Pledging Allegiance Isaiah 43:1-3; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

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1 George A. Mason The Baptism of the Lord Wilshire Baptist Church 13 January 2013 Dallas, Texas Pledging Allegiance Isaiah 43:1-3; Luke 3:15-17, Have you been following the bizarre story of the French actor Gerard Depardieu? He s a big man in French cinema, and he s a big man generally. Well, the French economy is in shambles, as are most economies in Europe. So the government has proposed a tax on its wealthiest citizens. Sound familiar? Here s the difference: while we have raised the top marginal tax rate to 39.5 percent on those making over $400,000, the French are trying to raise it to 70 percent on those who make more than 1 million euros per year. Now, before you say, Well, there s the French for you, you might like to know that in our country, from 1936 to1980, the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was between 70 and 91 percent. And most of that time, wealthy was defined as earnings of more than $200,000 per year. Go figure. But back to France: Depardieu was infuriated by the tax consequences to him personally, so he decided he would move across the border to Belgium, where his taxes would be much lower. The French prime minister responded by calling his tax-evasion move pitiful and shabby. Depardieu lashed back, saying that he would give up his French passport. The next night at a farewell party in Paris, the rotund actor bragged: Putin has already sent me a passport. Not really. But when word reached Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, he mulled it over and decided to do just that. He invited Depardieu to Moscow, gave him a bear hug, calling him a beloved son of Russia, presented him his passport, and offered him a job as cultural minister. (Russia has a 13 percent flat-tax rate, in case you were thinking about relocating yourself, don t you know?!) Putin had to cut through lots of red tape to pull this off so quickly. As with most countries, the person usually has to show serious intention to become a citizen by living in the country first and pledging allegiance to its flag, philosophy of government, and the like. But as Putin put it, he wants to attract people to Russia who are spiritually and culturally close to it

2 And there it is the spiritual connection to our sermon on baptism this morning. You knew I d get there eventually, didn t you? Baptism is a kind of pledge of allegiance to the kingdom of God. It confers and confirms your identity as a beloved child of God. It s a passport that says that wherever you go, you belong to God and the Christian flag is first in your heart. This being The Baptism of Our Lord Sunday, let s take a minute to look at Jesus baptism before we look at our own. We wonder why Jesus needed to be baptized. Luke doesn t tell us. Matthew comes closest by having Jesus say that it was to fulfill all righteousness. I think we have some hints in Luke s account that would help us. First, understand that this is no coming of age ritual for Jesus. It s not peer pressure from sitting in the pew Sabbath after Sabbath and seeing his friends go forward at the altar call to profess their faith and get baptized. It s about taking his place among the grown-ups in Israel, realizing that it was time for him to take the faith upon himself. In the centuries following Jesus time, that happened and still does at the age of 13, with a bar mitzvah ceremony in which boys (girls now, too, among more-liberal Jews) become sons [daughters] of the commandments. But in Jesus day, there was no such bar-mitzvah ritual. You simply came to the age of majority at 20, when you were eligible for military service and taxation. Your father would simply pronounce a blessing upon you that amounted to transferring responsibility for your life from him to you. But Jesus is about 30 now. His baptism must mean something else. It could have meant a ritual bathing, called a mikveh, that Jewish men would undergo for various purposes to purify themselves usually before going into the temple to worship. But John the Baptist is certainly not preparing people out in the desert for going back into Jerusalem to worship. His purification baptism is about repentance for the sake of going into battle against the spiritual forces that war against the soul. Jesus s baptism prepares him for his public ministry. Right after his baptism he will go into the desert to fast and pray for forty days. It s spiritual boot camp for his coming ministry. But it would be a misreading of all this to say 2

