Revisiting Jesus' Baptism

    I preached about the baptism of Jesus last Sunday. As one person was leaving the sanctuary, she shook my hand and said, “I’ve always wondered why Jesus was baptized in the first place. Jesus didn’t have any sins to repent for and he didn’t need to have any sins forgiven.”
    It’s a very good — and popular — question. Almost every commentary written about the gospels has to address this matter, since Christianity traditionally holds that Jesus was sin-less.
    For one thing, scholars across the board agree that this event actually took place. The fact that all four gospels tell the same story lend credence to the idea that Jesus really was baptized by John. It appears to be a very important story to the followers of Jesus.
    So why was Jesus baptized?
    I’ll be honest; I think this is a misleading question. It assumes that Jesus knew he was sinless, or conscious of his status, when he was baptized. I think this story is best read as Jesus’ own call story. This is the event in Jesus’ life which jolted him into awareness of who he was, and what he was called to do.
    You may have noticed that the gospels are extremely light on details of Jesus’ life before his baptism. All we have are birth stories from Matthew and Luke, and a story about Jesus in the temple as a 12-year old (Luke 2:41-52), and those stories are all of dubious historicity.
    The truth is that nothing is really known about Jesus before he was baptized. He came down to the Jordan River that day to see and hear John the Baptist. He was moved by John’s proclamation, decided that he wanted to be part of John’s movement, and went down into the water with everybody else to be baptized.
    But when he came up out of the water, something happened. He saw into heaven, he saw the Spirit of God descending and entering him, and he heard God’s voice saying to him, “You are my Son, my beloved; in you, I am well pleased.”   
    What happened in the Jordan River was the defining event of Jesus’ life, up to this point. This is his coming out party, his debut, his “burning bush” moment. From this time forward, Jesus begins to live into the reality of who he is. He begins to understand more and more about his calling and his task; he starts to speak and act with authority.
    I think he didn’t fully understand his identity before the baptism; he didn’t know who he was or what he was supposed to be doing. I don’t believe this is a heretical idea; the orthodox belief is that Jesus was fully divine and fully human. To be fully human means to have knowledge which is limited to one’s own experience. Until Jesus experienced God’s call, he couldn’t have known precisely who he was.
    The more important question that this story raises is whether or not each one of us has heard God’s call upon our lives. God didn’t call only Jesus; no, the New Testament is full of stories of men and women who recognize — or not — God’s call and then act — or not — upon it.
    I believe that God has called every one of us — man, woman, and child — to a life full of meaning, fulfillment, and grace. Each life has its own unique bent; some, like myself, are called to ordained ministry, others are sent into the corporate work place, while others are called to the teaching, healthcare, or law enforcement professions, just to give a few examples.
    Yes, your life has its own special divine calling. You are the only one who can follow it. You are the one chosen by God to fulfill God's own particular mission.
     It's a high calling. But you are equipped for it. And so am I.

Harvey, Noah, and God's Saving Work

If you took a close look at my stole last Sunday, you might have noticed that it was a detailed illustration of the story of Noah’s ark. It’s a beautiful piece of art, but I don’t wear it often because it doesn’t fit any church season very easily.

However, you can guess why I chose to wear it last week. And I’m going to wear it again this coming Sunday.

I keep finding myself reading and re-reading the story of the flood in Genesis these last few days. I’m searching for some kind of interpretive clue for making sense of the tragedy unfolding in Houston these days. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find comfort in the Noah story.

For one, according to Genesis, God causes the flood — no, to put it bluntly, God uses the flood for genocidal purposes. He wanted to purge the earth of human beings and start all over. So he picked Noah, who seemed like a good guy at the time, and gave him alone the lifeline he and his family would need to survive the flood.

I don’t believe that this is really the true explanation for the flood, let me be very clear. I do believe that there was a big flood in the ancient past; other ancient civilizations and cultures also have stories of a major, earth-altering flood. But the Noah story sounds like a very early, weak attempt to make sense of its widespread destruction, which is something we humans are always trying to do.

When tragedy occurs and disaster strikes, we work hard to make sense of it. We find it very difficult to accept the idea that storms happen because of a complex of factors related to atmosphere and barometric pressure and winds. We shrink from the thought that sometimes random things happen, or that accidents occur.

Sometimes the human authors of the Hebrew Scriptures struggled with this very tendency. They found it easier to ascribe a cause to the flood; since the only thing that could possibly cause a worldwide flood was God, then obviously, God must have caused the flood. And why? Well, isn’t it obvious that people can be evil?

It might have made for a plausible scenario for early civilizations, but the story sounds absolutely horrifying to 21st century people. This doesn’t sound like the God we know, nor like the God we come to know in the rest of the Bible.

When I consider the “meaning” of Hurricane Harvey and the subsequent flooding, I don’t ask, “Whose fault is it?” I’m not angry with God for “letting it happen,” nor do I think God caused it to happen.

Rather, when I look at what is happening in Houston, I see God at work in the aftermath of the storm through all the ordinary people who have put their own lives on hold to be in service.
Haven’t we all seen God at work in extraordinary ways? We have seen scores of inspiring photographs and videos of people helping people. We have watched journalists reaching out to assist elderly Alzheimer’s patients, uniformed officers carrying women and children, and teenagers piloting boats and canoes down flooded streets to save families. Every time we see someone else being saved, we are watching God’s salvation work happening.

