Pilgrim Preaching

John's Holy Spirit Baptism

The Baptism of Jesus

January 8, 2006
Mark 1:4-11

Notes on Structure

John and Those Being Baptized

This week's text has a couple of interesting structural things going on. First, there's a move back and forth between John and those being baptized. In the first half of the text, we hear about John, and then we see everyone—rural people and city dwellers alike—being baptized. In the second half of the text, we hear from John, and then we see Jesus being baptized.

From Sin to Spirit

It also happens that in the first half of the text, the narrator tells us that John's ministry was "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins," to which the people respond by being baptized and confessing their sins. All good. And all sort of looking backward, in order to prepare for what is to come. In the second half of the text, what "is to come" is here. John speaks of one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit, and then the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus as he is baptized. Repentance mean a turning around, and the text itself turns from a focus on confession and forgiveness of sin to a focus on the one-who-is-to-come becoming present, and a proclamation that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is happening now.

Here are the two structural observations in table form:

Verses	Characters	Notes
1:4	John	Mention of sin.
1:5	People being baptized.	Confession of sin.
1:6-8	John	Mention of Holy Spirit.
1:9-11	Person (Jesus) being baptized.	Appearance of Holy Spirit.

A Couple of Preaching Implications

Water and the Holy Spirit

John performed at least one "Holy Spirit" baptism. Acts makes a strong distinction between John's baptism and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. (See this week's second lesson, Acts 19:1-7.) Yet, for the record, God uses John's water baptism as the time and place to split open the heavens and have the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus. In at least this one place in scripture, a baptism of water and the Holy Spirit coincide. This should offer a caution to those who teach that water baptism is second-rate or incomplete. God uses this water-baptism as a venue for anointing with the Holy Spirit and proclaiming Jesus' status as a Son with whom God is pleased.

Looking Back, Bounding Forward

The focus on sin and forgiveness in the first half of this text is not an end in itself. John preaches a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin. People receive that baptism, confessing their sins. This is astonishing ("All the Judean countryside, and all the people of Jerusalem…), but it is actually small potatoes compared with what will happen in the second half of the text. Something greater than your remorse is here. Something greater even than a whole community's capacity to repent is here. "O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down," Isaiah had pleaded with God (Isaiah 64:1). Here, God does just that. The heavens are torn open. "God is on the loose," as our teacher Donald Juel used to say. The turning back at the first part of this text leads to a bounding forward as Jesus begins his ministry.

Blessing as Freedom

Epiphany 4A | January 31, 2005
Matthew 5:1-12

In his article, "Matthew's Beatitudes: Reversals and Rewards of the Kingdom," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 58/3 (1996) 460-79, Mark Allan Powell argues for a two-part structure to the beatitudes. The first four are "reversals for the unfortunate." The second four are "rewards for the virtuous." I like Powell's sense of the structure of this text, but instead of reversals and rewards, I prefer to talk about freedom in the beatitudes.

The first four declare freedom from

• despair (blessed are the poor in spirit),
• grief (blessed are those who mourn),
• want (blessed are the meek) and
• injustice (blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness).

The second four declare freedom for

• healing (blessed are the merciful),
• integrity (blessed are the pure in heart),
• peace (blessed are the peacemakers) and
• faithfulness (blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake).

Powell's reading of "blessed are the meek"—that the meek are those in economic need—may not be a usual reading of the text, but he makes a strong argument for it. The meek are not "the humble" but instead, "the humiliated." They are lowly not because they mean to be virtuous but as a result of having been flattened by the powerful.

I summarized "blessed are the merciful" with the word healing because "to show mercy" in Matthew is often to provide physical healing (9:27; 20:30, 31; 15:22; 17:17). However, mercy in Matthew is bigger than just physical healing and involves activities as varied as giving alms, eating with outcasts and forgiving sins.

