2018-01-08
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Mark 1:4-11
Baptism of Jesus
In his article for this month’s Spire, Mark Simone wrote about New Year’s resolutions. He pointed out that most resolutions have to do with diet and exercise. The goal is to improve ourselves, make ourselves healthier. One of Mark’s friends has resolved to try morning devotions, maybe for the first time, or maybe again after a break.
Here we are on the first Sunday of the new year, and it’s easily possible that our best laid plans have already gone by the boards—not enough determination or conviction, maybe, to sustain us for a week, much less a whole year. Or maybe some of us have kept our resolutions for this week, and the promise is that we will continue to keep them.
You may know, as I did not, that New Year’s resolutions have their origins in religious ritual. Ancient “Babylonians made promises to their gods each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts. The Romans began each year by making promises to the god Janus, for whom the month of January is named. In the Medieval era, . . . knights took [a] ‘peacock vow’ at the end of the Christmas season each year to reaffirm their commitment to chivalry.” In all of these traditions, the goal, yearly, was “to reflect upon self-improvement”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_resolution) to make valuable and productive changes.
So it’s timely that we hear this morning about the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry as the gospel of Mark tells the story. Without any special preparation or lead-up, along comes this wild and somewhat intemperate prophet called John, “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). Gobs of people go to him to receive this baptism. And what John tells them is that the real baptism is going to be performed not by him, but by a special person who is yet to come. And what John knows is that whoever performs this baptism, it is all about “repentance.” It’s about adopting a new way of living, a way more in keeping with who and what we were intended to be.
Repentance is like a resolution, only stronger, more all-encompassing. And partly because of its apparently edgy demand, it seems, in some ways, hard or unpleasant to many of us. The word has been used, in many circles, like a sledge hammer, as though we’re supposed to amend every single thing about ourselves. When I hear the word “repent,” I always assume that I’ve done something awful, and that I need to stop doing it immediately: “repent and sin no more” says Jesus to the woman caught in adultery (John 8:11). Sin no more? How likely is that? I’m going to let God down countless times before I go to bed tonight! We all are.
And what many of us have come to believe is that we’re never good enough. We too often see God as the berating parent, wagging a judgmental finger at us as if to say, ‘You are never going to be good enough for me. Stop your foolishness! Repent!’
And if we’re honest, we know there’s a grain of truth in this demand for improvement. We do fail, we do let each other down. Our lives are punctuated with sins that cause pain, or that fail to alleviate it. If we took honest stock of the way we had lived even one day, we’d find that we had not lived up to expectations a good bit of the time. And our expectations for each other, and the expectations God has for us, are that we will stop doing whatever it is that hurts and demeans others or the earth. Stop it. Take the Ten Commandments seriously: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t be mean to your mother and father, don’t betray your marriage vows. Stop it: don’t gossip, don’t talk meanly to each other, don’t cheat people, don’t ignore your children. Stop it. Repent.
And yet we do these things again and again. In response to Jesus’ admonition to “go and sin no more,” Rachel Held Evans, a thoughtful blogger, says, “How’s that working out for you? The ‘go and sin no more’ thing? Because it’s not going so well for me. I’ve known Jesus for as long as I’ve known my name, and still I use other people like capital to advance my own interest, still I gossip to make myself feel important, still I curse my brothers and sisters in one breath and sing praise songs in the next, still I sit in church with arms folded and cynicism coursing through my bloodstream, still I talk a big game about caring for [those who are] poor without doing much to change my own habits, still I indulge in food I’m not hungry for and jewelry I don’t need, still I obsess over what people say about me on the internet, still I forget my own privilege, still I talk more than I listen and complain more than I thank, still I commit acts of evil, still I make a great commenter on Christianity and a lousy practitioner of it” (https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/sin-no-more). As Held Evans says, we do let God and each other down, and sometimes we seem almost totally incapable of changing, of stopping what we’re doing, of repenting.
And yet that’s John the Baptist’s insistence: repent. It’s his religious spin on our New Year’s resolutions: something in us is not right, so we should do better. And we should. It’s just that it’s not always so easy, is it? Sometimes our best intentions just fall completely flat. Sometimes when I’m trying to lose weight, I start eating right, and things are going great, and I think, “This is so easy. And if I can do it, everybody can. Piece of cake.” Mr. Self-Righteous! And then I’ll have a cookie. And then another. And pretty soon I’m up to twelve! And having gotten my fix of sugar that day, the next day I want more! And pretty soon, that “easy” diet is a million miles away and I am constantly craving sweets!
