On The Wild(er)ness of Baptism and God's Maternal Dispensation of Renewal

On The Wild(er)ness of Baptism and God's Maternal Dispensation of Renewal

Rev. Douglas Olds

5 February 2020
all rights reserved

    O God of our salvation; 

    you are the hope of all the ends of the earth 

    and of the farthest seas. 

    6By your strength you established the mountains; 

    you are girded with might. 

    7You silence the roaring of the seas, 

    the roaring of their waves, 

    the tumult of the peoples. 

    8Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs; 

    you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy. 

    9You visit the earth and water it, 

    you greatly enrich it; 

    the river of God is full of water; 

    you provide the people with grain, 

    for so you have prepared it. 

    10You water its furrows abundantly, 

    settling its ridges, 

    softening it with showers, 

    and blessing its growth. 

    11You crown the year with your bounty; 

    your wagon tracks overflow with richness. 

    12The pastures of the wilderness overflow, 

    the hills gird themselves with joy, 

    13the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, 

    the valleys deck themselves with grain, 

    they shout and sing together

--Psalm 65:5–13.  New Revised Standard Version. 

         Human alienation from nature--manifesting now especially in economic idolatry that is heating the planet--may be countered by a Christian spirituality of biocentric re-immersion into reality, cultivating the virtue of loyalty to the genius of place and planet and the trusteeship of nature. “Rewilding” is a Christian spiritual practice for the Anthropocene. Perceiving the disconnection of contemporary human life from its ecological foundation reveals the link between spiritless materialism and hasty, combustion-fueled existence. Human obsession with the horizontal plane of the ephemeral obstructs the awareness of eternity that integrates verticality and horizontality in the living, eternal rhythms of the animated world. Perpendicularity recognizes the Sky’s wild sustenance of nature in rain, air, storm, the intimacy of plant and animal respiration—and our own--inside a landscaped home. 

          As a corrective of this alienation from nature, Dahill (2005) proposes the liturgical renewal of and venue shift for baptism:

Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence…Out in contact and conviviality [with open-aired nature is] an astonishing fullness of the baptismal life, a much wilder immersion.

Christian practice has moved from the early understanding which involved relishing, drowning in, and enjoying the water of life. The baptismal river became a pool; [then a] cistern; [then] a barrel; [then] a font; [then] a birdbath; [then a] bowl; [then a] fingerbowl…[losing experience with] the transforming symbolic power of full immersion in baptism, and construction of fonts with the sounds of running water and immersive capacity [now] in indoor rituals more or less fully cut off from the actual biological life of the larger watersheds in which such communities are located.

I want to…restore the practice of Christian baptism into the uncontrolled, dangerous, transforming waters of a community’s watershed . . .[to] shape belief, habitus, worldview…powerfully [by] the form of baptismal experience—shap[ing] in formative ways participants’ spontaneous, untutored articulation of what their baptism means[---A] radical spiritual/ecological immersion into the actual local [open-air] watershed and the largest life of Earth that we need today.

It is after immersion in water that Jesus re-emerges into air to meet the Spirit “coming as a dove” (Mt. 3.16) [3]. These processive images recapitulate the sequence of Gen. 1.1-3, with the immersion of God’s incarnate Son who is Israel’s messiah ritually presided over by Israel’s summation priestly prophet. This takes place at the historical point of border entry by the people into the promised Land [2], a people sent within the covenantal dispensation of obedience as agents of conquest in the land still suffering the cosmic effects of the fall. Jesus emerges by biological necessity to meet with the sent Spirit in the Sky, for the transformation of Creation inside the covenantal ontology of shalom and freedom. 

Baptism liturgically incarnates the wild death-in-birth and birth-in-death experience of a liminal, refugee mother in labor suffocating under the threat of social eviction and extinction. Rather than inert backdrops of a solely spiritualized drama, the water and atmosphere are ontological participants in the baptismal apocatastasis that returns forth (missio) a new family. Creation is to be renewed in Salvific healing, reaffirmed in both its materiality and spiritual essence. God’s new dispensation of Love manifests as maternal and not dominating, ever steadfast in loyalty and care (hesed). The wails of the newly delivered give way at the ecstasy—her shouting and singing at the astounding punctuation of being and history--of the resurrected mother, a loving trustee of a new earth, Christ becoming all-in-all (Col. 3.11).

For you shall go out in joy,

    and be led back in peace;

the mountains and the hills before you

    shall burst into song,

    and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands (Isa. 55.12).

Notes:

[1] Dahill, Lisa E. 2015. “Into Local Waters: Rewilding the Study of Christian Spirituality.” Presidential Address (Fall) to the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. Manuscript.

