8, 9, 10...Ready or Not, Here I Come!

¹³Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. ¹⁴John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” ¹⁵But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. ¹⁶And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Matthew 3:13-17

Jesus comes to John at the riverbank, joining the throngs of people who had travelled to hear John’s message and to undergo baptism.

Jesus comes to the riverbank with the followers, not as a leader. He takes the journey of common men and women. He participates in their ritual and he submits to John’s baptism.

Jesus comes to the riverbank and John takes him in his arms and plunges him under the water. Jesus stops breathing as the water washes over him. John then helps him to his feet again, the heavens open to Jesus and God proclaims his love and favor.

Jesus comes to John in this familiar story. But can you imagine John’s response? Here he is doing his baptism thing when up walks Jesus. John senses he's the one. John knows it is Jesus, and John is humbled by his mere presence. When Jesus asks to be baptized he balks.

John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

Surely, Jesus should not be submitting to John’s baptism. It should be the other way around. My guess is that John feels unworthy and incapable of the great task set before him. Surely the Messiah should be the one in the leadership role. Surely it should be Jesus taking John into his arms and plunging him into the river as a holy statement of who is who, a visible sign of who is really in charge here.

Left to his own devices and following his own instincts, John would have prevented the baptism of Jesus. If it were up to John, he would have let his feeling of inadequacy stop it from happening. He must have had a bunch of doubts running through his mind: How can I be the one to do this? I'm not prepared for this! He asks Jesus, You come to Me?

Biblically, it’s not uncommon for God to call people who feel totally inadequate, incapable or unqualified. They all have good and valid reasons to say thanks, but no thanks. Abraham and Sarah were really old, they couldn’t possibly birth a child and be the parents of an entire nation. In fact, when told of their call, Sarah laughs to herself at the news. Abraham’s response is even bigger as he falls on his face laughing at God as if the plan were some sort of cosmic joke. But it happens.

Moses stalls, too. When God calls him to go challenge Pharaoh he demurs, saying I’m not eloquent. I’m slow of speech. But he goes. When confronted with God, the prophet Isaiah says, Woe is me I’m a man of unclean lips. But he speaks as a prophet. Paul says, You can’t use me, everyone knows I sent Christians to prison and beat them. But, you guessed it, despite a rock solid reason for opting out, God used him.

In one way or another each of these Bible heros said what John said to Jesus: Do you come to me?

Really? You want me?

The answer to the “Do you come to me?” question is yes. God does come to you. God comes to me. God comes to us in all of our glorious inadequacies. Not just for our own benefit, but for God’s benefit. God comes to us with expectations. God comes to us expecting that we will participate in the Missio Dei, the mission on God. And we are to respond to that call of God, even when we don’t feel qualified. Even though we aren’t qualified.

It’s easy to assume that there is someone more qualified (like Jesus) to do the work of God. It’s easier to say, It’s in God’s hands and than to do something with our own hands. It’s easier to say, I’ll pray for you than to find two hours in our day to sit and talk to a friend about his depression or her job loss.

As a hospital chaplain, I’d often feel unqualified. For months on end I felt nothing but unqualified. How could I possibly help a young mother dying of cancer? What wisdom did I have for a Jewish woman who lay moaning in fever? Other than words, what did I have for a man who was terrified of dying because he felt his sin so heavily on his heart? 

The truth of the matter is that I was unqualified in all of those circumstances. It also didn’t matter. What mattered is that I went into each of the hospital rooms anyway. What mattered is that I walked in knowing that I couldn’t fix anything or save anyone. What mattered was that I was there, hearing their stories and speaking words of love and forgiveness. Not evangelizing. Just loving. What mattered wasn’t my inadequacy, but Christ’s presence through me. What mattered was my willingness to do it even though it seemed crazy and hopeless.

Spending time as a hospital chaplain taught me to be more comfortable with my own inadequacy, to not let it stop me from doing the ministry that God was calling me to do--at least some of the time. And trust me, like John, if there was any way I could have prevented that chaplaincy from happening, I would have. I did not want to spend 8 months as a hospital chaplain. But I did. 

  

In our passage today, Jesus comes to be baptized. Jesus comes to John.  And it says John would have prevented him. Such a predictable, human response! So like us.

And yet this story is so like God. God chose a feeble man to father the nations, not an overtly fertile one. God chose a man who was slow of speech – who may have had a stutter—to speak for the Israelites. God chose a killer to help birth the church.

God didn’t wait until the world was perfect before entering it. God isn’t about using the best or the most of anything. God comes into our world and our lives just as they are. Jesus comes to John to be baptized and John feels unprepared. 

In our story, God comes to Jesus there in the river. Before Jesus speaks of word of wisdom. Before Jesus heals a single person. Before Jesus takes to the cross, God comes. The Spirit descends like a dove and says this is my son, with whom I am well pleased.  

Do you come to me?

Yes. God comes to you. Ready or not. 