And it’s that way not just with eating and sweets, either. Sometimes I can be snippy with Mary (I know you can hardly believe that!). I can resolve to my heart’s content that I’m never going to be impatient, that I’m never going to ignore her viewpoint, that I’m never going to interrupt her. And the next day, what do I do? I’m impatient, I ignore her, I interrupt her.
“Repent,” says John the Baptist. And he’s exactly right. I do need to repent. But two things get in the way for most of us. One is that some of these changes are damnably hard to accomplish on our own. Alcoholics and addicts of all sorts have known this forever. Which is why doing it on our own is often such a lost cause, and why summoning a “higher power” is so crucial. A lot of these changes are exceedingly difficult to accomplish by sheer will-power. Saying, “God, please help me deal with my addiction or my crabbiness or my self-centered obsessiveness” is a fabulous way of changing what may seem too big for any of us to handle on our own. Asking for the help we need can get us over whatever hump it is that keeps us from making some of the changes we need to make. God, help me. There is a remarkable and mysterious power just waiting to help us in the bumpy parts of our journey.
Not only do we sometimes find it difficult, on our own, to make the changes we need to make, but a number of us also rebel against the notion that we’re awful people who can do no right. Countless people have given up on the church because it makes them feel rotten. They feel as though they never measure up. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times: “The church constantly tells me what a failure I am. It keeps hammering me with my sinfulness. I’m not going to do this ‘church’ thing anymore. I refuse to be forced every week to wallow in what an awful person I am.”
I’m convinced that a joyless church has done more to drive people away than any other single thing. The church is about so much more than what we’ve done wrong and what we need to fix. The really striking thing about the story of John the Baptist’s instruction to repent is its juxtaposition with the episode that comes next. Right after John tells us to turn around, what happens but Jesus comes along and is himself baptized. And what happens in that baptism is a stirring and beautiful thing. “The moment he came out of the water, he saw the sky split open and God’s Spirit, looking like a dove, come down on him. Along with the Spirit, a voice: ‘You are my [Child], chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life’” (1:10-11, The Message). “With you I am well pleased,” says the translation we read earlier. And then there’s my favorite translation of those Greek words: “in you I have taken delight” (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, p. 479).
This is, of course, God’s words to Jesus, not us, and we dare never confuse ourselves with Jesus. It’s Jesus who is the distinctively radiant embodiment of God. The whole story of the gospels is a testimony to what a uniquely wonderful and beautiful manifestation Jesus is of God.
That said, though, what God says to Jesus at a moment like that is said because this grace is simply the way God is. Those heaven-sent, affirming words convey something about Jesus, of course. But at their core, they say something profound about God. When those heavens are torn open and a voice speaks to Jesus, what we hear is a magnificent heart making itself known and being broken open for us. At the core of God’s identity is a lover. This is a God who is pleased with his creation. This is a God who takes enormous pride in her children. This is a God who delights in you and me and everyone on the face of the earth.
So when we wonder whether we’ll be able to amend our behavior and stop some of the hurtful things we do, when we dismiss the church as all about the negative and eager to punish us for our shortcomings, then it’s time to return to the moment of the heavens breaking open, because that’s when the heart of God is revealed: pleasure, pride, delight—in you, in me, in everyone.
And it is conveying this pleasure, this pride, this delight that is the most important thing that we churches can do. This is what is at the root of our worship, our faith formation, our building of community, and our service to the wider world: pleasure, pride, delight.
A writer whose name is unknown to me once wrote this: “Could it be that we should put a sign over the doors of our churches: Danger Inside!? Then the worship [bulletin] might have a heading that says, ‘This is a warning. In this service you may actually encounter the holy God who has awesome power, and an intense interest in a relationship with you. You may be totally changed here. You may have to leave your worries and anxieties here. (Then what will occupy your time?) You may be emboldened to live a courageous, victorious [,justice-seeking] life, fearful of nothing, able for anything.
“You may also find the most loyal of friends here who wear you out with their concern and love, who seem to want to have a steadfast relationship with you to the point where you may say, “Enough already!”
“Finally, in this place you may receive so much joy you simply won’t know what to do with it except to share it with others wherever you go. What a dangerous bore you may become! This is indeed a hazardous place and we have warned you’” (https://www.proclaimsermons.com/illustration.asp).
Yes, we we’re called to turn toward God, to amend our less-than-stellar ways, to find a moral center. But all of that happens in the arms of the One who baptizes us, and offers us a grace-filled sustaining meal, and delights in us. It’s time to be treasured and delighted in. And it’s time to repent, to resolve to share that joy-filled, affirming love, in Christ’s name.