Sermons from Mission Hills UCC San Diego, California Rev. Dr. David Bahr [email protected] January 8, 2023 “God Changes Us” Matthew 3:13-17 - Common English Bible At that time Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan River so that John would baptize him. 14 John tried to stop him and said, “I need to be baptized by you, yet you come to me?” 15 Jesus answered, “Allow me to be baptized now. This is necessary to fulfill all righteousness.” So John agreed to baptize Jesus. 16 When Jesus was baptized, he immediately came up out of the water. Heaven was opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God coming down like a dove and resting on him. 17 A voice from heaven said, “This is my Son whom I dearly love; I find happiness in him.” Jesus was born two weeks ago and all of a sudden today he’s already 30 years old! What happened in between? Well, according to Matthew, he was visited by some wise men or magi or kings or Zoroastrian astrologers who followed a star. Then Joseph had a dream that warned them to flee to another country to escape a violent murderous king. The family lived his early years as refugees in Egypt before finally moving to Nazareth where Jesus grew up following in his father’s footsteps as a carpenter. That’s the Gospel according to Matthew. In the Gospel According to Biff, Jesus traveled with Biff, his sacrilegious and foul-mouthed childhood pal. They met up with the three wise men, in this story a magician, a Buddhist, and a Hindu Yogi. Among other things, they taught Jesus and Biff how to multiply food and how to become invisible. And the origins of cappuccino. When Jesus and Biff returned home from their fantastical journey, they shared tales with their friend Maggie, later known as Mary Magdalene. These young friends shared their hopes and dreams and under the influence of Biff, some occasional mischief. Since the Bible offers so little information, it stands to reason that people are left to speculate. Biff is a little more blasphemous than most, but speculation has often included the idea that Jesus spent part of his young adulthood traveling. For example, in the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, he spent his 20s travelling across India, Persia, and Tibet, learning from Eastern religions, especially among Buddhists. While I love this idea, scholars like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan assert that none of these theories about Jesus encountering other religions are supported by actual scholarship. They are “without historical foundation.” That’s too bad. I love pictures of the Dali Llama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu poking at each other and making each other giggle and think that Jesus and the Buddha would have made marvelous friends too, although they were 500 years apart in age. But back to the Bible, in the Gospel according to Luke, when Jesus was 12 years old, the family traveled to Jerusalem for the Festival of Passover, just as they did every year. But when it was time for everyone to return home, Jesus went missing. He had stayed behind to talk with teachers in the Temple and caused his parents great concern. Lacking any sensitivity to their anxiety, perhaps under the influence of Biff, Jesus rudely responded, “Where else would I be?” The only other thing Luke said about Jesus’ childhood is that he “increased in wisdom (perhaps with a good talking-to by his mother), and in years and in divine and human favor.” How? We can only speculate. There’s another ancient source called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, dated around the same time as Luke. It did not make the cut to be included in the Bible, but in it, Jesus is described like a trickster in Greek mythology. A trickster and petulant. A neighbor once complained about something to Mary and Joseph and Jesus made the neighbor blind. But it was all good because later he healed them. My favorite story from that collection is "When Jesus was five years old he was playing at the ford of a rushing stream and shaped soft clay into twelve sparrows. Jesus clapped his hands and shouted to the sparrows: "Be off, fly away, and remember me, you who are now alive!" And the sparrows took off and flew away noisily." That’s actually a story repeated in the Quran. Did you know Jesus is spoken of in the Quran 90 times? In it, Jesus says, “I create for you out of clay the likeness of a bird, then I breathe into it and it becomes a bird with God’s permission." (Quran 3:49) Both the Gospels of John and Mark don’t bother with any of the lost years of Jesus. Mark jumps immediately to his baptism, presented as the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In fact, all four gospels present the baptism, around age 30, as the point after which Jesus began his ministry of teaching and healing and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. Perhaps our first question should be: What is baptism? What do you think? I asked the participants in our Lunch and Lectionary group on Thursday what baptism means to them. One said, baptism is the initiation rite into the