posts — Page 24 — Andy James

Loving God Through the Law

February 16, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 119:1-8, 169-179; Deuteronomy 30:15-20
preached on February 16, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I have always been something of a rule follower. While I may not always keep to the exact speed limit while driving, I am a stickler for proper attention to most other traffic laws, chief among them a four-way stop. It’s not that hard, people. First, come to a complete stop! Then, if someone else is there at the same time, the car that got there first goes first, and if two cars arrive at the same time, it’s the person on the right!

In other matters, I try my best to obey copyright law and other such things, often to a fault. Back in the days when my friends were all freely swapping music online, I was that guy who was building up a CD collection that now sits mostly idle amidst all the online music available for free! And I have embarrassed more than one friend by refusing to show my ID when paying with a credit card because it is against the rules of the credit card companies to require. I’m not proud of the scene that inevitably results, but I haven’t lost any friends over it—yet. All of this surely comes as no surprise to those of you who have known me even for a little while—it’s just part of who I am that I like to follow the rules!

It’s no surprise, then, that I spend half of each week working for the Presbytery of New York City as our Stated Clerk, a position that blends the important work of record-keeping with the interpretation of our extensive Presbyterian rules. Now it is not just my personality but my job to follow the rules! In the four months I’ve been in this position, people have learned that my rule-following nature means that I like to do things by the book. Sometimes this means that I have to tell someone that something can’t be done, but more often it means that I end up offering a plan to work within our rules to make something happen. It might take a little longer than they had expected or require a different kind of approach than they initially thought was necessary, but in the end the rule-follower in me fits in very well with our Presbyterian way of doing things “decently and in order.”

Our two texts today from the Psalms and Deuteronomy ought to fit very well with mindsets of rule-followers like me, as they both deal with the joys of God’s law. First we heard the beginning and end of Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the entire Bible. This psalm is an acrostic poem praising God for the gift of the law, and each successive section offers a new word of thanksgiving built on the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In these two segments that we read heard this morning, the psalmist proclaims the happiness and the possibility of God’s intervention that come from following God’s law. This happiness comes from not being put to shame, from diligent attention to the precepts of the law, from seeking God, the source of the law, with the whole heart. All this brings not just happiness but deeper and greater praise. The hope of intervention proclaimed in the second segment comes from understanding the law, from the deliverance promised in the law, from lips and tongues that sing praise and show delight in God’s law. Even when he is lost, the psalmist longs for God to seek him out, “for [he does] not forget [the] commandments.”

All this poetic praise for God’s law is very similar to our second reading today from Deuteronomy, a portion of Moses’ farewell address to the people of Israel. In these brief words, Moses places the hope of life in following the words of the law. The law was everything to Moses—he had received the origins of it in the Ten Commandments, and he knew that it was the best thing God could offer to the people of Israel to guide them in their life together.

Here, though, he makes it abundantly clear: the law is a life and death matter. Obedience to the law means life—it shows ultimate connection to God and to God’s people by loving God, walking in God’s ways, and keeping God’s commandments. But turning away from the law means death—death through bowing down to and serving other gods and ignoring God’s commandments. So as he concluded his time journeying through the wilderness with the people of Israel, Moses called on them to make the choices that would lead to fullness of life for them and their descendants, “loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him.”

These perspectives work well for rule-followers like me, but dealing with the law as Christians isn’t always so straightforward. By the time of the early church, Christians had come to believe that Jesus was the fulfillment of the law, meaning obedience to the law was not the ultimate thing to bring the gift of life. But what exactly does the law mean after this? The apostle Peter long struggled with how much of the law he should follow, with his struggles culminating in a vision recounted in Acts where he was invited, even encouraged, to eat things that he had considered unclean under the law. But others in the New Testament were equally chastised when they set aside the whole of the law, thinking that any sin that might result would just allow grace to abound.

