There’s a new show on NPR that I’ve recently gotten into called Invisibilia. The program looks at the intangible things that shape human behavior, things like our ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and emotions. The show is on Sunday nights at 8 pm, but I prefer to listen to it as podcasts while cooking, providing a nice, non-visual distraction to the boring task of chopping vegetables. Which is how I found myself one evening, with this week’s texts floating around in my mind, listening to an episode titled, “How to Become Batman.”
The focus the episode was expectations, how our expectations affect the actions, and even the abilities, of people around us. The program began with the hosts sneaking a lab rat into NPR studios and asking their colleagues this question, do you believe your thoughts could affect the behavior of this lab rat. The answer, universally, was no. No, it’s a rat, obviously it’s going to do whatever it’s going to do, and my opinion of it has nothing to do with those behaviors. But a research psychologist named Bob Rosenthal discovered something surprisingly different.
So here’s what Rosenthal did. One night he snuck into his lab and hung signs on a whole bunch of the rat cages, labeling some rats as incredibly smart rats, and others as incredibly dumb. This was completely random, the rats weren’t smarter or dumber than each other, they were all just rats, just the same lab rats you would get from a place that supplies rats for any sort of scientific testing. Then Rosenthal brought a bunch of other research scientists into this lab filled with randomly labeled rats and said, for the next week, your job is to take these smart and dumb rats and run them through mazes, and record how they do.
The results were not even close. The smart rats did almost twice as well as the dumb rats. Except, remember, the smart rats were not smarter and the dumb rats were not dumber, they were all just rats. What Rosenthal eventually discovered is that the expectations the scientists had for the rats affected the way the scientists handled the rats, and this in turn affected the rats behavior. Thinking they were handling incredibly brilliant rats caused the scientists to behave more warmly toward the rats, to handle them more gently. And the rats, in their own rat way, responded to that better treatment and in fact lived up to the expectations the scientists had for them. While the dumb rats, which, remember, weren’t dumb, dumbed down to the low expectations the scientists had for them.
This has been seen in human subjects as well. A teacher’s expectations can affect a student’s IQ scores; a military trainer’s expectations can literally make a soldier run faster or slower. But there’s a limit to this, of course, the host of the show challenged the psychologist. My belief that if a person jumps off a building they will be able to fly is not going to end well, no matter how firmly I believe it. So what is the line, what is the tipping point where my expectation stops being able to influence behavior. It is a continuum, the psychologist agreed, but there isn’t a line. Or, at least, that line is moving, as we continue to understand how our beliefs affect an outcome or how one person affects another person, that line can move.
It’s a brilliant episode, and I’d definitely recommend catching the end of it. Or stay tuned, because the second half of the show featured a story about a man without eyes who uses echolocation to see that is begging to be a sermon illustration at some point itself. But as I thought about our Gospel reading for today, I kept thinking about the rats.
Our Gospel text for this morning is the call of the first disciples. Things happen very fast in Mark’s Gospel, if you read through the Gospel, you’ll notice Mark uses the word immediately the way most of us would use the word “um.” Jesus saw Simon and Andrew, he said, “Follow me, and I’ll make you fish for people,” and immediately they left their nets and followed. Then Jesus saw James and John and called to them, and immediately they left their boat and followed. It was a crazy, gutsy move on the part of Simon and Andrew, James and John. John the Baptist has just been arrested, within a few chapters he will be beheaded, but even so when Jesus came calling, calling them away from everything they’d ever known, they dropped their nets and followed. And so we hold the disciples up as models of faith, models of commitment, models of devotion. And we ask ourselves, if God called me away from everything I’d ever known, would I follow?
But remember the rats? The rats weren’t smart or dumb, they just responded to the commands they received, and as a result, some did better than others. Similarly, to hold the disciples up as models of faith or commitment I think is to give them too much credit. The disciples didn’t weigh pros or cons or make any giant, bold leaps of faith. It just happened too fast. Jesus said, follow me, so, they followed. Jesus treated them as disciples and so they became disciples. They weren’t always awesome at being disciples, read the rest of the Gospel of Mark, they were really rather bad at it, but that’s to be expected too. The smart rats didn’t start quoting Shakespeare; they were still just rats. The disciples went from being fishermen to followers because Jesus believed in them, because Jesus knew that they would.
