Sam Bush, “Coming Clean”
In 2005, during my first week as an undergraduate student at UVA, I was invited to play a round of disc golf on grounds with some upperclassmen. On the second hole, I somehow broke a window in the Rotunda (second story, second window on the left). I was mortified but, when showing up the next morning to turn myself in, the window was already fixed. Unsure of what to do, I did nothing and figured it wasn’t a big deal.
Nearly twenty years after the incident, Maddy and I recently took our boys to the lawn and I still felt a tinge of guilt. As I kicked a soccer ball around, I thought it would be nice to enjoy the Rotunda’s splendor in good conscience. Later that day, I emailed President Jim Ryan and made my confession. After all this time, I still felt the need to come clean. We’ll come back to that story.
Do you feel that way about anything? Is there something you’d like to turn yourself in for? Is there a conversation you’ve been putting off for the past twenty years? Any skeletons in your closet you’d like to clean out before they grow into those 12-foot monstrosities people put out on their lawns for Halloween? This is something that our reading from the Gospel of Mark addresses.
Let’s set the scene. John the Baptist is baptizing throngs of people in the Jordan River. Mark says, “People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him.” What’s all the fuss about? What is he selling? It says John proclaimed, “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” In first-century Judaism, cleansing rituals were a major factor in worship. If you touched something that was unclean, if you contracted a disease, if you were going to worship at the temple, you would have to perform certain cleansing rituals to make yourself presentable to God. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness.
These days, we seem even more consumed with self-sanitation. Many of us are currently undergoing some kind of post-holiday cleanse. After gorging ourselves on sugar and alcohol, we need to be purified. Even on a practical level, to be a human being is to be perpetually in need of cleaning and being clean - whether it's your house, your clothes, your children, your car, your body, your teeth, your fridge, your iCloud storage, I could go on (I could feel everyone’s blood pressure rising as that list got longer). It is a never ending struggle and ultimately a losing battle.
The songwriter Chuck Prophet has a song called “Soap and Water” in which he says “Soap and water, my oldest friends. Nobody knows quite where we’ve been.” You see, soap and water wash away the evidence of where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. Soap and water make you presentable. I don’t need to belabor the moral implications of cleanliness. Even the phrase “to come clean” about something or when addicts say that they “got clean” implies that cleanliness is a matter of the heart.
It’s worth noting that there is a difference between being tidy and being clean. I was first introduced to cleanliness when I first got married. Before that, I was very orderly. Shoes were put away, magazines stacked on top of each other. Everything looked great as long as you didn’t look too closely at the thin layer of dust everywhere. It was soon brought to my attention that, while I was tidy, I was a far cry from clean.
Perhaps this is what made John the Baptist’s proclamation so appealing. He was not afraid to call the religious leaders out on the distinction between being tidy and being clean. In those days, Jewish leaders declared that only Gentiles had to be baptized because they were considered unclean. But John gave no special treatment. According to John, everyone needed a baptism of repentance. On multiple occasions, John confronted the Jewish leaders saying, “You may look like you have it all together. You might be tidy, but you’re not clean!” Apparently, this message hit home. Both Jew and Gentile came out of the woodwork to sign up for a baptism of repentance.
Of course, repentance on its own is not enough, is it? Just like making yourself presentable, repentance falls into the same trap of “enoughness.” Can you ever be sorry enough? Is there someone in your life who withholds forgiveness until there has been sufficient groveling? Or maybe you’re that person. Chances are, you’ve been on both sides of the gun.
Into these murky waters, who should come along, but Jesus. He takes his place at the back of the line and waits his turn among the sinners. When he gets to the front, he asks John to do the honors and, as John lifts him out of the water, it says, “He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.” That moment fulfilled a seven-hundred year old prophecy from Isaiah: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…to make your name known!” And God does exactly that. A voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” If Epiphany means “a revealing,” on this Epiphany Sunday, God reveals the true nature of Jesus. This is no prophet or motivational speaker. This is the Son of God, the Savior of the world!
In that same passage from Isaiah it says, “How then can we be saved? All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” It’s a desperate cry to be made clean and it’s a cry that God ultimately answers.
John the Baptist tells us that while he baptized with water, Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fire. Because soap and water is not going to cut it. Water may clean the body, but not the heart. Fire, on the other hand, cleanses not only the surface but the entire substance. When a metal is completely melted down, the dross rises to the top and is then removed from the metal before it cools. Likewise, the fire that Jesus baptizes you with burns away everything that you think you are. Your career, your marital status, your criminal record, your triumphs and your trip-ups - they’re all consumed by the fire of God. Once the fire has done its work, God is able to look at you and say, “you are my beloved son/daughter. In you I am well pleased.” That’s your identity in Christ. You are nothing more and nothing less than a beloved son or daughter of God. When it comes down to it, that might just be all you ever wanted to be.
Of course, the gospel proclaims more than a baptism of repentance. It proclaims that Jesus took the heat on our behalf. On the Cross, the clean was substituted for the unclean, the righteous for the unrighteous. Where John the Baptist preached what we need to do to be made presentable to God, Christ himself presents us to God, pure and blameless.
As Christians, we are washed in the blood of the lamb. And, as they say, blood runs thicker than water. Now, make no mistake, blood is messy. It’s impossible to get out. But you are covered in it. And as 1 John says, “The blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.”
In her children’s book, Out of the Woods, Rebecca Bond tells the story of her grandfather Antonio who grew up in a hotel that his mother ran which was in a small Canadian town on the edge of a lake. Living in the hotel, he got to know all kinds of people (the maids and repairmen who worked there; the outdoorsmen and the lumberjacks who were guests), listening to stories spoken in all kinds of languages. Outside of the hotel, he saw signs of the elusive wildlife - tracks of foxes or moose fur rubbed off on a tree. One day, during a dry summer, a raging fire swept through the surrounding forest. The wind pushed the flames in every direction so fast that there wasn't any time to outrun the fire. There was only one place to go.
Here’s how Rebecca Bond tells the story: "All the people - hotel guests, trappers, silver miners, cooks, Antonio's mother and Antonio - went into the lake. There was even a baby, not half a year old, held in his mother's arms. They stood in the water up to their knees, their waists, their shoulders and stared as the fire came closer and closer."
As the forest burned around them, the group of people saw something astonishing. Out from the woods and into the lake came the elusive wildlife. "Wolves stood beside deer,” she writes. “Foxes beside rabbits. And people and moose stood close enough to touch” as the smoke darkened the sky so much that no one could tell if it was day or night. When the flames finally died down and the sky began to clear, every creature returned from where they each had come.
That is what it looks like to be baptized in the name of Jesus. As the fire of God’s righteous judgment comes for you, there is only one place to hide. The water of Baptism. In it you are safe from judgment because you are buried with Christ. By it you are saved from death by sharing in his resurrection. Through it you are reborn by the Holy Spirit and made clean.
Three days ago I got a reply from President Jim Ryan. “Hi, Sam. Please consider yourself absolved and enjoy the lawn with a clear conscience. Also, if one of your sons chooses UVA, please let us know - just in case we need to reinforce the windows!” This is God’s word to you. In Christ, please consider yourself absolved and enjoy your life with a clear conscience. Amen.
