Baptized Into an Unfolding Life [Epiphany 2/Baptism of the Lord]

Psalm 29

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Let me say a quick word about our worship series this month, “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.”  To begin with, we trust that when we gather something will happen.  We trust that we are met here by the living Christ.  And, we hope that in this meeting there is a fresh and exciting sense of discovery.  When it comes to Jesus, you have to stay curious for a lifetime.  You have to guard against the temptation that you already know all there is to know.  In a way, it’s kind of like moving into fresh discoveries about your parents as you grow older.

 

When our fifteen year-old son Oliver visited Stephanie at work recently, he said to her, “I always forget you go somewhere to work every day, that you have an office and you do stuff.”  When we’re young, we don’t give much thought to our parents’ lives.  But as we get a little older, we begin to see our parents in new ways.  We begin to see them as real people, with real jobs, real stress, real insecurities, real strengths and weaknesses.

Today’s reading from Luke offers us a chance to meet Jesus again and to discover something that is fresh and compelling.  Luke uses the scene of Jesus’ baptism to picture Jesus as an embodied human person.  When we look at Jesus what we see is the clearest manifestation of the full possibilities of human life.  That is, Jesus helps us see what’s possible for ourselves if we open ourselves to a life lived with the Spirit.

Each of the four gospels includes the baptism of Jesus.  But each gospel shapes the story differently.  What makes Luke’s telling unique is this sentence: “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too.”  Luke wants us to know that Jesus stood in line.  Many others were coming to receive baptism by John.  And Jesus took his place in line.  The other gospels picture the baptism scene as a powerful ritual as Jesus begins his public ministry. In Luke’s gospel, we see Jesus standing in line with everyone else. 

Waiting in line is a pretty fundamental human experience.  I say “waiting in line” only because we’re in the Midwest.  In the Northeast you would be “waiting on line.”  In the Northeast if you want to know where the line forms, you ask someone not “Are you in line?”  But “Are you on line?”  Regardless, the experience of long lines is part of life.  I am particularly sensitive to being at the back of the line, since in grade school we always lined up in alphabetical order.  If you’ve ever been to an amusement park or an airport, you’ve had the experience of long lines that snake their way back and forth through the slowest racetrack ever devised.  Perhaps you’ve even had the experience of suspecting that someone is trying to cut in line ahead of you. 

In the middle of Central Park in New York City is the Delacourt Theater.  And each summer the Delacourt hosts an event called “Shakespeare in the Park.”  The tickets for each night’s performance are free and made available each morning at 8am.  My friend and I were told that the line forms early.  So we made sure to get there in plenty of time.  We arrived at 4:30am.  We got to the theater and saw the line already formed.  And so we began to walk to the back of the line.  We walked and we walked.  “Boy, there are sure a lot of people already in line at 4:30am” we thought.  We got in line.  We took turns, like everyone else, getting coffee and going to the bathroom.  Finally at 8am, the line began to inch forward.  We weren’t sure how many tickets were given away each day.  But we were confident that our heroic efforts would be rewarded.  As the people in front of us were handed their tickets, the theater employee shouted, “Sorry folks, no more tickets today!”

When I’m in traffic on I-35, I am always convinced that I can mystically intuit which of the four lanes of traffic will move the fastest.  And so in stalled traffic, I’m always using my blinker to nose in and out of lanes of traffic, proud of myself for not getting caught in the slow lane.  Of course twenty minutes later, the car that began behind me is now in front of me because they just stayed in the same lane and waited it out. 

“When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too.”  This is a picture of Jesus freely and gladly receiving from God his fully human life.  It is, at the same time, a picture of what’s possible for us.  We too can freely and gladly receive from God our fully human lives.  And the lives God offers to us are unfolding lives.  God does not give us our lives all at once.  God gives us a life that develops over time; a life that takes shape in response to all kinds of forces and influences in our surrounding environment.

Luke wants us to know that Jesus’ life unfolded within the influence of God’s Spirit.  One of the most important ingredients in Jesus’ fully human life was the surrounding Spirit.

