January 13, 2008
The First Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A)
The Baptism of Our Lord
Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17
In Isaiah the reading says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.”
And for the gospel we have the story of the baptism of Jesus, when, it is believed by Christians, the prophet Isaiah’s words came to fulfillment: the dove descended and God’s voice rang from the heavens, “This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
We don’t often have the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian scriptures in so harmonious a juxtaposition: the Hebrew scripture foretelling; the gospel living it out. It is in some ways a preacher’s dream. It all fits together in such a tidy piece. I could stand here and reaffirm my absolute trust that Jesus is God’s beloved, and we would all leave this place with a warm fuzzy feeling that indeed we had heard the truth of the gospel and the truth of Jesus and be satisfied.
But you know, reading this tidy piece this week left me wondering, left me a bit ajar. And it is that discomfort I want to share with you this morning. It is that discomfort, the questions this tidy little package raises that for me contains the real truth of the gospel, the real challenge, at least for me, of what this gospel message can be.
My first thought, as it always is when I hear of Jesus and John’s exchange about Jesus coming to John to be baptized, is, “Why did Jesus need to be baptized?” Why? And the only answer that makes sense to me, although I can’t seem to find it in any commentaries, is because Jesus was part of the human race. And we, all of us humans, no matter how pious, righteous, holy, and just plain good we are, bear being human within ourselves in spite of ourselves. I have no illusions that I am anything less or more than human; and I know that I bear sin because of that humanity. I know that I bear the sin of classism; I was born into it through no fault or choice of my own. I carry it without much thought. I am middle class, by some standards, upper middle class, educated, very educated. I am traveled. (Not as much as I would like to be, of course, but by the standards of almost anyone, I am well traveled.) I eat as many meals as I want a day (and I want far more than I need). I am a product of white privilege. It is a sin I bear daily, without much thinking about it until I think of a truly sinless human, Jesus. Then I realize he was a male in a patriarchal society, a first born male at that, a teacher and perhaps a carpenter like his father. He was of the House of David – he had royal lineage, and he bore that sin, not because of what he had done, left undone, or chose.
The power of the baptism of Jesus is that Jesus was human, and in that act of choosing to be cleansed from his sin by his cousin John, he accepted that sin of the world, the sin of the community, the sin of the culture, as his own because he was human too. The power of the baptism of Jesus is not that he was doing anything symbolically, but that he was doing something powerfully humble in admitting that, in spite of himself, he was privileged by the mere fact of his birth, that he had what others did not, not because he was the chosen or the beloved, but because he was the first born son in a first century Jewish family where being the first born son was a rank above the other humans.
This passage makes me uncomfortable because it reminds me that communal sin, the sin we all bear by our own privilege and lives and even our nationality which gives us enormous privilege, that communal sin is mine even when I am not doing one other thing that separates me from God or community. Jesus somehow knew that before it was “PC” [politically correct] to do so.
What makes me almost unbearably uncomfortable is that sin is not always, indeed, is rarely, an individual thing. One can atone for one’s own individual indiscretions, but unless one is willing to atone for, to work for, powerful communal changes, to be one who is about transforming society, then our sin is always before us, even as Jesus’ was before him – and he was able to see and acknowledge it. Truly as Christians we are not just to convert people to Christ and build communities of like minded religious people, but we are to convert the world to sinlessness, by fighting prejudice, ingrown privilege, poverty, all the “isms,” such as racism and classism and sexism. We are to transform cultural and societal mores and ways until the world knows Christ because we humans who love Jesus have transformed the world with our love.
I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty scary, overwhelming. And starkly true to Jesus as I have come to know him. Starkly true of the man who insisted on his own cleansing from sin though unlike the rest of us he had never told a lie, nor broken any of the other nine commandments. It’s a high standard; a bar set so high that, of course, none of us can jump it – because we are human.
This brings me to the second thought about these two tidy passages that we read on the first Sunday after the Epiphany each year. Suppose a dove were to come into this room, into this sanctuary, at this moment, right now, and fly toward the heavens, and we all heard the words of God in unmistakable clarity, “You are my child, my beloved. I put my spirit on you. You are the one in whom my spirit delights.”
Look around. Of whom would God be speaking?
It is my deepest belief that God would be speaking of you, of each one of you, and of all of you, and the children downstairs and the people in the kitchen making coffee and everyone absent today. God chooses us. God loves us. God rests the Holy Spirit on our heads and sends doves like halos over each one of us, not because we are God or equal to Jesus, but because we are human, because we are beloved, because we are a piece of God, beloved creation of God, that God unabashedly adores and even more unabashedly trusts with the work of God’s heart. We are the ones God trusts to bring forth justice to the nations. We are the bruised reed, each of us bruised sometimes by each other. We are the bruised reed which God will not allow to be broken
As Jesus shares our corporate human sin, we share being the beloved of God with Jesus.
I invite you to go from this place today basking in the truth of being God’s beloved, and in the truth of being one who is a part of the sin we all carry with us corporately, even as Jesus carried it with him. Hold these two truths in tension. And then, as only the beloved of God can, turn to do God’s justice. Bend, but know you will not break, O beloved of God, making the sin of the world a thing of the past that we might together be heralds of the kingdom of God as Jesus our brother charged us to be so long ago.
Beloved, God has chosen you, and you and you, all of us. God’s soul delights in you. Bring forth justice in God’s name. Delight in being the ones with whom God is pleased.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd