Baptism, Bodies, & Masculinity [Week 1]

Genesis 1:1-5

Acts 19:1-7 

One of the great things about baptism is that it gives you courage.  It gives you courageous permission to reject the demands and expectations other people might have for you.  You might not see baptism that way right now.  But over the next month we’ll be exploring connections between baptism, our bodies, and gender roles. 

 

Now maybe you’ve never thought much about the connections between baptism, our bodies, and expectations for women and men.  We’ll start exploring those connections today with a look at a story from Acts about baptism.  But in coming weeks we’ll be reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.  Those readings will raise all kinds of questions about the connections between faith and our bodies.  Paul, they asked, is it a big deal if a member of the church is sleeping with his step-mother?  How important is it that the men of the church stop having sex with prostitutes like they’re in the habit of doing?  Paul, if the body’s desires are dangerous, should we just avoid sex altogether?  And in that case should those of us who are married get divorced so we can be more devoted to the Lord?  And what are we allowed to eat?  Can we keep going to the weekend religious festivals that honor the gods and eat meals prepared by the priests? 

Now the questions we have about our bodies, food, sex, singleness, marriage, and desire won’t be the same, of course.  But we will have to reflect together on what it means for us to “honor God with our bodies.”  This week we’ll begin to raise some questions about gender roles, about cultural expectations for men and women, and how baptism provides us with a larger and more interesting picture of who we are and how we can use our gifts and strengths.

Between World War II and the end of the 1960’s, there emerged a picture of “the ‘real man,’ a man with square shoulders and an unwavering love of country; he could throw a football, kill his dinner, and make love to a woman.”  Those who modeled this new manhood included Clint Eastwood (in Westerns) and Jim Brown (on the football field), or even Ronald Reagan (in both movies and politics).  (see “Masculinity in the Age of Ron Swanson,” vulture.com). 

By the early 21^st century, this notion of the “real American man” was outdated and almost dead, when a television show called Parks and Recreation debuted and introduced an impressively mustachioed character named Ron Swanson (played by Nick Offerman).  Ron Swanson models a life of “roughing it.”  He “builds things, shoots things, and can’t stand [bs]. . . . [he] prefers to keep to himself in an era where everybody wants to tweet their feelings and Instagram their dinner.” 

In case you haven’t seen Ron Swanson’s version of manliness on Parks and Recreation, here is Ron in his own words . . .

·         When a nurse asks him if there is any history of mental illness in his family, Ron says, “I have an uncle who does yoga.”
·   On pets: “Any dog under fifty pounds is a cat and cats are useless.”
·   He wrote his own will when he was eight, and it reads, “Upon my death all of my belongings shall transfer to the man or animal who has killed me.”
·   On the importance of honesty, “There’s only thing I hate more than lying: skim milk, which is water that’s lying about being milk.”
·   On food, “Dear frozen yogurt: you are the celery of desserts.  Be ice cream, or be nothing.”
·   Ron refers to capitalism as “God’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor.”
·   On friendship: “The less I know about other people’s affairs, the happier I am.  I’m not interested in caring about people.  I once worked with a guy for three years and never learned his name.  Best friend I ever had.  We still never talk sometimes.”
·   On being outdoors: “Fishing relaxes me.  It’s like yoga.  Except I still get to kill something.”
·   On strong emotions: “Keep your tears in your eyes where they belong.”

Ron Swanson is a caricature exaggerated for effect, but you get the drift.  A “real man” is a carnivorous, competitive, uncaring, lonely human being who is deathly afraid of feeling any strong emotions other than anger.  So an interesting thought experiment might be, “What happens if Ron Swanson were to receive baptism?”

You might be surprised that baptism has anything to do with changing gender roles.  But baptism is a life-defining, life-shaping ritual.  It’s a ritual that carries with it a whole new story about the shape and possibilities of our lives – how we understand ourselves and how we engage with and relate to others.  Consider our reading from Acts today.

Acts 19:1-7

Traveling, Paul “found some disciples” in Ephesus.  Paul asked them about the beginning of their faith.  Did they receive the Holy Spirit when they “became believers”?  No, they respond.  “We have not even HEARD of this Holy Spirit.”

“Well at least tell me this,” Paul continues.  “Were you even baptized when you became believers?”  “Oh yes,” the twelve confirm.  “We were baptized with John’s baptism.” Paul then points out that John’s ministry was to point to the more powerful one coming after him, that is, Jesus the Christ.  So apparently these disciples had only a very partial and very elementary version of the life of faith. 

