Well, it’s a new year, and with the new year comes one of my least favorite chores, filling out the paperwork for my health insurance. Clergy health costs are notoriously high, and one of the ways the ELCA’s insurance company is trying to keep our health costs down is to encourage healthy living. It does this by having us all take a health assessment every year and then giving us a series of tasks to accomplish to help improve our health. In theory, this should be a super easy thing to do. The health assessment only takes about15 minutes to do, and the extra project this year is literally “do any healthy thing, anything at all, and tell us about it.” It is really not a big deal. And, in return, in addition to the benefit of doing something healthy, I get $400 in my health savings account, and the synod gets a 2% refund, so it really is all win.
Or, it should be, but for whatever reason it honestly never feels like a win. First off, the health assessment, even though it talks all about how it is not a judgment of our health, and is not reported to anyone but us, and is just about setting a baseline, feels like it’s judging me. And I don’t like that feeling. As far as clergy go, I think I’m pretty healthy. I exercise, I eat right, I get plenty of sleep, I always feel like fireworks should go off when I click submit, and a hand should come out of my computer screen to give me a big pat on the back and a certificate that says, thank you for being so healthy. But that is not what happens. No congratulations, no great job, no nothing. Just a list of three things I could do to improve my health. You know what number one was last year? Eat more vegetables. Eat more vegetables, health assessment, I’m a vegetarian! What do you think I eat?!
My problem with the health assessment is it feels less like helpful suggestions, and more like another thing I have to do. It feels like I’m working really hard at being healthy, and the health assessment is just trying to find ways to show that I’m not working hard enough, that I should be doing more. Do you have things like that in your life? Where you feel like you’re doing the very best you can, and someone keeps coming along and being like, hey, that’s great, but really if you did this, it would be better? I think that’s more or less true for all of us. Maybe yours is not literally your insurance company, but just the pressure of society, hey, if you exercised, or ate right, or you saved more money, or had a bigger car, or gave more time to charity or worried less or whatever, things would be better for you. The list of shoulds is endless. The things we should be doing.
And it’s the season for “shoulds” right now, it’s new year. The time for making resolutions. This is the year I’m going to exercise more, or this is the year I’m going to eat right, or, we are in church, maybe this is the year I’m going to pray more, or study scripture, or work on my relationship with God. Which, let’s get one thing out first; as your pastor, I certainly encourage you to pray, study scripture, and have a good relationship with God. But I do want to caution you about taking on “improve my faith life” as a new year’s resolution. Because, like the health assessment turns my enjoyment of exercise and healthy eating into a drudging chore; when we take on spirituality as a resolution, we run the risk of having our faith become a checklist. And Jesus wants faithful disciples; I don’t think he wants checklist disciples.
Let’s take a look at our Gospel reading for this morning. Last week we heard Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist in the Jordan. In John’s Gospel, and before we get too far into this, let’s just acknowledge that John the Baptist and John the writer of John’s Gospel are two separate people. It would be easier if they had different names, but they don’t, so I’m going to try my best to identify who is who. So anyway, in John’s Gospel, instead of a description of Jesus’ baptism, we hear John the Baptist’s reflections on the baptism. There is no Jesus coming to John in the Jordan for baptism, we don’t even know from John’s Gospel if John the Baptist was the one who did the physical baptizing. This is because for John, both John’s actually, John the Baptist and John the writer of the Gospel, who did the physical baptizing is unimportant. The action of Jesus being baptized was an action of God and the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist, even if he was physically standing in the river, with his hands on Jesus, dunking him in the water and speaking words over him, had nothing to do with it, he was merely the vessel God to perform God’s own action.
