Baptism of Christ, Isaiah 43:1-7; Acts 8: 14-17; Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22. 13th January 2019

Fr James Harris

 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, be sure that an illusion hides more than a million.

 Enter the fascinating world of illusion which will trick your confidence…and confuse you completely… Visit us and you will be thrilled because nothing is what it seems, especially not here!

 [Our installations are a] reminder that our assumptions about the world we perceive are often nothing but a spectre of illusions.’

 

So says the website for the new Athens Museum of Illusion which opened last September in Monastiraki and tempts you with the possibility of walking through a vortex tunnel which seems to spin you 360 degrees and an upside-down room which convinces you you’re standing on your head – whilst in both cases you actually keep your feet firmly on the ground.

 

It is a world of illusions – and all great fun, I’m sure.

 

It puts me in mind of the way the earliest Christians – in places such as Rome – prepared their candidates for baptism, for entry into the Church

Typically, having been stripped of their clothing, candidates were shoved into a pitch dark room, spun around to create a sense of complete disorientation, before being plunged into a pool of water and then hauled out into the bright sunlight, presumably spluttering and blinking, to be dressed in white robes and presented to the church with great rejoicing.

This dramatic ceremony would have been the culmination of months, possibly longer, of preparation including in-depth study and fasting  – all of it designed to rid the candidates of any notion that they were in any way capable of engineering their own salvation; to rid them of the illusion that their own strength, wealth, understanding, ability was what was important.

This was a process of disillusionment – the stripping away of illusions – so as to allow the truth of the gracious gift of God in Christ to be more clearly apprehended and received.  And so my question this morning – as we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord himself, the fount of all truth – is: how disillusioned do you feel today?  On a scale of one to ten, how disillusioned do you feel, with life, with the world, with the church? Just think about that for a moment…

If you’re towards the bottom of the scale, if things actually seem pretty rosy, are there perhaps things in your life which are disguising the true view of how things are, which need to be stripped away? Are there illusions you have created for yourself or which others have put upon you which are perhaps a smokescreen shielding you from the true reality which needs to be grasped if you are to move forward from where you are? Is everything just a bit too comfortable and familiar?

If you’re towards the top of that scale, if you’re feeling pretty well cheesed off with a situation, is it possible that amidst your disillusionment there is potential for growth, for new things, which you have yet to recognise because now that what you thought was the truth has been stripped away, what remains is just too counter-intuitive or unlikely or downright terrifying to consider?

Hold those thoughts for a while as I try and unpack this idea of disillusionment a little further.

 

I read a sermon this week by a monk in the USA, called Brother Keith Nelson of the Society of St John the Evangelist in Boston, who spoke convincingly about disillusionment as being, in fact, the default state of the Christian life – how the stripping away of illusion is the way we grow in faith and understanding, how disillusionment is a gift which leads us into truth and closer to Christ and his purposes for our lives.

Brother Keith writes:

“Our spirits are equipped with a bottomless thirst for more Truth. If we continue to respond to this innate thirst, the…thresholds by which such Truth enters afresh will often be our experiences of disillusionment…

“This does not mean that our previous concept of God or ourselves was wrong or inappropriate… Rather it may simply mean that those understandings are too small or inadequate for the fullness of life into which we are being called now, today.”

 

Jesus’ baptism was, I suggest, a moment of the most striking and dramatic disillusionment for those who witnessed it, and for us, who hear it described today.  The Jews had a form of baptism which involved being cleansed of sin and committing to a new way of life. John had been offering this baptism to many and, indeed, on the day in question Jesus was the last in a long line of people queueing on the banks of the Jordan.   But John knew there was something more at hand than he could offer. And as Christ emerges from the water, we see it: all illusion is stripped away as divine Truth is presented before us: Father, Son, Holy Spirit aligned in perfect relationship and the words of grace spoken out loud:

‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Words which resound through history and are spoken to each of us too:  ‘You are my child; I love you; I accept you.’

 

What makes the difference seems to be the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is given to Christ in this moment and which he then pours out on all believers on the Day of Pentecost.  It is the Holy Spirit which transforms the baptism John the Baptist has been offering, and the Holy Spirit which alights on those for whom Peter and John pray in the reading we heard from the Book of Acts.  It is the Holy Spirit which transforms human endeavour into something which is divinely infused, a Spirit which offers identity and adoption as children of God – as St Paul says, the Spirit which allows us to cry ‘Abba, Father’; a Spirit which leads us  from the fictions we create for ourselves into all truth; a Spirit which illumines and disillusions.

In baptism, our human desire for truth and understanding, our tentative baby steps towards wisdom, taken in faith, are met and recognised and honoured by God who seals them with the gift of his Holy Spirit and enables us to see afresh.  Just as in his baptism, Christ was revealed, clearly and definitively, unmistakably, for who he truly was – Son and Messiah – so for us, the pursuit of disillusionment may create the clear window through which the true perception of God and ourselves, the reality of the purpose of our lives, may be seen.

 

I was sitting this week in the Church of St Dionysius the Areopagite, close to where we live, on Skoufa in Kolonaki. It was a particularly grey day as many this week have been and, unexpectedly, a man on a stepladder started smashing the window glass in the south aisle of the church. [I should add that I believe this was his job; he was a glazier not a vandal!]

The window was leaded but contained just plain, rather aged yellowed, obscure quarries. What became apparent as he broke out the panels one by one with a hammer was that they actually let through a very gloomy quality of light and, as he took out the pieces, the church grew visibly brighter and lighter as what little sunshine there was outside flooded through the open leading.

The window had not been totally destroyed; its basic shape and structure were still evident in the lead tracery, but it had been enhanced and improved by the stripping away of what was preventing the passage of the true light.

It had been, if you like, disillusioned.

 

As I finish, let’s return briefly to the question I asked at the beginning. How disillusioned do you feel today?

Is it possible that disillusionment could be a gift to help you move on from where you find yourself by seeing more clearly who you are, who God is, and how those two align? Is it possible a process of disillusionment could help you grow in faith and understanding as you allow the light of God’s truth to flood through the spaces created by the stripping away of perceptions which have simply become too restrictive for the fullness of life that God wills for you today?

After our service finishes this morning, I’l return and sit here in the sanctuary and, if you would like to come and sit with me, to discuss or pray about something that has struck you in what I’ve said this morning; or if you just want to sit in silence, please do come and do so.  In the meantime, I finish with a poem, with is also a prayer, attributed to Sir Francis Drake. It’s called Disturb us, Lord but I’ve taken the liberty of substituting the word ‘disturb’ for ‘disillusion’.

 

Disillusion us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves,

When our dreams have come true

Because we have dreamed too little,

When we arrived safely

Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disillusion us, Lord, when

With the abundance of things we possess

We have lost our thirst

For the waters of life;

Having fallen in love with life,

We have ceased to dream of eternity

And in our efforts to build a new earth,

We have allowed our vision

Of the new Heaven to dim.