Scripture: Psalm 131; Isaiah 30:15-18; Mark 1:1-11.
Well, so it’s a new year, a new millennium…at least for those of us who think in terms of the western Christian calendar and who don’t care that for Jews this is the year 5761, for Moslems 1421, and that it’s something else for the Chinese and again something else for other religions or ethnic groups, and who don’t care that until 1582 the new year was celebrated on March 25, not January 1, and who don’t care that the best estimates on the date of Christ’s birth are something around 6 B.C., so that 2000 years from the date Christ was born may have taken place 6 years ago. O.K., so we have made it all up. In a way we’re just pretending it’s a new millennium…pretending that it’s even a New Year. But it’s convenient. It gives us a chance to do an assessment of where we have been, to lay down or lay aside some of what has been, and to turn toward the future with…well, with what? With great anticipation? With optimism? With new energy? With foreboding, or resignation, or cynicism? Or most likely with some combination of all of the above and a bunch of other things as well.
There’s a saying that is popular among many Christians that says in effect that we don’t know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future. As with all sound bite wisdom, we probably shouldn’t ask this saying to bear too much weight. This is not a philosophy of life or a theological world view. It’s not a profound or original insight. At best, it’s a well-turned phrase that may, if we don’t let it do our thinking for us, turn us in a helpful direction.
A year ago last fall, when I was still in Chicago, I was attending a meeting at Trinity U.C.C., a predominantly African American, 10,000-member church on Chicago’s south side. On tables throughout the church, there was a printed message from the pastor, Jeremiah Wright, that addressed all the millennium hype that was considerable in Chicago at that time. Everyone from end-of-the-world preachers to public radio was discussing what would happen when 1999 turned to 2000. What Dr. Wright essentially said in his pastoral letter was first of all, as I was just trying to point out, that all our ways of measuring time are just human constructs and that from God’s vantage point there was no such thing as the millennium, and therefore that Christians need to keep their bearings, focusing not on the end of the millennium but on bringing good news to the oppressed, binding up the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to comfort those who mourn, and repair ruined cities—that all this is to proclaim, as Isaiah said, a year of the Lord’s favor, and that this was the only kind of year that mattered to God.
It struck me as a good, and necessary, message then, and I recall it now because it still rings true to me as I try to get my bearings and focus myself at the beginning of a new year. In this regard I have a few post-Christmas/Epiphany/New Year kinds of thoughts today. Some of them are maybe of a more analytical nature, some of them more personal. Both are rooted in the gospel reading about Jesus’ baptism.
I’ve always felt a resonance or responsiveness in my soul with the story of Jesus’ baptism. I’m not sure exactly why, and I find I don’t have quite the right words for it, but it has something to do with the ordinariness of it all. As I see and feel this story, Jesus is beginning his ministry without any fanfare, without bands, press releases, announcements, pronouncements, inaugural ceremonies, claims, promises, or predictions. He’s doing what hundreds, maybe thousands, of other people at the time were doing: wading down into the waters of the Jordan to be baptized by John.
I know there are other parts of the story. I know John recognizes Jesus as the messiah and shines a light on him from that direction. And then there is a light from heaven, or at least a voice and a dove that confirms Jesus as the messiah. And the church collectively has made much of this over the years. This is one of the stories traditionally read at epiphany, which means revealing. This is supposedly one of the stories that reveals Jesus for who he really is, the messiah. And we are to be impressed with his messiahship and even impressed that this messiah would submit to a baptism he did not need, which further shows his wonder and his glory. The church wraps the story in its theology about Jesus, and I begin to hear trumpets blaring in the background. But Jesus hype is not what this story is about. At least that’s not how the story touches me.
There is a literal down-to-earthness about this story that touches me in something of the same way the Psalmist does who begins Psalm 131 by saying “You know, God, my heart is not lifted up.” Or Isaiah when he says, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” There is a modesty in these approaches to faith that appeals to me—not modesty in the sense of self-effacing, but modesty in the sense of not making too many claims and of shying away from pretense.
