January 8, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Contrary to what I said on Christmas Sunday, merely two weeks ago, Christmas is over. I have taken down all the decorations and put away the Advent candles until later this year. Our great celebration of the Incarnation is ended. And the bulletin reads, the First Sunday after Epiphany and the Baptism of Our Lord. We no longer have the special bulletins.
God has become flesh and moved in with us. While Emmanuel, the Savior of the world and king of kings, is among us, is this what we expected? We’ve moved from Advent expectation to Christmas celebration to Epiphany surprise. We reached a grand highlight of the Christian year that even the rest of the world was celebrating. But now what?
There’s a pastor whose daughter was exhibiting some almost curious interest in things religious. She was unnaturally quiet, playing alone in her room. So he got up and peeked in and heard the toilet flushing repeatedly in her bathroom. He came closer and heard her repeating the words, “ baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and Down the Hole You Go.” Then she flushed the toilet. The child was somewhat confused about “baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
Or was she? I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and Down the Hole You Go.” Is this what we expect after Christmas?
John the Baptist
As quickly as two weeks have passed, we are now remembering Jesus’ baptism by his cousin, John the Baptizer. You can almost hear the excitement in John’s voice as he proudly announced, I’ve baptized you with water but just you wait; coming after me is one who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. I may be a fairly popular preacher but there’s one coming for whom I’m not even worthy to reach down and tie his shoelaces.”
And when Jesus shows up on the banks of the Jordan River, John was a bit surprised to hear Jesus say, “Baptize me too.” John protests, “I’m not worthy to tie your shoelaces. You ought to be baptizing me! You’re the great Messiah whom we’ve been so long awaiting!” John was not expecting to baptize Jesus.
When Jesus was coming up out of the water, this divine pronouncement was heard, “Here, being baptized by John is the very Son of God.” And just when we are expecting the descending Spirit to lift Jesus upon the throne up at the palace, the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. There he meets Satan who tests and tempts Jesus for forty days and nights.
We would have expected that John the Baptist, the first person to proclaim the good news that Jesus is God’s Son, to have some important position in the palace, but in just a few chapters into the Gospel of John, John’s head will be hacked off on a whim of the king and served up on a plate at a party.
Throughout the four weeks of Advent, we said we wanted to meet God in a more intimate and meaningful way than ever before. Some of us read and participated in Advent Bible Studies while others came to worship faithfully and prayed earnestly. But when God became present as Jesus of Nazareth, it wasn’t what we were expecting.
Your Baptism
So what were you expecting to happen when you made your way to church today? On the basis of what you know about what happened to Jesus and his journey, what about you? What about all of us? What are you expecting to happen today?
In your baptism, you were claimed, enlisted, invited to go with Jesus on a journey. The journey begins in baptism. Just as Jesus’ ministry began with his baptism, yours did too.
Did you know that most people met Jesus on the road? When John the Baptist introduced Jesus to the world, he quoted the prophet Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low…and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” In Jesus, God worked a highway construction project, making a road straight through the desert to an enslaved humanity.
Most of us think that we believe in God based on our intellect, our morality, our institutions, our art and architecture, but in Jesus Christ, God slipped in among us. The first name for the church was simply “The Way;” not our way to God but rather God’s way to us. If we expect to follow Jesus, our journey begins with baptism.
There are fewer people in church today than were here on Christmas Eve or Christmas Sunday. People love to come to church on Christmas Eve because everything is so warm and fuzzy and spiritual and wonderful. But you are here a couple of Sundays after that, as we move into the ordinariness of January, into the chilly and long nights of winter. And while you know and expected that, you are here.
You made your way to church today because you might be expecting something more than the spiritual highs and mountaintop experiences of the yuletide season. But we all know that eventually you have to come down off the mountaintop and to resume life down in the valley. Maybe you are looking for some solutions to everyday problems. Maybe you have problems with the kids or with your spouse or with your boss. So today you made your way and came to church hoping to find some meaning of hope to your problems.
While our Christian faith can be a thoroughly emotional experience, it’s not limited to emotions and feelings. There are times when habits, rituals and persistence carry us through when we are bereft of feelings. Sometimes when we are not too sure what we believe in, attending church and experiencing the rituals would begin us on the path to believing once again. When we practice the rituals and being persistent with our faithful practices, the problems that we might have in our lives can be resolved.
There are times when all of us might not like being with God, the church and even with other Christians. But when we come to church and participate in worship and all of the different activities of fellowship, learning, and service projects, we begin to talk with God and we put ourselves in situations in which God can talk with you. At those times when you don’t feel like being a Christian, the church offers you different ways to keep you at the Christian faith simply out of habit. Perhaps this is the reason why you came to church today.
