Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from January 8, 2006

“Unexpected Jesus”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Acts 19:1-7

Mark 1:4-11

The year was 1979 and after one year in seminary, I was called to be the pastor of a small American Baptist church here in Connecticut.  One week I was sitting on the organ bench playing substitute organist, and several weeks later I was standing in the pulpit as their pastor.  For the most part, they were a patient and good-natured lot but there were a few folks who weren’t quite sure that they wanted a woman pastor, let alone one who was scarcely 22 years old.

The whole thing particularly troubled one woman.  She struggled to stay open-minded.  In about three months into our pastoral relationship, she sent me a card.  On the outside of it, it said “You are the answer to my prayers.”  On the inside, it said, “You are not what I prayed for but, apparently, you are the answer.”  I still have that card. 

I just didn’t fit the image.  When visiting at local hospitals, I was often challenged when I said I was the minister of the Baptist church.  People would respond with, “You don’t look like a minister.”  I would say, “Well, what does a minister look like?”  Usually, the answer had something to do with being slightly overweight with a receding hairline and about 50 years old.  Well, 27-some-odd years later, I’m pretty much two for three.

We all have images of what religious leaders are supposed to look like.  whether it’s pastors, priests, rabbis, or imams, there’s an image that comes to mind.  It’s true for us as it was for the people of Jesus’ time.  While it is pretty clear that, at the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, He disappointed a bunch of people with what He was all about.  What we don’t often think about is that it begins right here, the very beginning of His earthly ministry.

For the last few weeks, we have seen that each of the gospel writers has a unique take on the early years of Jesus’ life and ministry.  Matthew and Luke are fairly similar in their approach.  John and Mark are very different from Matthew and Luke and somewhat different from each other.  So when it’s Mark’s turn to talk about the beginning, like John, there’s no angel, no star, no manger, no wise men; in fact, there’s really no birth narrative at all—no flight to Egypt to save their lives, no trip back eight years later that finds Jesus astounding His elders in the temple, nothing.  Unlike John, the writer of Mark’s gospel begins with the good news of Jesus Christ at His baptism, a baptism by John the Baptist in the Jordan river.

Now, we Christians like to think we invented baptism but we didn’t.  Truly.  In ancient times, the mikvah, a ritual cleansing bath was central to Jewish life and faith.  It was used for ritual purification for men and women, and for priests in relation to temple ritual.  Men would visit the mikvah before Sabbath or Yom Kippur for spiritual purification.  Going to the mikvah was a requirement for all converts to Judaism, and for brides on the day before their wedding.  It was customary to wash new cooking utensils in the mikvah if they were purchased from a non-Jew.  That’s what made them kosher for use.  The mikvah was so central to ancient Jewish life that rabbis said a community should go to mikvah even before they build a temple.  The rabbis said it was even acceptable to sell a Torah scroll in order to build a mikvah.

This ancient practice was the forerunner of baptism.  So when John began his ministry, that concept of a cleansing water ritual really was nothing new.  What John did with that ancient ritual, however, was.  Instead of a ritual purification, John connected it to repentance, changing one’s life from the inside out.  The Greek word is metanoia which literally means “to get a new heart”.  John was getting people’s attention.  It may have been in part because he ate bugs and wore clothing that even the rummage sale people wouldn’t handle but I think that it’s just as probable that, like prophets of every age, John challenged the status quo which, in this case, had both political and religious implications.

Now most people think that John was calling people out of Judaism but, in truth, he wasn’t.  Instead, he was calling people to a particular vision of Judaism that had, at its heart, justice for all people, care for the poor, and care for God’s creation.  In the context of first-century Roman occupation and religious collusion with that oppression, people flocked to John to hear what he had to say.

  So when Jesus shows up and is baptized by John, he identifies himself with that vision.  Jesus could have been Pharisee or a Sadducee, part of the religious establishment of the day.  He even could have been a zealot.  Those were the folks who were hoping that the land of Israel would be restored and that the nation would grow strong again.  Instead, he identified with John.  It was almost the equivalent of running off and joining a cult.  In the eyes of the mainstream, Jesus identified with an individual and a group whose commitments lie just beyond the outskirts of acceptable religious expression.

From the very moment of Jesus’ earthly ministry, from the moment of His baptism, He establishes Himself as a counter-cultural and prophetic leader who cared for the poorest of the poor, erased the lines between saints and sinners, making room for everyone who shared the vision and was willing to be part of making it happen.  Talk about an unexpected Jesus.