This Sunday, we have the opportunity of participating in this salvation work. As a church, we are joining together to put together a number of flood buckets, which will be immensely helpful over the coming weeks as the flood cleanup begins. The church will provide the five-gallon buckets, but we need you all to bring the supplies. Here’s a list of what is needed, and you’re invited to bring them this Sunday morning. Bring them to your pews with you, because the service will be interactive and participatory. We’ll be putting together flood buckets AS an act of worship, and taking Holy Communion, too. See you Sunday morning!

How to Keep From Misusing the Bible

One might be mightily confused about what Christians stand for if you listen to some of the high-profile, public preachers who have a national platform for their words. For example, not long ago, a pastor said that Romans 13 gives carte blanche to the government “to do whatever, whether it’s assassination, capital punishment or evil punishment to quell the actions of evildoers like Kim Jong Un."

And it's not just public people either. In a viral video from Univision, a member of the Ku Klux Klan tells a Hispanic woman that II Peter instructs him not to eat with immigrants or people of color, and that the Biblical admonition to "love thy neighbor," really means to "love thy people."

These “Biblical” responses might prompt one to question whether the Bible is worth using at all. The truth is that ANYTHING can be supported or proved by the Bible. After all, slavery was supported by the Bible — the sale, transfer, and ownership of human beings was upheld as a Biblical principle. If the Bible can be used to justify slavery, then what else can it support? Murder of children? Check — see II Kings 2:23-25 for a chilling story in which the prophet Elisha directs two bears to maul 42 naughty kids to death. Genocide? Check — see Joshua 6 for just one example when God instructs the Israelites to conquer a city and kill every living thing in it.

Can we really believe that the Bible is a trustworthy and reliable document?

Of course I believe that the Bible is worth using. It’s just that there are good and bad ways to read and interpret the Bible. The key is learning how to understand it.

When the apostle Paul was aging, he spent much of his time mentoring a young man named Timothy. In one of his letters to him, he encouraged Timothy by saying, “Make an effort to present yourself to God as a tried-and-true worker, who doesn’t need to be ashamed but is one who interprets the message of truth correctly.” In other words, there is a right way and wrong way to interpret Scripture. 

This is a skill that is not only learned by pastors with years of seminary; every single one of you can also become a more informed, better equipped reader of the Bible. We need these skills now more than ever.

Here’s a list of five things to know/do in order to avoid misinterpreting the Bible:

1. Refuse to take verses out of context. Every book in the Bible was written at a particular time in history, by a particular person who is trying to make a particular point. One can’t simply pull a few words out of a passage and quote them to win an argument. It’s certainly tempting to start a sentence with the words, “The Bible says …” but you can’t do that unless you are sure that this is what those words actually meant to the one who wrote them.

2. Recognize that the Bible is not — cannot be — inerrant. One of the great stumbling blocks of American Christianity is the 20th century doctrine of Biblical infallibility, or inerrancy. This teaching claims that the words of the Bible came directly from God, and are recorded precisely as God wanted them to be recorded. In this view, there cannot be errors, mistakes, or incorrect information recorded therein. Furthermore, one part of the Bible cannot contradict any other part of the Bible. The problem is that close scholarship of the Bible naturally reveals all sorts of mistakes in the text. Often there are contradictory accounts of the same event. This does not invalidate the Bible’s importance in our lives; rather, it reinforces the importance of reading it correctly.

3. Remember that the Biblical writers were not perfect. We know this to be true; how then can we expect that their writings are “perfect”? In fact, their writings are an attempt to record a revelation of God in a reliable and genuine way. None of them thought that what they were writing at the time would come to be regarded as Holy Scripture. Paul was simply writing letters to friends in churches. The gospel writers were merely trying to record the oral accounts of Jesus’ life and death so that they would not be lost. Not a single one of the authors would argue that their document was “inerrant”; after all, they were simply humans trying to figure out what God was doing in the world. 

4. Realize that the Bible contains different genres of writing. The Bible is full of different genres, and each genre has its own rules of interpretation and use. The Psalms, for example, are poetry and song; they function like hymns or songs for use in worship. They are not necessarily places to go for doctrine; check out Psalm 138:8-9. Or to take another example, I Corinthians is a letter written to a specific church in response to a letter which Paul received. Unfortunately, we don’t have a copy of that original letter to which Paul was responding; we hear only one side of the conversation. To what extent does the letter even apply to the rest of us? That’s a matter that’s up for debate!

5. Let go of the “single interpretation” model. Most of us were raised to believe that there is only one correct interpretation of any passage of Scripture, and that the goal of Bible study and scholarship is to figure out that correct meaning, to wrestle the kernel from the seed. I used to believe it, too. However, my experience of Scripture is far more complex than that. I believe most texts are multivalent, meaning they have multiple legitimate meanings. I think this is what makes the Bible especially relevant and authoritative today; our acceptance of the Scriptures as authoritative for our community is based on our sense that God has spoken — and is still speaking -- through these texts. Scripture is a living, breathing document, and the Holy Spirit is active in and through it to speak to us in our own context.

I pray that you are not scared away from the Bible by these suggestions. We don’t need less Scripture, we need more! In these crazy times in which we live, we need the comfort, challenge, and transformative words of the Bible more than ever.