Jesus Coming of Age
In the middle of Advent, we talked a bit about Herod – about the kind of power that he represented and about the ways that power manifested – in his desperate search for the baby born in Bethlehem, in the order to kill innocent boys much like Pharaoh had ordered so many generations earlier.
Last week, we talked about the wise strangers who followed a star to discover a child that they understood to have great power – a power that would eventually be exercised very differently from that power exercised by Herod.
The word epiphany means to shine forth or to manifest something. In the context of our Christian faith, Epiphany is about the manifestation of God in the human child Jesus. And it is ultimately about all of the power that divine manifestation conveys into the world.
We said this back in Advent: Power is a tricky thing – it is not inherently good or bad. What we do with power counts.
Both of our scriptures this week draw us more deeply into the manifestation of God’s power in the world.
Our first story is one that makes me cringe just a bit as a parent. As Jesus is coming of age, he travels with his family to Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of the Passover. And while there, adventuring and exploring in the way adolescents are prone to do, he gets left behind. Perhaps you know well those boundary-pushing impulses that show up between ages 11 and 13. I can imagine Jesus as a scrappy kid who is beginning to understand the bigness of the world, wandering from alley-way to alley-way.
Mary and Joseph are caught up in the bustle and joy of the festival too, and they leave with their traveling group, assuming that Jesus was with their group somewhere….you know, hanging out with friends.
But he wasn’t… and when the realize this and return to the city, they spend three days searching for him. Imagine the tension – a crowded city, lost travel time, lost work, lost income, and a deep sense of dread.
When they finally find him, he is in the Temple, listening and learning from those he finds there. Mary and Joseph arrive with some frantic wonder, and Jesus quickly suggests that of course he would be here in his Father’s house - a reminder straight from the adolescents mouth that, after so many years since the wonders of his birth, something much, much bigger is going on here.
And then…isn’t it amazing what we don’t know much of anything about Jesus’ life between this moment in the Temple and the next passage, some 20 years later at the brink of his ministry. Don’t you wonder what other moments of awe he generated before this?
Here in Luke, we meet Jesus again, this time in the wilderness outside of Jerusalem, seeking baptism from his cousin John.
John was born to a well-situated priestly family. By tradition, he would have followed in the footsteps of his father, Zechariah, taking his place in the hierarchy of ritual and worship in the Temple in Jerusalem. Perhaps he would have been tending to the holy baths at the Temple. The kind of baptism that happened at the Temple had to do with ritual purity. Pilgrims had to be physically “clean” and spiritually clean to enter into the various parts of the Temple and there was a brisk business for the priestly class to oversee these rituals.
But instead, we find John is in the wilderness well-outside the city. These are not private baths built into the stone edifices of Temple courts but instead he is at the riverside in the middle of nowhere.
Dressed in garments drawn from nature. Eating what he finds there.
Turning away from the pageantry and hierarchy and prestige of the religious elite, inviting a motley crew of untouchables to make a choice to turn their lives around.
John is offering a baptism of repentance to those who have followed him into the wilderness, away from the Temple courts.
We’ve talked about this before – the language of “repentance” found here is the word metanoia in the Greek. It’s meaning is not just to be clean, but to change one’s ways, to take a new road forward into life, to have a change of heart.
Here is John, living his own protest movement – away from the power structures and the norms of Jerusalem, inviting or calling or challenging people to commit to a change of heart.
And the text tells us that a LOT of people were showing up, perhaps squirming as they are labeled a brood of vipers. They clamored to know what exactly Johan meant when he said that they needed to change their lives.
John says a radical thing – then and now (perhaps even more so now): John instructs them to redistribute their belongings so that everyone is covered and fed. You heard that right – if you have two coats, give one away. Same with your food – if you have enough, give the rest to those who need it.
There are two specific group mentioned here – soldiers and tax collectors. Both were working in the community on behalf of the occupying government, Rome.
Soldiers were part of the feet on the ground, keeping the order and maintaining a Roman presence, while also extracting resources from the poor who were already squeezed by the occupying force. John’s counsel to them – stop skimming extortions to fill your pockets. Do no more taking away than you must. You get paid by Rome, let that be enough.
Tax collectors too, were pleasing the local officials (like Herod or Pilate) by collecting taxes from the poor. Again, John’s counsel is not to take more than is due from people to meet their obligations. Do not make yourselves richer on the backs of those with less, from those over whom you have societal power.
