When You Pass Through the Waters 1/13/19 Epiphany 1C

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser 

WHEN YOU PASS THROUGH THE WATERS

1/13/19           Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22          Epiphany 1-C  

There was this tune that kept running through my head when I sat down to work on this sermon. I’d been reading a commentary that said that Jesus got baptized to show he was in solidarity with us humans, which seemed kind of obscure to me.  I heard the tune and then the words came -  “What if God was one of us?”  So an important line like that was enough to run a Google search, and I found it.  What if God was one of us? , the chorus asks.  Just a slob like one of us?   I was kinda awkward with the word ‘slob’....In Michael Jackson’s cover of the song, he used the word ‘slave’. Just a slave like one of us…. Just a stranger on a bus, tryin’ to make his way home.   Its a questioning song, wondering about God, just thinkin’....  What IF God was one of us?

If God had a name what would it be?  And would you call it to his face? If you were faced with Him in all His glory ...What would you ask if you had just one question?

            Suspend what you’ve been taught for a moment, all that you affirm in our confessions, all you’ve learned from Sunday School and accepted - and join in the asking about who God is and what God is like.  Many people in our world, in our country, and probably right around us in our community are skeptical of what church teaches.  Maybe from a bad experience at church, or a church person who turned out irresponsible or even criminal.  Or maybe super strict or punitive.  And they’ve brought the whole message into doubt for those they’ve hurt. 

            And yet people  wonder about God anyway. Movies ponder about God; TV shows ponder about God.   If some folks got it wrong, maybe, somewhere, someone has it right.  I mean, people in  all cultures talk about God somehow.  We seem to have a hunger for God.  What would it be like to call God a name, and to God’s face, the way we do one another?  And if you could ask one question, what would you want to ask?

Bart Millard, of the band MercyMe wrote another song about being in God’s presence from a christian faith perspective - his story got made into a movie, too,,, the song is “I Can Only Imagine”…. Its an intriguing thought, isn’t it?  We have an old hymn called Face to Face that I learned as a child - Face to Face, what will it be?  When in rapture I behold him - older language, of course, similar thought.  What might it be like to actually see God?

If God had a face what would it look like? And would you want to see, if seeing meant That you would have to believe in things like heaven And in Jesus and the saints, and all the prophets?

If I did see God’s face, does it mean I’d have to believe all the church stuff?  That’s an honest question - that’s a lot to shoulder just to ask to see God. People want the experience of an encounter with God, not a bunch of dogma.  To many folks, we’ve made church a big burden to take on.  Does it mean I’ll turn into an intolerant,  right wing, Bible thumper?  I just wanted to see God.  I just wanted the experience of God myself.  I want to know. 

You remember that I started down this train of thought as I was pondering about Jesus being baptized.  I mean, did he really have sins to wash away?  The way we think of Jesus being fully God, how could he sin?  Yet he was also fully human - we forget that part, or think its rather impossible.  Does Jesus’ holiness go way back to his birth and childhood?  Did he really not cry as a baby? That’s actually from the carol Silent Night, you know, not the Bible.  Did he never feel the urge to lie to his parents?  Did he never get carried away having fun and go too far? Is the only way he ever worried his parents that he stayed too long in the Temple?  How about as an adolescent - Did he never notice young woman?  Did he never resent his parents’ rules, and want to escape?  Did he never question what he was taught?  Did he just have all this deep wisdom without suffering for it, the way we do?  Was his whole life just easy and golden?  Up until he started being a prophet, that is….  Just why did he need to be baptized by his cousin John?

Did he do it just to try and say, “Hey, I’m one of you”?  Some people argue that was the reason.  I sure don’t have it figured out! 

I can imagine Jesus struggling with … or against… a growing desire to speak about what he was seeing around him -  the injustice, the greed, the cruelties person to person, the suffering… and struggling to put that next to the vision of God’s kindom that had pressed itself on him.  I can imagine a growing realization over his life that God was important to him, and that the Scriptures spoke a word, a vision of what God wanted - a vision that was a far cry from what he saw in the world.  I can imagine that he came to be baptized as a way of marking that he accepted his call, saying Yes to this new word God wanted  to speak through him.  Perhaps his baptism marks the time he steps into his role as Jesus the Christ.   