So Paul welcomes them to a fuller baptism, one done “in the name of the Lord Jesus.”  And then Paul lays hands on them and “the Holy Spirit came upon them.”  When they received the Spirit, their capacities and powers were elevated and intensified just as it had happened in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost: they declared the good news of God’s love in a variety of languages.  The same Spirit that hovers over the waters of creation hovers at the waters of our baptism, giving order and form to the beginning of a new kind of life. 

These “disciples” remind us that growth, depth, and maturity is always a process.  Growing in faith, hope, and love is a life-long project.  We come to faith in bits and pieces, in fits and starts.  We gather what we can carry for now, and leave the rest for later.  We absorb what we can and set off, knowing that we’ll need more guidance down the road. 

There is an important healing story in Mark 8.  A blind man in Bethsaida is brought to Jesus for healing.  Jesus touches the man’s eyes then asks him what he sees.  “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”  That is, he could see but not very well.  If you have poor vision like I do, you can easily imagine what this guy was seeing.  There were shapes moving about, but it was all blurry.  And so Jesus touches his eyes a second time.  This time the man opened his eyes, and could see everything clearly.  In the gospels, it might appear that Jesus always heals instantaneously.  But this story suggests that for most of us, we will experience God’s healing as part of a process.  There will be stages, different depths and degrees of healing through which we move as we mature.

Let me make a couple of brief comments about baptism as part of a healing process for all of us and then I’ll come back to Ron Swanson and gender roles.  First – and this is so plain and simple, so obvious that it’s easy to overlook – baptism is for bodies.  If our bodies were not important, we wouldn’t need a ritual and symbol that involves water on our bodies.  Whether you’re dunked or poured upon or thrice sprinkled in baptism, the water comes into contact with the skin of your body.  Baptism marks our bodies as holy, beautiful, and beloved.  Baptism signals that our bodies are gifts from God and that God delights in their range of capabilities and their array of powers. 

Second – and here again, I apologize that this is so easy and so obvious – when we receive baptism our anatomical features and our biological sex do not play any significant role.  Put bluntly, we might say that you don’t need a penis to receive baptism.  (I’m happy for you to be tweeting about worship today but I’d rather you not tweet that particular line!).  Why put it that way?  Because for communities gathered around Jesus Christ, the ritual of baptism replaces the ritual of circumcision as the initiation into a new way of life.  And so baptism invites the hovering Spirit to surround women’s bodies and women’s lives in the same way that it surrounds men’s bodies and men’s lives.  In this new way of life, women receive the power and the gifts of the Spirit just like men do. 

So let us return to the somewhat silly question: what would happen if the character Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation were to receive baptism?  Would it be ok if he continued to love eating meat and hunting and fishing and hating skim milk and frozen yogurt?  Yes I think so.  But he would slowly begin to understand that his particular version of manliness is only one of limitless ways that men can live out their masculinity as those baptized into a new way of life.  Ron would slowly begin to welcome male friends who are vegetarian or vegan, men who have hobbies other than hunting or fishing, men who do yoga, and men who have cats.  And Ron might learn the names of his coworkers.  He might even inquire about how they’re doing and what they’re feeling.  He might welcome vulnerability, might learn to care, and at some very advanced stage, might even permit himself to shed a tear when he feels sadness or grief.

For all of us, baptism marks the beginning of the journey.  We don’t have to get everything right from the start.  We just start.  We just confess what we can.  And then we join our lives with others in a project of continual learning and growing.  The rules about what it means to be a man or a woman that we absorbed as children are the places we start.  It’s good to have rules and guidelines when you’re young.  But in our baptisms we begin to see a larger picture of the graceful possibilities for all human beings – and those possibilities have almost nothing to do with the biological sex of our bodies or gender roles.  And so as we move through stages of healing, we can move past and through cultural expectations and stereotypes that are too small for us.  We can welcome a larger life, full of unique gifts and strengths and experiences that make us who we are.

Welcoming these new arrays of power in our lives and living by them makes a new depth of life possible.  No longer are we living in a way constricted and confined by cultural expectations and gender roles.  Rather, we are receiving from the Spirit the life to which God has called us.  And it is a life of serving others with our gifts.  And what we begin to discover as we welcome our own wisdom and experience and our own variety of skills and strengths is that other people’s expectations and needs for us would have been far to narrow a life.  Our baptized lives are creative, not conformist.  They draw on our strengths rather than cater to the expectations of others.  All of us, as baptized women and men, are called to “honor God with our bodies,” but we can’t know what that looks like without going on pilgrimage with everybody else, further and deeper into the mystery of God’s grace.