By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Matthew 21:23-32, preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI on September 27, 2026
“Not Me” Attention
A prelim footnote: my evangelical, born-again, Pentecostal, tongues-speaking, word of the Lord-seeking “Christianity” all to the good, much of my adult life has been about learning to see, appreciate, honor, and finally be amazed by what is not me. “Not me” in terms of living for 15 years in community sharing all things in common under the same roof with as many as 20 other people in one single family dwelling; “not me” as a white male in east side inner city, Black Detroit; “not me” in terms of gender and orientation; “not me” in having a wife who is Filipino-born and enculturated; and with her, “not me,” in learning from indigenous cultures and peoples how to turn aside from human focus on human concerns to fall in love with the Wild World of more-than-human elders and co-dwellers, whether plant, animal, soil, season, weather. Or water.
We are in the Christian lectionary “Season of Creation” with a central theme of Living Water. And the question for me is: Can I pay attention to water outside of my concern to drink it, wash with it, ask it to cleanse my dishes and tools and take my garbage and pollution away, grow my crops or transport my computer chips from Taiwan or my I-phone from DRC? Can I get fascinated with Water on Her own terms and for Her own sake? Can I stop being human supremacist and only paying attention to such things to the degree they support me or give me some kind of experience I can capture in a selfie? Can I stop being the center of my own universe? After all, I am more than 60% water myself and Her dwelling in me means I am not primarily “me,” but another creature who is literally billions of years old and only for an evolutionary split-second, “agreeing” to be in this strange conjunction of all kinds of other creatures—eaten plants and metabolized animals, cavorting bacteria and provocative viruses, a little bit of residual iron and copper, bone and nails and hair, etc.—whose sum and substance for some 70+ years has rambled across a small piece of this planet as an upright oddity called “Jim Perkinson.” Can I relate to Water without instantly colonizing it?
Nepal Devastation
8:37 am Nepal Time on August 26, 2026, a seismic thud registered at 5.2 magnitude on the Richter scale. A slice of glacier-covered-rock 5,000 feet long, 3,300 feet wide, 425 feet thick, sheered off the north face of Langtang Lirung Mountain, plunged nearly a mile almost straight down into the Lhende Khola valley tributary to the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems, landing with the force of 950 tons of TNT, pulverizing the rock, melting the ice, and then surging with a force 30 times that of Niagara Falls, at times racing more than 100 miles an hour with a wave crest as high as 300 feet, downstream for 60 miles before finally slowing and settling into a “mere” flood.
A “Water Word” sounding at a mega-decibel level heard round the globe.
The human consequence is still being figured in the multiple thousands of deaths, entire villages wiped out, 41 bridges swept away, thousands of homes destroyed. And we can be tempted to say—Ah, Nature! So cruel! So brutal! So uncaring in the trajectory of its “wild agency,” mindless of its effect, in an eyeblink taking out vast numbers of our species who did nothing to warrant such an annihilation!”
But the cause of this event is not simply Wild Nature. It is rather being assessed as a combination of rising temperatures due to climate change repeatedly melting and re-freezing “permafrost” in rock cracks and thus amplifying the cracking process, and of industrial and mineral soot flowing downwind from one of the most heavily polluted urban corridors in South Asia, over decades coating the high mountain glaciers with black carbon such that sunlight is no longer reflected back off the planet, but absorbed into the ice, intensifying melting and destabilizing the ice.
None of us who drive cars, or use computers, or rely on electric grids, or love our metal tools and cement roads and glass houses, are innocent. In spite of capitalism’s drumbeat celebrating competition, and Peter Thiel’s championing of The Sovereign Individual book manuscript advocating the replacement of democracy with tech-bro fascism, and all of our I-phone fetishizing of selfies re-making us into a Me-first, Me-central, Me-focused mirroring of Me, Me, Me, as the entire concern of human being on the surface of this amazing Blue Marble cruising the Big Black Mystery called the Universe—in spite of all that, we are actually profoundly interdependent and yes, “dependent” beings, deeply entangled in local watersheds, and by Water, Wind, Rock Crust, and Shifting Temps interlinked on a global scale, such that a community’s fate in Nepal is not separate from my choice for a latte on a Sunday morning in Detroit.
