January 9, 2005 Isaiah 42:1-9, Matthew 3:13-17
A SAFE PLACE TO BE HUMAN
Peter Cartwright, the 19th-century Methodist circuit-riding evangelist, used to tell the story about the time he proclaimed in the midst of a sermon: "There's no such thing as a perfect man! Anyone who has ever known a perfect man, stand up!" No one stood, of course, and so he continued. "And there's no such thing as a perfect woman. Anyone who has ever known a perfect woman, stand up!" Whereupon a woman in the congregation did stand up. "Do you mean to tell me, sister," the preacher bellowed, "that you know an absolutely perfect woman?" "Well, I don't exactly know her," the woman replied. "She was my husband's first wife!"
That possible exception aside, Peter Cartwright was correct: there is no such thing as a perfect man or woman. Unless, of course, you want to consider Jesus as a candidate for that distinction.
In his short time on earth, there were a lot of opinions and impressions about him, and obviously not everyone thought he was perfect. Some thought he was a perfect fool, and he was accused of being a wine-bibber and a glutton, and a carouser with sinners. But the impact he had upon his followers was such that in succeeding generations, they were able to look back and say: Here is the perfect example of what it means to be human. Some parts of the church took it so far as to insist Jesus was so perfect that he was not really human at all, only appeared to be so, and was actually God in disguise. That view – known as docetism – was declared heresy. But even that did not end the church's embarrassment over the event reported in our scripture lesson for this day, the account of Jesus' baptism.
Now we baptize people all the time, mostly infants, and no one is embarrassed by it at all. Quite the contrary: there is always much joy and often a big family celebration, and video-tapes are sent to the relatives who could not be there. It is our way of celebrating new life, of welcoming a person into the world, into God's family, and into the care of the Church. It is a momentous time in that the parents and family and church all make promises about raising the child in a loving, Christian way, and the child is declared to be -- as was Jesus at his baptism -- a child of God. Nothing embarrassing about that -- rather we celebrate it and shout it from the rooftops.
But baptism didn't mean quite the same thing in Jesus' day. When John came as the voice crying in the wilderness and calling people to repentance, baptism had one purpose: the forgiveness of sins! The Kingdom is coming, he cried, but (as Frederick Buechner puts it) "if you thought it was going to be pink tea, you'd better think again. If you didn't shape up, God would give you the ax like and elm with the blight.... He said being a Jew wouldn't get you any more points than being a Hottentot, and one of his favorite ways of addressing his congregation was as a snake pit. Your only hope, he said, was to clean up your life as if your life depended upon it, which it did, and get baptized in a hurry as a sign that you had...."
Well, he attracted quite a crowd, and with great emotional fervor many were baptized -- they repented and then went in a new direction, living less sinfully than before. You'll find this scene repeated at any number of fundamentalist churches today, and at rallies and crusades, as repentant sinners come forward at the altar call, tears streaming down their faces, with the choir singing “Just as I am, without one plea”, to "receive Christ" and set out on new lives.
And there are countless preachers who will insist that unless you and I have just this sort of dramatic experience of coming face to face with our own sin, then no matter how good or religious or faithful we are, we will never be truly "saved". I even heard one say in a TV interview once that even Mother Teresa must have had this experience, and unless she did, all her good works would be powerless to save her soul from hell!
It's safe to say, I think, that this kind of approach turns most of us off, that our style of faith does not require this gut-wrenching sort of conversion. And that's why we -- along with the early church -- need to wrestle with this account in our scripture lesson. For into the midst of a scene such as this, with people responding emotionally to a very dramatic appeal, sinners having their past washed away in the Jordan, repenting, turning their lives around -- into the midst of this altar call walked Jesus -- the perfect, sinless man -- who said, "I, too, will be baptized!"
And so the question, and the embarrassment, for the early church and for us: Why was Jesus baptized? If baptism was for the forgiveness of sins, then for what sins did Jesus need forgiveness?
Now from what I understand of his life and teachings, it is clear to me that Jesus did not have an overwhelming sense of "private sin." In that he was quite different from John. To quote Frederick Buechner again, "Where John preached grim justice and pictured God as a steely-eyed thresher of grain, Jesus preached forgiving love and pictured God as the host at a marvelous party or a father who can't bring himself to throw his children out even when they spit in his eye. Where John said people had better save their skins before it was too late, Jesus said it was God who saved their skins, and even if you blew your whole bankroll on liquor and sex like the Prodigal Son, it still wasn't too late. Where John ate locusts and wild honey in the wilderness with the church crowd, Jesus ate what he felt like in Jerusalem with as sleazy a bunch as you could find. Where John crossed to the other side of the street if he saw any sinners headed his way, Jesus seems to have preferred their company to that of the W.T.C.U., the Stewardship Committee, and the World Council of Churches rolled into one. Where John baptized, Jesus healed."
You see, Jesus did not devote much energy to condemning sinners. His usual response to a sinner was, "Go and sin no more!" He befriended sinners, he ate with them, he asked them to join him as disciples. He transformed them.
His focus was not on personal, private sin, but on human community. Jesus came to the Jordan to be baptized along with his compatriots because he identified with them, shared fully with them the joys and struggles of being human. He participated fully in their dilemma, and felt a solidarity with them. And so he was baptized as a way of saying, "I am one of you. I am one with you!"
Now, one of the struggles I have with being human is that, no matter how hard I try, I am still a sinner! I don't mean this in the sense of how good or bad I am personally -- Lord knows, I make my share of mistakes, and my self-centeredness often gets in the way of my call to love others -- but even if I got it all together and lived an exemplary life, I'd still be a sinner because I am part of the human family. We're all in this together, bound together, as the Bible puts it, in the bundle of life. And don't think that you can escape this by moving to a cabin in the middle of West Virginia, living as a hermit and communicating with the outside world only by Email!