Fast-forward 2,000 or so years to any given Sunday right here at Mystic Congregational Church.  A child is brought to the waters of baptism by her parents—time and tradition have added  many layers to our understanding of baptism as witnessed in the reading that Nancy shared with us.  But pieces of John’s vision remain.  In our U.C.C. liturgy, we ask the parents, “Will you encourage this child to renounce the powers of evil?  Do you promise to resist depression and evil, to show love and justice.”  Each time we bear witness to the sacrament as a congregation, we are asked, “Do you, who witness and celebrate this sacrament, promise your love, support and are to the one about to be baptized as she lives and grows in Christ?”

Do you have any idea what we are promising to do?  We are promising to bear witness to this unexpected Jesus and point the way to Him so that, one day, she might find her own way to Him.  Annie Dillard asks the question, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares.  They should lash us to our pews.  But, instead, we people in churches often seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute.”  Gives you pause.

Each time we celebrate the sacrament of baptism, we welcome a child and a family to a journey that has as much to do with looking good on wood as it does with looking good in white.  Each time, we commit to a journey with the unexpected Jesus.  As a my friend Joyce Katzberg is fond of saying, “If you want to journey with Jesus, you gotta look good on wood.  The unexpected Jesus we meet at the waters of the Jordan stood at odds with the powers of first-century Palestine.  His visions, like John’s, lie beyond the religious nationalism and social elitism of the day, and close to the heart of Jewish teaching that cared for the poor and included the marginalized.

We are in need of the witness of the unexpected Jesus because our times are not so different.  Walter Owensby writes, “In a day of so-called religious revival that has a dangerous affinity for political power and super-patriotism, religious nationalism is a crucial issue for us.  The present American version of the kind of nationalism rejected by Jesus and John as well as by the prophets comes in our day dressed as a moral crusade.  The contents of this moral crusade,” he continues, “is opposition to issues that, predictably, include abortion, homosexuality and equal rights for women.  But what it supports is equally troubling:  huge military budgets and massive arms sales; and what it is utterly silent on is more troubling still:  poverty, racism, inequality and injustice.”

Now fast forward thirteen years or so—this little baby girl that we baptized is now a teenager.  Provided that her parents have kept their promise to participate in the life and ministry of the church and bring her along, we get to see how well we’re doing in making this unexpected Jesus real.

Sarah Dylan Breuer wrote, “Our kids, if they’re blessed with common sense, and most of the ones I have experienced are, know well that Jesus’ way is not primarily about refraining from drugs, alcohol and tobacco although that’s a really good idea.  By the time, they’re teenagers our kids have developed really good detectors of certain substances.  The needles on those well-tuned instruments will be jumping all over the place if we try to tell them on one hand that following Jesus is an important commitment around which they should center their lives, and on the other hand that following Jesus doesn’t include doing anything that will upset the status quo.  If our kids have read the bible at all, or even if they paid minimal attention when the story was read in church, they are going to know at least this one thing, and that is that following Jesus always leads to the cross.”

What they will want to know from you and me is how we are doing on our own journeys.  What they want to see in us is our own faulty faithfulness that keeps getting on with it as best we can even as we struggle with our own doubts.    Strengthening our witness to the unexpected Jesus is the journey of our lifetime.  We need to stick with it if we have any hope of our kids finding their own way to Him.

It’s not about being perfect.  It’s simply about being faithful.  It’s not about having it all together.  It’s just about having integrity.  It’s not about never losing our way.  It’s always making sure that we find our way back. 

When this church began the Faith in the Future Campaign several years ago, it included a vision of a space just for youth where they could come and experience something different from the world, a place where they could be themselves, and grasp on to something of the eternal in a specific moment.  Part 1 of that dream has come to pass and, though the Capital Campaign Committee and the Building Committee may disagree with me, it may be that that was the easy part.  Part 2 is what looms ahead.  If it takes a whole village to raise a child, it surely will take a whole church to launch a vital life-changing, life-sustaining ministry with youth towards justice hungry for the unexpected Jesus as we are. 

So I invite you to join us for that meeting next week as we talk about what’s happening with the Youth Space and to open your hearts to the place that ministry might have in your life.  We have a mission to move from the waters of baptism where we meet the unexpected Jesus to share His ministry with others who are also meeting Him in their daily lives.  If we are lucky, you never know, someday, someone might say to you, “You are the answer to my prayer.  You are not exactly what I prayed for but, apparently, you are the answer.”  Amen.