Will any of this preach? I'm not sure I'll preach on this text, but if I did, I might talk about how the beatitudes begin to paint a picture of what the world looks like when the Lord's Prayer (also part of the Sermon on the Mount) is answered: "thy kingdom come; thy will be done…" we pray. Jesus is saying, "In the kingdom, in that place where God's will is done perfectly, these people are blessed by receiving freedom from lack and freedom for steadfast love." This description of the kingdom is not just philosophical or hypothetical. Just before the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has said, "… the kingdom of heaven has come near" (Matt 4:17). The beatitudes start to describe what the reign of God will look like as God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven, an eventuality that is at hand.

Riches in the Rule of God

Luke 6:17-26

Almost everyone I know prefers the gospel of Luke to the gospel of Matthew. I teach Matthew, and I love it, but even I recognize that Matthew ruins some good stories, like when he tells everyone that the synagogue ruler's daughter is dead before Jesus even starts off to see her (Mt. 9:18-26; cf. Luke 8:40-56), or when he omits all the great details about the demoniac among the tombs (Mt. 8:28-9:1; cf. Mark 4:35-41).

People who love Luke tell me that this is the gospel of the little people (not least of all Zacchaeus), the gospel with all those great lyrics: Zechariah's Benedictus, Mary's Magnificat, Simeon's Nunc Dimittis, the gospel that most explicitly lifts up the ministry of women and most eloquently records Jesus' care for the poor.

Yet if I were preaching this week, here on Thursday afternoon I would be missing Matthew and his version of the Beatitudes. Even though Matthew's version, like Luke's, can function to accuse rather than just comfort, it is easy to get lost in Matthew's poetry. In Matthew, Jesus talks about the meek, the pure in heart, the poor in spirit. It is possible (even though probably wrong) to see these all as emotional states, and so to miss the way they bear upon relationships with and responsibilities to other people.

If you have a synopsis of the four gospels, dig it out and do a side-by-side comparison of Matthew and Luke here. (You can make your own synopsis online at a site called The Five Gospel Parallels. Find the text you want to compare in one gospel. Then click the little Bible above the pericope's title, and the texts that have a parallel to the one you clicked magically move to that parallel!)

Look at Matthew's list of blessings next to Luke's.

Blessed are...	Matthew	Luke
	the poor in spirit	you poor
	those who mourn	you who weep now
	the meek	--
	those who hunger and thirst for righteousness	you who hunger now
	those who are merciful	--
	the pure in heart	--
	the peacemakers	--
	those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake	--
	you when others revile you...	when others hate you...
Woe to you...	--	that are rich
	--	that are full now
	--	that laugh now
	--	when all speak well of you...

You can find woes in Matthew (cf. chapter 23), but not mixed in the list of beatitudes. And you can find concern about the poor in Matthew (cf. 25:31-46), but "poor in spirit" and "hunger and thirst for righteousness" do not as easily lead in that direction as Luke's version.

So how to preach Luke's version? Some thoughts:

The folly of the "We're so rich" cliche.
It does no good and can do harm for North American ministers to tell their congregations, "Just by virtue of being here today, you are among the very richest people in the world." Why don't I like this?

1. It's not news. Those of us that this comment accurately describes know this about ourselves. Your saying it just inspires a weird kind of dead-end guilt. Can we help it that we are in North America? Are you asking us to go live somewhere else? Or are we just supposed to feel guilty so you can feel important and needed by announcing forgiveness to us? Or do you want us to do something about being "among the richest people in the world" and if so, what?
2. Someone in your congregation is probably really hungry, perhaps really poor. They will feel "invisible as usual" as you speak. You have projected your middle class status on everyone there and are blind to people like the elder who really does choose between buying food or medicine, or the child in a home so dysfunctional or poor that supper is routinely a bowl of Fruit Loops. Not everyone has your problems.

Reversal of fortune
The point of the text is not that Jesus loves to hate rich people. The point of this text is that, "The times, they are a changin'." The mighty will be cast down and the lowly lifted up. (Hmm... we've heard that somewhere before.) So a way into preaching this text might be to consider what are those things that change about our lives as a result of life in the Rule of God. The values here are upside down: "woe to you when all speak well of you..." and so on. Are there real, upside down stories or experiences you see close to home?