Our faith rests upon the actions of a loving God toward us, rather than on something done or believed by us. It’s like how God first created the world:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
We are created not by our efforts or doing but entirely God’s doing. Our faith comes from God first loving us.
When you join the church, we strip you down, hold you under the water, half drown you, and pull you up sticky and dripping like a newborn baby. Christian discipleship begins with this obedient act by you. You can’t do baptism to yourself; you must be baptized. Baptism is a ritual that is done to you and for you, not by you. You must submit to the offer of grace from God through the church. Thus baptism gathers up, in its very form, the peculiar nature of the Christian faith as service, submission to Christ, solidarity with sinners, learning how to receive a gift from God that you don’t earn or deserve, and all the rest. You may have come to church today without any expectations at all—but God’s expectation for you is to be faithful to your baptism.
Down in the Valley
John the Baptist stands before Jesus, the Christ, and he sees him as the long-awaited Messiah. But when Jesus, the Son of God, Savior of the world, stoops down, wades in the water, takes on solidarity with sinners, well, it wasn’t what John expected.
“What are you—Son of God—doing being baptized by me?” John asks.
After all the excitement of Christmas, with the angels and miraculous birth and all, this may seem a rather simple way to begin our New Year with God—standing knee-deep in muddy Jordan River water, taking a bath, listening to a strange, wild figure like John the Baptist. It’s not what we expected.
But this can be seen as one of the great aspects of our faith. Christianity is a faith not just for the mountaintops, but also for the valleys. Most of us don’t live in a world of perpetual spiritual bliss and happiness; we live down in some valley, where there is work to be done, laundry to be washed and folded, baths to be taken, and troubling realities need to be confronted. And here’s the good news: that’s where our God meets us.
In your baptism, God meets you, embraces you, comes out to you, and commissions you to be about God’s work. All of our baptisms take their meaning from Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. For Jesus, a voice came from heaven and said, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Don’t we all want to have God, our Father say that he is pleased with us too?
What are you expecting to happen to you today? Now is the time when we have our expectations for God rearranged, when we discover, to our surprise and delight that our God didn’t wait for us to come to him; our God came to us. Jesus meets you where you are. He comes not to be served but to serve and invites you to walk that way with him. He comes so that you too can be called sons and daughters, the beloved; with you God is very pleased.
Enough for Jesus
Over the Christmas season, we have definitely experienced some high times of spiritual fellowship and divine experience. I am still telling people how we had standing room only attendance on Christmas Sunday. But one of the great glories of our faith is also this ability to ask the question, “What are we to expect now?”
There’s someone at our church who said in the middle of a discussion of some deep theological question raised during our Advent Bible study group meeting, “Well, most of this is beyond my comprehension. I’m a rather simple disciple. I don’t know a lot of theology. I don’t comprehend much of the Bible. So I just try to be a faithful a follower of Jesus as I can where I am in my own little way. And it seems to be enough for Jesus.”
As someone who does know a good bit of theology, having given much of my life to understanding scripture, I think that this person got the Christian faith just about right. Is what you are doing with your life enough for Jesus?
As all of us begin the 2012 New Year with an entire new year of calendar pages to fill and flip over, let us be open to what God will do to us rather than what we might think we can do for ourselves. Let us come to expect surprises and delight to happen to us since we don’t ever baptize ourselves but in the grace and love of God, baptism is a ritual that is done to you just like John the Baptist baptized Jesus at the banks of the Jordan River.
The presence of God is not limited to those moments when we are consciously aware of God’s presence with us. God is with us whether or not we feel or are consciously aware of God’s presence with us.
The great martyr bishop, Oscar Romero in The Violence of Love said, “God is not failing us when we don’t feel his presence. God exists, and he exists even more the farther you feel from him. When you feel the anguished desire for God to come near you because you don’t feel him present, then God is very close to your anguish. God is always our Father and never forsakes us, and we are closer to him than we think.”
Maybe the little girl who is fascinated with religious rituals is profoundly right; we are baptized “in the name of the Father, the Son and Down the Hole You Go” because it is there where we are meeting Jesus in the valley of life. It is down in this hole of life when we truly meet God.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, we give praise to you for your daring, risky, loving advent among us. You came and stood beside us. While we were sinners, you still came to us and blessed us with your presence. Help us to not only joyfully praise you for your Epiphany among us, but also to follow you daily in your walk before us. Give us courage to not only love you but also to lovingly obey you. Empower us to serve God and our neighbor in all that we do in the coming year. We are bold to ask this in your holy and loving name. Amen.