And like the moving line psychologists found of how expectations affected abilities, that belief that Jesus had in the disciples was a continuum. The more they followed, the more they experienced this belief that Jesus had in them, the more they were capable of and the more they believed in it too. Taking a lot of time thinking about why the disciples followed Jesus or what we would do in their place is to over think the epiphany. Jesus called, the disciples followed, and things were never the same after that.
There are few things I can say for absolute certainty, but I can say this, you will never find yourself in the first century standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee holding a fishing net. You may travel to the Sea of Galilee, you may even get to hold a fishing net, but the time travel bit, the family history of growing up in a career of subsistence fishermen, a thousand large and small details render wondering how we would respond in the disciples place irrelevant. What matters is that like the disciples, God has expectations for us, expectations that are better, more than we think we are capable of, and those expectations change who we are, change how we interact with the world. God says to us, you are my child, the Beloved, and we are, because God says it is true. God says, follow me, and I will make you fish for people, and we do, because God says we can. Some of these actions are life-shattering, like the disciples dropping their nets and following. Others are smaller, simpler, but no less important or profound, forgiving someone we did not think we could forgive, inviting someone to church we were afraid to ask, praying for someone who needs our prayers, working at the food pantry, writing a letter to a Congressman, or simply getting up and beginning another day knowing that we are beloved in God’s eyes are all profoundly important actions that we do everyday because God believes in us, expects it from us. And as we journey along this continuum of faith, these beliefs that God has in us changes us more and more, so we begin to know more and more the depth of God’s love, and the power of that love to work in our lives and in the world.
“Follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fish for people.” That sentence is not a command, it is not a request; it is simply a statement. An expression of fact by the one who is Truth. And so we follow, and we fish, because God knows we can. Amen.
The episode of Inivisibilia can be found here: http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-become-batman. The whole episode is excellent, but the rat story specifically is in the first six or so minutes.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, January 26, 2015
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Stand Up: A Sermon on 1 Samuel 3:1-10 and John 1:43-51
“The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” That’s how our reading from the Old Testament opened this morning, “the word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” Not the intro you might have been expecting to an Old Testament story, a period of history we tend to associate with the word of the Lord and the presence of visions being a regular and active part of society. After all, the Old Testament is jam-packed with stories of God appearing to people in real and vibrant ways. Sounds more like a description of life today, when while maybe you have experienced a time when God spoke directly to you, it often comes more as a feeling or a sense than, say, an audible voice from within a burning bush demanding that you take your shoes off. But our story from Samuel opens by reminding us that Old Testament stories were the exception, not the rule. For the most part, for thousands of people across the thousands of years that the scriptures span, life in Old Testament times was not unlike life today, when “the word of the Lord was rare” and “visions were not widespread.”
And even for Samuel, the word of the Lord came not as a roaring earthquake or as a burning bush, but as a voice, a voice that sounded strikingly similar to the voice of his teacher, the prophet Eli. So similar that when the voice called to Samuel, he three times went to Eli, thinking he was being summoned, before he and Eli realized that the voice who was calling was God.
Not a surprising mistake, why would Samuel assume that the strange, disembodied voice waking him from sleep was anyone other than Eli. After all, not only was the word of the Lord rare in those days, but Samuel would not be anyone’s first choice of a prophet of the Lord. He was, as the scriptures tell us, only a boy. Maybe later in life, when he’d had more training, more experience, more wisdom to draw from, he might be a prophet, might be one to speak God’s voice to the people. But now he was just a kid, no more than an errand boy sleeping in the temple to make sure all the lights stayed lit.
Before we go any further, it may be worth breaking in here and talking a little bit about what we mean by the word “prophet.” Just in the last couple hundred years, the word prophet has gotten combined with the word “prophesy.” So when we think of a prophet, we tend to think of someone who can predict the future. But a prophet is not a fortune-teller; a prophet is a truth-teller. The role of a prophet was and is to say things as they are, even when those things are hard to say. To be honest about how people have sinned and what the consequence of those sins are. If we read on past this morning’s Old Testament reading, Samuel’s very first “prophesy” if you will, was to tell the truth of the corruption of Eli’s sons, and how that corruption was destroying Eli’s house and would if left unchecked cause its ruin. It was a hard message, and Samuel was afraid to tell his teacher the truth about the evil Eli knew his sons were up to, but Eli was a wise teacher and knew Samuel had been called by God to speak truth, and so encouraged Samuel to speak.
