<html><body><div>Here's the first part of my draft for Sunday.</div><div><br></div><div>Bob</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ABAN, ALBANY <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>1 EPIPHANY: THE BAPTISM OF OUR LORD JESUS</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>GENESIS 1:1-5<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>7<sup>th</sup> JANUARY, 2018</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>ACTS 19:1-7<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>PSALM 29</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>MARK 1:4-11</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'> </span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'> How do you feel about creation? Are you for it or against it? Mind you, if you say you’re against it, you may be zapped out of your pew right now, and no one will know if you’ve ever been here.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Seriously, though, how <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>DO</u></b> you feel about creation? What do you think of it? Or <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>DO</u></b> you think of it? The first reading refers to it directly and the Gospel makes an indirect but telling comment on it. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>The poem of Genesis talks about the time when everything was chaotic. Even that, though, is a step up from non-existence. At least chaos implies the existence of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>SOME</u></b>thing, albeit it without a sense of purpose or the ability to organize itself. Just as John’s Gospel last Sunday reiterated again and again that Jesus was Divine, so this week, our first reading presses home the point that only God can draw from chaos a semblance of order and peace.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>This is helpful to remember. For the soul which is seeking meaning, seeking purpose, seeking something to call home and to celebrate; behind these, most of us here admit that it is God who is able to help us tackle the biggest problems, and help us to discover the way out of chaos.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>God, according to the first reading’s poetic imagery, draws sense and rationality, and the glimmerings of the understanding of being – God draws everything out of water.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>We can’t live without water. It’s such an intrinsic part of us that if we exercise or stress ourselves, we’re advised to take water with us, to replace what we’ve lost. Water doesn’t just taste good, then, especially in a hot day. It renews us. It draws us out of the chaotic into which we can sink.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Yet water <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>CAN</u></b> be treacherous. At the very least, it challenges. We know of its power. We know of the way in which we can be swept away. It seems that, despite the benefits of water, we’re only one mis-step away from being overwhelmed.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>I think this is why Baptism demands so much of us.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Jesus submitted to the ministry of John. Jesus was drawn to this act of submission, perhaps without fully knowing its implications, just as it is with us.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>It’s not, nor has it ever been, magic. Being baptized, in Britain at least, is sometimes described as “being done”. And as long as there is the clear focus that God is the actor who brings grace to us, that somewhat crass statement may hold our attention.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>There’s more to it, though. Much more. Throughout the New Testament, there are references to dying under the waters with Jesus, and then being raised again with Jesus, as He was. And it was in the act of rising, in the act of leaving the chaotically charged water of the cold Jordan river, that the heavens were torn apart and Jesus’ life and intentions were affirmed.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>Yet His life was never far from chaos, either in His own struggles or in the struggles of those whom He met. He was challenged – not a bad thing in-and-of-itself; He was challenged and ridiculed and, ultimately, brutally killed by the forces of chaos, His baptism notwithstanding, killed by those who preferred that dark chaos to any form of light.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>This speaks to us. Most, if not all of us here this morning, have been baptised. Yet we’re surrounded by chaos. We’re threatened by chaos. There are those who try to use chaos to intimidate and control us.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>And perhaps the first reaction we may have is to try to shut away all aspects that chaos presents. But that is to meet like with like. That’s to become one with chaos in our manner of living.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>The point that God demonstrated at creation; the way that Jesus submitted to baptism demonstrated that the forces of chaos, the forces which draw us from the love of God, can’t tolerate being engaged with opposing thoughts and opinions.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>God didn’t create, Jesus didn’t come or live in the world in order to bring silence, but to engage all of humanity in the great exploration and discussion of life.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>The reason, or at least one of the reasons, why society in this country and around the world seem to be wallowing near or in chaos in its dark, smothering forms, is because society – and we, we have to admit – have allowed little or no dialogue. It’s degenerated into talking so forcefully or shouting that no dialogue is permitted – between us and God, or among ourselves.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>The chaos which God redirected and which God refocused at creation, and which Jesus addressed at His baptism, depends on openness, on thought and discussion – the very things which God brought about, and empowered and reaffirmed at both creation and baptism.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>When we turn away from this mask of living as God’s image, then, we’re giving up the very things that God wishes to present to us as blessing.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>The one thing that God prays that we’ll understand is that agreement is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>NOT</u></b> part of the package. Open, honest discussion, questioning, challenging as long as it’s not in the brow-beating, diminishing sense, but learning to help one another to stretch in our understanding of who God is and who we are: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>THESE</u></b> are the ways in which we are to address chaos in all its forms.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>Two articles authored and published three or four thousand miles apart, on different continents, bring this home, talking about one of the signs of chaos, namely a lack of honesty and transparence.</span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"><br></span></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"><br></span></span></p></div></body></html>