[2] At the Jordan River. "The crossing of the Jordan is such a pivotal moment in Israelite history that the Deuteronomic usage of the term 'to cross' is almost synonymous with the entrance and occupation of the promised land, both with and without explicit mention of the river itself (see Deut 6:1; 27:2–3). Crossing the river transforms them from wandering Hebrews to the landed 'Israelites.' The biblical debate over the legitimacy of the tribes of Gad, Reuben, and the half-tribe of Manasseh further demonstrates the Jordan’s significance as a boundary. According to the biblical account, these tribes settled to the east of the Jordan. Yet at the initial crossing, all the tribes crossed over the Jordan—including the eastern tribes. Only later did Gad, Reuben, and the half-tribe of Manasseh cross back over to reach their allotted lands. The book of Joshua refers to these tribes as being 'across the river' (see Josh 14:3; 17:5; 18:7).

"In Joshua 22, the eastern tribes build an altar as a memorial to their full participation in the body of Israel, suggesting there was some tension regarding their eastern settlement."  Treadway, L. M. (2016). Jordan River, Critical Issues. In J. D. Barry, D. Bomar, D. R. Brown, R. Klippenstein, D. Mangum, C. Sinclair Wolcott, … W. Widder (Eds.), The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

"The Jordan River "runs from Mt. Hermon S to the Dead Sea, thus separating the W part of ancient Palestine from the E part.... Many of the biblical references to the Jordan appear in connection with boundaries and crossings [while] notions of 'boundary crossings' are often laden with symbolic and metaphoric connotations of a religious nature, [so] that the Jordan river has become a significant metaphysical reality within Judaism and Christianity.

"Such a use of the Jordan river as religious metaphor may, in Psalm 42['s] “land of Jordan” (v 7) ... be a poetic name for the netherworld (Dahood Psalms I AB, 258; Smick 1973: 101). The Jordan as a symbol of crossing from life to death (or from this world to heaven) seems to underlie Heb 3:17–19.--Thompson, H. O. (1992). Jordan River. In D. N. Freedman (Ed.), The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (Vol. 3, p. 957). New York: Doubleday.

Both the border point of the Jordan (Nu. 13) and Mt. Hermon in Bashan (1 Enoch 6) are associated with rebellion and fear, and thus with the inescapability of death and the sins resulting from its evasion and repression.  Thus the Jordan River is a liminal marker between life and death, rebellion and faithfulness (Cf. Josh. 12; Deut. 3. esp. vv. 6ff; 1 Enoch 6). Mt. Hermon is identified with the Mount of Transfiguration of Jesus which he noted (in Mt. 16) was the location of the "gates of Hell" that would not prevail against the Church of Peter's faith.

Thus the Jordan marks out the geography of fallenness, originating in fallen Hermon and ending at the Dead Sea.  With the cleansing of Galilee during his New Testament ministry, Jesus restores Galilee to its promise.  Thus Jesus' baptism is symbolic of geographical salvation as well as epochal of a new spiritual dispensation for the people. The Jordan runs from unredeemed humanity in Hell on Earth at Hermon through the promised land to humanity's common physical inheritance in a Dead Sea.  The flow of the Jordan in this way represents salvation history for both the nation of Israel and for the individual journey of faithful life. In Jesus' baptism, the waters of the Jordan become the punctuation of this flow, an immersive spot where physical death is experienced in new birth, for sending in mission into the renewed Eden, the land of steadfast promise.

[3] NRSV's "like a dove, alighting on him" is problematic.  The Greek ὡσεὶ is better translated with a functional rather than visual sense of the bird's character, keeping with the sense of "image" in Gen. 1.26, where humanity's image in God is functional--to image God's love and stewardship rather than reflecting personal form. In the same way, the image of the Spirit in Mt. 3.16 would be a functional image of the bird, reflecting the motile character of the Ruach in Gen. 1.3 manifesting while the Creation itself was formless.
The NRSV translates the Piel participle of רחף in Gen. 1.3 as "swept" whereas in contrast, lexicons translate the Piel of רחף as “quivering, meaning to hover with fluttering wings, characteristic flying behavior.” Koehler, Baumgartner, et al. 2000, 1220). While Piel Hebrew verbs were thought to intensify the Aktionsart of the Qal verbal stem, “Piel tends to signify causation with a patiency nuance.”  (Waltke and O’Connor 1990, 355). 
 The Piel stem of רחף applied in Gen. 1.2 “represents God as the agent and the [wind] as having been caused to be put into the state of” trembling or fluttering" (ibid., 363). The English translation of “swept” neither adequately conveys the causative aspect of agency (divine medio-passivity) nor the “patiency nuance” applied to the verbal stem. See also: “PIEL, to brood over young ones, to cherish young (as an eagle), Deut. 32:11; figuratively used of the Spirit of God, who brooded over the shapeless mass of the earth, cherishing and vivifying” (Gesenius 2003, 766).  This functional image is consistent with the maternal dispensation suggested in the text, above.

Supporting these images is the emergence in the early Church of Christ as a Kestral, a bird known for its hovering, a dramatic contrast with the vulture/carrion Eagle denoting Babylon/Rome (Mt. 24.28).  The Kestral offers an alternative image for faith to that of the fish and fisher.