Eternal Return

Lost in an AI Dimension, by Cassi Jo

Propers: The Baptism of the Lord, AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

About half a century back, the Romanian professor and historian of religion Mircea Eliade published The Myth of the Eternal Return, a highly influential book on how humanity experiences the divine. In it, Eliade argued that ancient societies struck a clear distinction betwixt the sacred and the profane.

The profane, for him, would be our world of regular linear time. We get up, we work, we go to bed, and every day we get older. Everything down here, in this mundane world, is relative, shifting, mercurial, ephemeral. Nothing’s permanent. Nothing’s reliable. This he called “the terror of history,” which seems a little harsh but not too far off the mark, if we’re being honest. Bad things indeed happen within a fallen world.

But there’s another world, another layer of reality: the sacred. And the sacred is more real than the profane. The profane, in fact, relies upon the sacred. Sacred reality is pristine, absolute, transcendent, eternal: beyond space and time, beyond sin, death, and hell. That’s what really matters to us, according to Eliade. That’s what’s really real. Profane mundane life gains meaning, purpose, value, joy only when it emulates the sacred: wisdom, love, grace, truth, goodness, beauty, bliss.

And these worlds intersect in what Eliade calls hierophany: the sacred breaking into the mundane, glimpses of enlightenment, of heaven come down to earth. When I was in college, we used to call these “god-bombs.” You’d be minding your own business, running the rat-race, when bam! —something wondrous and unbidden would fall like a bolt from the blue: a mystical, miraculous, supernatural experience.

Lots of human beings have glimpsed the sacred. I suspect that on some level all of us have. It’s what keeps us going, what makes us human: those moments when everything has meaning, when everything is love; a flash of eternity through the broken shards time. If only we could grasp it, hold it, keep it. If only the sacred could dwell in our hearts each moment of all of our days. Then history would cease to be a horror, and life below be more than just our long and slow defeat.

Yet how can one grasp at infinity? How can we communicate a truth beyond all words, a higher and deeper reality, transcending thought and sense? For this we need symbols and rituals and myths. We need religion to encapsulate the sacred within the profane. And it works. Religion works. It shows us the deeper reality. It lifts us up to eternity. It takes us out of space and time in communion with the divine: the finite holding the infinite.

Faith is passed from hand to hand and mouth to ear, in history and in mystery, in Word and in Sacrament. And something so powerful, something so true, attracts deep corruption. Religion can be misused as a tool for control, abuse, and exploitation. Luther wrote that wheresoever God may build a church, the devil slaps up a chapel nextdoor.

But none of us would be here, none of our forebears would have come here, were it not for the fact that they found in this Church the divine within the mundane, the sacred within the profane, God in Man in Jesus Christ our Lord. This is what Eliade called our “eternal return.” By symbols and sacred stories, by spiritual rituals that lift us up from this temporal world, we return to our origins, back to our beginnings. Our faith begins and ends in Christ.

One of the definitions of a sacrament is of a symbol that contains the very thing it signifies.  In other words, the Eucharistic bread represents the Body of Christ, and it is the Body of Christ. Holy Communion remembers the Last Supper, and it is the Last Supper. We are there, with Jesus, on the night He was betrayed. And the same holds true for Baptism. For all of humankind, water symbolizes birth and deluge, cleansing and drowning, life and death. And that’s exactly what Baptism gives to us: the death and Resurrection of Christ.

You’ll find water in every religion: Hindus immersing themselves in the sacred River Ganges; Muslims performing ablutions before prayer. In Judaism, the mikvah bath cleanses one of ritual impurity, marks a change of heart, and welcomes new converts into the people of God.

John the Baptist offered an immersion of repentance, of returning, of preparing for the Kingdom of the Lord. Yet his was only the opening act. “I baptize you with water,” he cried, “but one more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

Enter Jesus. Here we have the one of whom John spake: the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; the Son of David come to claim His royal throne; the one like unto a Son of Man who raises all the dead. He travels to the Jordan to be baptized. But why? What need has He to repent? What need has Christ, who is the Kingdom, to prepare for Kingdom come? Other Gospel accounts report John’s confusion as well. “I should be baptized by you,” he says, “and would you be baptized by me?”

But what happens next is hierophany. Jesus enters the waters and the heavens split asunder. The Holy Spirit descends upon Him as a dove. And the voice of God the Father proclaims, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Christians love this, of course, because here is the full revelation of God as Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit: One Divine Essence in Three True Realities.

Baptism doesn’t change Jesus; Jesus changes Baptism. Here is God revealed in the waters: revealed as the Spirit of God who is God; revealed as the hidden King who always was divine; revealed as the Father and Creator of us all. God meets us in the waters, fully, truly, utterly. That’s why we return to Him, to His presence, to His promise; to the sacred Mystery of the waters of our rebirth.

When we come to Baptism, we are not simply cleansed. We are not simply welcomed into this community. You and I and all of us are joined, eternally, to the death and Resurrection of the Christ. Here we drown in the waters, drown in the Old Adam, drown in our sins, to rise up again with the life of Christ within us, the New Adam, the God-Man. Thus writes St Paul, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me.”

When we enter these waters, this Font of eternal life, we are promised the Holy Spirit, poured out in Word and water. The Spirit of Christ is the Life of Christ, the Breath of Christ, breathed into earthly clay. We are thus christened, given a new name, Christian. And through our Baptism we approach the sacred Altar of God, where we are given Jesus’ Body and His Blood. And we can do the math, can’t we? If we have the Body of Jesus, the Blood of Jesus, the Name of Jesus, the Life and Breath and Spirit of Jesus—what does that make us? Who does that make us?

It makes us Jesus, all of us, together. Moreover, if Christ is one with God, and we are one in Christ, then we are one with God. The sacred exists within the profane, for Jesus lives in us! That’s the whole point of the Church. We together are Christ for this world. We are heaven descending to earth, eternity in time, the Creator conquering Creation, God incarnate in this Man.

The deeper reality, the higher truth, the origin of us all, is the love of God poured out for us in Jesus Christ our Lord. And as sure as that water is wet, the promise stands secure: “Where two or three are gathered, I am with you … I will be with you unto the end of the age.” Christ is alive—here and now in you—in His Church, in this Body of sainted sinners.

And we return eternally to the presence of God in the waters, to the promise of the forgiveness of our sins; joined irrevocably to Christ’s own death already died for us, that we need never fear death again; and joined to His eternal life, already here begun. Baptized with fire. Baptized with Spirit. Baptized into heaven while yet we walk upon this earth. We are the Resurrection come to set the world ablaze! This is the truth that transcends all space and time. This is the grace Jesus pours out here for you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

Twitter: https://x.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987

Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026