TEXT: Matthew
3:13-17
Embracing God, we come searching, perhaps wrestling with our inner voices, listening to gain some clarity, some affirmation of who we are, where our efforts might best be pointed, and the extent to which we and our efforts finally matter. You come, arms outstretched, drawing us to yourself in blessing, claiming us and defining us as your beloved children with whom you are very pleased. And we are grateful – grateful for the countless ways you touch us with blessing.
But we don’t delude ourselves. Your blessing embrace of us – the pleasure you take in us – does not mean we always get it right. Our choices are, as often as not, driven by selfishness rather than the imitation of Christ. Our interest, as often as not, is pleasure rather than your purpose for all creation. We know how to grab and bite back; we know how to hoard and how to bully, and how to deceive and how to ignore. No, your embrace of us is not because we are perfect – but because you are, gracious God. And we praise you. And recognizing that even in our biggest and best moments we have need of your presence, need of your power, we pray for your touch just now.
We pray for ourselves. We pray for this world, wounded in so many ways, and yet so capable of healing and being healed. May we find in your embrace the courage and grace to stretch our arms, as well, in blessing. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.
I’ve just returned from
But
Like Galilee was for Jesus. You might remember that it was a home reached
as a child by great effort. According to
Matthew, the Holy Family fled Bethlehem, in Judea, after learning that King
Herod wanted to kill the child. First,
they hid in Egypt, and then in Israel.
But after learning that it, too, had connections with danger, they
finally settled in Galilee, in the town of Nazareth.
Galilee, then, had been safety for
Joseph’s family – the cradling arms of security and nurture. It was the habitable home where the child
could thrive and grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and
humankind. Galilee was the geographic
and relational house in which Jesus was reared.
It was the bosom into which Jesus and his family had nestled when the
winds of threat and fear had blown.
So why did he leave it? According to Matthew, “Jesus came from
Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him.” Now, to be sure, it wasn’t that great a
distance as a mapmaker might count the miles.
But in every other way, the journey was bold and spanned distances only
calculated by the soul. Why did Jesus
leave his Galilee? What had drawn him
out of the protective confines of that cocoon that had kept him safe? According to Jesus’ own report, it had
something to do with “righteousness.”
Notice that Jesus didn’t simply
leave. He went someplace specific, to
someone specific – as if answering a call.
John was there we learn from the story, and as we recognized again
during our Advent reflections, Matthew telegraphs, in every way imaginable
(through his description of John’s clothing, his diet, his call to repentance),
that John the Baptist is a prophet – one in the vocational lineage of
Elijah.
What we also know is that it is a
prophet’s job to point people in a new direction – that is what repentance means, after all – and more
specifically in the direction of God’s desire.
Baptism, for John, is a sign of that new direction. It is “passing through the waters” as in
Israel’s passage through the waters out of the Egypt and through the Jordan
into the Promised Land. It is “passing
through the waters” as in birth. It is,
to repeat, the ritualized, external sign of one’s turn and emergence in God’s
direction.
In that sense, John’s baptism is a
human act. It represents one’s decision
to accept God’s new direction for one’s life.
In John’s baptism, we submit ourselves to God’s intention for us. John goes on to say, however, that one is
coming after him – one who is greater than him – who will baptize not merely
with water, but with the Holy Spirit and Fire.
This suggests a more dramatic change.
That one will not simply be external, and reflecting human choice, but
total and complete and transformational; from the inside out. One is coming, John announces, who, to borrow
Chrysler’s familiar slogan, “changes everything.”
Which is to signal, through person
and place, that Jesus’ movement is neither casual nor incidental. Having heard the call of God and wading, now,
into the Jordan River through which Israel had crossed before into Promised
Land, Jesus, with heaven watching, crosses over into the new life, the new
role, the new ministry that God intends for him.
There is something powerful about
the beginning of a new year. With simply
the turn of a calendar page, all that transpired in the days and months
preceding pass into that sacred and comfortable realm of memory, where
nostalgia transforms even the speculative and experimental into pattern and
tradition. New years are the birth
canals through which phrases like, “the way we’ve always done it” pass into our
vocabulary and psyche. Somehow – and it
seems almost mystically, magically – all that we experienced and attempted in
the year just ended takes up residence in the comfortable environs of our
personal and collective Galilees where it is familiar, where it is reassuring,
where it is – whatever else it may be – “known,” making it hard to step out of
and away from, and leave.
But in the clearer recesses of our
minds we know that we are not always living in the places God needs us to
be. Sometimes, as it apparently was in
an immediate sense for Jesus, turning in God’s new direction may literally mean
moving to a new location. But “crossing
the Jordan” doesn’t always involve a moving van or good shoes. Sometimes it means stepping…
·
into a new role
·
or a new insight
·
or a new task
·
or a new position of influence and perspective.
Sometimes
it means not going someplace new, but
becoming someone new – rising to a
new demand; even accepting a mission somehow new.
At least part of the faithfulness
incumbent upon this new year is being attentive to those “John the Baptists” in
our lives – those strange, surprising, and challenging characters who speak to
us God’s beckoning word in ways that beckon us into beyond where we’ve been
accustomed to go. At least part of the
discipleship inherent in this year is the sacrifice of certain Galilees that
have felt as comfortable and familiar as an old home town to venture out into
the wilderness – no doubt at some personal cost – to take steps uncharted into
new lands God is preparing.
As this New Year opens, we don’t
yet know what choices and changes and new challenges God may be setting before
us – in order to “fulfill all righteousness.”
But if we listen carefully, we will likely hear the gurgling of some
River Jordan that separates the given from the promised. And if we respond faithfully, leaning forward
in the confidence that heaven is watching; in the confidence that when, with
faith, we take the risk and cross such tides into God’s fresh purpose, we, too,
will feel a flutter of Spirit wings, and hear the blessing words of affirmation
and affection: “this is my child, my
Beloved, on whom my favor rests.” And it
will make all the difference.
For there, in the light of God’s
own smiling, we will have the shining confidence to say, as in the poetry of
former U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold:
“—Night is
drawing nigh—“
For all
that has been – Thanks!
To all that
shall be – Yes! [1]
[1] Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, translated from the Swedish by Leif Sjoberg and W.H. Auden, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 89.