john-the-baptizer

Blending in with the Crowd

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Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

   Luke’s version of Jesus’ baptism is remarkable for a couple of reasons.  First, Luke hurries to get John the Baptizer out of the picture.  Even before Jesus steps into the waters of the Jordan, John tells the crowd that he, John, is definitely not the messiah, and then Luke explains that John has been arrested and imprisoned.  The point of telling this story out of order is to get John out of the way so we can focus on Jesus.     

   Second, the description of Jesus’ baptism is fleeting.  “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized …” – that’s it. 

   Why was Jesus, the messiah, baptized by John, not the messiah?  John’s baptism is described earlier in the chapter as “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”  (Luke 3:2).  Did Jesus need to repent of his sins?  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus is clearly the Son of God even before he’s born (remember the angel Gabriel’s conversation with Mary back in Chapter 1?), so he doesn’t need the baptism to tell him that, and neither do we.  So why was he baptized?  The phrase, “Now, when all the people were baptized…” gives us a clue.      

   I listened to much of the state funeral for Jimmy Carter this past week.  Again and again, people told stories about how Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States, rode on the bus with the other Habitat workers, slept on church floors like other Habitat workers, and hammered nails along with everyone else.  I couldn’t find the exact quotation, but someone explained that when Carter was instructing a new volunteer for Habitat, he’d say something like, “It’s probably been a while since you’ve done work like this,” as a way of respecting whatever past experience people brought, and not demeaning anyone who might actually be a complete novice at construction. 

   Like Jimmy Carter, Jesus was removing the distinctions between himself and “all the people.”  All the people are getting baptized.  And so Jesus is baptized as well.  It wasn’t literally all the people, of course; you can bet King Herod wasn’t out there waiting in line to be dunked.  But all the people who are longing for the good news that their present situation isn’t the way life has to be, that God has something else, something better in mind – those are the people who come to be baptized. 

   It is into these waters, the waters of the longing of all the downtrodden people, that Jesus steps and begins his ministry.  Jesus’ baptism announces that the Son of God identifies with “all the people.”  It announces to us that he is not only among us, he is one of us. 

After his baptism, Jesus hears words from heaven: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Is God pleased because Jesus decided to be baptized, or just pleased with him, generally, or both?  We don’t know but we do know these words are not unique to Jesus.  They echo the prophet Isaiah: “…you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” So these words Jesus hears from heaven don’t set him apart from us, either.  Like his wading into the Jordan in the first place, they lump him in with the rest of us.  As the letter of First John tells us, “God has loved us so much that we are called children of God.  And we really are God’s children.”  We are God’s children – sons, daughters, offspring.  We are God’s beloveds.  If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. 

    Jesus was baptized, and it made him part of the crowd, the crowd of broken and hurting people longing for wholeness, longing for life to be just and peaceful and safe.  Our crowd.  When we are baptized, and when we reaffirm our baptism, we join in his crowd, rooting our identities in his, as God’s beloveds.

© Joanne Whitt 2025

Turn Around and Do Something Different

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Luke 3:7-18

I don’t blame any preacher for choosing the Philippians passage over the Luke passage this week. “Rejoice!” feels so much more Christmas-y than “You brood of vipers!” But it’s Advent; it’s not Christmas yet, and John the Baptizer is all about preparing the way. In spite of his harsh and scolding tone, there are some great Advent messages in what John tells the crowd.

The word “repentance” feels like a reprimand even without John’s brood of vipers indictment. As I wrote last week, to repent just means “turn around.” Go in a different direction. There is good news in recognizing and accepting that what you’ve been doing isn’t working. There is good news in making the decision to turn around and do something different. This good news is the beginning of healing, for ourselves and for our society.

What we’ve been doing isn’t working, or at least, it isn’t working for a large portion of the population of our world, and it certainly isn’t working for our planet. When the people ask John, “Okay, so what do we do?” his blunt and fairly simple instruction is to stop acting as though they live in a world in which their actions don’t impact others. Stop being greedy and dishonest; start sharing the wealth.

John seems to threaten that when the Messiah comes, just as in the song, “Santa Claus is coming to Town,” you’d better watch out. We learn when we encounter Jesus that he doesn’t wield a winnowing fork or threaten anyone with unquenchable fire. But like John, Jesus preaches that a life realigned with God’s purposes is good news. Luke is known for “good news to the poor,” and certainly this realignment is good news for the poor. But Jesus proclaims that it is good news for everyone. Years ago, author Barbara Ehrenreich was asked in an interview what she would give up to live in a more human world. She answered, “I think we shouldn’t think of what we would give up to have a more human world; we should think of what we would gain.”

John tells the people who come to be baptized by him, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Those with enough, and particularly those with more than enough, should share with those who do not have enough. As simple as this is, it is countercultural in our society, especially at Christmas. Even with Santas ringing bells on street corners and “Giving Tuesday,” most of our Christmas celebrations are shaped more by our consumption-driven culture than by the nativity story. The forces behind our patterns of consumption are complex and entrenched, and we will not solve anything by scolding people in the pews. The way we consume is a systemic issue, built into our economy and culture. However, systems are created and supported by individuals. We can go along, or we can turn around and try something different. So we might hint that we are challenged, or perhaps even called, to figure out what is “enough.” We might suggest that the reason some people want more and more stuff could be because they don’t think that they, themselves, are enough. We might assure them that our things are not what make us enough, or good, or important, or valuable. Every one of us is precious – just because we are who we are, the way God made us. And we might point out that this planet on which all of us – ALL of us – depend, is suffering from our consumption patterns.

