6 Pentecost 2013
Father Adam Trambley
June 30, 2013, St. John’s Sharon
The Discipleship Arm Dance –
Part 2: Jesus was Baptized by John
Some of
you may remember the Discipleship Arm Dance from last week.
Jesus
was baptized by John.
He came
up out of the water.
He
received the Holy Spirit.
He
heard the voice of God, “You are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
He went
into the wilderness.
He
defeated the devil.
He came
out of the wilderness.
He
announced his purpose.
He
chose four others.
He
taught them everything they needed to know.
He sent
them out.
This
morning we are going to look at the first part of the Discipleship Arm Dance:
Jesus was baptized by John. We are going
to look at this component from three perspectives: the perspectives of Jesus,
of us and of people we will want to disciple.
Jesus
accomplished two very important things by being baptized by John. The first was that he began a life totally
devoted to God and God’s purpose for his life.
Second, he lived out that purpose being connected to a specific particular
community of God’s people.
Think
about Jesus’ life. Outside of a brief
incident at thirteen, we know nothing about Jesus life from his
infancy until
the start of his public ministry. We
don’t know what he was doing, exactly.
He seemed to have lived a good Jewish life, maybe as a builder, who
studied the scriptures when he could, spoke a couple languages like most folks
living in Galilee, and didn’t commit anything we would consider sins. Yet, he hadn’t really lived fully into the
ministry his Father sent him here to do.
He wouldn’t be able to until he took the next step of being baptized, so
that he could have the Spirit descend upon him and defeat the devil and take
the rest of the necessary steps to start his ministry. (Photo of Jesus and the Carpenter is by Neal Parrow.)
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By
coming to be baptized, Jesus was dying to his old life so that he could begin a
new life entirely dedicated to God and God’s purpose for him. He was offering himself to be used however
God wanted to use him, fully expecting to have his life changed and to be
transformed himself into ways he may not have imagined. He wanted what God wanted for him more than
he wanted to hold onto the good life he had.
Until Jesus made that leap of faith, even the sinless life he lived
wasn’t going to achieve the purpose God created him for.
Now we
might think that he could have just decided to be about God’s purpose one day
and start doing it. He was God’s Son,
after all. But even Jesus needed to go
to someone and be baptized by him. He
didn’t go to John because John was better than he was. John himself said he wasn’t fit to tie Jesus’
shoelaces. But he knew that if he was
going to totally give himself over to God, he had to submit to somebody.
Somebody needed to accept his decision, and a specific community needed to
gather around him and launch him in his ministry. We shouldn’t be surprised that at least one
of Jesus’ first disciples, Andrew, was a disciple of John the Baptist.
At some
point in our lives, we need to come to the same kind of commitment Jesus did. For some people such a moment might come at
baptism, for others at confirmation, for others at a reaffirmation, and for
some just at a moment of prayer with their brothers and sisters. Sometimes the moment is when a person begins
serious twelve-step work. But at some
point, before we are going to experience all of the rest of the steps of the
Discipleship Arm Dance, we will decide to die to our life so that we can live
entirely into God’s purpose for us. At
some point, we turn our entire beings over so that God can change us into the
people he made us to be and so that we can live fully for him. At some point, we go to some particular
person who has already taken these steps and surrender ourselves to them as
God’s agents to us.
Now
this surrender is both more and less than we might imagine. Dying to ourselves and our old lives doesn’t
necessarily mean that we give up everything we have and leave all the people
who love us to go halfway across the world.
But we are going to live in the midst of all the relationships we have
differently. We are going to think about
how we use what we have differently. We
are going to want to spend our time differently.
Recently,
I had a conversation that I think can demonstrate this difference in
perspective. I was chatting with a
friend when his wife came over and asked me to talk to him because he was less
than enthusiastic about going off for a few days to the wedding of one of her
relatives. Now, of course, pastors want
nothing more than to get in the middle of marital disagreements, so we talked
about the trip a bit. Suffice it to say
that there were some things that could have made the trip unpleasant. But after discussing the wedding for a while and
life in general, I silently said a prayer and told him, “For whatever it’s
worth, here’s what I think. You’re a
night person, so every night before you go to sleep, think about how to spend
the next day doing things to make your wife happy. The trip is for her anyway, and trying to
give her a good trip will give you something to focus on that will make you
happier, too.” He said he would never
have thought of that, but would have just thought about everybody being
miserable. This simple change on a
difficult trip from being satisfied with being miserable and dragging others down
with you to spending your time and energy making your loved ones happy is a
good example of the specific kind of transformation that occurs when we see our
entire lives lived for God’s purposes.
We can all probably think of other examples where what we might
naturally do for ourselves is not the same as what God’s purpose for us in the
midst of that situation. We no longer
have the option of being mediocre spouses or parents or children or employees
or friends because we are living our whole lives for the glory of God.
The
person and the community that accepts our surrender to God are going to be the
people who lead us as we set out on this new life we’ve chosen. We know we can’t do it by ourselves. If we could, we wouldn’t need to make the
surrender. God’s purposes would flow
naturally in our lives. But we join a
local church community and begin to live out whatever the next steps that God
sets before us. Usually we find those
through the life of our local church.
Just
think for a moment about the people we want to disciple. We will be asking them pretty early in the
process of discipleship to die to their old lives and make a commitment to be
formed by this community to live into a new life. They may decide to visit for a while and even
participate in various activities. And
nobody has to go through any of these steps to be saved or even to be part of
the church at whatever level they are comfortable. But before people are likely to feel God’s
love filling the core of their being or be able to understand their deepest purpose
in life, they will likely need to open themselves to be fully used by God.
What
circumstances could possible encourage people to make such a huge decision. Some might come because their lives are so
bad that dying to their current self isn’t much of a loss. For this reason, Christianity has always
grown with people at the margins. We
will probably have more success with people that need a church then with the
people we would be most comfortable having join our church. But sometimes others
with good lives might trade them in if we can witness to them about how much
better and fuller our lives have become after we surrendered ourselves to
God. But our story needs to be
compelling, the kind of compelling that only comes from living fully through all
the stages of the discipleship arm dance.
So let’s do the dance together, starting with Jesus was baptized by
John.
Jesus
was baptized by John.
He came
up out of the water.
He
received the Holy Spirit.
He
heard the voice of God, “You are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
He went
into the wilderness.
He
defeated the devil.
He came
out of the wilderness.
He
announced his purpose.
He
chose four others.
He
taught them everything they needed to know.
He sent them out.
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