Water, Sound, and Spirit

January 7, 2024 – Mark 1: 4-11, Genesis 1:1-5, Psalm 29, Acts 19:1-7

I love water. I love being around water. Of course, here, that means I like to spend time at the beach, near the Gulf of Mexico. I can sit and listen to the sound of the waves for hours. But it’s not just the beach that I love. In the mountains of northeast Georgia, I was also strongly drawn to the water.

When I lived there in my little mountain farmhouse, I would often take my dog Cotton to the Chattahoochee River to places where we could swim and walk through the woods. Or we’d hike the trails at Tallulah Falls or other waterfalls in the area. No matter how I felt at the beginning of the day, when I got to the water, it was like my whole spirit would decompress and an incredible feeling of calm would come over me. I’m sure you’ve felt that too.

The Power of Water

And it’s not just in our minds. There’s actually a chemical reason why we feel so good around water. Did you know that the oxygen molecules in water have an extra negatively charged electron, and those are good for our health? You see, all the electrical gadgets we’re surrounded by in modern life produce positive ions, and cities and other crowded places are loaded with them. Over time, those positive ions disrupt our body’s electro-magnetic field and can then damage our health, causing allergies, insomnia, anxiety, depression, and fatigue. But the negative ions naturally created by the sun, water, and air of the earth attach to the positive ions and neutralize them. The negative ions found in extra abundance near moving water help to purify the air, alleviate depression and stress, and can even increase the oxygen flowing to our brains.

Water is powerful on so many levels. That’s one of the reasons it’s so often used in rituals. There has been some interesting research done that even shows the ways in which water seems to be affected by our thoughts and feelings.

Ten or twenty years ago, a Japanese scientist named Masaru Emoto did some fascinating research that he published in a book called The Hidden Messages of Water. He showed that when people prayed over water or just directed positive intentions toward it, the crystals that formed when he froze that water showed beautiful patterns while the crystals that formed in water toward which people directed negative emotion formed ugly crystals. He even compared the effects of classical music vs. heavy metal music on water, and I’m sure you can guess which produced the beautiful crystals. Water is positively affected by positive thoughts.

This seems even more interesting when you think about the fact that our bodies are 55-60% water by volume and over 90% water by molecules. Not only that, but more than 70% of the earth’s surface is water, and it’s said that rivers are like the circulatory system of the earth. I’ve never given birth, but I’ve watched a lot of episodes of “Call the Midwife,” and so I know that what announces a baby is coming is the flow of water from the mother’s body. Water is essential to life, to birth, and to creation.

The Power of Sound

Our text from Genesis about the creation of the earth tells us that in the beginning, there was a formless void of deep waters. Today, our science tells us that at the quantum level, everything emerges from a field of potential. Things arise from that field through fluctuations or vibration. Similarly, God’s process of creation begins with God’s Spirit or “wind” moving over those waters and stirring everything up.
God’s Spirit moving over the waters and God’s spoken Word are dynamic. I like to think of both that creative wind and God’s voice as the vibratory power of sound waves. God speaks everything into existence. This is echoed in the Psalm where we read that “the voice of the Lord is over the waters…the voice of the Lord is powerful…”

That formless void is like the undisturbed unified field before anything differentiated from God came into existence. The Dynamic Sound of God shakes and splits apart that unity, disturbs the field, and brings new things into being.

The Power of the Spirit

We see these same elements of water and sound play a crucial role in our Gospel text about the baptism of Jesus. And just like it was the movement over the waters of the Spirit of God and the Sound of God’s voice that brought our original world into existence, so it is the Spirit of God moving over the baptismal waters of the river Jordan and speaking Jesus’ ministry into existence that births a new creation for us all.

Last week, I spoke about the ordinary and the extraordinary. In this baptism text in Matthew, there’s an dynamic relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary. In the baptizing, John is using a very ordinary ritual within the Jewish tradition, that of purification or cleansing. Even to this day, Jewish communities practice what is called a mikveh or ritual bath. There are different reasons why men or women might do a mikveh, but generally, mikvehs are required when someone converts to Judaism, before a woman gets married, or at other times for spiritual cleansing.

Traditional mikvehs were used periodically throughout one’s Jewish life. But John uses the immersion in water in a new way. People came to John’s baptism one time to mark a big change in their lives. John’s baptism is a ritual of whole-person repentance. Remember, I mentioned a few weeks ago that repentance or metanoia doesn’t just mean admitting the bad things you’ve done. It means turning one’s life around completely and embracing a whole new way of thinking and being.

When Jesus comes to John to be baptized, we see these ordinary elements of cleansing and water come together in an extraordinary way that reveals Jesus’s unique status as God’s Son and agent of salvation.
Let’s look at the extraordinary symbolism that Mark uses in this story.

First, John is preaching in the wilderness, and in the Hebrew tradition, the wilderness is a place of change and new pathways emerging. People went to the wilderness to be baptized by John to show that they were changing their hearts and setting their lives on a new path.

Now look at the way John is described: he wears a garment of camel hair, a leather belt, and eats locusts and honey. These are all references to the Hebrew Bible that indicate to Mark’s audience that John is the promised messenger that God would send to prepare the way for the coming glory of the Lord. Camel’s hair is a traditional prophetic garment, and Elijah wore a leather belt. I had no idea of the many references to locusts in the Old Testament until I read an article by Peter Leithart, but locusts basically symbolize destructive forces that consumed Israel and its people. John devours the devourers. Honey too has rich symbolism related to the promised land and God’s nourishment. They may not mean much to our modern ears, but all of these symbols reflect John’s role in Israel’s redemption.

Next, Jesus comes to John to be baptized. He goes down into the deep waters of baptism, and when he rises up, he sees the heavens splitting open and the Spirit coming down on him like a dove. We might remember that it was a dove that symbolized the new creation after the great flood. And then there’s the voice of God saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Here again, God speaks a new creation – Jesus’ ministry of healing and salvation – into existence. And while many figures in the Old Testament were referred to as “son of God,” like Solomon, here Jesus is also God’s Beloved. This relationship is centered on love.

What happens here to Jesus is extraordinary, but only the reader and Jesus are given this viewpoint. Neither John nor anyone else present sees what Jesus sees. He has what we would call a mystical or religious experience – he encounters God directly in an inner way. As Bruce Epperly writes,

When Jesus is baptized, the Spirit of God descends upon him. He receives clear insight into his life’s vocation. He receives the vision and power to become God’s Messiah, God’s Christ to the world.

This is what the Spirit can do with the ordinary elements of life, like water, and sound. Our God is a God who dynamically enters into the ordinary parts of life and transforms them. There is power in water, there is power in sound. In our own baptismal waters, we receive the powerful Spirit of God and we receive our calling as beloved children of God. As Epperly says, “In remembering and claiming the baptismal spirit, we experience God’s unending and unconditional love. It is not the rite, but the Spirit that matters.” It’s the Spirit that makes the difference. Being near the waters of the Gulf or mountain waterfalls brings calm, I know that to be true. But the real changes in our lives come through the Spirit of God.