John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Mark 1:4-11
In my academic life, I study groups and group actions. Of course, this morning’s worship service is not about academics, it’s about our unified worship of the Triune God. But I just have to mention this really compelling social psychology paper I came across a week ago, that I couldn’t help but relate to this morning’s gospel lesson.
The conclusion of the paper is that, when people feel powerless, when they feel like they have no personal control of their lives, they focus on their membership in a group to help restore their sense of control. By participating as members of a larger collective, people feel like they can recuperate some of the power they feel they have lost. This involves increasingly identifying with a certain group, conforming to its norms, and having negative views of those outside of the group.
It happens on both sides of the political spectrum. It happens in all parts of the country. It probably happens with you and with me. I know I’ve felt powerless more than once in the last fourteen months. And when that happens, we feel a pull to join ourselves to a group that looks like it has, or might soon have, power.
Now there is surely a virtue in this kind of thinking. It is simply true that, when we get together with other folks, we’re able to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. A cord of three strands, we know, is not easily broken. But I wonder if sometimes we ought to be thinking about—and seeking—a different kind of power.
In the text for this morning, John is out in the wilderness, calling people to repent. And as he fulfills the prophesy from Isaiah, with his voice crying out in the wilderness, John tells us that there is one more powerful than he is, one who is coming after him. And the phrase “more powerful” here, in the original Greek, is not just “greater”—it’s literally more powerful. Stronger. Sturdier. Mightier.
Now, if I’m being honest, I can’t imagine that John was super burly. Eating locusts and honey doesn’t exactly beef you up. But there was something about John that brought a lot of folks out to him—the text says that the whole Judean countryside and all of the people in Jerusalem headed his way to repent and be baptized. My hunch is that they might have been flocking to him because, just like the subjects in the study I just mentioned, the Judeans felt as though they weren’t in control of their lives. They were, after all, living under imperial colonial rule. Perhaps, they thought, by joining the crowds gathering around John, they might recuperate some of that control.
But John wanted to point them to something else. Or perhaps, I should say: someone else.
Power is a pretty important word these days. When we hear and use the word “power,” either here at SCE, or in the different social and institutional contexts we all inhabit in our daily lives, my hunch is that we have a very particular sense of the word in mind. We talk about the dynamics and disparities of power that obtain between a junior and senior faculty member, or between an African American pulled over on the highway and the cop that’s pulled him over. This kind of power is something lobbies have; it’s something editorial boards have; it’s something grand juries have. We ask ourselves again and again as we dissect the ethical circumstances we study: how is power at work in this state of affairs? What does power do? We’re rightly reminded to pay attention to power as we who care about ethics do the work we do.
But perhaps, like the Judeans in Mark 1, we need John’s redirect. Because when John reminds us that there is someone who is coming who is more powerful than he is, he’s thinking about someone with a power that is categorically different than the kind of power any of us have. He’s pointing to the one who caused the world to come into being, who brooded over the waters. He’s pointing to the one who, according to Job, stretches the sky over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing, who wraps the rain in thick clouds, and covers the face of the moon, who created the horizon and separated the waters, who makes the sea grow calm, and who makes the heavens beautiful, and these are all, Job says, merely a whisper of God’s power. Even the folks on Forbes’ most powerful people of the year list—Putin and Trump and Gates and Merkel and Bezos—none of the power any of them have can make them able to do any of that.
When John speaks of the one who is more powerful than he is, John is pointing to the very one who breathes life into being, who brought you and I into existence.
This is a different kind of power, I think, than we tend to meditate on. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is because we are afraid to recognize that we will never have that kind of power. Or perhaps we are tired of waiting for the one with the power to bring an end to death and mourning and crying and pain, we’re tired of waiting for that one to come. And there’s a part of me, a not small part of me, that feels that that sentiment is fair. It’s dreadfully hard to keep from demanding God to tell us why he hasn’t fixed everything yet. It’s good and holy to want the Triune God, the one who set the stars, to remedy the wrong of this world.
But it’s also good and holy to confess with John that one more powerful than all of us is coming. He’s been here, among us, and the mystery of our faith is that he will come again.
In the meanwhile, however, it’s not as if the kind of power John is referring to is absent from this world. No, John himself reminds us that the more powerful one who is coming will baptize his followers in the Holy Spirit. And that’s exactly what happens in the first two chapters of Acts. Do you remember, in the conversations after his resurrections, what Jesus says is going to happen? The disciples ask Jesus if he’ll restore Israel, to finally put an end to imperial domination in Palestine. Jesus simply responds that his followers will receive power, through the Holy Spirit. They’ll get a serving, a taste, of the power that brooded over the water at the beginning of creation, the same power that ripped open the heavens at the Jordan on the day of Jesus’ baptism, and the purpose of that little taste of such holy power is so that they can be witnesses of Christ to the ends of the Earth. What does the power that comes to the disciples at Pentecost look like? It’s the thing that enables the disciples to speak—in unfamiliar words to unfamiliar people who needed to hear them.
We, too, have received that power, in our own baptism. The sacrament of baptism is one in which the Holy Spirit moves in us, not only to name and call us God’s own but also to empower us to be Christ’s witnesses.
Now, there’s something really important to be said here. I think that some of the power that’s given to each of us in baptism by the Holy Spirit is so that we might witness to what Christ would say or do about the very disparities that we tend to think about when we talk about power these days. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit to remind others that Jesus was appointed, through the power of the same Spirit, to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. But it’s so important that we remember that the power we receive does not derive from wealth or social standing, or our identification with a social group. It comes from the governor of the universe, who, as the book of Hebrews says, sustains everything by the mighty power of his command. And we do that together. At Pentecost, the power of the Holy Spirit falls on Jesus’ friends and followers when they are together. The church is constituted when those who have received the power of the Holy Spirit in baptism gather together, to witness to one another the gospel news that there is one more powerful than you and I who loves us. It’s not—or at least it shouldn’t be—because we feel like we might be stronger or regain control by virtue of our participation in a group of people called Christians. Rather, our strength comes from the God who made us and all things, who knits us together into the body of Christ to announce and anticipate the coming kingdom. May it be so. Amen.