Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered January 13, 2008
Matthew 3:13-17
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.”
Vocation
It is a point of no return, that moment when Jesus steps up to John the Baptizer in the Jordan. There is no turning back.
You know that kind of moment. It’s like sky diving. Even if you have never done it, you can imagine your first time: You step to the edge of the airplane door and look down. It doesn’t matter that everyone behind you is telling you, “Don’t look down!” It’s what you do. You look down. There’s something about looking down at the distance of ten thousand feet that is unreal. Over the noise of the airplane engine and the wind, your instructor shouts something, but it take a second to realize that she’s saying, “Let go!” You hadn’t realized that you had a death grip on her arm – and every instinct within you is telling you the opposite, “Don’t let go!”
Deep inside you, the voice of reason and instinct shouts, “Don’t do it! Walk back to your seat, buckle your harness, and don’t unbuckle until the plane comes to a complete stop and the pilot extinguishes the ‘fasten seat belt’ sign.”
But, there is another voice, perhaps the voice of adventure that got you into this in the first place, that tells you, “Step out. Jump. This is why you came here.” Is it courage? Or a split second of insanity?
Whatever it is, once you have done it, once you take that step into the air, there is nothing else left to decide. There is no turning back. Gravity will have its way with you.
And, so it is with today’s Gospel reading. No skydiving story would be complete if it ended there, with our hero stepping out of the airplane. It has to continue. We have to know, How long is the freefall? Does he find the ripcord? When he pulls it, does the parachute open? Once it opens, does it work? Can our hero control it? And, finally, we have to know: What about the landing?
How does it end?
And so it goes with the gospel of Matthew. This story doesn’t stand all alone, with a beginning, middle, and end. It is only the beginning. Once Jesus steps into the Jordan with John the Baptizer, “to fulfill all righteousness,” there is no turning back. Jesus has answered the call, and events will fall into place leading inevitably to the cross and resurrection.
I use the image of skydiving because it is a death-defying feat.
Answering the call to follow Jesus is, also, death-defying. For, the call he issues to us is like the call Jesus issues to Lazarus, a call out of the grave and into life. “Come out!” he shouts to Lazarus, and Lazarus steps out of the tomb and they set him loose from his grave clothes and he has life again. He defies death.
In baptism, scripture tells us, “we have been buried with Jesus by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” When we baptize, we defy death.
Like Moses thrown into the Nile just as Pharaoh demanded all the Hebrew children must be, but in a watertight basket so he could be drawn out of the water for the life God intended; he defied death.
Like the Hebrew people who passed through the Red Sea on dry ground with a wall of water on each side, they escaped the Egyptian army and defied death;
Like the widow of Zarephath who was ready to make one last meal for her son and herself and then die – but, when the prophet Elijah showed up and said, “Make me something to eat,” she did, and found that her grain and her oil never ran out. She defied death.
To answer the call Jesus puts before us, to discern the gifts God has given each of us, to discern the need of the world around us, and to say yes to the opportunities to use our gifts to meet the world’s need for the grace of Jesus—that too, is death-defying.
We defy the walking death of a life lived for ourselves alone.
We defy the death of trying to earn the favor of God through our own merit;
We defy the death of living for things that will not last.
In the ordination vows, we promise to carry out our work with “energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.”
My prayer for those who are ordained or installed today is this: for the energy that comes with death-defying feats of adventure;
For the intelligence to recognize the opportunities for ministry God gives us, and the gifts we have to carry them out;
For the imagination to see a vision of the future God is planning for us next year, three years, five years down the road;
For the love, given and received, that we can only know in the full realization of God’s gift to us in Jesus Christ.
Thanks be to God. Amen.