If God has a name, if God had a face, if God was one of us - yeah, those questions have been answered - Jesus was the name and the face, and one of us.  That’s the gospel in a nutshell.  If they had had buses back then, Jesus could have been the stranger on the bus making his way back home after after speaking at Temple.

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The more important question, as God walks among us, might be - would I recognize Jesus’ face? Or know his name?  This person speaking about God who seems to counter much that the world assumes as true?  Who even questions our received traditions? Who seems to speak a new word about God, yet a word that harkens back to the very experiences of God of our ancestors?  Who seems to know God intimately?  Might I wonder if this was God speaking?  Or just think he was weird? When he got in trouble with the religious authorities, would I back up from him?  You see,

God HAS walked among humans, and has had a face and name, and spoken face to face with people.  What do I now do with that? 

We might say, Oh, that was long ago, I wasn’t there, I have to trust that the folks who wrote about Jesus didn’t exaggerate, or didn’t make it up. 

Yes, there was a historical Jesus who lived and walked.  Evidently what he said and did awakened people to recognize God’s presence, and eventually change the world.  I mean, the church eventually changed the dating of time into the time before, and the Year of Our Lord, Anno Domini, or AD as we learned to write after historical dates.  (Nowadays people have changed it to Common Era and Before Common Era, CE and BCE)  Western history is intertwined with the story of the Christian church. 

But God isn’t chained to history, my friends.  God IS - God is alive now and all times.  God is in the present, always.  God lives in 2019, and will live in 2020, just a truly as God lived in year 30.  God is among us as truly now as at anytime, historical time or future time.  God’s Spirit is working among us as we worship here, as we shop at Food Lion or Costco, as we go out in the woods to hunt, as we work in our gardens, as we teach school, as we drop clothes at the dry cleaners, as we see clients or patients, as we meet in Session -- all the time.    “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, “ Isaiah says on behalf of God.  And Jesus told his disciples, ‘I will be with you, even to the end of the world.’ 

Jesus also told his followers that when they even gave someone a glass of water in his name -  that is, because of the love implanted in our hearts through Christ - that we are actually offering that water to Christ himself.  When did we see you naked and give you clothes?  When you do it to one of the least of these among you.  Christ is among us and walking this world every day - the question is, do we recognize the face and know his name?  Hundreds to times a day, there is a stranger on a bus making his way home from work….or a tired worker at the cash register…..or a young man in a hoodie….or a rude person in a car…..or a disabled person walking across the street….or a kid on a bike along the road….   They are also people made in the image and likeness of God, and Jesus said that our treatment of them is also our treatment of him. 

I’ll change tact a minute here.  When we are baptized in Christ, we are marking our life journey with a decision to follow Christ.  Those of us baptized as babies or toddlers have been the recipient of our parent’s promise to raise us to know and love Jesus Christ, and our church’s promise as well.  In the Presbyterian tradition, we affirmed our own faith commitment at our Confirmation. Some of us here, raised in a different tradition, responded to God and were baptized at an older age.  Baptism itself doesn’t have a magical quality of salvation - what baptism DOES is mark that time for us - mark us as claimed in the community, mark us as responding to God’s love.  Mark the time time that, like Jesus, we said yes to walking the walk.  That we confirm our agreement  with being that disciple, that follower, that person who sees God everywhere they look, that person who let’s that love of God grow in their heart so that compassion and kindness flow out of our actions to others more and more.  Baptism is an entrance rite, a marker, a declaration of solidarity and intention. 

Today, as we read of Jesus’ own baptism, which precedes his 40 days of solitude in the desert and his three-year ministry, may we remember and reaffirm that we, also, are baptized - may we again pledge ourselves, here at the beginning of a new year, to let God speak through us and use us, to live into that vision of the kindom of God that flowed through Jesus, and to serve God with our lives.  AMEN.