Even now, we still wonder to what extent we must follow the law in order to enjoy the happiness, understanding, and life that comes from God. How much of the law—and which particular provisions—must we follow in our own time? Can we set aside the law’s prohibitions on eating bacon cheeseburgers or shrimp cocktails while still demanding that “thou shalt not kill”? Is it okay to condemn divorce while ignoring the ways in which we are not fully loving our neighbors as ourselves? Are we okay with God if we do some work or go shopping on the Sabbath but not if we fall in love with someone of the same gender? In all these things, what is the extent of forgiveness that can be allowed? And ultimately, how do we sort out what the law is for us if it is not the source of our salvation but yet still matters?

The founder of the Reformed tradition, John Calvin, had some strong thoughts about the law. Like many of the reformers of his day and age, Calvin was concerned about how the Roman Catholic Church of his time had placed great emphasis on checking off the legal boxes and following the rules of the church that were necessary for salvation. Even so, Calvin also knew that scripture included the law and lifted it up as something worthy of our attention. At his core, Calvin was a bit of a rule-follower like me, partly because he trained as a lawyer before starting his reforming work and partly because he spent a lot of time sorting out how to make the people of Geneva behave!

In the midst of all this, Calvin described three uses of the law that I think continue to be helpful for our reflection today. First, Calvin said that the law convicts us of our sin and shows us our need for God’s grace. In this way, the fullness of the law insists that we fall short of the way of life that God intends for us. Second, Calvin insisted that the law is necessary to preserve the civil order. He knew of no better source for the kind of order necessary in his adopted home of Geneva than the Bible itself! But finally and most uniquely, Calvin said that the law shows us how to live—it shows us different and new and gracious ways to live out God’s love in our lives and in our world.

For Calvin, this third use of the law ultimately embodies our gratitude to God, for all that we have and all that we are comes from God, built on the salvation we have in Christ Jesus, so our best response is to live in gratitude and hope. In all this, Calvin suggests that we put less focus on the details of the law and instead encourages us to emphasize the gifts that the spirit of the law under Christ can bring to our lives and our world.

The ultimate gift of the law, then, is not to make more rule-followers like me and Calvin but rather to guide us in our love for God and in the expression of that love with others and our world. It’s easy to get caught up in all the details, to use the law more to condemn than to bless, to miss the spirit of the law that drives us to deeper love for God and neighbor, to focus on following the rules rather than the one who gives them to us. But the gift of the law is to show us how to live in gratitude to God and in grace toward one another, to strengthen us in following the source of all life and hope and grace.

So may God help us to use the law not just to convict us of our sin or keep us in line but to deepen our rejoicing in all of God’s gifts as we walk in God’s ways and learn more of God’s law in our lives as we live more fully each and every day through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Strange Kingdom

February 9, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 5:13-20
preached on February 9, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s been a whole lot of talk about salt lately. With the persistent snow we’ve been getting this winter, it feels like we are going through more salt than ever before, and the statistics seem to be proving it. In the last week we’ve even heard about a looming shortage of salt, with public officials all across the country starting to fear that they will not have enough to make it through the winter safely. Salt—or some variation on it formulated for colder temperatures or different uses—seems to be an integral part of surviving the winter these days. Without it, our world would stop for wintry weather even more than it already does, and we would be far less likely to even be here today because of treacherous roads and sidewalks!

But I don’t think Jesus was thinking much about salting sidewalks when he offered these words about salt and light in the Sermon on the Mount. In Jesus’ time, the thought of tossing salt onto a walkway would have been a huge waste—it’s how they would have dealt with salt that had lost its saltiness! But I have to wonder if what he meant when he told his disciples and the gathering crowds that they were the salt of the earth is comparable to the importance of salt for us this winter. In Jesus’ time, salt was an extremely important commodity, used to fertilize and prepare the fields for crops before planting and then to help preserve the staples held over to get through the winter.

Even now, salt continues in these important roles in our world, but in the winter it seems more useful in dissolving the snow and ice that can so easily paralyze our world. We need only look at Atlanta a couple weeks to see what would happen to a modern city that isn’t able to use salt amidst snow and ice. Not only did gridlock reign and the city essentially shut down when too many cars attempted to drive at once, people were stranded for hours, even overnight, after just a two-inch snowfall. As much as any coordination from City Hall or the Department of Sanitation, the response of New York City in winter weather depends on salt just as much as salt was important in Jesus’ time.

