I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
expressed binaries
seldom integrate
or divide
baptismal water
common
Holy Spirit
capitalized
resolve into priority
mysterious
chickens and eggs
can dance together
for a long time
equally mysterious
water and Spirit
find their privilege
in exclusionpast and future
catch and release
their armored plates
determining primacy
the present trembles
in the shaking
rebalancing false choices
blaming old woundsin this very work
present unbalances
visions of a future
still far off
and now further
expressed binaries
seldom divide
or integrate
What we do is common, ordinary. What is yet to come is for us quite uncommon and surprising.
These two states indicate a disjuncture common to beginnings, to Ta-Da announcements, to a new way and new life.
John is not Jesus. Jesus is not me. All three of us are growing into G*D. Theosis is a journey of grace. This Orthodox orthodoxy is involved with a journey from water to Spirit.
The Self-Ruled Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America puts it this way in their blog on “Theosis: Partaking of the Divine Nature”:
In fact, deification is very akin to the Wesleyan understanding of holiness or perfection, with the added element of our mystical union with God in Christ as both the means and the motive for attaining perfection. Fr. David Hester in his booklet, The Jesus Prayer, identifies theosis as “the gradual process by which a person is renewed and unified so completely with God that he becomes by grace what God is by nature.” Another way of stating it is “sharing in the divine nature through grace.”
This journey will be revisited in Chapter 9 when the revelation of “belovedness” at a riverside baptism is reprised on a mountain.
For now, note Mark’s building of a story of Jesus’ beginning and movement toward a mysterious promise of resurrection and reunion.