Sermon 1-15-2006
Borodino United Methodist Church
"Community through Christ"
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January 15, 2006
Mark 1:6-11
Now John was clothed with camel's hair, and had a
leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey. And he
preached, saying, "After me comes he who is mightier than I, the
thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have
baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy
Spirit." In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was
baptized by John in the
Sermon
Jesus in the Mirror
During these Sundays after Epiphany we’re going to be looking at
signs; the signs that God has shown to us, visible ways in which he has
given to us an indication of his regard for us in the life of Jesus
Christ. Epiphany is a season
of signs; and the sign that we’re looking at today is the sign of the
baptism of Jesus. The baptism
of the Lord took place in the River Jordan.
I’ve already described it in the children’s message, and I’ve
just re mentioned it in the Gospel lesson so the details should be fresh
in your mind. Jesus came
to John, Jesus was baptized by John; and when the baptism was over there
was a visible manifestation of God’s stamp of approval on this event –
when the heavens opened and the dove came down and the voice came from
heaven “This is my beloved Son.” The
baptism of Jesus, a sign of God’s intention to save us in the life and
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Jesus was baptized in an action that other people were also
engaging in at the time. John
had been baptizing people for some time before the day when Jesus came to
him. People had been baptized
by John in response to his message; and his message was repent, repent
because your lives are broken, repent because you have done evil, repent
because all of us cannot escape doing evil, repent because God is coming
to change all that. That was
John’s basic message, and for that reason, people were flocking to him,
perhaps by the thousands, coming down to the riverside to be baptized by
him in token of their repentance for the sins that they were well aware
of, sins they acknowledged, sins that they felt guilty for and didn’t
know what to do about; John baptized them as the start of a new life for
them.
And that baptism had things in common with the baptism we use in
the
John clearly didn’t see the point; but Jesus told him to go
ahead, because in fact, God wants it this way.
So John went ahead and baptized Jesus and then we had the visible
sign of the dove, the sound of the voice indicating God’s approval of
what Jesus had done. Our
baptism, the baptism of Jesus, they’re not exactly the same.
By why was Jesus baptized if he didn’t need baptism the way we
do? Jesus the man without sin,
Jesus born with the power to prevent sins, the power that every other
human being has lost; Jesus didn’t need our baptism so what’s the
connection between him being baptized and ours?
Jesus’ baptism was not the same as ours; and yet it was Jesus’
way of identifying with us; of making a connection between himself and us.
We can’t help the fact that we’re selfish.
Jesus took the consequences of that selfishness upon him in being
baptized. He chose not to
become a selfish person, but to pay the price for the selfishness of
everyone else; and that paying the price began when he was baptized.
And the word “baptism” carried forward for the rest of his
life, the rest of his ministry leading up to his death on the cross.
When that cross was very close to him, when he was feeling the
anguish of the voluntary self sacrifice he was about to make, when every
thing that was human in him was resisting that without any sins still
being committed, but resisting it naturally and rightly.
It’s right and human to shrink from death.
When Jesus was shrinking from death he referred to it in a sentence
to the disciples that was almost as agonized as some of the statements
that he made during his period of intense suffering right at the end of
his life. He said, I
have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am restrained until it is
accomplished, how my heart grieves within me until it is accomplished.
So Jesus thought of his own death as his baptism.
The baptism that he had from John was the beginning of a period in
his lifetime which would come to its climax when he died on the cross.
His baptism in the river was prelude to his baptism on
Our baptism, like I said, is slightly different.
Our baptism is one in which we take upon ourselves the death of
Jesus. But because we take
upon ourselves the death of Jesus, Jesus took upon himself the death of
the human race and the consequences of sins.
We take upon ourselves the death of Jesus which pays for the
consequences of sins; and because we do we also have in our own language
of Christian spirituality the language of the cross.
Jesus doesn’t bear the cross alone for Christians.
We have crosses too.
Jesus, himself, talked about that.
Our cross is not the same as the cross of Jesus; but it’s our way
of identifying ourselves with him. Just
as Jesus’ baptism which wasn’t the same as ours was his way of
identifying himself with us. Our
cross is our way of identifying ourselves with Jesus.
The Christian life then, is a life in which having been baptized
into the life of Christ; we finally, at one point or another, maybe early
in life, maybe late in life, maybe many times in life, maybe throughout
life we finally take up the cross. This
is something that Christians don’t always want to emphasize; but it’s
also something that all people sometimes talk about in a way that I think
needs a little bit of clarification.
“Taking up the cross,” what does that really mean?
A lot of people use that phrase to describe anything bad that
happens to us that we have to endure.
If we come down with a catastrophic illness, if we experience an
untimely death of a loved one, if we even lose a job or our marriage
dissolves, or something bad happens to us, any of these things that cause
a psychological response, any of these things that people who are
otherwise comfortable in life are terribly afraid of when they look at
their lives and their futures – if any of these things happen to us it
might flash across our minds “this is a cross we have to bear”.
And I think that’s not all wrong, but at the same time, I think a
little bit of clarification is needed.
It’s a cross if we are willing to make it a cross.
It’s a cross if we are willing to somehow connect our bearing of
that with our devotion to Christ. If
we are willing to take it up as a cross, something that we are going to be
crucified on, something that we are going to allow to shape our lives for
the future. It might be not so
much the experience of a bad thing that happen to you as your choice to
make that experience be the pattern into which your life is going to be
molded as you carry that burden through the rest of your life.
You have to choose to make it a cross before it really becomes a
cross.
