01/10/2021 Sermon

Baptism of Our Lord Year B 2020 Mark 1:4-11
The story of the Baptism of Our Lord begins with crowds seeking John’s baptism of
repentance—that is a redirecting, a turning from one way to a new way of life, a resolution to
live differently, if you will—and we celebrate this day just a week or two after our own new
year begins, with all the hopes and expectations we invest in it, and only days after adopting our
own resolutions, if you go in for that sort of thing.
But the people of Jerusalem and Judea who sought John in the wilderness were not
merely making resolutions for a new beginning like we make resolutions in anticipation of a
better new year. I guarantee none of them were buying gym memberships or vowing to drink
more water instead of soda. They weren’t hoping their new beginnings would be pretty much
like last year but maybe a bit more prosperous, with better weather, less illness, or more time
spent with family. John, who dressed, ate, and preached like one of the Old Testament prophets
was not calling the people to quit bad habits or break old routines; a little more honoring parents
here, a little less sabbath-breaking there. John was calling them to the same kind of wholesale
change to which the prophets of old called ancient Israel. Their message was less about what
any one individual might do and more that the whole society had become corrupt; their social
system had grown greedy and unjust—no longer the cooperative community God envisioned in
the Law. In the same way, John was not instructing his followers to keep living pretty much as
they had been with just a tweak here or there. To repent means to turn from one way to go in an
entirely different direction. That Mark tells us that all the people of Jerusalem and the whole
Judean countryside came for repentance shows us that their entire society was broken. The
people couldn’t live godly lives by doing just a little bit better at following the ideals of the
world around them; they had to counter that culture in order to follow God.
When Jesus is baptized, he is not repenting from sin or leaving a previous worldly way of
life. But it would be wrong to think that Jesus appeared simply to show those newly baptized
Judeans what they were supposed to be doing instead. The people already knew what God
commanded: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Jesus didn’t invent a whole
new way of living; he lived as God had always commanded and intended for humanity to live.
So it’s important that when we think of John preaching repentance we not see it as just a
critique of Israel’s spirituality or as a failing of Judaism for which Christianity was the answer.
We have our own problems. God’s call to holy living had not changed and has not changed; so
John’s call to repentance calls us, too, because the followers of God in Christ have, time and
again, turned from the way God commanded, and we turn from Christ still.
Our own Christian tradition encompasses 2000 years of historical crossroads where we
could have chosen the Christlike path but instead we went the way of the world, abandoning humble service in order to accumulate wealth and wield power. As soon as the church was able,
it left the margins of society where it was born and established itself as an institution aligned
with political force. So followed hundreds of years of Crusades—violence and loss of life in
exchange for buildings and property; then the wars of the Reformation and the Inquisition—
bloodshed over who had influence in the Church and which branch of it could align with more
powerful rulers. The Church justified colonialism and imperialism, the exploitation and
extermination of indigenous peoples all over the world, the enslavement of an entire race in our
nation that was supposed to have been founded on the “self-evident truth that all men are
created equal.” Factions of the Christian church supported segregation and sewed and watered
the seeds of white supremacy; it was a Lutheran who murdered nine African Americans in a
bible study at Emmanuel AME in Charleston. What could he have heard—or not heard—
growing up in the church that could have fomented that kind of hate? We commemorate
Dietrich Bonhoeffer but not the whole church of Germany for resisting Nazism because most
German Christians wanted the power and influence that came from uncritical support of the
government, even as that government systematically kidnapped and killed their neighbors. And
if we wonder how the Christian church could ever have been complicit in that kind of violence,
we only need to look at the crowd at our own Capitol last Wednesday: people carrying signs
that said “Jesus saves” in their terrorist attack, where a police officer was murdered and four coconspirators
died.
In the aftermath of the insurrection, I’ve heard people lament that “this is not who we
are” but the photographs and the videos show us that this is exactly who we are. It is not,
however, who we are called to be. Remember what happens next in our story: Jesus, enlivened
by the Spirit, is tempted in the wilderness. Satan offers him worldly power, but Jesus declines.
Jesus’ baptism begins not a military campaign, not a violent overthrow of the Roman
government, but a ministry of mercy—teaching, preaching, feeding, healing, welcoming, and
serving. That is the life into which we are baptized; that is the Christian calling.
Like Israel during the days of the prophets, like the crowds on the bank of the Jordan
River, like Christians throughout every phase of history, we have a choice: live by the rules of
the kingdom of God or live by rules of this world. Mercy, grace, justice, humility, service,
truth, love…or vengeance, cruelty, violence, pride, exploitation, lies, hate. When we’re on the
wrong path scripture tells us what to do: confess, repent, and go the other way. What we cannot
do is stay on the path of evil and claim that it is good. The Beloved Son who is well-pleasing to
God showed us with his life which way we are to go. May the light of Christ illuminate the
darkness in our lives and in our world, so we may follow the life of the one who gives us life.