Which, I have to tell you as a pastor; just the act of writing that sentence was a bit of an epiphany for me. Because, when I do baptisms, let me tell you what, I have a checklist. Tell Rosemary to make sure the baptism makes it in the bulletin. Print the liturgy, checking to make sure I changed the name every time, so I don’t accidently baptize this person using the name of the last person I baptized. Check with Wayne and Rose to make sure the font is full, the candles are lit, there is a certificate and a candle and a towel. Make sure the sponsors know what they’re doing. Check with the lay assistant to make sure they know their part. And on and on. I’ve got it down to a pretty good system now, it doesn’t take all that much time, but there are a lot of little details that I run through in order to make sure the baptism goes smoothly. But as I was writing about the baptism of Jesus, it occurred to me that none of the things I do matter. Yes, it’s nice to have a certificate, and a candle, and liturgy so you all can follow along, and all the things we do at baptisms at Trinity. But truly, none of those things are necessary. If I forgot all of those things, every last one of them, we could still have a baptism. There’s always a little bit of water in the font, even if it gets a bit funky after a while, or we could fill up the font from the back, or someone would have a water bottle, we could make do. Because baptism isn’t about what we do, it isn’t about me saying words, or you singing “You Belong to Christ,” or lighting a candle, baptism is about what God does. The things we do are nice, they help set the scene, they are visual representations of God’s action, but the action is God’s. And here’s the much alluded to sandwich metaphor: If someone makes you a sandwich, you don’t thank the cutting board for being such a great surface for getting the onions chopped, and the lettuce rinsed, and the cheese sliced. No, you thank the person who actually made you the sandwich. Friends, the checklist, all the stuff we do, that’s just the cutting board. God made the sandwich.
So the next day, after John the Baptist gave this whole story about how he knew who Jesus was because the one who sent him (A.K.A. God) told him it was Jesus, John the Baptist was standing with two of his disciples, and Jesus walked by. And John said, “Look, here is the Lamb of God,” and two of John’s own disciples left John and followed after Jesus. And John was totally OK with that, because that was the whole purpose of John’s whole ministry, to point people to Jesus. If the disciples had said, “oh, that’s interesting,” and kept following John, John would have failed in his purpose.
So these two disciples follow after Jesus, and when Jesus turned and saw them following, he asked, “What are you looking for?” To which they responded, “Where are you staying?” Now, here seems like it would be a good time for Jesus to tell them a little bit about himself right? Maybe give them a little background about who he is, how important he is. Or maybe tell them what his expectations for discipleship will be, what he’ll want from them, what it will mean to be a follower. But he doesn’t do that. What he does instead is respond to their question of “Where are you staying,” with the simple statement, “come and see.” Come and see. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ ministry is a ministry of presence. The first step to being a follower of Jesus is seeing Jesus, then being with Jesus, and then slowly one moves into knowing Jesus. There isn’t some test of faith, some proof of commitment, or show of understanding. Seeing, being in the presence of leads to believing.
The disciples went, and then one of them, Andrew, went back and told his brother, “We have found the Messiah.” Andrew testified to his brother about who Jesus was, he moved from seeing to believing. So Simon heard Andrew’s testimony and he went to Jesus, and Jesus said to Simon, not to Andrew who’d testified, but to Simon who was just seeing for the first time, “You are to be called Cephas,” which is translated Peter, meaning Rock. And naming, remember, hugely important in ancient times in claiming the identity of someone. Jesus claimed Simon, named him Peter, claimed his identity as the rock of the church, all on the power of Simon showing up. You’d think Andrew would get to be the rock, after all, he was the one who did the testifying, but no, Simon is the one who gets renamed. I mean, we can assume something great happened to Andrew too, after all, the experience was memorable enough to get him to go back to his brother and recount this experience, but the writer of John’s Gospel didn’t think Andrew’s experience was important enough to pass along. The focus of the writer of John’s Gospel is this ongoing experience of someone seeing Jesus, being in the presence of Jesus, and Jesus doing the rest.
So, dear people of God, let me urge you, and in fact, give you pastoral permission to let go of your life of faith checklists. Yes, you should pray, and read scripture, and care for the poor, and do all those things, those are great things. But, if you do them out of a sense of obligation, then they’re not about faith, they’re about crossing off chores. So just relax. See Jesus, and let Jesus figure out your action. If your prayer life isn’t working, give it a break for a while, try something different. If you’re frustrated with God, be frustrated, God’s a big God, God can certainly handle it. If things are great, and you’re cooking along in your life of faith, delight in that. If you feel God calling you to do more, to take on a new thing but you’re worried you might not know how, be bold, take the leap and give it a try. Don’t get too caught up in how to be better, just lean into God who just wants you to come and see and be in the presence of the Almighty, and let that change you. What we can take from this passage is that God is all about relationships. God wants to be in relationship with us, and that relationship will change us, and change us in ways we cannot expect or imagine. Make your resolution for your life of faith this year to just be in relationship with God, and see where it goes. God is making the sandwich. It may not be the sandwich you were expecting, but trust me, God is an excellent cook. So leave the end result to God; just be the cutting board. Amen.
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