This weekend our nation celebrates the life of one of our great modern-day prophets. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet in every sense of the word, in that he was called to proclaim truth about the evil of racial discrimination and hatred in society, and how that evil was destroying our nation and our world. He, like Samuel, was called to speak hard words to people who did not want to hear them, to shine a light on the evil in our midst and how that evil was drawing us away from the heart of God. Being a prophet, speaking truth, is scary and dangerous, and like Samuel, King was afraid at times of the message God called him to tell.
On a morning when we heard the story of Samuel’s midnight call story, it seems only right to remember that King had a similar midnight conversation. On January 27, 1957, King awoke to the phone ringing and a threatening voice on the other end of the line. Such threats were not uncommon, but for whatever reason, this one shook King. Leaving his wife and baby daughter asleep upstairs, King went down to the kitchen and, as any good Protestant preacher would do, made himself a cup of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table, hands cupped around the steaming mug, and he prayed, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right… But… I must confess… I’m losing my courage.” King later described what happened next as “an inner voice saying, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for truth. Stand up for justice. Stand up for righteousness.”* The threats against King did not cease; in fact the threat that woke King up that night was fulfilled just a few days later when a bomb exploded on the front steps of the house. But what did cease was fear. King himself described that kitchen table moment as a conversion experience in his life, the turning point where he knew the work he was being called to was God’s work.
The stories of prophets like Samuel and King are great stories, inspiring stories of God at work in amazing people. But both can seem almost too big to be believable in our time and place, when “the word of the Lord [is] rare” and “visions [are] not widespread.” Which is why I love that for our readings this morning John’s Gospel gives us another call story; the call of one of Jesus’ first disciples.
“The next day,” the reading opened, “Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip… and Philip found Nathanael.” Already this reading takes on a cadence of some kind of goofy parade. Nathanael got the message of Jesus’ summons second hand, not in a booming voice from heaven, but from his buddy Philip, who was basically like, “hey, you’ll never believe who I just met!” Nathanael, understandably, was doubtful of this news and asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” The question may seem short-sighted now, but remember what Nathanael’s experience of Nazareth would have been. Ten miles from the Sea of Galilee, it wouldn’t have even been a fishing village, just a rough collection of huts. That anything at all, no less anything good, could possibly come from such a nowhere place is a fair question.
Philip’s response to his friend’s query is possibly the best line of evangelism ever, “Come and see.” Philip didn’t try to press his point, argue with Nathanael’s short-sightedness, judge his opinion. He simply invited Nathanael to see for himself the thing, the person, which had so changed Philip’s own life. Come, and see for yourself. And Nathanael came, and he saw, and he was amazed at the One who stood before him, the One who knew him before he could see, the one who was the Son of God.
Epiphany is the season of revelation, the season of God’s presence made known in our midst. And for all three of these men, Samuel, King, and Nathanael, God’s presence was made known to them in ways that changed the course of their lives. But what is also true for all three of these men is none of them went out seeking epiphany, none of them went out seeking to find God. Nathanael questioned his friend, King questioned his courage, Samuel was actually asleep. But in the midst of all of these things, God found them. God revealed Godself to them. And in this revelation, they discovered they were more than they ever thought they could be.
The revelation of Godself changes us. We cannot look on the face of God and not become different, become greater, become more than we thought we were capable of. In this season of Epiphany we experience the revelation of God and we will be changed by this experience. Like Samuel, we may not be looking for it. Like King, we may think we lack courage. Like Nathanael we may actively doubt that anything good can come from this place, can come from us. But this Epiphany God invites us not just to come and see God, but to come and see ourselves. To come and see the things which God is about in our own lives. To come and see how God’s presence is made real through us. So come and see. See Jesus, see God, come and see also yourself. See the good work which God is about in you. Amen.
* Lisa Singh, “Martin Luther King’s defining moment: A kitchen, in Montgomery, Alabama, past midnight,” American Detours 18 Jan 2010
And even for Samuel, the word of the Lord came not as a roaring earthquake or as a burning bush, but as a voice, a voice that sounded strikingly similar to the voice of his teacher, the prophet Eli. So similar that when the voice called to Samuel, he three times went to Eli, thinking he was being summoned, before he and Eli realized that the voice who was calling was God.
