Memory to Imagination
By Jared
Slack
On Luke 3:15-18, 21-22
At First Austin: a baptist community of faith
On the Baptism of the Lord Sunday
January 13, 2019
Up to
about 3 days ago, you were all really close to hearing a sermon on Jesus’ baptism
that I had preached in 2012 when I was a chaplain at Baylor during all three of
their Wednesday morning CHAPEL Services. Because, I figured, there’s no way in
this world that anybody in this church today or in that concert hall 7 years
ago has ever heard it.
You were
also really close to hearing the one I preached at the First Baptist Church of
Lufkin, Texas back in 2014, just a few months before I came here to be on
staff.
And I’ll
also admit, that you were surprisingly pretty dang close to hearing a few of my
favorite lines from the Sermon I offered on Jesus’ baptism from this very
pulpit 4 years ago, almost to the day. Because again, I figure odds are that
anyone not listening back then might give me a listen now, and those of you who
listened back then, well… you may not be listening to me anymore.
It’s when
I sat down to start writing that I found myself in a bit of a predicament.
I’ve
decided to call it, “the preacher problem.”
You see,
it’s the problem that arises when you’ve been preaching for so long that you’ve
accumulated files and files of old sermons and notes stacked up all about the
same text. And each and every year as you make another lap through the lectionary,
you’re faced with the very real challenge of trying to muster up the creative
energy to say something brand new – or, settle for saying something again.
But the
odd thing is, I think many of us come here to today with this same “preacher
problem.” Each and every one of us – professional Christians like me, and all
of you dedicated amateurs sitting in your favorite seats. We all have our own
mental file folders brimming with sermons and Sunday schools that immediately
pull up onto our mind’s screen, ready to go.
And when
we come to days like today, with these milestone-type stories that we have to
deal with every single year, we’re met again with that very same, very real
predicament. Are we going to hear something new, or are we going to hear
something again?
And rest
assured, I’m not here to tell any of you that one of them is better than the
other. Because I believe that both are needed and required for what it is
that we are here to do. And I hope, for our collective sake, that we find both
today.
But before
I go further in, I think this might be the best place for us to pause. Right
here, where we’re establishing together that we do, in fact, want both: the new,
and the again.
The
already, and the not yet.
That we’ve
all come here today because we need to be reminded of some things. We need to
keep practicing the things that we’ve been practicing from the very beginning.
Wanting to hear that same faithful message of our naming and claiming as God’s
beloved.
But I’d be
lying if I didn’t tell you…and maybe there are many of you here with me that
are also hoping there’s something else to explore. Some sort of newness that
might emerge for us today. Something that surprises.
So friends,
as we pause now to pray, let’s begin first by uttering an inner “Yes, Lord” to
God’s invitation to explore both of these possibilities: the new, and the
again.
Are you
with me?
Let’s pray.
And now, O
Lord, may all the words of my mouth today and the meditations of all of our
hearts here in this beautiful place be pleasing to you, our solid rock,
redeemer and faithful friend. AMEN.
Like any
good millennial who’s finally decided it’s time to grow up, Sarah and I
recently scrounged up enough spare change and all the Home Depot gifts cards
you gave us for our wedding to remodel our kitchen.
I know
some of you understand what it’s like to take on a project like this. You have
to plan well ahead of time and keep a very close eye on your budget to make
sure you don’t overdo it before everything is completed. But from the very
beginning, there were two places I was insistent on giving plenty of breathing
room in our remodeling numbers.
The first
is easy: our oven. And there’s little need for explanation here because
everyone knows by now that I have an addiction to things made with flour and
butter.
The other
actually might surprise you, but I think for all my fellow homemakers out there
you’ll readily understand where I’m coming from…because the second
non-negotiable for me in this remodel of ours was the kitchen faucet.
You see, ever
since I set out on my own, I’ve always dreamed of the day I could have one of
those sinks where the water spout magically extends out from inside the faucet
like some Harry Potter nonsense and reveals itself to be a spray nozzle.
Y’all, I’m
from East Texas. We don’t have those kinds of things there, and at the ripe of
35 I now finally have the faucet of my dreams.
And so it
was a couple of weeks ago, right before bed, just days until Christmas, and I’m
standing at the kitchen sink having to pressure wash the metal bowl that goes
with my stand mixer, and really having to get at it because I’d left cake
batter in there too long and it had hardened into this sugary, stucco-type
situation.
As I’m
getting to work, water is flying everywhere… every spray from my fancy-pants
spray nozzle just keeps ricocheting of the slippery stainless-steel bowl like a
slide at a water park. And I swear to you, there’s water all over the counter
and if the sun had been shining, I’m sure you would have seen the tiniest
little rainbow glistening in the misty aftermath above my head.