So maybe we need to think about being the salt of the earth in this way this winter. Just as salt works to give us traction when things are slippery, as salt of the earth we can help others to regain their footing in times of uncertainty. Just as salt works to melt down the mounds of ice around us these days, we can be the salt of the earth to help melt the hardened hearts of our world. And just as salt takes a little bit of time to take effect and clear the path, so as salt of the earth we may need a little time and patience to join in God’s work of making a way amidst the challenges of this world.

In the same way, when Jesus proclaimed to the crowd that they were the light of the world, he gave them the inspiration to bear something new and different into the world. Just as salt transforms the world and makes new and different things possible, so light brings life to the darkness. The examples that Jesus gave to illustrate his point made this abundantly clear. This light is meant to shine—it is like a city on a hill, like a lamp on a lampstand, bringing light to everyone. This light is meant to bring light to all—not just a select few but to the whole house, to anyone who can see the city shining brightly at night. But ultimately this light of the world is less about the light itself and more about what the light does, about what the light enables others to see, about helping others to give glory to God.

And so in this day, when we too hear Jesus’ command to be the light of the world and to let that light shine before others, how do we let it shine? The light in us is not meant to be a blinding light, so bright that people cannot see anything else, but to be a guiding light that points the way to something and someone else brighter than ourselves. The light in us is not meant to be the only light, shutting out every other source of light everywhere, but to be light enough for the way today. And this light in us is ultimately not our own but rather a reflection of the light of Christ that we receive and share with the world, and so it must not be brighter than its source.

Ultimately, for Jesus the matter of being salt and light is about being part of the kingdom of heaven. To Jesus, the kingdom of heaven is not some far-off time and place, some distant enjoyment of God’s blessings to be inherited upon our death, some world yet to come that means nothing for our world today. To Jesus, the kingdom of heaven is a new way of life in the here and now, a promise of hope amidst the brokenness of this day and age, a different way to approach God and one another that sets aside the measures of the world and welcomes the gracious judgment of God, a way of joy and peace and promise that embodies the fullness of the fast described by the prophet Isaiah:

to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free…
to break every yoke…
to share your bread with the hungry,
[to] bring the homeless poor into your house…
to cover [the naked]
and not to hide yourself from your own kin.

This kingdom of heaven is the whole purpose of our being salt and light. The salt helps prepare the soil, clear the pathway, and slowly but surely get the gunk out of the way so that the kingdom of heaven can be real. And the light helps others see the way in the darkness, transforms uncertainty into hope, and gives the glory to God, the source of all light, so that the kingdom of heaven can be visible to all.

Even in our world that doesn’t have all that many kingdoms anymore, the kingdom of heaven is so very different from what is the norm for us. It is hard if not impossible to get in based on the usual measures—Jesus says that the righteousness we need to enter the kingdom of heaven must exceed that of the scribes and pharisees, so getting in must be about something more than righteousness. This kingdom of heaven is a place where the ways of the world matter immensely but not at all, where the law and prophets that have guided things for so long are not so much abolished as fulfilled. And it is the place where God’s full presence abides each and every day, where the prophet’s words become real:

Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry for help, and [God] will say, Here I am.

This kingdom of heaven, then, is not something we achieve on our own or by any accomplishment of human merit—it is the gracious gift of God for all creation, and we have the privilege of being a part of it as salt and light to make way for others to join us.

So in these winter days, may God help us to be salt and light in this world, working always to help the kingdom of heaven to be be shown more fully in our world as we trust God’s work to make all things new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God for salt and light! Amen.

Turning Blessing Upside Down

February 2, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 5:1-12
preached on February 2, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s an interesting article that has been making the rounds of Facebook among my churchy friends, “5 churchy phrases that are scaring off millennials.” It lists out five phrases that the author thinks need to be put out of our vocabulary if we are to effectively welcome younger people into our life:

“The Bible clearly says…”
“God will never give you more than you can handle.”
“Love on”—as in, “As youth group leaders, we’re just here to love on those kids.”
“Believer/Unbeliever/Backsliding”
“God is in control/has a plan/works in mysterious ways.”