Not a surprising mistake, why would Samuel assume that the strange, disembodied voice waking him from sleep was anyone other than Eli. After all, not only was the word of the Lord rare in those days, but Samuel would not be anyone’s first choice of a prophet of the Lord. He was, as the scriptures tell us, only a boy. Maybe later in life, when he’d had more training, more experience, more wisdom to draw from, he might be a prophet, might be one to speak God’s voice to the people. But now he was just a kid, no more than an errand boy sleeping in the temple to make sure all the lights stayed lit.
Before we go any further, it may be worth breaking in here and talking a little bit about what we mean by the word “prophet.” Just in the last couple hundred years, the word prophet has gotten combined with the word “prophesy.” So when we think of a prophet, we tend to think of someone who can predict the future. But a prophet is not a fortune-teller; a prophet is a truth-teller. The role of a prophet was and is to say things as they are, even when those things are hard to say. To be honest about how people have sinned and what the consequence of those sins are. If we read on past this morning’s Old Testament reading, Samuel’s very first “prophesy” if you will, was to tell the truth of the corruption of Eli’s sons, and how that corruption was destroying Eli’s house and would if left unchecked cause its ruin. It was a hard message, and Samuel was afraid to tell his teacher the truth about the evil Eli knew his sons were up to, but Eli was a wise teacher and knew Samuel had been called by God to speak truth, and so encouraged Samuel to speak.
This weekend our nation celebrates the life of one of our great modern-day prophets. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet in every sense of the word, in that he was called to proclaim truth about the evil of racial discrimination and hatred in society, and how that evil was destroying our nation and our world. He, like Samuel, was called to speak hard words to people who did not want to hear them, to shine a light on the evil in our midst and how that evil was drawing us away from the heart of God. Being a prophet, speaking truth, is scary and dangerous, and like Samuel, King was afraid at times of the message God called him to tell.
On a morning when we heard the story of Samuel’s midnight call story, it seems only right to remember that King had a similar midnight conversation. On January 27, 1957, King awoke to the phone ringing and a threatening voice on the other end of the line. Such threats were not uncommon, but for whatever reason, this one shook King. Leaving his wife and baby daughter asleep upstairs, King went down to the kitchen and, as any good Protestant preacher would do, made himself a cup of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table, hands cupped around the steaming mug, and he prayed, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right… But… I must confess… I’m losing my courage.” King later described what happened next as “an inner voice saying, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for truth. Stand up for justice. Stand up for righteousness.”* The threats against King did not cease; in fact the threat that woke King up that night was fulfilled just a few days later when a bomb exploded on the front steps of the house. But what did cease was fear. King himself described that kitchen table moment as a conversion experience in his life, the turning point where he knew the work he was being called to was God’s work.
The stories of prophets like Samuel and King are great stories, inspiring stories of God at work in amazing people. But both can seem almost too big to be believable in our time and place, when “the word of the Lord [is] rare” and “visions [are] not widespread.” Which is why I love that for our readings this morning John’s Gospel gives us another call story; the call of one of Jesus’ first disciples.
“The next day,” the reading opened, “Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip… and Philip found Nathanael.” Already this reading takes on a cadence of some kind of goofy parade. Nathanael got the message of Jesus’ summons second hand, not in a booming voice from heaven, but from his buddy Philip, who was basically like, “hey, you’ll never believe who I just met!” Nathanael, understandably, was doubtful of this news and asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” The question may seem short-sighted now, but remember what Nathanael’s experience of Nazareth would have been. Ten miles from the Sea of Galilee, it wouldn’t have even been a fishing village, just a rough collection of huts. That anything at all, no less anything good, could possibly come from such a nowhere place is a fair question.
Philip’s response to his friend’s query is possibly the best line of evangelism ever, “Come and see.” Philip didn’t try to press his point, argue with Nathanael’s short-sightedness, judge his opinion. He simply invited Nathanael to see for himself the thing, the person, which had so changed Philip’s own life. Come, and see for yourself. And Nathanael came, and he saw, and he was amazed at the One who stood before him, the One who knew him before he could see, the one who was the Son of God.
