Matthew 3:13-17
Glimpses of God’s New Day
James Sledge January
8, 2017
I
have a number of books featuring sermons by Barbara Brown Taylor, along with a
book by her on preaching. She’s famous for being a great preacher, and I’ve
quoted her in sermons often. But a few years back she wrote a very different
book entitled Leaving Church: a memoir of
faith. It is about just what the title suggests, and here’s a bit from the
introduction.
By
now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown
gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs
after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own.
I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was
ordained.
Today those
vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church
pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly
Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians
who remain my closest kin. Sometimes I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of
steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest
perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living
teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a
small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering in an eye clinic in Nepal,
there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am
through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But
it is the life that has turned out to be mine…[1]
When
the book came out, many of the pastors I socialized with agreed with one
colleague who labeled Taylor “a whiner who never should have entered ordained
ministry in the first place.” But I could not dismiss her so easily. I
resonated with some of her frustrations with church and the world. And if
anything, this last year has left me with an even more skeptical and frustrated
view of the world, its institutions, and humanity.
This
can prove challenging for faith, and the combination of post-Christmas let
down, winter doldrums, and news of the latest shooting doesn’t help. Christmas
speaks of peace on earth, of God decisively entering into human history, and God’s
new day beginning to appear. But all these centuries later and the kingdom
seems a long way off. The world is still a place of horrible suffering, violence,
greed, and selfishness. And the church often just shrugs. Worse, the church is too
often an agent of prejudice, greed, hate, and violence.
Today,
barely out of the Christmas season and moving into the heart of winter, we hear
once more of the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry as he comes to the Jordan
to be baptized by John. It is a strange story, one that troubled those early
Christians who wrote the gospels. After all, John the Baptist said quite
plainly that he baptized people for repentance. So why would Jesus come to him
for baptism?