SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, DUNEDIN
BAPTISM of CHRIST (January 12th) 2020
READINGS:
Isaiah 42: 1-9
Psalm 29
Acts 10: 34-43
Matthew 3: 13-17
You may have heard Philip Yancey’s story of a prostitute who sought help from a community worker. I was once accused of “swearing in church” because I mentioned a prostitute in a sermon. As well as noting that the scriptures frequently refer to the world’s oldest profession, it is worth noting that the alleged murder of a sex worker in Christchurch less than a fortnight reminds us that women – and some men – of the streets are amongst the most vulnerable citizens in our society. The vulnerable are precisely the people amongst whom Jesus called us to proclaim God’s redeeming love.
Which is why Yancey told the story.[1] The woman approached a community worker, seeking help to feed her drug habit. She did so despite the atrocities she was perpetrating not only on herself but on her two-year-old daughter. Details need not detain us: the issue is that, when asked if she had considered seeking help from a church the woman was horrified: “Church? Why would I go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d make me feel worse.” Yancey contrasts the woman’s fear of the judgement she would receive with the story of the Christ who hangs out with prostitutes, and (from another hated wing of first century society), tax collectors.
Paradoxically the reprimand I received from the parishioner – a reprimand formally sent in a complaint to my then bishop (long ago and far away!) – served to reinforce the sad message that the fears of the dejected woman of the streets was spot on the mark. We, the Body of Christ, are far from conspicuous for our manaakitanga, our welcome, our hospitality. Not that we are utterly devoid of compassion. But it is not the hallmark of the Christian community in the view of our wider community.
When Jesus came to his kinsman John, he joined the apparent swathes who were seeking, as John put it, “forgiveness of sins.” Craig Keener notes, “Jesus relinquishes his rightful honor [in order to] to embrace others’ shame.”[2] In the verse before our passage Matthew has made clear that John’s baptism was secondary to that which the younger man would bring. Jesus himself baptised no-one, and the church interpreted its own baptismal mission as fulfilling John’s expectations that Jesus would bring a greater baptism of fire and Spirit. But what was a nice, and traditionally seen-to-be sinless bloke like Jesus doing in a place like a baptismal scene?
In short, he was hanging out with sinners. There was nothing “ersatz,” nothing substitute about the incarnation. Jesus dived into the whole experience of being human. Jesus – and I will make no secret of my very conservative and traditional view of the incarnation and subsequent events – dived into the very deepest troughs of human experience. Jesus dived into the life experience of a woman working the streets or a general ordering missile strikes or a nonchalant passer-by ignoring the plight of his or her neighbour. Jesus dived deep into the void of a British poet whose blog I read this week, a young transgender poet and scholar who stumbled into faith despite the clergy he encountered at a local church, clergy who publicly announced their opposition to moves to ensure LBGTQI were welcome in church.[3] Jesus dived deep into the experience of you or me and so much more.
In ancient iconography the waters from which Jesus emerged were full of symbols of the human pain he left behind. In a modern icon I have seen, the Jordan from which Jesus emerges is full of syringes and guns and condoms and dumped cars and other flotsam and jetsam of our being struggling humans.
We the bearers of Christ are called to walk in those still-wet footprints of our Lord. We are called to bear and proclaim the one who will not, in Isaiah’s prophesy, break a bruised reed or quench a dimly burning wick. We are called to be the skipping ones, showing by our lives the possibilities of joy (but of justice, too), possibilities of hope even as oceans warm and forests burn. We are called to be bearers of the one who God called “The One in whom I am well pleased.” We are called to be his hands and feet and ears and he emerges from waters of grot into green pastures of hope.
How we do that, of course, is a complex question. Can I sing? Then sing in the spirit-enflamed hope that a life might be touched. Can I feed the hungry? Then serve food in the spirit-enflamed hope that a life might be touched. Can administer? I certainly can’t, but if I could then administer in the spirit-enflamed hope that a life might be touched. Can I cook and sew, make flowers grow, read and teach and listen and help a person across the street, can I build houses like Jimmy Carter or fight fires or talk to strangers from different socio-economic and racial cultures?
Can I find ways to say “glory” in today’s world? Can I say that, as Hopkins put it, “the whole world is charged with the glory of God,” when it seems instead that the whole world is deadened by terminal idiocies and selfishnesses and futurelessness? Can I be a walking advertisement for the one whose voice splits the terebinth trees (and makes last Monday’s winds become as if no more than a gentle zephyr or summer breeze), yet who cares for the sparrow that falls? Can I be the hands and feet of the one who dares tread the waters of baptism even when his holiness does not belong there?
The answer is “no.” Or it is unless I open myself up to the nudging of the God who in Christ enters into the waters of human grot. The answer is no, too, unless I set aside my intellectual doubts and let myself be exposed to the possibilities of faith.
Can God be baptised? Intellect mocks, of course, but intellect does not have the final word. Do I dare have faith that this same Christ of the gospel-stories, of baptisms and parables and healings and so much more, is one who “camest from above”? Do I dare trust that as such he, and we with him, enter into the inexplicable and inextinguishable light of the first Easter?
If we do we might already be bearers of light, not darkness, of invitation not rejection. Our prayer must be that we can be hope, be light, be glory-bringers when the woman of Yancey’s recollection, who had been taught to fear the judgement of Christians, crosses our path too. For we too have in Christ crossed the Jordan and left the grot behind.
1 comment:
Thank you, content and delivery are everything - the power, the launch and so the impact to disperse throughout the week. Christine Tuckey
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