3 that his baptism is merely a spiritual event between him and God that kicks off his mystical walk in the world. Jesus was not preparing for religious service in the temple among the Sadducees. He was not preparing for a teaching ministry about the law-abiding Pharisees. He was not pledging allegiance to the Herodian party, which supported the Roman rulers; or to the Zealots, who tried to overthrow the Romans. He was not even preparing for a monastic-like life among the Essenes in the desert. Jesus was not a party man, even if he was sometimes accused of enjoying a party a little too much for a spiritual leader. Jesus was in the desert identifying with John s ministry and his people. In the verses before these, Luke tells us that John was preaching a radical message of spiritual and social change. He didn t just tell the crowds to get their hearts right with God. He told them to give an extra coat to those who had none, and the same with their food. He told tax collectors to stop cheating and to start treating people fairly, and he told soldiers not to use their power for themselves but to be content with their wages. Let s be clear: John was beheaded by King Herod because he was too political in his preaching, not because he was too spiritual. The people who responded best and most quickly to John were a predictable lot: the broken and bruised who had fallen and failed. Jesus baptism identifies his life and ministry with the lost, the least, the little, and the last. There is absolutely nothing wrong with working hard and achieving great success financially and in public status, as long as you have made it honestly and use your success humbly for the sake of others. But the gospel starts to take effect in the lives of people, rich and poor alike, only when they acknowledge their lowliness, not when they achieve loftiness. This is such a contrast with our culture of identifying with winners. Max Post was telling me the story the other night about getting Cotton Bowl tickets to sit in the President of University of Oklahoma s VIP section some years ago. President David Boren was on the board at Texas Instruments, where Max worked, and Max knew him through committee work. One year Max got a call from his boss that they had two extra tickets, and Max and Candy 3

4 went. They didn t know anyone but President Boren, but sometime after halftime, then Governor George W. Bush walked down the steps to where max and Candy were sitting and started chatting with Candy. They had a nice visit, and then he moved on. But suddenly others started coming up to them and visiting with Candy. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison stopped by to pay her respects. Then the chancellor of OU came by. Max was pretty clear that everyone had watched the governor take notice of them and thought they must have been important, whereas until that moment they had had no attention at all. The world loves winners. It takes people of true character who understand the gospel to care about all kinds of people. My old friend Milton Brasher- Cunningham was in town this week. Milton has been doing youth camps for Wilshire for years. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, now and has written a book called Keeping the Feast. It s a beautiful rambling account of communion of all kinds the ways the Lord s Table and all tables combine food that nurtures all our relationships. One of the chapters that illustrates this notion of how the 4 body of Christ that we take in is broken and the blood is spilled, talks about another one of his and my loves baseball. He points out that even the very best hitters in baseball succeed only about three out of 10 times to the plate. Their failure rate is more than 70 percent. We focus our praise on those who fail less often than others. One reason that baseball appeals to us is that no matter how often you fail, you keep stepping up to the plate in hopes that the last failure is not the last word. Milton says it this way: In God s way of organizing, redemption requires a Redeemer who abides on both sides of the equation. So when we step up to the plate, so to speak the Communion plate of Christ s broken body and spilled blood we are remembering how God organizes the world: Jesus magnificent defeat, our own special failures, and the grace that saves us all. 2 Jay Hogewood illustrates this well. Our first Wilshire resident will be coming back to Wilshire this week for the residents reunion. He is now the senior pastor of the Ingleside United Methodist Church in Baton 2 Keeping the Feat: Metaphors for the Meal (Morehouse: 2012), p. 95.

5 Rouge. You know he left here to become the pastor of University Baptist Church there. But after a few years, he went through a painful and all-too-public breakdown of his marriage that coincided with his leaving the church. He sold insurance for a while, joined the Methodist church, and Kelley and the kids began to go there, too, as they wanted the best for their family, even after a divorce. Slowly but surely the Methodists began to work on him about God not being finished with him yet. They asked him to help out parttime on the staff, and eventually the bishop invited him to pursue the pastoral life again, assigning him to a mid-city church that needed a new start like he did. Jay describes the journey in the words of the saintly Julian of Norwich, who said: First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall; both are the mercy of God. 3 Indeed they are. And this is what Jesus understood about the ways of God by submitting to baptism. It s what all of our new deacons understand about their work of service. They are not being ordained to a ministry of spiritual perfection; they are being called to serve as those who have the humility to love and care for others in the name of Christ. None of them is being ordained because of his or her worldly success. Each of them is being ordained because of spiritual faithfulness and humility that we hope will be as contagious in our body for good as the flu in our bodies is for ill. Gerard Depardieu says that he will always be French, that he will hold dual passports from Russia and Belgium whatever seems to work in his personal favor, I m afraid. But when we are baptized, we pledge allegiance to God s way of organizing the world and that way alone. We identify with sinners, as we ourselves are sinners, too. We pay attention to those who have failed, because we know that we have, too. But most of all, we tell ourselves and we tell everyone we meet that sin and failure are not the last words for any of us. First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall; both are the mercy of God /a-pastor-again-by-grace 5