We have decided we deserve to live at global scale, violently pillaging any and every mineral, metal, and molecule we desire, from whatever corner of the planet they can be extracted to serve our extension of our bodies by armatures and prostheses, airplanes and fiberoptic cables, satellite eyeballs and concrete roadways, etc. across the entire surface of the earth, no matter the consequence for those few human communities still living at scale in local niches much less the whole of the more-than-human biosphere that begot us and feeds us, every millisecond of every day.
We are deep in it, brothers and sisters, and before centering down into John’s baptism as this morning’s reading suggests, I can’t resist one more rant, one more omen, one last emblem, of the travesty we have unleashed on the entire globe largely beginning 10,000 years ago when we re-tooled our collective profile from small-scale, roughly egalitarian communities synched up in respectful mutuality with local ecologies and instead moved toward ever-expanding, ever-aggressing settlements, utterly committed to squeezing every drop of surplus we can from wild nature before discarding the remains as polluted garbage and lifeless dead zone, savagely incarcerating that surplus in rapacious domination systems, run by self-absorbed elites, fetishizing themselves as the paragon models of how to be human, relentlessly promulgating their images everywhere by both reward and punishment such that most of the rest of the species is caught up to one degree or another in envy and effort to emulate that lifestyle if not that persona.
Chemical Inundation
That “one more” example is this: according to the American Chemical Industry data bank, we have now flooded the planet with some 360,000 chemicals that are partially regulated and more than 280 million chemical hybrids completely unregulated—none of which occur naturally and would never have come into existence except for our insistence that we have the right to re-engineer everything according to our mere whim and fascination. Carcinogenic plastic now found on Everest heights 5 miles up, in Atlantic Ocean trenches 5 miles down, and in every living body on earth. PFAS chemicals now borne by every single raindrop falling anywhere on the planetary surface—so-called “forever chemicals,” produced now to the tune of 7 million different kinds. Most—toxic to life at any level of concentration, remediation of merely one of which would cost more than the global GDP for a year, leaving the “forever-ness” of the other 6,999,999 untouched. Welcome to the story of this amazing species called homo sapiens, racing off the edge of the knowable horizon in the name of an absolutely unquestionable value and supposed reality called “progress.” Homo sapiens—”human wise ones”? I think the more accurate label, as climate scientist Bill Mcquire renames us, is homo stupidens! And yes, Elon—please “progress” to Mars. And take Thiel, and Bezos, and Zuckerberg, and Elliot, and Karp, and Amodei, and Altman with you!
John’s Baptism
Public Disinformation
Such is the preface to what I want to look at in today’s scripture. Jesus asks: “The baptism of John, whence was it? From heaven or from men?” And we typically swallow too quickly here, thinking we know. We need context—which is a dangerous statement for me to make, because I might just start a sentence that has no punctuation or concluding period until sometime tomorrow. But I’ll try to make myself be brief. Where are we in the gospel narrative? Not far from the end—at least in synoptic telling.
We are in Jerusalem, immediately after Jesus has taken his posse from the outback of Galilee where he had been operating for more than a year, teaching about Sabbath-Jubilee requirements to return to a land-based economy of sharing goods in common, relearning the foods the wild offers “of itself,” without human intervention, establishing a network of sanctuary-villages inhabited by peasants and rural safe-zones frequented by the marginalized.
A contract had been taken out on his life within the first month or so of his public ministry, elites quickly beginning a disinformation campaign, charging him with exorcising “street-level” demons by the Prince of Demons, Beelzebul, hell-bent on destroying his reputation so they could then destroy his body without creating a riot or worse. That “hidden agenda” of the ruling elites marks much of the dramatic tension of gospel narration. Official figures asking him pointed questions in public gatherings to try to provoke an incriminating “soundbite” they could then take up into the kangaroo court they want to—and will—convene to get him sentenced and six feet under. And Jesus dancing deftly in ironic send-ups and parabolic come-backs, avoiding the political retribution waiting in the wings and pillorying the effort in subtlety and parody. A continuous “battle rap” scenario with “grave” (figurative and literal) consequences.
