Only after the Descent

It is Sunday afternoon December 4.  Kendra and I are in Bonaire sitting on the back of a scuba diving boat.  Looking around us, the sky is mysterious and cloudy, a little like the rummage of thoughts bouncing around inside of our heads.  We have been on the Dutch Antilles island of Bonaire for 24 hours and are about to take our first ever boat dive.

Geared up with all our equipment we stand at the edge of the boat about to jump in.  We have been trained and prepared and yet there is no substitute for experience when it comes to adventures like this.  What will it be like?  What will we see?  Will we remember all we are supposed to remember?  There is an excited nervousness ruminating in both of us.

Mark, the boat captain and dive master, yells "the pool is open . . . time to go diving!"  With respectful fear for what we are about to do we edge ourselves to the platform.  It's time to take the plunge.  To descend below the surface of the ocean and discover the world under the water.  With one final deep breath we leap . . . into the unknown . . . into a world we know nothing about.

Eugene Peterson, pastor, writer, scholar and friend, reflecting on the call of being a pastor, writes these words in his book Under the Unpredictable Plant, "Gradually, and graciously, elements of vocational spirituality came into view.  The canyons and arroyos were not so much bridged as descended, and in the descent I reached a bottom from which I could ascend as often as I descended (but only after the descent) with a sense of coherence, the personal and vocational twinned."

"But only after the descent."

What did Peterson mean by that?  What does descending have to do with anyone's life . . . let alone a pastor's?  To descend means to drop down, to sink or to drop lower than the place we currently are . . . which of course is completely contrary to anything we experience in this world.  We live in a world of ascent.  Corporate structures, educational systems, government hierarchies, even families are all shaped by the mindset of climbing the ladder.  We all live in a world formed by a top down mentality.  What does Peterson mean by "but only after the descent?"  I was about to find out . . . off the back of a boat . . . on the remote island of Bonaire.

Letting the air out of my buoyancy compensator (a fancy name for a vest filled with air) I slowly started to descend down into the ocean.  I was unprepared for what I saw.  Beauty raged in colors and formations I had never seen.  Corals and creatures twisted in dependent relationship dancing back and forth with the surge of ocean currents.  My eyes were as wide as a five year old child on Christmas morning.  Life was abundant here . . . full and free . . . beautiful and striking . . . discovered only in the descent.

It strikes me that the descent is the life Christ revealed to us.  "He came from heaven to earth" we sing year round.  "Infant holy, infant lowly, for his bed a cattle stall" we sing during the Advent and Christmas season.  "But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness" Paul writes.

This is the stunning beauty of the gospel.  It is also the stunning beauty of baptism.

In baptism we descend with Christ.  We descend to the depths of brokenness and separation and sin and death; and in doing so we reach the bottom only to discover the beauty of grace.  Grace filled with the vibrant colors of God's mercy and compassion.  Grace that floods us with life even though we don't deserve it.  Grace that brings us to the surface as new people with a new identity and a new way of living.  Grace that unites us with Christ . . . but only after the descent.