The author, a millennial herself—someone who was born after 1980 and so came of age in the new millennium—gives very good reasons to avoid these phrases, and I agree with her completely.

Thankfully I think we’re pretty good at keeping these out of our vocabulary here, but I propose that we add a sixth phrase to her listing: anything involving the word “blessing”—as in, “It was such a blessing to hear that song this morning,” or “God is just blessing me so much these days.” “Blessing” is certainly not as creepy as “love on” and not as presumptuous as “God has a plan,” but all too often I think our use of the word “blessing” is focused on the benefits that come for us rather than on the gracious gifts of God. Sometimes it is used to write off the pain we face by emphasizing some positive thing that we have received. And other times it puts the gifts that we have received from God into a position of special honor beyond what others have experienced. While I’ve worked on it over the years, I still struggle to hear the word “blessing” in the way that many intend it, as a genuine expression of thanks for what God is doing in their lives.

So every three years when the Beatitudes show up in the lectionary, I have to reassess what it means to be “blessed.” These are such wonderful statements of how God intends for our world to live and act, but couldn’t Jesus have chosen another word that doesn’t carry so much baggage for me?? Well thankfully, it’s not all about me and my understanding of this word, but others haven’t done much better with these things. Some preachers have tried to be cute and so describe these as the “be-attitudes,” as descriptions of how we ought to behave. Others use them to describe how we need to change our world ourselves so as to empower those who are in different circumstances than our own.

However, I think the most compelling exposition of these statements of blessing is one that predominates among many interpreters: these are not statements of how we need to behave or what we need to do but rather, as commentator Tom Long describes, the Beatitudes “proclaim what is, in the light of the kingdom of heaven, unassailably true. They describe the purpose of every holy law, the foundation of every custom, the aim of every practice of this new society, this colony of the kingdom, the church called and instructed by Jesus.” (Matthew, p. 46-47)

Unlike so many of our named blessings that claim great value for the things that we have received, these statements of blessing don’t line up quite so well with our experience. When was the last time anyone viewed as poor in the eyes of the world in any way was given such a great gift as the kingdom of heaven? Is it really all that common for those who hunger and thirst for righteousness to be filled? The richest nation in the world is cutting food aid to the poor yet again! And when have those who clamor and work for peace in a world so dead-set on war been offered any broad and real word of appreciation or hope, let alone been called children of God?

Ultimately, in proclaiming the way things are in God’s kingdom, the Beatitudes turn our world upside down. They praise and bless things that we have put down. They insist that God will find a way to transform our lives and our world in ways beyond our wildest dreams. And they promise that the world is already filled with more hope and new life than even the most optimistic person could begin to imagine—even as they insist that there is much more to be done so that these blessings are realized in the here and now and not just in some distant world yet to come.

These nine statements describing God’s blessing, then, should guide our way of thinking and living each and every day, not by promising us blessing but by encouraging us to join in God’s blessing. The Beatitudes give their real promise to those who are in greatest need, to those who have been left out of the world’s blessing, to those who can look only to God for hope and promise. Living out the Beatitudes ultimately gives us a map for fulfilling the wondrous words of the prophet Micah:

What does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

When we live out the Beatitudes in our lives, we live out these simple requirements and join God in blessing what the world so often refuses to bless, in turning the world’s standards and expectations of what is good on end, and in taking even a little step toward the transformation of all things in Jesus Christ.

Biblical scholar Stan Saunders gives us some ideas of what this might look like. When we join in blessing the poor in spirit, we honor those who may seem to have less than we do but who still place their hope in God. When we join in blessing those who mourn, we embody God’s presence and hope and transformation amidst all the damage the world inflicts. When we join in blessing the meek, in honoring those who set aside personal vengeance and instead trust that God will bring redemption, we join in God’s work of genuine transformation in places where the world prefers to return evil with evil. When we join God in blessing those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, we make ourselves vulnerable to those we name as our enemies and those we think are strangers and so make space for a new and different and restored way of relationship. When we join God in blessing the merciful, we “create space for those who have none, space to turn around, to be forgiven, reconciled, and restored to full humanity.” (Saunders, Preaching the Gospel of Matthew, p. 33) When we join in blessing the pure in heart, we encourage integrity in our thoughts and actions and help others to gain a glimpse of God in us and through us. When we join in blessing the peacemakers, we work toward making things whole, promoting the peace and wholeness and hope known in Hebrew as shalom. When we join in blessing those who are threatened by this different way of life, we take our voices away from our world’s ways that are threatened to their core by God’s kingdom. And when we are not afraid of others rejecting us because we have embraced this way of life, we can “‘rejoice and be glad,’ not only because of [our] great reward in heaven, but because [our] suffering conforms to the model of the one who is revealing God’s power and presence.” (Saunders, p. 34)