Epiphany is the season of revelation, the season of God’s presence made known in our midst. And for all three of these men, Samuel, King, and Nathanael, God’s presence was made known to them in ways that changed the course of their lives. But what is also true for all three of these men is none of them went out seeking epiphany, none of them went out seeking to find God. Nathanael questioned his friend, King questioned his courage, Samuel was actually asleep. But in the midst of all of these things, God found them. God revealed Godself to them. And in this revelation, they discovered they were more than they ever thought they could be.
The revelation of Godself changes us. We cannot look on the face of God and not become different, become greater, become more than we thought we were capable of. In this season of Epiphany we experience the revelation of God and we will be changed by this experience. Like Samuel, we may not be looking for it. Like King, we may think we lack courage. Like Nathanael we may actively doubt that anything good can come from this place, can come from us. But this Epiphany God invites us not just to come and see God, but to come and see ourselves. To come and see the things which God is about in our own lives. To come and see how God’s presence is made real through us. So come and see. See Jesus, see God, come and see also yourself. See the good work which God is about in you. Amen.
* Lisa Singh, “Martin Luther King’s defining moment: A kitchen, in Montgomery, Alabama, past midnight,” American Detours 18 Jan 2010
Monday, January 12, 2015
Beloved: A Sermon on Mark 1:4-11
There’s an old Brazilian folk tale that tells about two babies in the womb discussing the great question of all time: Is there life after birth? “There is,” the first baby insists, “there’s a whole world after this, just waiting to be explored.” “I don’t think so,” the second baby countered. “How could there be, everything we need is right here. And anyway,” always the voice of reason, “we couldn’t go far with the umbilical cord.” “After birth we won’t need the umbilical cord,” explained the first. “We’ll be free.” “No umbilical cord!” the second shouted, aghast, “but the umbilical cord is life, it is air, it is nutrients, it is everything we need, how could we live without it!” “The mother will take care of us,” replied the first. “The mother,” scoffed the second, “don’t tell me you believe in that old fairy tale of the mother.” “There is a mother,” insisted the first. “The mother is all around us. The mother protects us, provides for us, cares for us. Now we only feel the mother, but after birth we will be able to see the mother face to face. Others have gone from this womb, and the mother took care of them. So too will the mother take care of us.” Seeing an opportunity, the second countered, “but no one’s ever come back from being born to tell us what it is like. How can you believe in something you cannot see?” “I just know,” said the first, “I can feel it. There is life after birth.” [Pause]
So this morning is Baptism of Our Lord Sunday, the morning when we discuss the new life we receive in Christ through the sacrament of baptism. A topic that may seem as esoteric as two infants arguing about the meaning of life. What is baptism, anyway? As Lutherans, we practice infant baptism which means that some of you probably don’t remember your baptism. I don’t remember mine. I was three months old. My father remembers his, we were baptized together, me because that’s what you do to babies in my family, him because the pastor wanted him on council, and the church constitution at my parents church stipulated that council members be “baptized members of the congregation.” Either way, baptism for both of us marked an entrance into membership in the life of the church. And that’s true. Baptism is this promise that we have been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit. It is a tangible sign of the promise, something we can hold onto, touch, feel, something we can go back to whenever we need assurance of that promise and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, even when we don’t believe it, that we are children of God.
Both as a pastor and as a person of faith, baptism for me is an important part of my spiritual identity, and as I think is important anytime we talk about baptism in the church, I want to make a quick plug here and say that if you have not been baptized and you would like to be, or you are at all curious about the sacrament, please talk to me after the service. Or, during, really, we have water right here. This is God’s gift, I just get the privilege of being the one who gets to get my hands wet in the process.
But I also want to say something else about baptism. Because over millennia of talking about it, I think we, and here by “we” I mean myself and other theologians and church professionals who’s job it is to talk about such things, have put too much emphasis on baptism as this beginning step and we’ve turned baptism, what Martin Luther called “God’s greatest gift to us” into this hoop or this gateway that people have to jump through in order to be part of the family. Like fire insurance or having your wisdom teeth pulled, baptism somehow became this thing that we did so that our church record keeping could be clear. So we could tell who was in and who was out. But our Gospel reading for this morning is about the baptism of Jesus, and what we know about Jesus is that anytime a line was drawn between who was in and who was out, Jesus always managed to find a way to be on the wrong side of that line. If there were sinners, Jesus ate with them, tax collectors, he taught them, lepers, he touched them, he healed them. Throughout scripture, Jesus again and again thwarts the expectations of what it meant to be a “good religious person.” So if baptism becomes a line we draw as to who is in and who is out, Jesus is never going to be on our side of it.