First Words

John 1:1-4

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

With this passage we get a whole new take on the story of Christ’s entrance into the world.  While the Christmas stories Matthew and Luke describe the way Jesus came into the world in traditional story form, the Gospel of John opens with soaring poetry and imagery. In this reading, Jesus isn’t a baby.

Jesus is the Word, the creator, the light and the giver of life.

While this passage seems different from the other more story-like Christmas gospels, there are a lot of similarities—they open with a declaration of Jesus linage—who Jesus is. They all have images of light and dark, they mention John the Baptist, they present the idea of God living among us.

But in John, it’s harder to imagine ourselves in the middle of what’s happening because everything is so ephemeral. The other gospels offer us tangible details that reflect our own earthly experiences. We know what a baby looks and feels like in our arms. We’ve touched the wool of sheep. We even have images of angels that we can recall (whether or not they are biblically accurate). We may know what it’s like to be a young and confused parent.

But John’s opening is different. We know what light it, but we also know we can’t grasp it. We know what words are but we also know that they aren’t tangible. Words are vocal representatives of “real” things. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

Sometimes, it seems like the best thing we can do with a passage like this is to sit quietly and let the words wash over us. Trusting the rhythm and the language carry us to someplace new. Dropping our preconceived notions of what the words already say and allowing them to say something different. 

As Christians, we know the power of words—they were important in creation. Words are important in salvation. They are important in scripture. But so often we take words for granted. Our days are filled with words on the TV, newspaper, Facebook and Twitter. Our phones, our cars, our homes and even our church are word delivery systems—and they create realities for us as well. Something is being created with these words that surround us every day.

Words from news stations teach us to be afraid—convincing us that the world is full of violence and anger. Words from the Hallmark store show us a rose-colored world where all is well and so we pretend all is well.  Words on social media convince us that everyone’s lives are adventurous and exciting (or depressing and stagnant depending on the friend). Words from advertisers convince us that we are somehow lacking and must buy their products. 

But these are new words, not the Eternal Word. These are the words that come into being when we reach and fight and strive. These are the words we blurt or shout. They are weapons that chip away at the richness of life. The Eternal Word is different. The Eternal Word gives life.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.. 

Jesus as the Word is inseparable from God. Each one infused into the other one. Each one a reflection of the other. Our own words are a reflection of our hearts and minds as individuals and as a group. Let us remember to speak words of encouragement. Words of forgiveness. Words of love. The Word of God. Let us speak these words to ourselves and to those around us so that these words—this Word— can settle upon us and circulate among us and create a community of love and forgiveness. A community centered in the Word. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

Darkness and e. coli all around

⁸Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. ²⁰But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” ²²All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ²³“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” ²⁴When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.    Matthew 1:18-25

The winter solstice marks the shortest day of the year. Or, put another way, it's the longest night. This time of year it’s dark when everyone leaves my house in the morning and it’s dark soon after we get home. Oftentimes, I have to hurry up and change my clothes in order to get the dog walked before it’s too dark to see.

Some people are comfortable in the dark. My husband Matt likes to walk the dog in the quiet of the night. To him it’s peaceful. But, because I have terrible night vision, it can be frightening. Raccoons, ground hog holes, or a tree root that sticks up are threats in the night. And so when the sun goes down, my day pretty much ends. I try to avoid the literal darkness. But there is another darkness--the metaphorical darkness that descends upon us when tragedy strikes. Even though many of us try to avoid it, darkness creeps into our lives.

Darkness wrecks havoc with our existence. Even though it's something we don't like to acknowledge darkness plays a big role in our lives and in the Bible.

•  In the beginning, the very first words of the creation story tell us the earth was a void and covered in darkness.    
• The psalmist walks through the darkest valley but fears no evil.
• The prophet Isaiah says: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined.
• Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

Light and dark—it’s the stuff of creation. It is the stuff of salvation. It is the stuff of life.

Orion Nebula taken by Sarah Thornton

At Christmas we focus on the shiny, happy season of light. But sometimes our religious practice gets so skewed that we pretend that everything is light. At least on the outside. We fail to acknowledge that our lives are light and dark. Our world is light and dark. It’s a rhythm that feels eternal—night and day, birth and death, happiness and sadness, creation and destruction, joy and pain.

The birth of Jesus takes place during a dark time for the people of Israel. For them it had a long time of war and occupation.  The Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans came and conquered them time and time again. They were likely defeated and depressed. As we celebrate Christmas as a church and a culture, we often forget that Jesus came during what we metaphorically call a long, dark night of his nation’s soul.

But the hymn writers didn’t forget. The writer of O Come, O come Emmanuel know that Israel was captive to the dark and gloomy clouds of night, feeling lonely and exiled. The author of In the Bleak Midwinter knows that the world can feel like an unforgiving place, cold and hard as iron.