For those of us who have (like Mrs. Turpin and Claud in Flannery O'Connor's short story, "Revelation") "a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right," and want things to stay that way, Jesus does not give us much comfort. Things are changing. Yet I wouldn't be a preacher of the gospel unless I believed that what the Rule of God offers—this reversal of fortune that Jesus announces and over which he presides—is better than anything any of us will lose as a result of a change of administration. In Acts, we hear that the apostles, for a while at least, offer evidence of their trust in this conviction by living it out in the way that scares Americans the most: they hold their goods in common and share as one another have need. I wonder, what did they know about the riches of Rule of God that we do not know?

Regular People as Disciples

Luke 5:1-11

In his commentary on Acts in the Interpretation series, Will Willimon comments that Peter, quoting Joel in Acts 2, is not talking just about God raising up individual prophets, but rather about God forming a prophetic community. Old and young, men and women, servants as well as those served—all of these receive the Holy Spirit in the last days. Reading Luke 5:1-11, it occurs to me that the Holy Spirit doesn't wait until Acts to get going on this prophetic community development project.

Peter is a useful model for discipleship precisely because he is a regular guy. What do I mean by regular?

1. He's by the shore washing out nets. They guy works for a living.
2. He had a bad day (or night, actually) at work. Once in a while that happens to just about everyone.
3. He talks frankly to Jesus. Yes, he uses an honorific title ("master" in the NRSV), but you can hear the resistance to Jesus' words in his reply to the suggestion that he try fishing again. He's not afraid to say to Jesus, "This sounds like a bad idea to me."
4. He knows he's way out of his league when he realizes that Jesus has at his disposal the power of God. No false modesty here, just the realization that, "I am a sinner."

The epiphany in the text for me is not so much the great catch of fish (though that is impressive), but rather Jesus' catch of Peter and the implications of that catch for who else Jesus is interested in catching for membership in his prophetic community.

1. Jesus is not put off by Peter's initial resistance to the idea of putting the nets down again. Apparently we don't have to hide our true opinion of Jesus' ideas from Jesus himself.
2. Jesus is not put off either by Peter's sinfulness or Peter's acknowledgement of the same. Likewise, we don't have to hide our true opinion of ourselves from Jesus.
3. By calling Peter, Jesus is about something bigger than just affirming Peter (not that there's anything wrong with that). :-) The reason for the call is not to say to Peter, "Buck up, little buddy, you're not so bad," but rather, "Stop being afraid now. We have work to do."

The crowds are as overwhelming as all those fish in the nets. The reason for the call of disciples is that people need the power of God and the Word of God that Jesus is offering, and in order to catch people with these things, Jesus needs help. The best thing that Peter teaches us about discipleship is that a regular guy does not cease to be a regular guy just because he is called to follow Jesus. Jesus is not putting together a group of fellow superstars who can sing, "When we all retire, we will write the gospels, so they'll all talk about us when we've died." Jesus is putting together a prophetic community, a group of people who will live the gospel so that others can hear it and see it. To do that, he will need all the regular people he can find.

On Staying Put - Or Not

Luke 4:21-30

Once again, Paul Palumbo and I talked about the gospel text this week by phone. He asked, "What did Jesus do?" (Now there's a bracelet idea....) What did Jesus do to torque the hometown crowd sooooo out of shape? "They were filled with rage," Luke says, and they tried to kill him. What was so upsetting?

We agreed that the standard reading of the text is that Jesus says, "This work of God toward healing, binding up broken-hearted, releasing captives, etc. is not just for Israel," and upon hearing that "Our God is an awesome God," big enough for good deeds to outsiders, the Nazareth congregation gets ugly.

"Maybe," Paul said, but he was unsatisfied with that reading. Was it really such new and upsetting information that God is paying attention to others? This is a theme throughout the Law and the Prophets. Would a "God is gonna share the love" speech really get Jesus in that much trouble?

It's a good point. So, if the scandal is not a generous and inclusive God, what is it?

I wonder if the scandal doesn't have something to do with the people wanting Jesus to keep the work local in a different way. "Don't let the buffalo roam," the billboards used to say in Jamestown, North Dakota, encouraging us to shop locally and support local businesses. Maybe the people want Jesus to establish himself at home, to set up shop there, to give something back. They like it when he is reading and speaking in the synagogue. The young rabbi could establish himself right at home.