This is not an easy way of life. We can very easily slide back into the way of the world, a way that says that might brings right, a way that puts off real, constructive change to a day that remains far off because to change now would hurt us, a way that says that God is angry and demands vengeance for the brokenness of our world, a way that suggests that the world is not going to change and that we should put aside our hopes for something different to a distant world yet to come. But with God’s help, we can step into the world and work toward a new and different way, imagining that God can and will transform—and already is transforming!—our broken and fearful world into one that embodies these blessings of God not just in our individual lives or in the church but in every corner of our world, not just in some far-off time yet to come but in the here and now.

So may God give us wisdom and hope to live these blessings each and every day so that all the world might know the blessing we have from God now and in the days to come until all things are made new through Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Agreeing to Agree

January 26, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
preached on January 26, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As you heard earlier in the announcements, today is the annual meeting of the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone. This annual gathering is a wonderful tradition that gives us space to celebrate the life of the church in this place over the last year and to look ahead into the coming year together. While we do approach some serious business in our congregational meetings, this is largely a ceremonial affair. As much as our Presbyterian polity is built on something of a democratic system that trusts that God speaks through the voices of God’s people as we gather together like we do today, there are only five or six things that we are allowed to do in our meeting today. But even more than that, when the groups that are reporting and bringing items for action have done good work of listening for the movement of the Holy Spirit and have made reasonable decisions and present them in constructive and helpful ways, people will ask good questions and then go on to affirm the work that has been done to get us to today without much dissension.

It is very rare—though not entirely unheard-of—to have dissent and division in the annual meeting—unless you were the church in Corinth. The church in Corinth is remembered even after two millennia for its conflict and trouble, and I can’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like to have been in an annual meeting there! Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians were written to a group of people who seem to have been divided over nearly everything: who baptized them, how to sit together for meals, what sorts of sexual behavior were to be accepted, whether to deal with petty conflicts between church members in the church or civil court, how to deal with people of different backgrounds, what sorts of food was acceptable to eat, whether to cover your head when you pray, whether women should be allowed to speak in worship, even what to do with the weekly offering!

Paul knew that things were bad there, and he right up front in his first letter to them he named the issues:

I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends, using the authority of Jesus, our Master.
I’ll put it as urgently as I can:
You must get along with each other.
You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common. (The Message)

In this particular instance, different church members were claiming greater authority, power, and privilege based on who had baptized them. While they had originally come together as one church from their different backgrounds, united by the gift of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, they were now focusing on their differences. While they had once understood their life to be shared in common, connected by a common faith and hope, now they were pointing fingers at each other unnecessarily.

This situation isn’t totally surprising. The early church was itself an offshoot sect of Judaism, with no central authority or even structure to give guidance along the way, so individuals would obviously put greater confidence in those who had been instrumental in guiding them into their understanding of faithfulness. But Paul knew that even if this was an important initial step, it would be disastrous for the long term. If early Christians weren’t careful, they would soon divide up this message of hope and salvation, and in their actions of division they would keep others from wanting to be a part of this new way of life.

So Paul turned the Corinthians’ focus back to Christ, the unifying force in their faith and life. Eugene Peterson translates Paul’s words so clearly here:

God didn’t send me out to collect a following for myself,
but to preach the Message of what he has done, collecting a following for him.
And he didn’t send me to do it with a lot of fancy rhetoric of my own,
lest the powerful action at the center—Christ on the Cross—be trivialized into mere words.

The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction,
but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense.
This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out.