Storm and Seed Affirmation
We could drill down on the Beelzebul reference (and may do so in next week’s Wednesday bible study)—a cryptic attempt to associate the Nazareth prophet with the Canaanite Storm God known as Baal, denigrated as “Lord of the Flies.” Ah yes, “flies”—who under Moses’ conjuring “finger” and summoning rod, were integral to Israel’s ability to walk out of Egypt into desert freedom. A liberation occasioned by frogs and flies, gnats and pests, hail and storm! Wild nature as slave redeemer! But that is another sermon.
Suffice it here to note: Jesus will gain renown—and air-time in gospel writing—as frequently offering up Seed Teachings, pointing his movement towards Plant Kernels as models for how to be “human,” which teachings are then “answered” from Heaven by Thunder-claps of approaching Storms seemingly entering the dialogue by affirming, “Yes, be seeds, and we will honor the sowing by bringing rain and life!” And indeed, the movement leader will promise himself as a literal seed—a bread crust of eucharistic wheat grains—as one of his incarnate forms, even before he goes into the ground and comes back up as “resurrected life” . . . like any plant in its spring time return to sunlight! Nature has such an amazing presence in the gospels if we pay attention.
Jerusalem Confrontation
But in any case, Jesus is in Jerusalem, the day after having cleared the Temple which is also the national bank where all the records of indebtedness are kept, detailing who had been foreclosed upon and kicked off their land into impoverishment, by which fat cat landlords assembling their estates to pass on in their families. Jesus had flipped over the computer terminals and teller-windows and money-changer tables and dove-cages of the loan-sharks, occupied the Temple mall for an entire day, shut down all transport of goods across the grounds, and named the place “Thug Central,” “Den of Robbers,” to its face.
And of course, had immediately then “gotten out of Dodge” for the night, knowing his fate was now sealed and his public appearances extremely fraught and dangerous. Sure enough, next day back up in the Temple precincts, he is immediately called out in public by a hastily-convened ensemble of so-called “authorities”: priests, scribes, and elders, making common cause to take down this upstart threat to their oligarchic grift using God’s name and law to pick the pockets of the poor and increase their own profit margin. Jesus had dared name the game outright in the hearing of the crowd and the ruling elites are charging: “Who gave you the authority to do such things?” Jesus refuses to defend and instead counters question with question. “You tell me, the baptism of John—whence its origin? Heaven or men?” And we instantly go metaphoric and spiritual, thinking “heaven” is a stand-in for “God” over against what is “human.” But let’s recover the situation.
Wilderness Formation
Jesus had begun his movement in the wilds, east of the Jordan, where John was baptizing in Wadi Cherith, famed as the hideout of renegade flamethrower, prophet Elijah, when on run from Jezebel and Ahab. There John had convened a movement joined by Jesus among others.
And part of the take home here, is the role of the Jordan in Israelite formation and identity. Arguably, John is calling people not so much to a ritual as to a recovery, not primarily an experience but an embrace. The crowds that flock to his call as he moves up and down the Jordan River basin as Water Guru are actually coming to that flow from the west and moving east into the waters. They are stepping out of grain-growing settlement in the Canaanite hill country and reclaiming the primal experience and history of Israel escaped from Egypt—the Wilderness where for 40 years they had been debrided of imperial formation and de-programed from the economics of surplus accumulation and re-learned how to “gather” what the land offered free of charge and without recourse to violent human agency like planting.