When John the Baptizer speaks about Jesus to the crowds coming for baptism, the farming image is important.  “His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (v. 17).  This image of ancient farming practices might elude us at first.  What we’re to imagine is a farmer harvesting a wheat field and bringing the cut wheat to the threshing floor.  There the farmer will use a large forked instrument to toss the harvested crop into the air.  As long as they do this when there is a breeze, the chaff will blow away and the heavier grains of wheat will fall back to the ground.  Over and over the farmer tosses the harvest into the air, allowing the blowing wind to separate the chaff from the grain.  No doubt the farmer plays a role.  But without the wind, there is not way to separate what’s useless from what’s valuable.

In order to make sure that we don’t miss the way the fully human life of Jesus is shaped by God’s Spirit, Luke’s gospel mention that following his baptism, Jesus prayed (v. 21).  None of the other gospel accounts give us that detail.  But in Luke’s version, the Spirit descends upon him in the form of a dove while he is praying.  Here we see that human life lived at the top range of its possibilities is a life that opens itself in prayer.  A life that unfolds into its fullness over time is a life welcomes and invites the Spirit to be the gentle breeze that sorts out what’s worthless from what’s valuable in our lives. 

Learning to pray makes us more ourselves, more human.  Learning to pray settles us into the real stuff of life.  When we pray, we open ourselves to all that is beyond us and outside of us but which presses upon us.  We pray not as people who have reached some sort of finish line, but as people who are just beginning an adventure.  When we pray like Jesus prayed, we welcome all the changes that will become part of our lives (even the hard ones).  In prayer we acknowledge that our lives are like soft wax, vulnerable to impressions from the Spirit and from a wide variety of other forces in our lives.

It’s not always easy for us to understand what it means to be “created in God’s image.”  But the earliest Christians claimed that it is Christ who is the “image” of God, and that we human beings are just the “image” of the “image” (Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 4:4, Col. 1:15).  We are reflections of the one who is the perfect reflection of God (Heb. 1:3).  Jesus, standing in line with us for baptism, his life prayerfully open and vulnerable to the influence of the Spirit and all else, shows us that every human life is an unfolding life. 

God gives to us an unfolding life and not a ready-made life.  God gives us a life that must unfold across time, a life that is responsive to its environment. There is no fixed course or pre-determined flow.  No wonder there is such enormous variability in human life.  Human beings come in all sizes and shapes and colors.  We might be travelers or stay in one place.  We might be socially energetic or shy.  We might cultivate skills in cooking or skills in mathematics.  We might choose a life partner or we might remain single.  We might crave every luxury imaginable or we might live simply with only the barest necessities.  We might crave dangerous adventure or peaceful safety.

The fourth century theologian Gregory of Nyssa would say that we humans “exercise husbandry” on ourselves.  That is, we cultivate our lives as if tending a garden, planning, planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting.  As Kathryn Tanner puts it,  “human life takes a variety of forms depending on what it is that people care about” (46).  People make very different fundamental decisions about what’s important to them – cars, respect, wisdom, pleasure, safety, on and on.  Because we all live with powerful drives, instincts, and attractions, cultivating our lives has to do with which impulses we cultivate and which ones we restrain.  Put simply, “People turn out in wildly different ways, for better or for worse” (48).

To receive our unfolding lives from God is good news, but it is not easy news.  To be a human being is to live an unfinished, open-ended life.  It is to accept responsibility for the shape of our lives.  Like Jesus, we are susceptible to radical change and radical transformation across a lifetime.  Over time, we will be transformed by what we give our attention to and what we care about.  This will lead either to a life that warmly glows with God’s light or it will lead to a corruption and misdirection of our human powers. 

We often feel adrift and confused about our lives.  What are we supposed to be doing?  What would a good human life look like?  For Christians, Christ is the key to this (and everything else).  Jesus shows us the full depths and heights of human life.

The ambiguity of our lives and its open-endedness - so frequently a source of frustration for us - is actually what makes our lives rich and beautiful.  There isn't any shortcut to the task of opening ourselves to all that shapes our lives - to the Spirit, to our bodies and the bodies of others, to the natural and social worlds we inhabit, to work and responsibility and beauty and grace.  What God gives us is a life that unfolds to the thundering music of God’s voice: “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.”