So, yes, the bad things that happen to you are one way of noticing
the way in which our life is beyond our control, the way in which God
might be guiding us toward a way of living in a higher and more creative
and self sacrificing way. God’s
way of helping us along these lines is what I’m saying; but I do not say
that God causes the bad things; but that God helps us deal with the bad
things, what causes the bad things is more hidden and mysterious than
that. So the bad things that
happen to us are potential crosses.
But what needs to happen in that process is that we need to become
conscious that we are making it a cross, making it a way of identifying
our lives with the life of Christ.
There’s one illustration from recent history that might clarify
it a little bit further. From
the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.; he was a remarkable man, an important
20th century leader, a man with many gifts, and the historians
that have looked at his life with detail have been clearer and clearer
that he was a man with many flaws. There
have been other remarkable people through history that did not have the
disadvantage of people scrutinizing their lives as closely as Dr. King has
had. We’ve been
exposed to the ways he was compromised during his leadership, and the ways
in which in his writings he depended too heavily upon the writings of
others, some of his writings shaded over into plagiarism; and other ways
in which perhaps he showed himself not to be a perfect man.
But the point is that Martin Luther King Jr., even while he is
being acknowledged as an important figure in the 20th century,
has also been acknowledged as a leader with flaws.
One time however, he was criticized by his own comrades in the
Civil Rights Movement for a flaw in which I think they were mistaken in
their assessment of him. It
came fairly early in the Civil Rights Movement.
King had already led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and he had tried
to move from that success of having the buses integrated, no longer was
one required to sit in certain areas on the bus, and he was moving from
that and trying to figure out what he had to do next; because he had
become a nationally prominent figure and he felt that he had important
work to accomplish. A lot of
other people were excited about the work that he was doing, and were
starting to think of different things that they could do on their own.
And a number of very young adults came up with the project of the
Freedom Rides.
You may remember, if you’re old enough to be my age or older,
what the Freedom Rides were like. Groups,
generally from the North, would charter a bus and would go down into the
Southern states. They’d
get off the bus in a pre arranged locale and there they would commit acts
of civil disobedience – sitting at a lunch counter that was supposed to
be segregated, they would sit integrated blacks with whites; or trying to
register blacks to vote; or drinking at public drinking fountains that
were supposed to be only for whites, but blacks would drink there.
And although blacks and whites together engaged in the Freedom
Rides, the leadership was young African-Americans, people of a younger
generation than Martin Luther King, Jr. who was a man of early middle age
at the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
So the Freedom Rides were taking place, and these were extremely
dangerous events – lightning rods for white bigotry, trying to upset the
regime of legal segregation and legal discrimination that had been
established in the South. It
was during that that King sat down with some of the young adults that were
leading the Freedom Rides and they challenged him at that meeting to join
them in the Freedom Rides. King
wasn’t sure about it, he kind of hedged, he felt uncomfortable about
doing that. And they
pressed and persisted with him – Come
and ride with us and we’ll make this moment a really glorious moment in
the eyes of the public. We
need your prestige and you also need to be associated with an act that is
as revolutionary as this one. They
were really pushing him on that, and finally said - I
think I need to choose my time and place for my
That was what King said; and when that message was reported, when
the press got hold of it, when the larger civil rights movement heard it,
King was uniformly criticized. His
friends were embarrassed for him for saying that because it sounded like
King was saying he was Jesus. His
rivals turned their backs on him, they didn’t want this man to be too
prominent in their leadership because he was obviously letting it go to
his head too much. The phrase
“Messiah complex” was thrown about quite a bit.
And younger black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement actually
started making fun of him for thinking of himself as being that high.
And that was a major moment of setback in King’s image within his
own circle of people who wanted the things and the final goals that he
wanted. And that one instance
for which he was criticized for something that fellow Christian leaders
should have recognized, and I think some of them did, was just standard
Christian spirituality.
Yes, we do have our own Golgotha, we aren’t in the public
spotlight as Martin Luther King, Jr. was; we aren’t all marked for
assassination the way he seemed to be for the last few years of his life;
but we do all have to carry a cross to some place.
And there’s nothing wrong with saying it.
Yet our cross isn’t the same as Jesus’; as if we were having to
carry the cross alone they way that Jesus carried the cross, at the time
he was alone. But our cross
identifies us with the cross of Jesus.
When we take whatever burden it is, whether it’s the burden of
leading the Civil Rights Movement nationally, or whether it’s the burden
of dealing gracefully and creatively with any kind of difficulty, any kind
of tribulation that’s dropped in our laps by the circumstances of our
lives; which is more likely the kind of burden we would deal with.
We shoulder that burden into the shape of the cross and carry it
from
Another way of putting this is in terms of a mirror. The baptism that we are baptized with and the crosses we carry are not mirror images of the baptism of Jesus or the cross of Jesus. They don’t exactly reflect each other; but they do connect with each other. They do resemble each other, and in doing so they establish a link between God’s life and ours. It is the only hope of getting out of the predicament of our lives. They do establish that link. So that when Jesus was baptized, it was as if he was looking into a mirror and seeing in that mirror our reflection, the reflection of the whole human race. And when we shoulder our life’s difficulties creatively and willingly as a cross, as something we will bear by choice; when we shoulder our cross and are willing to carry it, it’s as if we are looking into the mirror and seeing – however briefly, however incompletely, but still nevertheless seeing – Jesus in the mirror. This sign of baptism gives us Jesus in the mirror. Amen.
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Borodino United Methodist Church
1820 Rt. 174
Skaneateles, NY 13152
Pastor Peter Agnew
E-mail: BorodinoChurch@aol.com