long time ago,
who established natural laws as a way of ordering it,
and who no longer has much to do with it.
This has been called the ‘clockmaker’ concept of God,
the One who set up all the mechanisms
to get the world ticking in the beginning, then left it alone.
The supernaturalist image of God is like the deist image,
except that this God supernaturally intervenes in this world from time to time.
But the great question that leaves us with is
“If God can dip in a supernatural finger into the workings of the world
and intervene to change things, why doesn’t God do so more often?
Why doesn’t God intervene to prevent evil or tragedy?
Why do earthquakes & famine & plane crashes happen?
Why did my friend’s cancer happen?”
But the image of God that Jesus reveals as a spirit person is very different.
Rather than being someone out there that we “believe in” and try to comprehend,
God becomes an experiential reality.
God is no longer a remote or transcendent creator, far removed from the world,
but a spiritual presence all around us –
“the one in whom we live and move and have our being”
as the book of Acts so beautifully describes it.
And our Christian faith and practice has less to do with believing in Jesus,
or believing in God, and more to do with
being in relationship with the same Spirit that Jesus knew.
The Christian life moves beyond believing in or believing things about God,
And moves toward being in relationship with God,
and prayer moves beyond asking for favors or miracles of intervention,
an moves toward holding each other in love
in the presence of the intimate, powerful energy of the Spirit.
We don’t have to be Pentecostals or Charismatics to pray for the Holy Spirit
or to ask “have you received the Holy Spirit?” or to sing
“Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me!”
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