Luke 3:15-22
In Line with Us
James Sledge January
13, 2013 - Baptism of the Lord
John
the Baptist gets a curtain call today.
We just heard from him during Advent, as we do every year. In fact, John
gets two Sundays during Advent. He’s there to help us get ready, to prepare for
the coming of a Savior. But now here he
is again. This time the focus is on his ministry
of baptizing as we remember Jesus being baptized.
As
a result, we don’t hear all of John’s message this time, don’t get called a
brood of vipers, and don’t hear about the ax at the root of the trees, but we
still get some sense of that. John says of Jesus, “His winnowing fork is in his
hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary;
but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” I’ve always gotten the impression
that John expected Jesus to kick butt and take names.
I
wonder if John thought the world was beyond hope. Did he expect Jesus to show
up, clean house, and start over with some righteous remnant? Was Jesus going to institute a fiery version
of the Noah’s ark story, wiping out all the bad with unquenchable fire?
John
the Baptist was probably a pretty strange guy.
Prophet types often are. But despite
all his strangeness, I know a lot of people whose thinking is a good deal like
John’s. Sometimes mine is, too.
A
lot of Christians proclaim a slightly modified version of John’s message. “The world’s horrible, filled with all sort
of terrors and cruelties and exploitation and needless suffering.” John could point to Herod and Roman
occupation and corruption in the Jerusalem Temple hierarchy and the way the
poor always got the short end of things while the rich got richer. Herod and the Romans are gone, but other than
that we know all about the exploitive dictators and military occupations and
corrupt religious institutions and the poor getting the short end of things
while the rich do just fine.
John
expected Jesus to show up and fix things somehow, and it wasn’t going to be
pretty. In the Christian variation on John’s message, fixing things is still
not going to be pretty. But now it comes
mostly via evacuation. Jesus comes with
his winnowing fork and carries the wheat off to heaven. But the not so good and
creation itself, well nothing but fire will fix that.
Liberals Christians sometimes burn less
stuff, less folks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t adhere to the basic formula
where the world is in some way hopeless and beyond redemption.
One
of the curious things about Luke’s gospel is the way he shoves John completely
offstage before Jesus steps onto it.
Today is the Baptism of the Lord, but we don’t actually see Jesus being
baptized. John has already been hauled
off to prison before Jesus shows up.
It’s
hard to say exactly why Luke does this. All the gospel writers seem a little
nervous about Jesus being baptized by John. After all, it was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of
sins, so why would Jesus have needed it?
But presumably the event was well known enough that they didn’t feel
they could ignore it.
I
have no idea if that is why Luke pushes out John before introducing us to the
adult Jesus, but whatever the reason, Jesus ends up more connected to all those
people coming out for baptism than he does to John himself. I don’t know if you caught it in the gospel
reading, but Jesus comes on stage this way.
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been
baptized… I’m not sure the NIV
translation is as literally accurate as our NRSV, but I like it. When all the people were being baptized,
Jesus was baptized, too.
To
me this makes for a remarkable image. All these people are coming out to see
John, many because they agree with him that the world is really messed up,
maybe hopelessly so. And Jesus joins them.
As one writer puts it, “Jesus simply got in line with everyone else who
had been broken by the ‘wear and tear’ of this selfish world and had all but
given up on themselves and their God.”[1]
That’s the image Luke leaves us with
when Jesus begins praying and the Holy Spirit settles on him, and he heard –in Luke the heavenly voice
speaks to Jesus and not the crowd – “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am
well pleased.” I don’t know what Jesus had been doing for the first 30
or so years of his life, but his ministry begins with his getting in line with the
people, with prayer, with the Holy Spirit, and with the assurance of God’s
love.
____________________________________________________________________________
I
realize that it’s dangerous to generalize about families, but despite their
faults, and despite some truly bad ones, I feel fairly safe in saying that a
lot of us think of our families as the one place where we will still be welcomed
and accepted and loved no matter how badly we’ve messed up. I know this isn’t
universal, but it’s common enough that when people see a murderer’s parents on
TV, visiting him in jail or sitting by him at his trial, we don’t think badly
of them. Rather it’s what we expect, what
we hope we would do.
And
this seems more the model for Jesus than John the Baptist’s expectations. When Jesus steps onto the stage, he has no ax
nor a winnowing fork. He just gets in line with all of us poor souls, and he
leans heavily on the Spirit and on God’s love, here at the beginning of his
ministry and all throughout it. Luke regularly shows Jesus withdrawing to pray,
to connect with God and God’s love to sustain him in his difficult work. And in
the book of Acts, Luke shows the church maintaining this pattern. It too receives the Holy Spirit, and it too
is sustained in its ministry by drawing close to God and God’s love in prayer.
The
Church has long held that in our baptisms, we have something of a parallel
experience to that of Jesus at his baptism. God’s love claims us by name. “You are my beloved daughter. You are my
beloved son.” And we are promised the
Spirit as well, to strengthen us for our ministry. In our baptisms we encounter
the love of God that simply will not give up on us or on creation, no matter
how hopeless is might seem. No axes, no winnowing
forks. In the waters of baptism we encounter God’s love that will not let us go,
and will not simply evacuate a few. God
will redeem creation, and God will do it, not by force, but by self-giving,
self-sacrificial love.
It
is easy to forget that in the Church sometimes.
Have you ever noticed that when people get caught up in a scandal, get
arrested or have a family member arrested, or even simply go through a divorce,
they sometimes disappear from church? Maybe they are too embarrassed and simply
want to hide. But sometimes it is
because they do not expect the church to do as Jesus does, to come and stand in
line with them, identifying with their brokenness and pain.
Surprisingly,
it’s also easy for churches to forget about drawing close to God and God’s love
in prayer. Oh, we say prayers a lot at
church, but too often they are perfunctory things said with little awareness of
God’s presence, with little sense that God’ love and the Holy Spirit are there
for us to sustain us and empower us and protect us in fulfilling our ministry.
The
typical church spends huge amounts of money on buildings and educational
programs and music programs and preachers so they can “do church.” But people
come and do not get some clear sense of Jesus standing in that line with them,
of God’s love desperately longing to hold them and reassure them that they are
a beloved daughter, a beloved son, then all the rest is just window dressing.
I’ve
never been a big fan of the NIV Bible translation, but I do love its line from
our gospel today. When all the people were being
baptized, Jesus was baptized, too. Jesus
got in line with us, and he invites us to join him in revealing something new
that is being born. It’s tough work, but the most fulfilling thing you could
ever do. But to do it, you need to be
open to the Spirit, and you need to draw close to God and God’s love, close
enough to hear that heavenly voice. “You
are my beloved daughter. You are my
beloved son.”
[1]
Robert M. Brearley in “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1, David Bartlett and Barbara
Brown Taylor, editors (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 236.
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