So back for a moment to our two infant philosophers, arguing about the meaning of life after birth. The story is silly and cute to us, right, because we know how it ends. We know their argument is completely irrelevant. Because regardless of what the infants believe about life after birth, it exists. And, whether they believe in it or not, the twins will be born. Born in a rush of water and blood, born into a bright new world, the depth and the colors and the complexity of which they cannot even imagine. And the Mother, during our story only an abstract idea, the Mother loves them now, even though they do not know Her. Even though they are as yet only abstractions, the Mother loves them with an unbounded love, such that they cannot even understand.
That’s baptism. Baptism is God loving us before, during, after, at every moment, in every aspect of our lives. Like a stone dropping into a pond, sending ripples through time and space, God’s love is not contained or constrained by our ability to say yes to it, but it moves beyond limitations pulling us deeper into God’s cosmic embrace.
Our Gospel reading for this morning is from the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel. We heard part of this reading already, in the second week of Advent. So you may remember, or have noticed, that the bulk of this reading is not about Jesus at all, but is about John. How John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism for the repentance of sins. How he wore a cloak of camel’s hair tied with a leather belt, how he ate locusts and wild honey, how the crowds flocked to him in the Jordan River to confess and be baptized. And then, almost as an afterthought, in verse nine, Jesus came from Nazareth and was baptized. This is Jesus’ first appearance in the Gospel of Mark. There is no birth narrative in Mark’s Gospel, no long genealogy connecting him to David and Abraham and Adam. No angels announcing his conception, no star heralding his arrival, no shepherds, no wise men, just Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee, coming to the Jordan. This is also before everything. Before Jesus called his disciples, before he offered any teachings, before he healed any lepers, loved any broken, forgave any sinners. This Jesus who came on the scene in verse nine to be baptized by John in the Jordan is just another face in the crowd, an unknown and unimportant stranger from the small village of Nazareth in faraway Galilee.
But as Jesus emerged from the waters, the heavens themselves were torn open and a voice from heaven proclaimed, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” That promise of belovedness echoed back and forth through history. We who stand on this side of history can see that Christ’s belovedness did not start or end at the Jordan. But this promise of Christ’s belovedness echoed through the Word made flesh, the one who was with God at the birth of creation, the one who taught and healed and loved and lived, the one who came to die, who was crucified on a cross and was buried, the one who rose again, and who still comes to us today, meeting is in water and word, in bread and wine. All of that, the entire history of creation is bound up in that promise in a moment at the river, when the heavens opened and God declared, “you are my Son, the Beloved.”
This is baptism, it is a promise that we are children of God. It is a promise totally dependent on God who meets us where we are and who we are and says to us, “you are my Child, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” Like the Mother’s love for the philosophizing fetuses, it is true wherever we are on our journey of faith whether we believe it or not, whether we know it or not, whether we have been to the water or not. Like ripples in a pond, the love of God flows back and forth through time and space reaching us wherever we find ourselves. So come to the water and know that this promise is for you. You are God’s child, the Beloved. And in you God is well pleased. Amen.
So this morning is Baptism of Our Lord Sunday, the morning when we discuss the new life we receive in Christ through the sacrament of baptism. A topic that may seem as esoteric as two infants arguing about the meaning of life. What is baptism, anyway? As Lutherans, we practice infant baptism which means that some of you probably don’t remember your baptism. I don’t remember mine. I was three months old. My father remembers his, we were baptized together, me because that’s what you do to babies in my family, him because the pastor wanted him on council, and the church constitution at my parents church stipulated that council members be “baptized members of the congregation.” Either way, baptism for both of us marked an entrance into membership in the life of the church. And that’s true. Baptism is this promise that we have been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit. It is a tangible sign of the promise, something we can hold onto, touch, feel, something we can go back to whenever we need assurance of that promise and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, even when we don’t believe it, that we are children of God.