Instead, he makes it clear that he will just keep moving on, and he also makes it clear that in doing so, he is following God's lead from the old days. I once heard a speaker talk about how Luke does not use verbs that have to do with status or with being established (relatives of ) in favorable contexts. Rather, being "on the way" is Luke's metaphor for the Christian life. Of course, not every impulse toward restlessness is an impulse to be a better Christian. For this reason, parts of the Christian tradition have put a high value on stability. Yet Jesus doesn't. Jesus "the same yesterday, today and forever?" I don't know how the writer of Hebrews meant it, but if we're talking about Jesus, we have to say, "For Jesus to 'stay the same' is to say that he will stay on the move. To stay with him will mean joining him on the road rather than coming back to a place where he has established himself, or a place where he will establish us, "setting us up" in a manner to which we could become accustomed. No such promises have been made, not to the people in the Nazareth synagogue, and not to us.

4 Epiphany C

This is an open thread for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany. Click on "comments" below to write on any of the texts. They are:

Jeremiah 1:4-10 (link to my blog entry)
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13
Luke 4:21-30 (link to my blog entry)

The Embodied Word

Jeremiah 1:4-10

I didn't get to preach last week because of an ice storm, which may be why I am still thinking about the finite bearing the infinite. Or maybe it's the texts.

Paul says at the end of Galatians, "From now on, let no one make trouble for me; for I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body" (NRSV).  RSV is better: "I bear on my body the marks of Jesus." In Greek, the word for "marks" is stigmata. We don't know what Paul is talking about exactly, but what strikes me about the comment is the "on my body" part. Paul is a missionary with his body. He is a follower of Jesus with his body. His body bears the marks of his allegiance to Christ.

All this body talk may make some of us a little squeamish. One of Gracia Grindal's 15 commandments for preachers is "Never speak of yourself in the the tub, shower, or in bed" [Word & World 19 (1999) : 73]. I heard a corollary of this commandment once, something like, "Never use the pulpit as a place to talk about yourself naked," as when you mention that you make the sign of the cross in the shower every morning to remind yourself of your baptism. (Your hearers may find this visual in their mind's eye to be, well, distracting.)

Even so, might Christians have something to say about bearing the marks of Christ on our bodies, of "inwardly digesting" the Word of God to such an extent that it changes (1) where we put our bodies—in what neighborhoods, with what companions, etc., and (2) how our bodies are themselves a witness to the one in whom we hope? In the OT reading, God talks about knowing Jeremiah when he was just a little body, not yet a body distinct from his mother's body. Then, God touches Jeremiah's mouth, a pretty intimate gesture for anyone, especially for the Almighty. Throughout his prophetic career, Jeremiah will bear on his body the words that the Lord gives to him for the people of Israel and the nations. He will do the text, with his life, with his body.

When I was in seminary, "the ministry of presence" was regularly ridiculed by theologians on the faculty who thought it was just a way for pastors to be lazy: "Don't worry about speaking a word from God. Just leave the reading, prayer and homework behind and show up here and there—that's enough." The theologians offered a needed corrective to the idea that "just being there" was always redemptive. Most of us have experienced a "just there" pastor or chaplain as "just in the way" when we or someone we loved needed something more than presence.

Putting our bodies where our hearts are is more than the old "ministry of presence." It is offering a physical, visual account of the hope that is in us. A friend of mine commented in a sermon once that he noticed as his parishioners served a meal at a homeless shelter an "invisible line." The homeless men stayed on one side of the table, and the church workers stayed on the other side. "What would it be like if we mixed that up?" my friend wondered out loud. What message—what word of God, even—might we be embodying if we walked around the table to the other side, or if we stood together on the serving side with men who lived at the shelter? Jeremiah will do this sort of embodiment throughout his career. Jesus will too.

Texts for 3 Epiphany C

Use this thread to make general comments about the texts for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany. Texts are:

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Psalm 19
Luke 4:14-21 (link to my blog entry)

Follow this link to read the texts online.