Ultimately, Paul wanted the Corinthians to understand that the divisions of the world, the human distinctions that emerge in our lives, and even the confusion that emerges in our life together cannot overwhelm the message of the cross.

Now this message of the cross would seem to be the last thing to focus on, really. The standards of the world would never place the cross, a symbol of death, at the center of thinking about new life. The thought that such a powerful God would be so humble as to die a human death was crazy in that day and age. And all the other good messages of that time were presented with flowery words and careful arguments that seemed far greater than the simple proclamation of Jesus through the cross. Yet Paul was convinced that this message was at the center of everything the church ought to stand for. This message was worthy of setting aside all conflict and division—in fact, this message was the only way that the church could come together amidst all divisions.

In our day and age, when so much of our world is more polarized than ever, when even the church keeps fracturing further because of disagreement on things that are pretty small in the big picture, when we need a witness to unity and hope more than ever, Paul’s urgent request echoes across the centuries: “You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.” This isn’t something we can just will into existence in our midst by pretending like conflict doesn’t exist. If we just set aside our disagreement and paper over our dissent, we don’t actually become “united in the same mind and the same purpose” as Paul so desired.

So as we approach an annual meeting this afternoon that seems to be pretty routine in a congregation where we usually all get along pretty well, it was interesting for me to spend this past week at a workshop on mediation and conflict transformation. Even if we don’t always express a lot of dissent in our annual meetings, conflict and disagreement is a natural and good part of the life of the church and our world. Believe it or not, we actually communicate better with each other when there is some healthy disagreement—so long as it doesn’t get out of hand and we keep talking to one another! Yet in these days our world suggests that we should have as little as possible to do with those we disagree with, so we in the church can offer a gift to others if we can simply keep talking with one another and loving each other even when we disagree.

I was reminded this week that we are at our best when we are hard on the issues and soft on people, when we take the things we believe and do just as seriously as we take our relationships with one another. I think this is what Paul was really hoping for, too. He was looking for the church at Corinth to recognize that they needed to keep their focus on the most important issue at hand—on the proclamation of the wonderful and strange message about the cross—and so to work through their quarreling and disagreement while living together in faith, hope, and love as best they could.

So what would this look like in our life together? Does this mean that we need to have a big verbal argument at the annual meeting today so that we can be focused on the cross—and kick out anyone in our midst who isn’t as focused as I am? Does this mean that we should just let anyone among us do anything they want, without worry or consequence for its impact on others? Or does this mean that we need to spend a little more time listening to one another as we try to discern how God is leading us in these changing times? I think that third option is the better way, for we are bound together in the cross of Christ and given the hope and possibility of a new and different way, not just in setting aside our differences but in welcoming the opportunity to learn more about the gifts of God in our lives and in discerning how we can be more faithful together in this changing world.

So as we do this important work later today and in the year ahead, may our foundation be Jesus Christ our Lord, may the cross be our hope of the power of God, and may all our conversation—and even any disagreement—reflect the joyous gift of God that brings us new life for all the days ahead. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Gift and Challenge of Baptism

January 12, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 10:34-43 and Matthew 3:13-17
preached on January 12, 2014 (Baptism of the Lord), at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I think Baptism of the Lord Sunday that we celebrate today is simultaneously one of the most important Sundays of the church year—and one of the most difficult to explain and figure out. All four gospels tell a story about Jesus meeting up with John the Baptist—that’s two more than that talk about his birth!—so this event that we celebrate today had to be pretty important to the early church, but what does it mean for us today anyway?

The story itself is challenging enough, really. First of all, as Matthew tells the story of Jesus, his baptism is a bit jarring. We move directly, without interlude, from Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, his exile in Egypt to escape the evil King Herod, and formative years with his parents in Nazareth to this strange scene with a bizarre messenger named John washing people in a muddy stream. There’s no real transition here—no story of the boy or young man Jesus, no tales of his exploits working in his dad’s carpentry shop in Nazareth, not even the familiar tale from Luke’s gospel where a twelve-year-old Jesus stays behind talking to the scholars at the temple while his parents head back home.