In Egypt, as slaves, they were building storage cities for grain for Pharaoh’s “Food as Weapon” policy, in which produce wrangled from the Nile Delta was accumulated under lock and key and divvied out on the basis of loyalty and subservience. Counter to that, once in “the Sinai Wild,” the walk-outs under Moses relied on the provisions provided by their herd animals and also ate “manna”—likely aphid defecation that even today Arab Bedouin gather from the base of tamarisk trees whence it puddles once dropped “from the sky” by the insects 15-50 feet up in the limbs eating the leaves and pooping 130% their body weight every hour. The Bedouin call it “man” in Arabic and cook it up into honey loaves.
Not Purification But Reclamation
Arguably, John is not actually engaging in a ritual but challenging one. More well-to-do Jews of his time in urban centers were catching water in cisterns called miqva’ot, used for washing especially for those deemed ritually impure such as poor working people of the land, who had to bathe in industrial-scale pools each morning as they entered the workshops owned and controlled by the elites, before drying and packing the fish, bottling the oil or wine, or working the textiles and woolens—in order to ensure the marketability (“purity”) of the products they touched and handled with their hands. Or any woman at the end of her menstrual cycle, who had to bathe to ensure the “purity” of the ancestral line she might conceive and birth. Here the vector of movement was away from the land (rural folk living in the outback) or from natural body processes (women in menses) and into carefully monitored “purity standards” by way of miqva’ot cisterns built for urban workshops and houses controlled by the wealthy and the men.
John’s summons is the exact opposite. He is calling the crowds and multitudes (but not the elites whom he will confront and repudiate for trying to join what he is convening) out of the cities and into the wilds east of the Jordan, in the process to be cleansed by a river not created or shaped by human hands, but itself a flow coming directly from clouds inundating mountain sides (like Hermon at the headwaters of the Jordan) and coursing across the landscape untampered with by aqueducts or cisterns.
At Sinai, before a Storm-Draped Mountain flushed with Rain and lit by Lightning that was the primordial “incarnate” revelation of Deity to nascent Israel, Moses had called for altars to be built for that Deity made only of earth or unhewn stone not touched by tools (Exod 29:25). John is standing at the edge of an “Unhewn” River of “Living Water” and calling for crossing back up the ancestral line to “Unhewn” Land to be re-schooled and re-made anew. He is calling Israel to recover its primal identity and practice as pastoral nomad and hunter-gatherer, before it settled into Canaan, and went agricultural and settled and then monarchical and urban.
Not Purchased Provision But Naturally-Given Fecundation
And one last bit of input on the throw-down Jesus is offering as a send-up to the Powers in the Temple precincts who are desperate to arrest and kill him. He had already—in a previous visit to the Temple according to John’s gospel, during the autumn Rain Fest called the Feast of Sukkot or Festival of Booths that ritually conjured the fall Storms to roll in off the Mediterranean to end the devastating droughts and desiccation of summer siroccos and heat—he had already engaged in a kind of “civil disobedience” action, on the last day of the Fest, suddenly standing up next to the altar and proclaiming “Free Water” to anyone thirsty, saying, “Come and drink, for out of your belly shall flow rivers of living water!”
So much implied in such a small handful of words!
The Temple priests, centuries before, had effectively “privatized” water, mandating a half-shekel “head tax,” to be paid to the Temple annually by every family to ensure the rains would fall and the fields yield crop—making themselves the guarantors of the Palestinian water cycle. Jesus is directly challenging that claim and payment, by quoting Isaiah 55’s proclamation, “Ho everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; the one who has no money, come ‘buy’ and eat! Come ‘buy’ wine and milk, without money and without price!”—an admonition that ends a few verses later by asserting, “for as the rain and snow come down from heaven and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall the word be that goes forth from my mouth [it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and prosper in the thing for which I sent it].” And the priority here is that God’s Word is like Rain, not the other way around. Rain is the Reality; the Word models itself on that pre-eminent natural Mystery and Gift.
Not Engineered Circulation But Living Parturition
And what’s more—the invocation of “Living Water” is not an invention of Jesus, but a reference to a centuries-old understanding in the Jewish community that water that is “alive” is water untouched by human hands or designs, untampered with by technology like aqueducts or cisterns, but rather “Wild Water” coming directly from the skies, from clouds hitting mountains and raining down. And finally, in the John 7 cipher, the word translated in English as “belly” is more literally in Aramaic, “womb”; the image very concretely that of a woman “breaking water” in birth; the implication a gender-bending combination of the male pronoun “his” with a noun of strictly female anatomy, “womb.”
