Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
[Spoken word poetry is a style of entertainment involving performance-based poetry—which means poetry that is written to be performed rather than to be read on the page. It focuses on word play and story-telling. Here in the United States it has roots in the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights movement of the 1960s and remains a popular form of storytelling and protest.
Because I love word play and I love preaching, today’s sermon will be an attempt to preach in this art form. I have done this only once before, and it was with the same story—the story of Jesus’ baptism. So part of this sermon is from an old one but much of it is new, and all of it is in the style of spoken word poetry. I hope this different way of preaching will help us experience a different way of hearing a story we know so well.]
Two weeks ago, we gathered here to celebrate the birth of a baby in a manger—
a perfect little stranger who somehow brought danger
to the very ones God longed to save.
Then we heard the story of the Magi, those wise guys with stars in their eyes
and strange gifts in their bags,
men who asked for directions and still arrived late.
But this was no ordinary baby shower.
This baby taught us that power breeds fragile egos
and it’s the powerless who hear heaven’s song.
Today we come and the baby in a manger is all grown up
and come to be baptized
and of course I want to know . . .
You know me by now,
know my question will always be why;
for I do not buy easy answers any more than I take the easy road.
I do not buy easy answers any more.
It’s not my style, I was recently told.
I’ve been told I walk a slippery slope.
I’ve been told that by not accepting this book lock, stock, and barrel,
that I am barreling down the road to hell
and how in hell could I pick and choose what is true?
It is true I walk a slippery slope and I have to admit
I like it.
I like the sudden drops and the way your breath catches when the ground gives way
to a truth you didn’t know was there.
I like the slippery slope for I trust the mountain beneath the snow.
So beneath the snow of wisdom’s cry, I bring my offering of why.
Why would the Son of God need to be baptized?
In this case Why must wait for Who or whom to be exact,
for who, exactly, was Jesus?
Was Jesus both human and divine,
as church tradition teaches,
both God and “a wretch like me?”
We are told he was without sin.
Is that because there is no room for brokenness in the wholeness that is God?
If so, is there no room for me?
Or is it because he was tempted, like me, and said “no,” like me . . . occasionally.
I’d rather believe that he was perfect because he was divine.
Of course, I want to be perfect.
No, if truth be told, I just want to be right, which is far from perfect.
But I’d rather believe Jesus was perfectly divine than perfectly human and still . . . perfect.
It lets me off the hook just a bit, frees me from the tyranny of the perfectionist inside.
But I am back to the question:
Was Jesus both human and divine?
And how do you predict when they contradict?
How could he be infinite and impotent?
How could Jesus be God if broken
and how could he be human if not?
How could Jesus be God if lonely, like me
helpless, like me,
be God and be . . . like . . . me?
I can’t comprehend the mystery the church fathers proclaimed.
I can’t even say in all truth that I believe it is truth
for I can’t understand it
and my rational mind argues with irrational fervor.
I try to sit in the mystery, but even with my slippery slope sliding
I long for somewhere solid to land.
Call me a heretic if you wish—I’ve been called worse than this—
but I know which I choose to believe.
If I cannot fathom Jesus as God and man,
and I lack the faith in our fathers to get it right,
then I pick the human in this theological fight.
If Jesus lived this extraordinary life, I want to believe he wasn’t a ringer.
If Jesus loved without limit and welcomed without question,
I want to believe it’s because he saw people as they were, on earth,
not as he had known them
bathed in starlight before their birth.
I want Jesus to be human because then I don’t get off the hook
when it’s my turn to welcome and to love.
Either way, Jesus’ baptism wasn’t for cleansing sin.
This is why the baptism we do here does not save a child’s soul—
we believe that child has no sin, is already whole.
It is not rescue but welcome that we offer.
Welcome to the world, little one so fresh from heaven.
Welcome to the community, the people of God,
for being with the people of God eases the longing
we all endure and forget—
the longing for the unity with all creation we knew so clearly
before our first breath.
Welcome to the church, where we strive to shine a mirror of heaven’s light.
To everyone we offer the welcome of the water.
Maybe this is why Jesus came to be baptized.
Maybe he came because he couldn’t stay away from the water.
Maybe the water, fluid and free like time-less-ness and wind,
reminded him of home—
the home he shared with God, with the saints,
maybe even with you and me in our purest state.
Maybe he came because the water washing over him felt like being wrapped in a blanket of stars
and getting a goodnight kiss from God.
Or maybe he had never known God’s kiss.
Maybe he was like me, sometimes,
unsure of his calling, the voices calling in different directions,
pulled apart by demands and commands
and understand I speak only for myself.
But if Jesus was like me, it could be.
It could be that doing his father’s business, which seemed so clear at twelve in the temple,
turned murky as he matured.
Maybe he came to the water in search of answers,
in search of his cousin who seemed to know who Jesus was
even if Jesus didn’t.
We all need to be seen as we are and as we may become
especially when we don’t feel becoming.
Did he get what he needed?
The four gospels all tell the story but not the same story,
for in Luke nothing happened right away.
In the others, “just as he came out of the water” he heard the voice,
but not in Luke.
In Luke Jesus got silence.
I know the feeling.
I have been baptized in whys and come up gasping
for air and affirmation
only to see a sky untorn,
to hear nothing but my frantic breath
echo on the distant shore.
I have walked away, dripping with water and sarcasm
(God must be too busy finding parking places or rigging football games).
But Jesus didn’t.
Didn’t walk away.
Didn’t flee the scene of anticlimactic action.
Didn’t give up on God or himself so maybe there’s hope for me.
Instead Jesus prayed.
Jesus sought relationship with the one he couldn’t see or hear
and then the heaven was opened
and then the dove came down
and the voice came at last: you are my beloved.
Is that the lesson for you and me?
To pray when we can’t see the dove, can’t feel the love?
I don’t love this answer because it seems simplistic
for haven’t we all prayed our voices out,
become hoarse with rage and grief
when prayers brought no relief?
Prayer is simple and hard and hardly ever easy
no matter how many times we say “thy will be done”
we mean my, not thy,
and why shouldn’t we?
But maybe the lesson isn’t in the outcome.
Maybe the answered prayer we seek is to be sought
and named and claimed.
You are my beloved.
And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that is why we come again and again to this place—
this table, this font, this sacred space
made sacred not by golden cross but by sharing loss.
We come because we need to hear, again and again,
that we are claimed and loved and pleasing . . .
And maybe it’s enough to know
that Jesus didn’t come to the water that day to walk on it
but to wade into it,
to be immersed in life with us,
to make an offering of himself,
to answer “a divine calling to be fully human.”[1]
The Divine is calling us today.
Come to the water.
Pray out your hearts.
You are my beloved.
So wade in the water.
Wade in the water, children.
That’s where Christ is waiting.
Amen.
Copyright 2016 Cindy L. Maddox
[1] bloomingcactus.com