We skip nearly thirty years of Jesus’ life—and then move into a story that just doesn’t always make sense. When Jesus shows up at the Jordan River and asks John the Baptist to baptize him, I find myself asking much the same question that we heard John ask in our reading this morning: Why?? Why does Jesus of all people need to be baptized? To even start thinking about this means that we have to think a bit about what this baptism means. The baptism that John offered in those days had a considerably different meaning and understanding than the baptism we celebrate in the church. For us, baptism is a sign and seal of God’s grace, a mark of how much God loves us and how we are welcomed into the community of faith and a reminder of our cleansing from sin that comes in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For John the Baptist, though, baptism was a ritual washing following on long-standing Jewish tradition that was a public and visible mark of a personal commitment to repentance and a different way of life.

Why would Jesus need to do this? We certainly understand him to be without sin, fully human and fully divine, from the beginning of his life following in God’s way, so there seems to be little point for him to make this statement of his commitment to a new and different way. John was the first to ask this perfectly reasonable question—he knew who Jesus was, and he knew that God had great things in store for this one who would follow him to open the pathway of new life. Yet Jesus approached John and asked him for this moment of blessing, telling him that it needed to happen in order “to fulfill all righteousness” and to make space for the new thing ahead for him.

Once John finally agreed to baptize Jesus, the story actually gets even more strange and wonderful. After Jesus’ baptism, God’s presence was made abundantly clear.

When Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

Ultimately this was a big deal, bigger than even Jesus himself had even thought. While he had gone to John knowing that this baptism was the right thing to do, in this moment he found a much deeper encounter with God than he had ever expected. As the heavens opened, the Spirit flew down like a dove, and a voice thundered from the cloud, Jesus found the confirmation that he needed to step out into something new, the affirmation of his ministry that he had been waiting for before beginning his work in public, the great proclamation of God’s love for him and God’s call upon his life that would define the days ahead in his life and ministry. Now it’s not clear from Matthew’s telling here if anyone else even heard or saw any of this—“the heavens were opened to him” and “he saw the Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him”—but it is clear that in this moment something happened for Jesus that he would never be able to forget.

For us, baptism should be this same sort of of unforgettable moment even though so many of us experience it at a time when we can’t remember anything. Just as Jesus did, in our baptisms we see the depth of God’s love for us combined with the breadth of God’s call upon our lives. In our baptisms, we see a sign and a seal of God’s grace that gives us the strength and the encouragement to walk with Jesus each and every day. In our baptisms, we receive the inspiration we need to not only speak about our strange encounters with God like this one but also to respond with actions that “fulfill all righteousness” in the world as Jesus did. And in our baptisms, we get a little glimpse of the new and different and wonderful world that God offers us, much like what Peter described in our reading from Acts today, where “God shows no partiality,” where all are welcome to the fullness of life made possible in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and where God’s grace is so abundant that “in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to [God].”

The incredible gift of baptism comes not even so much in its initial moment but in the ways in which this sacrament that we can only receive once can renew us and restore us time and time again. It doesn’t make sense, really. A small amount of water applied once in life ought not to make that much difference, right? Even if we participate in the tradition of baptism by immersion, how can a near-drowning change things for us? This is why words are so difficult to find for this story—ultimately baptism (and the Lord’s Supper too, both sacraments) is something that cannot be explained, but it instead must be experienced. The meaning of these things comes not in the theoretical concepts behind them but in the personal and communal encounter with God that come to us in them. When we think and talk about baptism, ultimately words and understanding will escape us, but somehow we know and we trust that God is somehow present in this strange and wonderful moment, transforming us and our world.

But as much as we can’t understand our baptism, we can never forget it, either. It makes us new people by water and the Spirit. It confirms the wondrous grace of God in our lives. And it challenges us to help others make their way to this place so that they can know the grace, mercy, justice, and peace of God and join us in working to make these things more real for all God’s children everywhere. So today, as we reaffirm the promises of our baptism in the past or look ahead to a future encounter with God in these strange and wonderful waters, may we always remember that in these waters we meet Christ himself, we go where he first went, we find the love that he offers us poured out in great and wondrous abundance, and we share that grace and mercy and peace with our world each and every day until he comes again. So remember your baptism, and be thankful, each and every day. Alleluia! Amen.