Augustana Lutheran Church
8 January 2017 + Baptism of Our Lord
Matthew 3.13-17
I confess that, as of late, I have become obsessed with Snapchat. I normally consider myself to be pretty tech- and social media-savvy, but it was only a few months ago that a friend introduced me to this app. I have quickly become something of an expert.
If you’re not familiar with Snapchat, it’s essentially designed to share photos and short videos with friends, but the content shared only lasts for up to ten seconds before disappearing. I think it’s a brilliant concept. Suddenly I can post all the selfies, pictures of food, or feline photo shoots I want—with no lasting evidence to suggest that I might be a self-absorbed, gluttonous, crazy cat person.
While “snaps,” as the messages are called, can be sent to particular friends, you can also post them to a feature of the app called “My Story,” which anyone can view for up to 24 hours—the idea being that your “Story” would capture your day over a handful of individual moments.
As a preacher, I can’t help but imagine the idea of stories through a theological lens. In pastoral care classes in seminary and one-on-one conversations with many of you, I have come to greatly value stories as windows into what makes a person who they are and what motivates them to do what they do.
Stories are crucial to human existence. They’re the ways we order and make sense of our lives. We tell stories about when we were born, where we grew up, when we fall in love, when loved ones die. We tell stories to understand our origins and to give us a sense of meaning and purpose.
Scripture too is full of stories. Whether or not these stories are literal accounts of history doesn’t make them any less true—true in the sense of what Marcus Borg has called their “more-than-literal” meaning. In other words, the stories of our faith are essentially metaphors that convey some truth about who God is and who we are.
There’s the story of creation, fall, and promise that shows us a God who yearns to be in relationship with human beings, whatever the cost. Or the story of the exodus, that speaks of God’s desire to liberate those who suffer oppression.
More recently in our church year, we heard the story of the nativity, the moment when God became one of us in Jesus of Nazareth, as an act of solidarity with human beings.
Regrettably, the gospels offer us precious little in the way of the childhood stories of Jesus, aside from his circumcision and that unfortunate episode where Mary and Joseph lose their pre-teen son in downtown Jerusalem.
Instead, in the gospel of Matthew, we go immediately from Jesus’s birth and John the Baptist’s preaching to the first story of an adult Jesus, just before he begins his public ministry: his baptism.
Wait a minute, though: Wasn’t the whole point of John’s ministry of offering baptism to his followers for the sake of repentance and the forgiveness of sin? It’s no wonder, then, that we get this skirmish between John and Jesus. I need to be baptized by you, John begins, and do you come to me? It seems a little backwards, doesn’t it?
Let it be so now, or perhaps truer to the original Greek text: Permit it at this specific time, for this specific purpose.
Like the other stories of our faith tradition recorded in the pages of scripture, this episode too tells us something more-than-literal. Of course, Jesus is not in need of forgiveness, but he comes to John “to fulfill all righteousness,” righteousness as an act of discipleship, a way of participating in the unfolding of the reign of God and the message that Jesus came to share.
So Jesus’s baptism is at once drastically unlike our own baptisms—I don’t remember any doves or voices from heaven at mine—but it also tells us something familiar about the life of faith. To paraphrase biblical scholar Karoline Lewis, baptism assumes wilderness.
Immediately after his baptism follows the other familiar story of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness. When Lewis suggests that baptism assumes wilderness, she reminds us that being in the wilderness is part of what it means to be God’s people (just look at the ancient Israelites in the desert!). But I would even go so far as to say that wilderness is part of what it means to be human.
After all, there seems to be plenty of wilderness to journey through in this life. I was sitting in the chapel at Trinity Cathedral just this Friday when my phone buzzed with a news alert of yet another mass shooting at the airport in Fort Lauderdale.
Wilderness, though, is often a lot more personal: grieving the death of a loved one, coping with the aftermath of a breakup or divorce, living in the uncertainty of unemployment or underemployment. Wilderness assumes that there will be ups and downs and more downs in the life of faith, but wilderness also assumes company.
There’s a reason that baptism takes place in the midst of the Sunday assembly. In turn, the pastor asks parents, sponsors, and the whole congregation if they promise to help, nurture, and support the baptized as they grow in the Christian faith and life.
Yes, in baptism, we are named and claimed as God’s own, but we are also incorporated into the body of Christ, made visible in our local congregations. Baptism assumes wilderness, but it also means that we never have to go through that wilderness alone.
In just over a week, we as a congregation will embark on a book study, exploring together the meaning of our faith in order to be better equipped at telling our stories—our stories which begin in baptism but continue to unfold over our lives as people of God. Telling our stories offers us the chance not only to reflect on our own lives but also to offer strength and presence to others. It’s an act of discipleship and of community, as we live out God’s reign of love and justice.
Like the stories of scripture, our own stories are also sacred, revealing the ways that God continues to speak through us to a broken world.
Pastor Josh Evans 