Both as a pastor and as a person of faith, baptism for me is an important part of my spiritual identity, and as I think is important anytime we talk about baptism in the church, I want to make a quick plug here and say that if you have not been baptized and you would like to be, or you are at all curious about the sacrament, please talk to me after the service. Or, during, really, we have water right here. This is God’s gift, I just get the privilege of being the one who gets to get my hands wet in the process.
But I also want to say something else about baptism. Because over millennia of talking about it, I think we, and here by “we” I mean myself and other theologians and church professionals who’s job it is to talk about such things, have put too much emphasis on baptism as this beginning step and we’ve turned baptism, what Martin Luther called “God’s greatest gift to us” into this hoop or this gateway that people have to jump through in order to be part of the family. Like fire insurance or having your wisdom teeth pulled, baptism somehow became this thing that we did so that our church record keeping could be clear. So we could tell who was in and who was out. But our Gospel reading for this morning is about the baptism of Jesus, and what we know about Jesus is that anytime a line was drawn between who was in and who was out, Jesus always managed to find a way to be on the wrong side of that line. If there were sinners, Jesus ate with them, tax collectors, he taught them, lepers, he touched them, he healed them. Throughout scripture, Jesus again and again thwarts the expectations of what it meant to be a “good religious person.” So if baptism becomes a line we draw as to who is in and who is out, Jesus is never going to be on our side of it.
So back for a moment to our two infant philosophers, arguing about the meaning of life after birth. The story is silly and cute to us, right, because we know how it ends. We know their argument is completely irrelevant. Because regardless of what the infants believe about life after birth, it exists. And, whether they believe in it or not, the twins will be born. Born in a rush of water and blood, born into a bright new world, the depth and the colors and the complexity of which they cannot even imagine. And the Mother, during our story only an abstract idea, the Mother loves them now, even though they do not know Her. Even though they are as yet only abstractions, the Mother loves them with an unbounded love, such that they cannot even understand.
That’s baptism. Baptism is God loving us before, during, after, at every moment, in every aspect of our lives. Like a stone dropping into a pond, sending ripples through time and space, God’s love is not contained or constrained by our ability to say yes to it, but it moves beyond limitations pulling us deeper into God’s cosmic embrace.
Our Gospel reading for this morning is from the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel. We heard part of this reading already, in the second week of Advent. So you may remember, or have noticed, that the bulk of this reading is not about Jesus at all, but is about John. How John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism for the repentance of sins. How he wore a cloak of camel’s hair tied with a leather belt, how he ate locusts and wild honey, how the crowds flocked to him in the Jordan River to confess and be baptized. And then, almost as an afterthought, in verse nine, Jesus came from Nazareth and was baptized. This is Jesus’ first appearance in the Gospel of Mark. There is no birth narrative in Mark’s Gospel, no long genealogy connecting him to David and Abraham and Adam. No angels announcing his conception, no star heralding his arrival, no shepherds, no wise men, just Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee, coming to the Jordan. This is also before everything. Before Jesus called his disciples, before he offered any teachings, before he healed any lepers, loved any broken, forgave any sinners. This Jesus who came on the scene in verse nine to be baptized by John in the Jordan is just another face in the crowd, an unknown and unimportant stranger from the small village of Nazareth in faraway Galilee.
But as Jesus emerged from the waters, the heavens themselves were torn open and a voice from heaven proclaimed, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” That promise of belovedness echoed back and forth through history. We who stand on this side of history can see that Christ’s belovedness did not start or end at the Jordan. But this promise of Christ’s belovedness echoed through the Word made flesh, the one who was with God at the birth of creation, the one who taught and healed and loved and lived, the one who came to die, who was crucified on a cross and was buried, the one who rose again, and who still comes to us today, meeting is in water and word, in bread and wine. All of that, the entire history of creation is bound up in that promise in a moment at the river, when the heavens opened and God declared, “you are my Son, the Beloved.”
This is baptism, it is a promise that we are children of God. It is a promise totally dependent on God who meets us where we are and who we are and says to us, “you are my Child, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” Like the Mother’s love for the philosophizing fetuses, it is true wherever we are on our journey of faith whether we believe it or not, whether we know it or not, whether we have been to the water or not. Like ripples in a pond, the love of God flows back and forth through time and space reaching us wherever we find ourselves. So come to the water and know that this promise is for you. You are God’s child, the Beloved. And in you God is well pleased. Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)