But in the piled-up references of those few words, it gets even deeper. For the assertion is finally that the real “Living Water” coming from the “Big Living Mother” is that of Clouds regularly drenching Mountains with inundation that then flushes nutrient and biodiversity downstream to every living creature making “Life” possible in the first place. And what human mothers do in breaking water is just one small version of that much older, much more pervasive “water break” we call “Rain.”
“From Heaven or From Men” Authorization?
So, the baptism of John, whence was it? From Heaven or men? The actual authority in question here are Clouds deluging Heights, birthing Rivers, engendering Life. That is where Jesus gets his authorization to clear the Temple and announce its demise. The real Temple is what happens in the skies on the heights of Hermon and its accompanying peaks in the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountain ranges up north whence comes the Jordan from its particular “womb.”
And finally, remarkably, we can then remember Jesus’ own immersion in the Jordan flow, in which he comes from Nazareth in the west, goes east to the watershed boundary, goes under, comes up, immediately “the Heavens open”—most other places in scripture a reference to a Storm Bank of Rain Clouds that suddenly “open up a downpour.” And from such comes a Voice, presumably of Thunder—“articulated” for human comprehension by a few verses from the psalms and the prophets (Ps 2:7; Is 42:1) that are usually only recited during the Feast of Booths gathering in the fall that is itself the preeminent Rain Fest in that particular ecology. And immediately, a dove descends from that Jordan River flyway for migrating water fowl and indeed drives Jesus east of the Jordan, back into the shaping Wilderness whence his people had come and where they were re-formed and re-taught how to live on the land after having been warped for generations in imperial Egyptian conscription and enslavement.
Which is to say—if we so want to read, in his baptismal experience, Jesus moves through his bioregional “boundary water” back towards his ancestral line where they were re-indigenized, is immediately adopted by a Storm Cloud and Thunder Voice upon surfacing, further adopted by that animal-form whose own pathway every season is that watercourse, a Dove-Pigeon who as Spirit-Bird “Familiar,” drives him into the Wild Stone outback where ancestor Jacob was dream-taught and tested. And there Jesus is himself re-made, initiated by those outcrops and mountain heights, tested by those Wild “Powers” before being eligible to return back to “civilization” to start challenging his entire generation about exactly what they are doing as a supposedly spiritual people “of God.”
Conclusion
To sum up: I once wrote—in a 2020 piece crafted for the Detroit water-shutoff struggle: “Water in our time is ‘speaking.’ It is demanding a new hearing—in the ‘Shouting Voice’ of hurricanes and floods; in the ‘Withheld Voice’ of droughts and wildfires; and in the ‘Peoples Voice’ of a cry for access as shutoffs continue in Detroit, poisoning remains un-redressed in Flint, and war over such breaks out in Syria and elsewhere” (Perkinson, 208). And now in Nepal—in the Crescendo-ing Voice of a melting glacier! But actually—water has never not been “speaking.” The real question now is, under threat of planet-wide annihilation, are we willing to re-learn how to listen? Rather than just take, pipe, use, abuse, and “flush”?
And a last footnote: We heard three weeks ago, from Joe’s sermon, that there is no Wilderness left to escape to. Which is true at one level. But at another—it is “Wild” all around and within us, even if coerced in extraction, deformed in re-engineering and commodification, enslaved in marketing, and disappeared in I-phone mystification and self-absorption. But it is not gone. And if we continue to insist on our own delusions of self-importance and human-supremacy, rather than self-limitation and more-than-human collaboration and honoring—it will make its “wildness” unmistakably clear. By making us gone.
Bibliography
Perkinson, James W. 2020. “Race War, Climate Crisis, Indigenous Witness and the Bible: The Word of Water,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 20:2 (Fall, 2020), 208-230.