community. Similar to what another said, it represents a choice or a promise made to join a community or raise a child in the faith. One said she baptized her children as an insurance policy against hell. It’s not what she believes now, but it a remarkably common view. I regularly get asked to baptize babies from people with no interest in being part of a church. I assure them that their child is not going to go to hell if they are not baptized. Almost all of them breathe a sigh of relief and I never hear from them again. I could grow a church if I was willing to stoke their fears and guilt, but it’s not a church I would ever want to be a part of. Another person said that baptism is an opportunity to be cleansed in order to develop a closer relationship with God. Cleansing is, in fact, part of what baptism was originally built upon. There have been practices involving ritual purification for thousands of years, but right around the time of Jesus, shortly before, it became common to ritually cleanse oneself in a mikvah. Mikvah can simply mean a body of water, sometimes natural, sometimes constructed, into which you could completely immerse yourself in a pool of clean water as a symbol of ritual purification. Well, a mikvah had been constructed outside the main sanctuary of the Temple, in the court of the faithful. Enter the temple, make a sacrifice. But to go a little further, pay another fee. A hefty fee. It wasn’t affordable for everyone. And, if wealthy people wanted an even nicer experience they could pay for a premium upgrade at the mikvah in the home of a priest, away from all the common folk. It was a lucrative opportunity for everyone involved and all of it getting a little out of control. But, just a day’s journey out of town, a guy named John was doing it for free. The price of admission to his natural mikvah, a river, was simply metanoia. A willingness to admit your mistakes and a promise to follow a better path. Metanoia. To turn around. John turned this water immersion into a symbol of forgiveness instead of a purification ritual. But hold on – only priests had the authority to declare God’s forgiveness. The religious authorities were upset that this was cutting into their profits. They came to the wilderness to check out what was going on. John called them hypocrites and broods of vipers – kind of like Jesus turning over the tables of the greedy profiteers changing money in the Temple. Ordinary people didn’t care about that. More and more made the journey out into the wilderness to John’s cave along the Jordan River to be baptized. To be honest and to claim a new life. That’s where it starts: a desire to be honest. So, if baptism by John was metanoia, to repent and promise to follow a better path, why would Jesus ask to be baptized? Maybe the Gospel According to Biff has some truth – that Jesus and his childhood pal lived a brief life of debauchery among the wise men. Probably not. Well, Richard Losch (All the People of the Bible) offers a very compelling answer. Jesus asked for baptism by John to identify with the poor who couldn’t afford the hefty fee at the mikvah at the Temple. Jesus’ baptism was a sign of his solidarity with the poor. Which then he made explicit in his first sermon, “Blessed are the poor, for to them belongs the Kingdom of Heaven.” Ultimately, however, what do we do with this passage today? Baptism has a lot of meanings: An initiation into the church and the Christian faith. A rite of passage. A sacrament, a promise, a dedication. I like the addition of an act of solidarity with the poor. But I think the best meaning of all, the one we need in our world today, is this: be honest, let go of your past, and try over again. That’s a real cleansing. This is something our divided and polarized world needs. We often assume the worst about our neighbors. We think people can’t change and refuse to forgive one another. But whether we are talking about other people or ourselves, bottom line: No matter what you’ve done, I’ve done, or they’ve done, no one is ever cut off from the possibility that, with honesty, we can begin again. That’s the grace of God. That’s how God changes us. Bryan Stevenson said of prisoners on death row, and which applies to all of us, “We are all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” We accept that in the ritual of baptism. Or recommit to it. It’s kind of too bad that we don’t wait to be baptized until we have truly and royally screwed up our lives, when the guilt or shame of something we have done weighs so heavily upon us we can’t imagine ever being free. Then, the dying and rising to new life would make sense and shock us into an awareness of our freedom. And then with newfound confidence join with Jesus in his ministry: To welcome the seeker and the refugee To heal a broken planet To feed the hungry To build bridges of trust To share our gifts To seek justice and peace for all people To bring Christ’s light into the world. The invitation and good news of baptism in Jesus Christ is that we can change. All it costs is honesty.
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