A handful of resources you might use for a gentle but critical delivery of this good news:

1) An excellent 20-minute video entitled, “The Story of Stuff,” a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM
2) A terrific children’s picture book by Kaethe Zemach that isn’t just for kids, entitled, Just Enough and Not Too Much (New York: Scholastic Press, 2003).
3) An oldie but a goodie: Jo Robinson and Jean C Staeheli, Unplug the Christmas Machine: A Complete Guide to Putting Love and Joy Back into the Season (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1991).
4) John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas Naylor, Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us – and How to Fight Back (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014).

The Word of God Came to a Nobody

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Luke 3:1-6

   After listing seven of the powers that be of the time, Luke concludes with “the Word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.”  Compared with the seven names mentioned just before, John is a nobody.  He’s in the wilderness, where no sensible person wants to be found, so he’s a nobody who’s nowhere.  Yet this is precisely where the Word of God went.  Not Jerusalem, or Athens, or Rome, or any of the other centers of culture and power, but to the margins.  And maybe that’s often where the Word of God shows up: just where we’d least expect it.

   This isn’t our first introduction to John in Luke’s gospel.  Mary’s cousin Elizabeth is miraculously pregnant beyond the normal years of childbearing.  When Mary visits Elizabeth with the news of her own miraculous pregnancy, Elizabeth’s child, John, does a cartwheel in the womb.  From the beginning, Luke’s gospel tells us that God is working to change the world through the weak and small – babies and barren women and unwed teenage mothers and wild-eyed prophets and itinerant preachers and executed criminals.  During Advent, we look not to Christmas but beyond, to the time when God’s work on this earth will be completed.  We just have to look around to know God isn’t done yet.  John reminds us that even today, God continues to work through unlikely characters to announce God’s good news of shalom, the Hebrew word that includes not only peace but justice, healing, love, and hope. 

   When you’re a minister, you end up telling your “faith journey” over and over, in seminary and to ordination and church calling committees and so on. When I tell my story, I always mention Bill Anderson.  I’d quit going to church in college.  My father’s rule was, “As long as I go to church, you go to church.”  That pretty much guaranteed that my sister, brother, and I would quit going to church when we moved away from home.  Even more than an expression of adolescent rebellion, however, it seemed to me that Christianity was all about who was getting into heaven and who was not.  I found this focus absurdly speculative, but even worse, it is mostly used to divide people, to manipulate people, to create insiders and outsiders; not to heal or bring people together. 

   When my older daughter was four, out of the blue she announced that she wanted to go to Sunday school.  I think she’d figured out that Sunday school was a chance to play with other kids one more day of the week, with the bonus that she could wear her Mary Janes.  I’d been raised Presbyterian, and a little church near the Marin County suburb where I lived at the time was the closest Presbyterian church.  I figured I could take her to church once, she’d get it out of her system and that would be that.  Sunday school was before the worship service and I wasn’t willing to leave my 4-year-old while I headed for a nearby coffee shop, so I stuck around for adult ed., which was held at the same time.  Adult ed. was a series on exploring things the church could do to help change the world.  That, by itself, was a surprise, but the guy who set the hook and reeled me in was Bill Anderson.  He was older than my dad, and he said Christianity was a social reform movement, a way to change the world – this world – to make it more just, more loving, more peaceful, more like God intends it.  Today I’d say, yes, it is that and so much more, but back then I’d never heard it put that way and it was exactly what I needed to hear. 

   During World War II Bill had been a military engineer who led troops onto Omaha Beach the day before D-Day.  His company was to secure the beaches to the extent possible before the actual invasion.  Bill wouldn’t talk about that day.  He’d get just so far into the story and then stop.  But it wasn’t Omaha Beach that caused him “to grow up fast and hard,” as he put it.  What really changed his life was being part of the military team that liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 and 1946.  It spurred him into the work of resettling refugees, which he did on and off, including after the Vietnam War.  He also served as a Witness for Peace in Nicaragua.  He went on three walks for peace in the Soviet Union, making connections with ordinary people who wanted peace and did not want to continue living under the threat of nuclear annihilation just because the Tiberiuses and Pilates and Herods of the world couldn’t let go of a grudge.

   Luke’s outrageous claim is that the “Word of the Lord” comes to a nobody named John in that no-place called the wilderness, and that this is more important than all the important people and events of the day.  And what is truly startling is that this is still possible.  Bill Anderson was a nobody in the grand scheme of things.  And yet, during the eighth year of the presidency of Ronald Reagan, while George Deukmejian was governor of California, and Diane Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco, the word of God came to Bill Anderson in Larkspur, California, who shared it with me.  Bill would be the last person to describe himself as a prophet.  When I’d tell him that he was largely responsible for the path that led me to ministry, he’d say, “Don’t blame me!” 

   Unlike John, Bill wouldn’t have used the word, “repentance” to describe what we’re supposed to do in response to God’s love.  But repentance, as loaded a word as that is, is exactly what Bill Anderson lived and preached, although he would claim he never “preached” at all.  To repent means to turn around.  It means quit going the direction you’ve been going.  John is saying, “Stop doing the things that sew hatred and strife and injustice; stop moving away from God’s shalom; turn around and move toward it.”  Bill Anderson lived and taught this for everyone to see.  He lived the good news that God loves everybody, not just some of us; that a loving God wants shalom for everybody; and the way we are to respond is to pitch in where we can.  In other words, we are to repent. 

   God is still working through the nobodies in the nowheres of our congregations, neighborhoods, and communities.  I hear God’s word of shalom, regularly, from many people; in what they say, and in what they do, which is often so much louder than words. 

   Frederick Buechner wrote, “Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.  Amen, and come, Lord Jesus.” 

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.