Finite Bearing the Infinite

Luke 4:14-21

I found out that the church I'm preaching at on Sunday is reading the Third Sunday after the Epiphany texts. Here are my preliminary thoughts about the gospel text. As you can see, I'm pondering what it means (and how it is true today) that "the finite is capable of bearing the infinite."

1. The gifts of God present in the common life of small town neighbors. When Jesus stands up and reads, then sits down and preaches, he is showing the people one of their own, anointed for God's work. There is a regular, everydayness to this. It was his custom to go to the synagogue; it was perhaps even his custom to read and speak about the text. He is "one of us." The finite is capable of bearing the infinite. But how do you know you're looking at the real deal? The people of Nazareth couldn't be sure, and were finally scandalized by the idea of such a familiar one making a claim like the one in Isaiah for himself. What are we missing because it is too familiar?
   
2. What "messiah" means. What will God's anointed one do? How do you know you're looking at the real deal? When John the Baptist sends the question to Jesus in Luke 7, Jesus replies to the messengers, "Go and tell John what you see and hear: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them." From the start here in Nazareth, this is the substance of what Jesus says his ministry is about: good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, an announcement of the acceptable year of the Lord. Where do we see this taking place today? Are we a part of it?
   
3. Expectations. Already word has spread. The people in Nazareth are eager to receive something from their weekly religious pilgrimage, just as everyone is who listens to a preacher today. All eyes are fixed, expectantly, on Jesus. What will they see in him? What will they hear in his message? Will he tell them that the Isaiah text (a) pleasant nostalgia about the past work of God to bring the exiles home, or (b) pie in the sky, a far-out promise to be fulfilled by God in heaven? No. Jesus rejects both of these readings and offers an alternative: Today. Today, with all its ambiguity, all its expectations, disappointments and compromises. Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Again, the finite is capable of bearing the infinite.

What do you think? Comment here on how you see this scripture fulfilled today where you live. Can we bear witness to present-day work of the Holy Spirit to make Jesus known as the one who announces freedom, good news and the acceptable year of the Lord? What sorts of things would we point to if we needed to make an argument that Jesus' word about what is happening "today" is just as true on Sunday morning as it was on that Sabbath day in Nazareth when he spoke?

I have one idea so far. I spent a few days last week at Concordia College. Concordia's purpose statement is this: "to influence the affairs of the world by sending into society thoughtful and informed men and women dedicated to the Christian life." I'm sure that Concordia has all the usual challenges that institutions face trying to live up to their own mission statements. Even so, something very good is going on there. Hundreds of kids came to the Wednesday night Communion service. The dozen or so kids who attended a Bible study the night before struck me as both "thoughtful and informed" already, as well as intellectually curious and pious at the same time.  Wherever they end up in society, they will be there as people who recognize the lordship of one who was anointed to turn the values of imperial society upside down (good news to the poor, freedom for those oppressed, jubilee ethics and economics, and more). It seemed to me that the Holy Spirit was well on its way to fulfilling scripture again, there in the lives of 18-22 year-olds, and, by allowing me to witness it, in my life too.

The Baptism of Jesus

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22.

Most of the sermons I have heard on the Baptism of Jesus are really about Christian baptism and its benefits. There's nothing wrong with preaching on baptism and its benefits, yet I suggest a thought experiment: what if you, O preacher, located yourself and your hearers somewhere else in this story besides in the Jordan with Jesus? Here are a couple of options.

Among those watching

What would it be like, for instance, to see ourselves as witnesses to the descent of the Holy Spirit as a dove, or as those who hear the voice from heaven? From that vantage point, what do you see/hear/think/feel? Is this what you have been waiting for (remember Luke's mention of people "filled with expectation")?

• You notice that Jesus is praying. A voice from heaven and a voice from earth are in conversation with each other. (This will continue to be true of Jesus and God, especially in Luke's gospel [5:11; 6:12; 9:18; 9:28-29; 11:1; 22:32, 39, 46; 23:34, 46].)
• You notice that he's affiliated with John the Baptist, that feisty, courageous and now imprisoned man who dares to speak truth to the likes of you and the likes of Herod.
• You notice that whatever is happening is public: the Holy Spirit is visible (which must be what "bodily" means) in the form of a dove, and the voice is audible. It is not just for Jesus, or a cozy connection meant only for Jesus and God. It is for something that will get bigger as the gospel goes on (starting when Jesus himself explains in chapter 4 why the Holy Spirit is upon him.)