When we look closely at our traditions, we can see that the people who welcomed Christ into the world—the people who formed our faith through words, song and liturgy rejoiced in Christ because they understood the darkness. They welcomed Christ not as another ornament in a glittery life; they celebrated Christ because they wanted hope for their future. They loved Jesus, because he not only saw their pain and brokenness. But because he lived it like we do.

Jesus came into a dark world in a messy way. There was family drama as Mary and Joseph and their families figured out how to make the whole pregnant by the Holy Spirit thing work. Try to putting yourself in Joseph's place. The woman who is to be your wife is pregnant, and not by you. What if your spouse or the person you expected to marry were pregnant? How would you feel? Would you think that all was right with the world?

 For Joseph it had to be a time of disappointment and anger. But, after the symbolic darkness of his defeated expectations comes the literal darkness—and a dream. It's a dream that changes Joseph’s destiny and our own as Joseph follows the charge of the angels and raises Jesus as his own son.

But accepting God’s call didn’t mean life got easy for him or Mary.  When it came time to deliver the baby Mary and Joseph were itinerant. Dirty. Weary. And Jesus was born amongst the animals—E. Coli and darkness all around.  Everyone who’s had a baby can tell you that it’s not an easy, clean process in the best of circumstances. Some of us howl like animals giving birth. Some of us cry. Jesus came into the world through Mary’s pain. Not that you’d know it from our art.

Our nativity scenes today don’t even have dust on them let along dung or sweat. That babies have survived deliveries like this over the centuries is a miracle in itself. But the message of Christ is that out of the dark, out of the family drama, out of the dirt and the muck and the germs, sweat, tears and pain, out of all this, the promise that hope can be born. 

Hope doesn’t come into a sanitized world in a greeting card, an As Seen On TV gift, or twinkling light (although it can). Hope can enter our world anywhere and anytime. Like this baby born in the dirt and laid in a feeding trough, hope can survive the most difficult circumstances.

It’s important for us to remember this aspect of the Christmas message because sometimes our lives are filled with darkness, drama, tears, sweat and pain. It can be so hard to feel the “spirit of the holidays” when we are suffering inside. It can be hard to feel joyous when all we can think about are the years of traditions spent with a spouse whom we have lost to death or divorce. It can be difficult to imagine the gifts we cannot buy because this year we just don’t have the money. It can be heartbreaking to celebrate when a diagnosis of cancer is new.

We can be conflicted about Christmas because we want to be cheery for those present in our lives, but we can’t help but know that something or someone is missing. We imagine their place at the table, we think about what gifts they might have enjoyed. We remember that what he or she baked or made every year. Christmas can intensify the ache of loneliness or the emptiness of depression or the anger at the unfairness of circumstances.

The good news is, you can come to Christmas just as you are. You can come to Christ if you are full of love and joy and you can come to Christ with a hurting heart and tears that just won’t stop. You can come to Christmas as a bewildered man following his dreams like Joseph or a pregnant woman howling in pain in the dark of the night. You can come to the manger with awe or tears.

We can come to the manger, to Christmas, to Christ as we are, because it is Christ who brings the gifts. It’s Christ who brings the light. It’s Christ who is Emmanuel, God with us.

There is no greater love than a God who walks with us. There is no greater gift than a friend who stays with us when the night is the darkest. This is our purpose. We are here to remind each other that even though life is difficult, God is with us. When we are convinced that we are alone in our pain, we are here to remind each other that God is with us. When we forget the gifts that God has given us, we are here to remind each other that God is with us.

We live in a world that includes darkness, but we are the people who point to the light. And when we cannot point ourselves, we have other people who can point it out for us. This is what it means to love each other. This is what it means to live in community.  This is what it means to be a church.

Into the darkness and the void of creation God spoke of light. God has walked alongside us into the darkest valleys. God came to us on a dark night through the cries of a young woman.  God came to us through the scandal of an unplanned pregnancy. Emmanuel means God is with us--though it all. 

You are not alone if you struggle with darkness. The great Mother Teresa revealed her struggles to her spiritual advisor. This embodiment of Christian love and compassion sometimes felt empty on the inside. She and other great mystics and saints sometimes had trouble praying. They sometimes felt abandoned. Just like you. Just like me.

When we can’t feel God, we sometimes need someone to help us see God’s light. Mother Teresa knew this. In the book of her writings titled, Come, Be My Light, she reminds us—and I remind you with her words:

“Jesus wants me to tell you again...how much is the love He has for each one of you--beyond all what you can imagine...Not only He loves you, even more--He longs for you… He loves you always, even when you don't feel worthy...” 

So come to the manger. Make the journey as you are, remembering the rhythms of life. Night and day, birth and death, happiness and sadness, creation and destruction, joy and pain. Come, trusting that out of darkness, God created. Come, knowing that out of family drama, a savior was born. Come, remembering that out of defeat, hope arose. As we come to the manger, let us remember that God is indeed with us each step of the way.