But because we are bound together, there is no way to avoid being a sinner. For example, whenever you drive down the street on the way to church, you pollute the environment, less if you drive a Prius, more if it’s an SUV. Whenever you sit in church, you are warmed or cooled by air conditioned by the burning of non-renewable fossil fuel. The bulletin is printed on paper that is yet to be recycled. If, during the fellowship time, you have a cup of coffee, at least it’s now fair-trade coffee, but still served in disposable paper cups. If, after church, you stop for some fast food, you may be eating beef fed by grain grown on ground that was recently a rain forest, but no more, and now more species have gone extinct. I don't mean to make an argument here for not attending church, but simply to make the point that our daily lives involve us in a lot of unavoidable less than perfect -- even sinful -- actions.
I mention these things not to make you all feel guilty, or to keep you from church, or to raise up a new set of "Thou shalt nots" or be negative -- but to say that in this world we are all bound together, as perhaps never before - related to each other at least by this fact of corporate sin -- the things we participate in by virtue of being part of the human community. And Jesus' being baptized, is to me at least, a powerful symbol for us of his solidarity with us in our humanness. We're all in this together: you, me, the transient down the street, the saint who runs the homeless shelter, the cop and the robber, the doctor and the dope addict, the prisoner of war and his jailer. And Jesus is with us too, wrestling along side us in our human condition, baptized with us into the human family, helping us in our struggle to find a way through it all, to a place of healing and wholeness and salvation.
That brings to mind a phrase I found scrawled on a note pad, tucked deep in the file folder where I store sermon ideas -- "a safe place to be human." I don't remember where I heard it or who first said it, but I wrote it down because it struck me as something we need: "a safe place to be human."
That would be a place where you can be yourself, where you don't have to cover up any imperfections, where you can face and accept the parts of yourself that maybe you'd rather not face -- and allow the same for others. It would be a place where you would not be afraid to admit your failures and shortcomings, and just let it all hang out. Sounds like I'm describing the shower -- but I'm thinking more of a family or perhaps even the church. A place where you learn that others accept you, and God accepts you, and you learn to accept yourself, and grow on from there.
Is it possible the church might be such a place? Recently I came across these words from Eugene Peterson:
"When Christian believers gather in churches, everything that can go wrong sooner or later does. Outsiders, on observing this, conclude that there is nothing to the religion business except, perhaps, business -- and dishonest business at that... Insiders see it differently. Just as a hospital collects the sick under one roof and labels them as such, the church collects sinners. Many of the people outside the hospital are every bit as sick as the ones inside, but their illnesses are either undiagnosed or disguised. It's similar with sinners outside the church.... So Christian churches are not, as a rule, model communities of good behavior. They are, rather, places where human misbehavior is brought out in the open, faced and dealt with."
You see, we are not a group of perfect people, but rather pilgrim people, with whom God is not yet finished, people of the comma (as aI said a couple of weeks ago), bound together in our baptism, doing the best that we can.
That's why we always have a confession of sin near the beginning of our worship service. It's a way of facing ourselves, of clearing away the rubbish, but doing it together. In a given week you may not feel your specific sin was mentioned in the prayer (if you have one, let me know and we'll include it!), or you may feel you're not as bad as the prayer makes you out to be, but that's not really the issue. The important thing is that we have confessed together, and instead of being judged harshly for it, or brow-beaten with it, we are instead accepted by God and each other, and we are forgiven. We have been told: This is a safe place to be human! Now, go and sin no more! It should be a moment of high drama in worship, not just a perfunctory line in the bulletin that we have to get through before we can greet our friends. It is that time when we hear, "I'm not okay, you're not okay, but that's okay. It's all right to be human. God loves you just as you are, even if God doesn't want you to remain just as you are. Now pick up and grow on from here." I often think that God is more concerned that we learn by trial and error than that we memorize the rules and make no mistakes. That's what human freedom is all about -- beginning where we are and moving on to where we want to be.
Because the church is a human institution, we do not always live up to the ideal of being a safe place to be human. Too many do not really accept themselves or others in the way that Jesus did. I have read speculation that 12-step groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, may replace the church in this new century. In fact it may already be happening. Many of the folks in 12-step groups that I know are some of the most genuine, honest, hang-up free, well-adjusted, mentally healthy people I have met. They laugh easily, mostly at themselves; they are generous with their time and their money. Not that they are perfect, or without problems. Many of them face tremendous struggles to remain sober or drug-free. But they seem to know how to let their authentic humanness show through. I suspect this is pretty much due to the fact that on a regular basis -- at least once a week -- they go to a safe place to be human -- a meeting -- and stand up and confess in front of God and all the people: "Hi! I'm Zac and I'm an alcoholic!" And anywhere from two to two hundred voices thunder back the Assurance of Forgiveness, "Hi, Zac!" They tell their story, their share their struggles, and receive tremendous support and encouragement. They reach out and offer the same to others who open themselves.
Of course there's a risk here. AA is safe and you know you'll be accepted and not condemned -- held accountable, yes, but not condemned. But not every place is so safe, and we can't go around with our gut feelings hanging out all the time. Yet we all need some place, a place where we can be ourselves, imperfections and all, and by accepting them, move closer to that place of grace that God covets for us all. I simply plead that perhaps the church could once again be such a place, a safe place to be human.
Jesus came down to the Jordan to be baptized, and thereby revealed that not only was he God's chosen one, but that he was truly and authentically human, joining us all on our human journey. That's why he was baptized, and that's why I follow him also as Savior and Sovereign!
