The Church celebrates the beginning of our faith journey with baptism. A symbolism that recalls Christ's baptism (Mark 1.9-11) and death to sin over calm waters that are prepared to keep the child from being to disturbed by the event. In other denominations the event is more traumatic with the complete immersion of the person in a pool, somewhat closer to the original immersion baptism of the earlier church. However, the symbolic immersion in the waters of the deep not only representative of death but also of the chaotic structures at the beginning of time (Gen. 1.1-3). This passage is not as easy to understand as our historic roots would suggest. We make an assumption of a God that is imperious and creator imposing that imperious will upon chaos to form order and peace for the good of all who come after. This tumultuous text hides, in English translations, the Hebraic structuring of a complex sentence covering three (English) verses. Verses that recall not an imperious God but one who invites creation from the absence of things that is present in tohu vabohu (emptiness and void) of a turbulent water over which God's Spirit hovers.
Beginnings do not start from no-thing but rather from the edge of chaos and order, a decision point that either moves us away from the turbulent into a stagnant similarity to what has gone before or sends us into a frenzied creativity pulling us along to form newness and change in the face of chaos. Christ following his baptism, not surprisingly, is sent by the Spirit into the desert (tohu) of primal experimentation and creation not an abstract nothingness. The place where God's Spirit hovers refreshing, renewing and creating pathways towards life and abundance. Baptism asks us to give up, surrender the old life in place of the new. A surrendering that allows for a sundering from what has gone before creating a space for newness to appear and develop. The water's symbolism of those things which are beyond our grasp and understanding reach out to us to form newness and life.
It is in this place of possibilities that we hear God call to us, not in authority but rather as an invitation. God calls to the light through an invitation to be not as a command to exist or be wrangled from out of the chaos and the deep. This is a cooperative creation that brings order out of chaos. In our baptism we are invited into a cooperative ministry that burgeons forth into the life of Christ in the community around us. It is we who are invited to go out to invite. To begin once more and undertake the process of creation. The creation of peace and justice out of the chaos of modernity. It is at the sharp edges of society where we are called to bring God's presence, it is here in the chaos of the everyday that we find the creativity of God's play as we answer the challenge that drives us into the tohu, that place were there is no-thing but every possible thing. The beginning comes at the start of all things and all times let us begin once more to taste the flavour of God's creativity in our lives.
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