New Things
Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 3:13-17
January 9, 2011
There is a real historical sense in which all of us here are Lutherans. Some of you are and have been Lutherans, and you definitely know who you are. There is not much doubt that the person who initiated the Protestant Reformation was Martin Luther and very quickly many others jumped into the fray. Just as quickly different hues of the Protestant imagination began to take shape and the United Church is the recipient of several of those colours, perhaps not the Lutheran shade as much as the Reformed and Methodist.
What we gain from Martin Luther, not always the easiest person to get along with, is his memorable reminder to himself when things were going badly, when he was tempted and depressed by his failures, when the devil was casting his hook on his soul, he would declare, “I am baptized!” For a lot of us who do not remember our baptisms that seems a throwaway phrase, yet for Martin and for us, it means that we have been claimed by God and resurrected again into a New Life.
Scott Hozee gives us two stories. Bruce Beresford’s film “Tender Mercies” chronicles the story of Mac Sledge, a one-time country-western singing star whose life later dissolved into a fog of alcohol and shiftlessness. Divorced from his wife and estranged from his only daughter, Mac staggers through life until one night he collapses onto the porch of a small, lonely little motel and gas station out in the middle of the Texas prairie run by Rosa Lee, a young widow who is raising her boy, Sonny, and trying to make ends meet. Even though Mac is a shipwreck of a human being, grizzled, drunk, and despairing, Rosa Lee takes him in, sets him to work for her, and through this, transformation comes to Mac’s life. Over time he kicks his drinking habit, becomes a kind of father figure to young Sonny, ends up marrying Rosa Lee and begins to attend the Baptist church where Rosa Lee is a member of the choir.
One Sunday morning both Mac and Sonny are baptized. After the pastor dunks him into the waters of baptism, Mac stands back up, blinking and drenched, water dripping down off his balding head and glistening on his grizzled beard. It’s a portrait of grace. But after the service, Sonny and Mac are sitting outside the motel and Sonny says, “Well, we done it. We got baptized.” “Yup, we sure did,” Mac replies. “You feel any different?” the lad asks. Chuckling, Mac says, “I can’t say I do, not really.”
No one believes him, for he has changed. Not too many of us remember our own baptisms. Words and water are common occurrences, so there’s nothing real special that we can feel happening. But none of us can say along with Sonny that we did it, for God is the one working inside the water and the words. When Martin Luther said, “I am baptized,” he was not speaking of his own accomplishment. It was what God had accomplished in him.
John the Baptist would be proclaimed today the inventor of baptism. He did cut a spectacular figure and he would be on the news every night. But he knew who he was and who he wasn’t. You may think I’m something, but you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Jesus came down to the Jordan into the midst of the circus at the Jordan. John knew this wasn’t the way it was meant to be, so wanted Jesus to take over and baptize him. Jesus insisted that this is the way it’s supposed to be. For the record, Jesus never baptized anyone. John relented, consented and baptized Jesus in the quiet of a personal encounter. No one else seemed to think anything unusual was going on, just another baptism. Doves and voices from heaven were heard only by Jesus in this account. Just water and words in the silence of the crowd.
In the Broadway play Copenhagen playwright Michael Frayn presents four versions of a single event. The event is a 1941 meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, between two world-class physicists: Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. At that time Heisenberg was in charge of Adolf Hitler's nuclear program even as Bohr was a Jew living in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Yet for some reason Heisenberg made a risky trip to meet with his old mentor. What did he want to talk about? No one is sure, so the play presents four possible reasons. We know that Heisenberg had dinner one evening with Niels and Margrethe Bohr after which, to escape the Nazi microphones bugging the Bohr house, the two men took a walk. But the walk ended within minutes when an angry Niels Bohr stormed back into the house. The evening ended abruptly as Heisenberg fled back to Germany. The two never spoke or met again.
Apparently what led to this unhappy conclusion to the evening was Heisenberg's asking Bohr what he thought about the work that was then being done on nuclear energy. Bohr sensed immediately the implication: Heisenberg was working in a program which could ultimately lead to the Nazi development of an atomic bomb. As a Jew living under the thumb of the Nazis, Bohr was incensed and so said nothing more to his old friend. But was it just anger that made Bohr clam up? The play presents that possibility among others, but at the end presents one final scenario with amazing implications.
When the war was over, it turned out that Heisenberg and the Nazis were not even close to getting the bomb right. But Bohr, following his escape from Denmark some time after this mysterious meeting, would work with the Allies in successfully developing the bomb. Bohr knew something Heisenberg missed.
The key piece of data was the “critical mass” of uranium 235 needed to make a bomb. The Nazis were under the impression that at least a ton of uranium was needed for just one bomb - an amount too heavy to be practical. As it turns out, a bomb can be made with twenty times less that amount - a fact which any well-educated physicist could figure out if only he executed a relatively simple equation – and Bohr evidently had.
So why did Niels Bohr clam up once Heisenberg broached the subject of nuclear power? The play's final scenario intriguingly suggests that perhaps Bohr knew that if he and Heisenberg had talked about this subject for more than a few minutes, Bohr may very well have inadvertently tipped Heisenberg off. And had this happened, it is possible that Hitler would have gotten a weapon with which conquer the world after all. If this scenario is true, then by holding back, Bohr rescued the world. It was the silence that saved.
Baptism is basically a silent event. Water dripping, perhaps a baby upset by all this stuff they’re doing to me, but unless the minister drops me, I am not hurt. If I remember my baptism at all, I remember no new super powers the following morning. Yet I am saved, renewed, resurrected in a way that I have to keep reminding myself in my silent, empty moments for most of the rest of my life. God seems to always be making a new thing out what we were.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan