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boythirteen · 5 years

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Thank you, Rev. Pat, for asking me to preach today. Today is called Recovery Sunday, and also The Baptism of Jesus. I may have been invited to preach because I’m someone in recovery. I’ve also been baptized—twice—once as an infant and again as an adult who made a choice. I think I’ve been in recovery for 22 years, or maybe 21 years or 23. Which would also be the number of years since my adult baptism, since I was baptized shortly after coming to MCCNY. And I came to MCCNY because I met Rev. Kristen, a previous pastor here whom some of you may know, at an AA meeting after having been through a detox program at Beth Israel Hospital, which would mark the date of my being clean and sober. I want to say this date was April 16. I don’t have documents to attest to it, or none that I can find, and my memory of dates and years is bad. I’m telling you this to say that I’m not an exemplary person in recovery who celebrates my sober anniversary and follows a rigorous path. I’ve benefited—greatly—from AA, as well as from an aftercare program at Beth Israel, many years of therapy, and, most importantly and enduringly, the support of my family of faith at MCCNY. I pray that everyone embarking on a recovery path will find their own way. I don’t believe there’s only one way or even a best way. I don’t offer my way as anything to emulate. I’ve been reckless with my emotions and haven’t sought serenity. I continue to be like this and just let myself be it. Don’t listen to me about it! I’m on a rocky path! It changes moment by moment though, as does my faith path. It has rolling hills and wonderful beach parts in the sun, too. So I can be here as a baptized person who will share my reflection on the readings for today about Jesus being baptized—Isaiah’s foretelling of this and the acting out of it by John the Baptist. I want to read the verses from Isaiah to you first.

Isaiah 42:1-7 Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon you; you will bring forth justice to the nations. You will not cry or lift up your voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed you will not break, and a dimly burning wick you will not quench; you will faithfully bring forth justice. You will not grow faint or be crushed until you have established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for your teaching. Thus says God, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am God, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes of all, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in obscurity.

Then come the gospel verses from Matthew, which I’ll read in a minute, that are about John baptizing Jesus, the one God calls both “my servant” and “my chosen, in whom my soul delights—” the one the verses in Isaiah are speaking to.

Something maybe everyone knows but I didn’t know is that baptism as we think of it sort of originated with John, although there were purity rites in Jewish law involving immersion in water that were the precursors of it. And the baptisms performed by John were different in purpose than the ones we have as Christian sacraments, in that the Christian ones have Jesus as the focal point, belief in Jesus, whereas John’s baptisms were about repentance to prepare for Jesus who would baptize with fire, or the holy spirit. John’s baptisms were happening before the fire of the holy spirit was set free in the world, before the wholesale forgiveness of sins that Jesus said was simply ours.

I remember my baptism happening right here, kind of over there. I had my dog with me, Scout. What I understood about the whole thing was that it was a public profession of my belief in Jesus, in the teachings of Jesus as guiding principles for living justly and lovingly. It was a formal way for me to align myself with a family of faith, to belong. Rev. Pat sprinkled me with water and put oil on my forehead. What I most remember is her saying: I claim you for Christ. I had a feeling of me and Scout being dressed in armor like Joan of Arc and her horse.

But John was baptizing people before anyone knew much about Jesus, except for believing that the coming of a prophesied messiah was definitely at hand. John’s was “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness” to prepare the way. He was someone living outside of society who wore camel hair clothes and ate locusts and honey. He was strange and counter-culture. He was immersing people in the Jordan river as a sacramental act of repentance and forgiveness of their sins, a cleansing act to make them new and ready for the triumphant arrival of Christ. The people coming to him must have been kind of counter-culture, too, or drawn to what was revolutionary. They were open to radical change, to something amazing—the imminent coming of the commonwealth of God, and not as an incremental process to still be pursuing 2 centuries hence, but as a thing dramatically at hand. Which it was, really, and continues to be in every instance of justice and love breaking through. But theirs was perhaps a more literal expectation of justice prevailing, and with a messiah at the forefront to secure it. John’s ministry was the pre-messianic movement that heralded this. So the people coming to John to be baptized were those desirous of a messiah who would “establish justice on earth,” as Isaiah prophesied—a chosen one of God who would be “a covenant for the people and a light for the nations, to open the eyes of all.” The impression I have is that people seeking such an inclusive savior would be those who cared about others than themselves, who cared about social justice and everyone having a seat at the table. Maybe they would have been the Resistance that we have today. Isaiah says, though, that the chosen one of God “{would} not cry or lift up {their} voice, or make it heard in the street,” which seems somewhat contradictory to the struggle for social justice, and to the actual behavior of Jesus who surely did raise his voice in the streets.

I need to collect my thoughts. This is a hard sermon to write. I realize as I’m saying this that I’ve already written the sermon and have hopefully collected my thoughts, but it feels important to pull back the curtain on the challenge of it. What I’m feeling, what I feel directed to think about, is something at the intersection of the contradictory things these verses put forth, such as Jesus being “servant” and also lauded “chosen one.” I’m thinking of the difference between what is a spiritual, internal, more abstract and maybe difficult response to life, and what is a literal, active, on-the-surface one. Like thinking of the “servant” identity being a spiritual practice of humility and the “chosen one” identity, while seeming to suggest a spiritual grandeur, being a more human way of ranking people. Or like thinking about raising our voices in the streets as a literal action in the fight for justice, but something else happening in our spiritual selves that is deeper and not confrontational or shouting out. Like thinking of trying to love our enemy Trump in our spiritual selves, to accept him as a sibling child of God, but out in the world we are clashing with him in fierce opposition to everything he represents. The surface response, the clashing and shouting, feels more immediate and gratifying on that level, whereas the spiritual response is ponderous and hard to sit with, but maybe ultimately more solid. I think of the people coming to John with their expectations of a Messiah charging in to right the wrongs of the world, how Isaiah’s prophecy of a chosen one who will “open the eyes of all, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in obscurity“ could be interpreted in a literal, immediate way of fixing things—healing people, eradicating disease, freeing people from actual jail, abolishing ICE—just storming the gates and tearing down real-life walls to bring about the commonwealth of God this very minute. But also the prophecy describes a metaphorical and gradually evolving process of opening people’s eyes, in a spiritual sense, to an existence free from self-imposed bonds of fear and selfishness, or bonds of addictive behaviors that inhibit just relationships. And maybe both of these interpretations are the right ones—the first one, the literal one, being about our more active and human experience of life, and the second metaphorical one being about our divine natures.

Jesus’s baptism seems, to me, to validate both ways of understanding. In Matthew, Jesus, the Messiah, comes to John to be baptized as if in need of repentance, but John resists and says “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Let me read the verses:

Matthew 3:13-17 Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by John. John would have prevented it, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Child, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

So John tries to deter Jesus because John’s baptism is about repentance and the forgiveness of sins, and Jesus is the coming Messiah, the divine one who doesn’t need such forgiveness in John’s eyes. But Jesus is also the human being who learns and grows. Jesus’s embrace of his divinity is also a process, as ours is, too.

Something interesting to me, as an aside, is that in researching John the Baptist and John’s baptism of Jesus in particular, I kept coming across writing concerning the authenticity of the occurrence—how everyone was in near unanimous agreement that the baptism of Jesus by John was a real event that happened in much the way that the gospels described, with a few variations about whether the voice from heaven was an actual out-loud voice, but with the rest of the story being told uniformly from version to version. Which was among the criteria for determining whether an account was real—how many similar tellings of it there were. But one of the main points in determining the authenticity of this story was that it was somewhat embarrassing to the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Jesus that Jesus would come to John to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins, since, as John clearly felt, it wouldn’t have been necessary. In other words, the story of Jesus’s baptism rings true because why would anyone in charge of documenting the ministry of Jesus want to make up a story that called into question Jesus’s divinity? But, to me, juxtaposing the divinity of Jesus with the potentially fallible human nature of him seems more to be the intent and power of the story, even than whether it truly occurred. I do so like that everyone wants to validate the reality of it, though. It puts things in a different, historical realm, a human realm, kind of like what I’m trying to think through anyway—the human realm intersecting the divine one. What happens to Jesus following his baptism is the forty days of fasting in the wilderness, where Satan tempts him with very human, materialistic and ego-boosting rewards to satisfy human needs and desires, both basic ones and ones of conceit. Jesus doesn’t succumb to the temptations, but the fact of him needing to address them at all serves to illustrate his humanness, whether or not the encounter with Satan is symbolic of an internal struggle or believed to be remarkably real.

In any case, Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism details that the spirit of God descends to alight on Jesus in the form of a dove, and God’s voice says “This is my Child, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” And this is the thrilling part to me. It’s what I want to have happen in the world today. I want a voice of absolute authority, God’s voice, to boom out and make irrefutably clear just who God is pleased with and who isn’t. And I already have my own definitive ideas about who isn’t. I don’t know if God’s actual voice would even be heeded, though, and we’re supposed to already be equipped with the Holy Spirit to be able to hear God’s voice in faith ways. And part of the point of everything we do as followers of Jesus is that we also hear this voice of God speaking to us, individually and collectively telling us that we are the beloved of God in whom God is pleased. And this brings me back to somewhere akin to the difficult place of trying to love my enemy Trump, or believing that I should certainly be trying to do this while I kind of feel in my human heart that I really don’t at all. Because in believing myself to be the Beloved of God even with all of my human fallibilities, I’m also having to believe, or being given the remarkable opportunity to believe, that everyone else is God’s Beloved, too, regardless of whether they’re easy for me to love or not. And just because I feel convinced that certain people are doing things that can’t possibly be pleasing to God, and that I must stand up against these things as I move through the world, which I want to do and will do, I sometimes have a glimpse of God having a soft spot for all of us no matter what we do, and urging us on to have this for each other.

I remember thinking about this in another sermon and having an image of us scurrying around on the earth, and the earth spinning through space, and God viewing us from a Gods-eye view as fragile little creatures crawling over the globe of the earth—how all the distinctions of human behavior we think of as being on a vast scale from good to bad just wouldn’t be measured that way from a heavenly overhead view. But what I’m thinking of now is the zoomed-in view of God knowing every single atom of each of us, and how amazing and beautiful we are in our atomic essences. I’m kind of surprised that I feel so open and generous about humanity’s essence right now, since I spend so much of my time looking at twitter and pretty much hating everyone and feeling despair at the swathes of people who seem to want to eradicate those who aren’t them or theirs. Recently I was looking at a twitter thread about transgender children, or about how the idea of transgender children was insane and that a parent being supportive of a child’s misguided whim of being transgender was outright abusive. And someone had tweeted a particularly infuriating thing about there not being such a thing as transgender children and that it was all a projection of a parent’s debased sexuality onto their child. So I responded to clarify that gender identity and sexuality were two different things, and that I was transgender and had known myself to be this as a child without anyone projecting anything on to me, and that my mother had contrarily been actively opposed to my chosen gender expression. And the person replied to say that I was lying. So. I guess this person does have a beautiful atomic structure, anyway.

But also the person has something inside of him that’s damaged, as does everyone, but with different manifestations. This person is threatened by the existence of transgender people for whatever reasons. In the prophecy from Isaiah, in describing the chosen one of God, God says: “a bruised reed you will not break, and a dimly burning wick you will not quench,” which firstly suggested to me something about marginalized people being bruised by systemic structures of oppression, their voices snuffed out by the more dominant ones, the oppressors, insisting on their own way, and how the chosen one, Jesus, would attend especially to the marginalized of society and work to ignite their powerful voices. Which I believe is what the prophecy is saying, but also it could go deeper to include even the oppressors, their bruises being the fear inside of them that manifests as intolerance and close-mindedness, their internal voices of conscience having been snuffed out by this fear. That Jesus would attend to them, too. And that we, as the beloved children of God who are also chosen by God, would need to consider all of this, however infuriating it may seem to be in this political climate of both sides-ism and the terrible legitimacy given to doctrines of hatred and exclusion. Which isn’t at all what we need to be giving legitimacy to.

Well now I need to review what I’ve learned at MCCNY about our relationship with God, which is that everyone is a beloved child of God no matter what we do or don’t do. Nothing can separate any one of us from the love of God. We don’t have to earn this love. All of us are as special and precious to God as we can possibly be, so we don’t need to compete with each other to be the most special since we already are. God doesn’t reward us for being good or punish us for being bad. God doesn’t make bad things happen to us but also doesn’t take away our struggles. God is with us through our struggles so that we can best abide them. We can do all things through God who strengthens us. We have God inside of us and can say Namaste to each other which means I bow to the divine in you. We are earthy and also heavenly. If God loves us no matter what we do, good or bad, we still strive to do good because we are like the people who came to John to be baptized who believe in justice and love prevailing and everyone having a special seat at the table, which is what we call the commonwealth of God.

And all of this I absolutely believe. But when I look inside myself in all honesty, which is something I’ve learned to try to do as part of being in recovery, I do find some inconsistencies in what I believe and what I seem to really believe. Most notably, I seem to believe that God does like it better when I’m good and loving as opposed to when I’m selfish and uncaring. And that God gives me little rewards for this and in fact often intervenes in my life to make it fun and great. And that I’m in competition with other people as to who’s the best and most favored one. That I want to be the best and most favored one.

But, conversely, I judge myself and am deeply ashamed of myself a lot. One of my bad areas is about the competition for God’s special love. What I know and believe is that God is Love, and that God’s Love is infinitely abundant, but still I behave as if I think there’s a limited supply of this love, and that I have to earn my share. Or worse, I’m jealous of other people getting lots of love because it means there’s less for me. Which I fundamentally know that there isn’t but still have the jealousy roiling inside me like lave burning me up. And I recognize this jealousy as coming from a similar place of fear of scarcity that I am so adamantly condemning of in other people who want to horde resources for themselves, so I think I must be a hypocrite, as well.

But if I look at this like looking at a cross section of myself, the layers of me, I can see that there’s a deeper layer that really and truly does believe in what I profess to believe. It’s kind of like a sandwich with my professed beliefs on top, and then the inconsistencies inside, and the professed beliefs again holding it in from underneath. And the good news is that I ultimately feel forgiven for all of it anyway.

And this is kind of the end of the sermon, but I need to add something. I want to say that I don’t feel forgiven because I think my belief in Jesus means that I am. I feel forgiven because I believe in the God of Love that Jesus’s teachings describe to me. I mean that I don’t believe that belief in Jesus is a prerequisite for God’s all-forgiving love, or that baptisms are required for professing belief. I don’t believe that anything is required, even though I chose to be baptized. I told you that it gave me a deeper sense of belonging, which my human nature wanted. And being “claimed for Christ” gave me a feeling of being a servant of God, a feeling of humility that seemed to be a deeper sense of self than what I felt when wanting to be the most special one, although I did feel special by virtue of simply being claimed. I’m thinking of the contradiction between Jesus being the servant of God and also God’s chosen one, but how it isn’t the contradiction of these identities but the combination of them that’s the true nature of Christ and of us, too. And that justice happens when we’re most aligned with this combination. But so often, especially in practicing organized religion, it’s the “chosen one” identity that seems to be preferenced for Jesus or for whatever figure serves as Messiah, the “servant” part being imposed on people not as a spiritual practice but as a lower ranking in relationship to a Godhead. But then the servants, or believers, can claim a higher ranking than those they consider non-believers, and so the rifts between us grow. And this seems to me now to be what patriarchy and systems of injustice are built on, and how religion is too easily used to protect and advance these systems by establishing such hierarchies in our relationships with God and with each other, how distance is created between us in this way, and spaces made for self-appointed chosen ones who practice oppression.

Is this making sense? I keep wanting to say it in another, clearer way, or to turn it upside down and look at it from underneath or look at it sideways. But times up for the sermon. It feels important to me to keep thinking about this, though, and maybe for you to think about it a little, too.

Amen

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