John the Baptist

In other gospels, John interacts with Jesus "on stage." Here, John is shut up in prison before we hear about Jesus' baptism. It probably does not fit with the spirit of the text to make John the Baptist the one from whose perspective we see this story. He is, after all, trying to de-emphasize himself and point always to Jesus. Even so, what might John see in the baptism of Jesus?

• He had expected the "Holy Spirit and fire." Yet here the Holy Spirit does not take the form of fire, but the form of a dove.
• Jesus aligns himself with those who are receiving a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The curious thing about Jesus at his baptism is not what is exceptional about him, but rather the way he joins and blends in with the crowd. Incarnation means incarnation in the people of Israel, too, not just incarnation in a human body, devoid of a community and its sinfulness and repentance.
• Jesus' ability to "blend" and the fact of the durable power of the world's Herods makes it hard sometimes to know if he's really the one. The complexity of John's feeling about Jesus is probably best summed up in the message he sends Jesus from prison, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?"

The challenge of this text is to preach Jesus, rather than preaching to people about how "your baptism makes you a child of God." (For the record, it seems to me we are all children of God by virtue of our having been created by the Creator God. Baptism joins us to Christ, and functions to make us God's reborn children, but that does not mean that we were born children of anyone but God in the first place. In as much as the Lutheran Book of Worship liturgy obscures this, it is IMHO* wrong.)

Looking closely at Jesus' baptism and at the role the Holy Spirit plays in his ministry (a concordance search on the Holy Spirit in Luke is a good place to start) also spares us from turning a sermon on baptism into something that could function as a commercial for "cotton: the fabric of our lives."  Our talk of baptism can get sentimental very quickly. Baptism is not just meant for the relieving of the individual's tortured conscience or making us feel collectively warm about the "family of God." There's fire to be walked through in this life, truth to be spoken to power and healing to be offered to the whole creation. It is for such things as these that God has given us baptism, with its gift of God's Holy Spirit, living and active in Jesus' life and in ours.

*IMHO = "in my humble opinion."

Water, Rivers, Fire & Flames

Isaiah 43:1-7

"Do not fear." We usually hear this exhortation from angels, but in Isaiah 43:1-7, it's in the mouth of God. "Thus says the Lord," and then, "Do not fear." Twice in seven verses it appears.

Bible study activity: figure out what is going on in this text by looking first at the fear that Yahweh tells the people not to have:

1. What is/has been the threat to them?
2. What reasons does God give for why the people should not fear?
3. Which reasons have to do with God's past actions, and which with promises for the future?

There are all sorts of things to be afraid of, if you're in a post-exile Isaiah's audience. How are people so thoroughly disenfranchised going to get home, even if Babylon's tyranny over them has been foiled by the likes of Cyrus? What literal and metaphorical water, rivers, fire and flames will the people have to pass through as God gathers them from north, south, east and west? What will they do in the ruined Jerusalem after they get back there?

Above all these fears is the fear that God has simply abandoned his people. It's over. The covenant is null and void. You're on your own, kid. A couple of months ago, a Christian said to me something like, "Everyone in this life will leave you." It seemed to me she was taking the death of others a little too personally ("He didn't die just in order to leave you."), but her passion and clarity on this point were stunning. I imagine a similar sentiment among Isaiah's listeners. Everyone in this life —including God—will leave you.

God says no to that conclusion. No, no, no, a thousand times no. I created you. I have redeemed you. You are precious. I will gather you.

*  *  * 

For a little creative writing on what Isaiah 40-55 is about, see Fred Gaiser's "A Preacher's Conversation with Second Isaiah," Word & World 14/1 (1994) 87-94. It's free as a .pdf file on the Word & World web site.  Fred begins by saying, "That favorite device of fantasy writers, the 'warp in the space-time continuum,' has brought the author of Isaiah 40-55 into conversation with a late twentieth-century preacher. We listen in."