Sermon - Ketchup on Black-Eyed Peas

Mark 1:4-11

Ketchup on Black-Eyed Peas

James Sledge                                       January 8, 2012 – Baptism of the Lord

I grew up putting ketchup on my black-eyed peas.  In my home as a child, if we were having black-eyed peas, a bottle of ketchup went on the table.  I naturally assumed that most other people did the same.  Ketchup on black-eyed peas was just like ketchup on French fries.  If you could have gotten black-eyed peas at McDonalds, they would have asked, “Do you want ketchup with that?”

But when I got married, I discovered that this wasn’t the case.  My wife Shawn considered the practice downright odd.  She sometimes makes fun of me for it.  I’ve occasionally tried to explain to her what she’s missing, but to no avail.  In fact, I’ve even grow a bit self-conscious about it.  I still use ketchup in my own home, but I’m less likely to do so at a restaurant or a church dinner.

Sometimes our Christian faith is a bit like putting ketchup on black-eyed peas.   Not so many decades ago it was possible to be unaware of this.  We thought most everyone was Christian, that the culture was Christian, that everyone put ketchup on their black-eyed peas.  But such an assumption is becoming more and more difficult to maintain.  Some of us have even started to realize that there are some strange, odd elements to our Christian story that we had not noticed before. 

Today’s story of Jesus being baptized may be one of those oddities, although the oddity here is not just the story itself but also what is missing from the story.

Have you ever wondered what Jesus did before he began his ministry?  We don’t know for sure how old Jesus was at the time of today’s gospel reading.  You hear 30 years old a lot, but that comes from a stray remark by some of Jesus’ opponents, so I don’t know how much stock we should put in it.  Nonetheless, when Jesus begins his ministry, he’s old enough that nothing is ever mentioned about him seeming too young to be a rabbi.  So perhaps 30 years old is not a bad guess.

And therein lies the oddity.  Where has Jesus been for nearly 30 years?  What has he been doing all that time?  How is it that the Son of God can go completely unnoticed for that long? 

In all of the New Testament, there is almost nothing about Jesus except as an adult thirty something.  None of the letters of Paul or others show any awareness of Jesus’ youth or the circumstances of his birth.  Of the four gospels, two, including Mark’s gospel that we read this morning, introduce us to a full grown Jesus with no mention of birth or childhood.  Only Matthew and Luke make any mention of his birth, and Luke alone includes a single story about a 12 year old Jesus.  In that story people are amazed at Jesus’ understanding, but even here, Luke insists that Jesus is still growing in wisdom.  He is no all-knowing, divine figure masquerading as a human.

One thing all the gospels agree on is that the beginning of Jesus’ ministry is somehow connected to John the Baptist.  Jesus, who has lived such an ordinary life that no one has taken any note of him, that not even friends and neighbors from his hometown expect him to be anything special; this Jesus shows up where John is baptizing.  John is a rather odd fellow who dresses funny and eats strange food.  But he seems to have touched a nerve among many people near Jerusalem.  John was talking about changing your life to be ready for something big God was going to do, and people responded to his message.

So, it seems, did Jesus.  For some reason, Jesus goes out with all those other people who were hoping for God to do something big.  Maybe Jesus was hoping the same thing.  Of course it turns out that Jesus is that big thing.

People have speculated as to Jesus’ own sense of who he was prior to his baptism.  Many of us are so accustomed to thinking in Trinitarian terms, where Jesus is God, that the idea of Jesus not being fully aware of this divinity seems strange.  But especially in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ baptism seems to be a key moment for him.  Notice how the coming of the Holy Spirit is a private moment for Jesus rather than a demonstration for the crowds.  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  These words seem spoken for Jesus’ benefit.  Did the Holy Spirit descending on him awaken something in him?  Did it open his eyes to who he truly was and what that was going to require of him?

When we were discussing this passage the other day in our staff meeting, Jeremy, our music director, recalled an episode from Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz.  In it, a woman named Laura is having something of a spiritual crisis.  She is not a Christian and doesn’t really believe in God, yet she is speaking with Miller, looking for some sort of help from him.  And he encourages her to open up to God, to ask God for grace and forgiveness. But Laura finds such an idea odd, and she says:

“I can’t get there.  I can’t just say it without meaning it.”  She was getting very frustrated. “I can’t do it.  It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes.  You don’t decide those things, they just happen to you.  If God is real, He needs to happen to me.”[1]

John the baptizer announces that there is one coming after him who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.  I baptize with water so you will get ready, he says.  But the one who is coming will make God happen to you.

Has God happened to you?  We Presbyterians say that if you’ve been baptized, God has happened to you.  We don’t say God can’t happen to you if you haven’t been baptized, but we do insist that God happens to you in baptism.  Yet many of us seem blissfully unaware of any such happening.  We’ve missed it somehow, settling instead for a comfortable God of habits and assumptions, an unexamined picture of God we picked up somewhere, like me thinking everyone puts ketchup on black-eyed peas.

When Jesus is baptized, God happens to him, and he takes up his true identity as Son of God, going from anonymous unknown to someone causing so much trouble they have to execute him to shut him up. 

In our baptisms, God promises to happen to us as well, to pour out the Holy Spirit on us so that we discover our true identities and our calling as daughters and sons of God.  Has God happened to you?

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[1] Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003), p. 53.