John seems to be trying to navigate tolerating what must happen, avoiding the brutal repercussions of occupation, while reminding people of their basic humanity and interdependence, calling them to behave as God calls them to, loving one another rather than bending to economy or politics.
John is stretching his power as far as he is able in the current circumstances. Because back in Jerusalem, it seems John has already fanned the flames around the current governor – Herod Antipas – by critiquing Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife.
This Herod is the next generation – the son of Herod the Great who three decades earlier had fumed about the wise strangers and the star. The text you hear today makes it clear that this “new” Herod is already prone to exercising his own impetuous and murderous power and he will eventually have John’s head on a platter.
It seems Herod has little tolerance for protest movements.
In this Luke text, we don’t get all of the drama of Jesus arriving on the scene. We have the crowds asking John if he is the Messiah, and John acknowledges that he is not – that one far greater is to come.
And then Jesus sort of quietly appears on the scene having been baptized with the crowds. His cover is blown when, as he comes up out of the water to pray, the heavens open, a dove descends and the voice of God declares, “You are my son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.”
Talk about power made manifest…
Here is Jesus, newly baptized, but in the descending of a dove and the voice of God it is made clear this is NOT just John’s work – it is the work of God.
In We Make the Road by Walking, author Brian McLaren talks about the power of that image of a descending dove – not a lion, not an eagle – but a peaceful dove.
How different this man will be from the forces of power that surround him. Bit by bit we see who he is and how he is set apart. Bit by bit Jesus makes manifest spiritual powers of healing, of teaching, of unity and grace and inclusion. Of resurrection, of forgiveness, of eternal life.
I wonder…How is Christ’s power continuing to be made manifest in the world today, and what role are we stepping up to play? How are we joining in, heralding his Lordship, and calling others to come and see and join in? Where is God speaking?
Where is that power – the peaceful power and the table-flipping, truth naming power – manifest today? And what is our role as followers of Christ in that manifestation?
Today, I call us all to remember that manifestation, and to remember how the Spirit is manifested in, through and around us through baptism.
Baptism is an act that has been carried forward through the centuries and continues to be part of our tradition still as we seek to walk in Jesus’ footsteps.
Baptism marks our commitment to living as a new creation – our commitment to make new creation manifest in our very lives. The reality that we are born anew through water and Spirit.
To remember that the Holy Spirit is present with us granting us the power to keep the promises of our baptism.
Today, it is tradition in the life of the church to remember the baptism of Jesus and our own baptism. And it seems to be just the right time to renew our commitment to make new creation manifest.
Today the work of remembering our baptism, of making new creation manifest by the power of the Holy Spirit falls to us as we are faced with unprecedented division in our country.
That work falls to us as we grapple with a viral pandemic alongside the pandemic of systemic, historic racism affecting the day-to-day lives for generations of indigenous, black and brown people.
In our baptismal vows, we renounce our sin and we profess our faith.
We renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of the world, and repent of our own sin – our individual sin and the shared societal sins of which we are a part.
We accept the freedom and power that God gives us to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
We confess Jesus as our Savior, put our whole trust in his grace and promise to serve him as LORD. We promise to do that serving work in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all nations, ages, and races.
We are broken people living in a broken world who have made missteps and yet, this baptism, each time we remember it, calls us back to our reborn selves – our life as new creation in God’s love. Empowered to receive the power and freedom that is given to us by God to resist evil, injustice and oppression.
I am well aware that we continue to be divided as a country, as a community, even as a church by the evil powers of this day. And I have found myself these past few days desperately seeking our common thread. It is here – in these vows we take.
To renounce the forces of evil, to reject the spiritual forces of evil and to repent of our sin – that which we commit and that which we stand by and let happen.
The power to accept the freedom and power that God gives to us…
So that we can resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
Not just to avoid them. Not just to stop doing it ourselves…
We have the power to RESIST. To resist.
To resist and to serve Jesus as LORD. Jesus, not Caesar, not mammon.
Sometimes that means protest – being on the outside the system and in the wilderness like John – protesting the ongoing and systemic relegation of black, brown and indigenous people, immigrants and refugees and LGBTQ people to second or third or fourth class status.
There is so much good work going on here. I know there are moments when our voices falter and we say… do we have to talk about that here? It is so divisive. It is hard to disagree. It is hard to find our way together. But beloved…
We make a vow. We make a promise.
The call is to RENOUNCE, REJECT and REPENT. The receive freedom and power from God in order to RESIST evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
It is our vow, and we renew it here today, together.
Come. Let us remember or baptism and be thankful.
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