That’s the way I see Jesus at his baptism, not so much laying claim to his messiahship, but laying claim to his humanity. In fact what I understand Jesus to be doing at his baptism is setting the tone for the rest of his ministry. It will be the essence of what Jesus will be about, the essence of who he is will be to refuse to recognize any absolute distinctions between people—between believers and non-believers, between the ritually clean and the unclean, the righteous and the sinners, the good guys and the bad guys, even between messiahs and non-messiahs.
There were all sorts of people who gathered around John the Baptist, I’m sure. Some, no doubt, stayed on the shore because they were above it all, didn’t need what John was offering, were already counting themselves among the pure, the blessed, the orthodox, the righteous, the religious, the role models, the redeemed. The rest, those who came to be baptized, were those whose self-esteem was not quite so well developed. Jesus washed in the water with them, just as he was later to break bread with tax collectors and sinners. Already, without a single word, Jesus was beginning to build a new kind of community, based not on the things that divide us from others, but on the threads of our common humanity.
This leads me back to those post-Christmas/Epiphany/New Year thoughts that I was talking about. One of those thoughts was occasioned partly by something I read in a magazine recently. I don’t even remember now where it was from or who said it, but the writer was saying that although he didn’t want to limit in any way the freedom or the rights of other religions, he felt that Christians who believed their religion to be true could not help but feel that other religions were gravely deficient in their beliefs.
Sometimes when I encounter statements like this I turn the page quickly and just try to find something more worthwhile to read. Sometimes, this time, I let it get to me. Not only does a statement like this not represent my attitude as a Christian. It represents an attitude that, if I could I would just wish completely out of existence. The task of Christianity, of Christians, is not to claim the superiority of Christianity in our own eyes or in God’s eyes, not to claim a position of dominance or preference or privilege culturally or politically, not to assert or defend any notion that this is a Christian nation or society. Society would be well served, the soul of the Christian movement would be well served, by Christians giving up the claim to be the best or to loudly proclaim how good and true and right and necessary Christianity is—and instead to set about the tasks that Isaiah saw as appropriate to the people of God: bringing liberty to the captives, comforting those who mourn, rebuilding ruined cities, bringing good news—being good news—to the oppressed.
That’s on sort of a macro level, what I hope and pray for in the big picture, that Christianity take itself out of the running for number 1 religion and devote itself to building community based on the threads of our common humanity.
On a more personal level, as I try to put myself in a certain attitude facing a new year, I find myself in a kind of a modest mood here too—again, not modest in the sense of self-effacing but modest in the sense of not wanting to make too many claims or assumptions. It really is true, of course, that we don’t know what the future holds, and from a perspective of faith it’s unnecessary and irrelevant to decide whether to be upbeat or down beat, optimistic or pessimistic with regard to the future. Such things may be relevant for the stock market, but not for lived faith.
I have always felt that Christmas is really the core holiday of the Christian faith, at least as I experience it. It’s about things that I know about, or at least might know about. . There are things that some Christians believe, and that may be part of official Christian belief, that I have to confess I find it better to leave to God. For instance, what happens at the end of the world? I don’t know about the final triumph of righteousness, about the blowing of the last trumpet, the dead being raised. Even what happens to you and me after we die, that little piece of eternal life is something we may have beliefs about but really can only imagine in some poetic way. I won’t say I never think about such things or have no beliefs or feelings, but mostly I’m content to leave those things to God.
But the darkness is something I know about—something we all know something about—and of course Christmas is partly about darkness. We know there is darkness. We also know, if we have received the gift of it, something about the light that shines in that darkness. We may call it by different names, experience it in different ways. But it is something we humans are able, by the grace of God, to know. And if we do know that—and I recognize that sometimes that can be a big “if”—what more is there that we need? Christmas, in its promise, is so essential, so basic, so human. Not to say it is an easy affirmation to make or an easy feeling to have. Sometimes “God with us” can itself become just another expression of sound byte theology. But certainly one of my prayers as we set out on another year is that in some way, whatever may happen, we all may know God as an indwelling presence in our lives. And then I will pray that that presence will not only see us through but will renew our own desire to set ourselves once again to the tasks that Isaiah suggests for the people of God, and that I will repeat this time in the words of Howard Thurman that began our service today, what he describes, paraphrasing Isaiah, as the work of Christmas: “to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace, to make music in the heart.” Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 7, 2001