And right when
I’m in the thick of things, pretty much soaking wet from head to toe, finally
about to dislodge this last little piece of dried batter that’s keeping me from
going to bed… I looked up to see my wife rolling around on the floor with our
dogs.
Something
we both do on regular occasions.
As I took
a pause to enjoy this perfect little scene, this clarity falls on me like an
unanticipated rain shower, drenching me in a truth I probably already knew
somewhere deep within.
Because in
that seemingly ordinary snippet of time doing the daily work of caring for our
home. Me in the kitchen taking my turn doing the dishes and my wife in
the living room playing with our dogs. Both of us doing the kinds of things
that God willing we’ll be repeating again and again for years to come.
It was
there… covered in the baptismal waters of our life together, that a voice came
down from somewhere out of the blue and said, “You are living.”
And I
don’t know if that sounds profound to you or not, but it was for me.
I don’t know
if that qualifies as an epiphany to you or not, but it was for me.
I needed
those three words.
To remind
me that this right here is my life. That I’m in it. I am doing it. I’m living
it. It’s not off in the future waiting for me to get started. It’s happening
right now and whether I’m aware of it or not, I am mysteriously and magically
at the same exact time being and becoming the person that I hoped for when I
was a little kid.
And I
don’t know if these kinds of things, these realizations, mean anything to you
or if they’re simply peculiar to me. I realize that I’m an odd guy, but there’s
a big part of me that really and truly believes that these sorts of things
happen to us all the time and we’re just not paying attention all that well.
And maybe
we’re not hearing them because we have a bit of a preacher problem of our own
in the daily lives we each lead…
You and I,
we’ve been doing the repetitive work of living for so long that each and every
day we wake up to do all the same things we did yesterday. We get up, let the
dogs out, make the coffee, and head off to work, do pretty much the same thing there
that we did yesterday, come home, make dinner, play with the dogs, wash the
dishes and go back to bed so we can repeat it all again tomorrow.
Soon we
all find ourselves caught in this endless cycle of again-ness and familiarity
that sets us down this unwitting road towards apathy and boredom as we’re
lulled into forgetting that at every moment God and this creation is constantly
trying to spritz us with a little bit of newness.
And so,
friends, it’s right here holding onto that thought that I want us to drop into
Luke’s telling of Jesus’ baptism. Because for me, this whole story is quite
literally drenched in the power of what can take place when the…
mundane
again and again…. and the mystical new are allowed mingle once and for all.
When we
give ourselves the breathing room to engage both our memory and our
imagination.
In verses 21-22,
Luke says, “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. That’s
about as mundane a description as it can get … Luke continues… And as he
was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on
him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my
Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” And that to me sounds
like some mystical mumbo jumbo.
You see
for me, at least, Jesus’ baptism lets us have a look at the kinds of wonderful
things that can happen when we allow these two worlds to converse and play…
when we allow our memory to be a conduit to our imagination.
And for
me, again, it’s how this whole scene, succinct as it may be with just these two
verses… almost like the shutter on a camera in the hands of a brilliant
photographer, this beautiful and complex event where Jesus long before us… but
also in some weird and crazy way us with him, we all get to experience what
it’s like to be named and claimed as God’s beloved child.
And all of
this… every single bit of it… in fact I think everything that’s true and good
in this world…is somehow captured and encapsulated in something as simple as
what we now call Baptism.
It’s
interesting because when you look at it like that, it makes you think that maybe
when we do baptisms of our own, we ought to borrow a bit more of the flare from
the imaginative rendering Luke puts down on paper.
It also
makes you wanna ask the question of where we each and every one of us might be
on that spectrum between memory and imagination.
You see at
this event, this brilliant little thing that happened in the Jordan river,
Jesus is the leading player in what I’d suggest maybe looks a lot like some
sort of South Austin Hippy Dippy human art installation where the eternal
and timeless story of all of our collective belovedness is finally,
miraculously and thank the good Lord… given a stage.
And even
though you and I’ve heard this story again and again…
And many
of us have done it ourselves once or even twice…
And some
of us have done it more than that…
But
somehow something must have gotten lost in the wash…
I don’t
know, maybe because it has something to do with dunking…
But it’s
quite possible that we’ve allowed this memory of Jesus’ Baptism and maybe even
our own to lose its original connection to what it’s supposed to be drumming up
in our imaginations.
I remember
back to my freshman year of college having my mind blown every single day
during my first real deal, taught by a guy with a PhD and a bald head, class on
the New Testament. We got to the parts about Jesus’ baptism and he told us that
this whole scene is a rather blasphemous homage to the deeply traditioned and
rather strict Jewish Purification rites that involved water.
Isn’t
there something awfully reckless about it when you look at it like that?
In just
these two verses… Luke brings together Jesus and John, a gaggle of strangers, a
highly trained dove and a voice from heaven and has them converge on a river to
do this thing that that had not really been done before. And in one swift down
and up motion, they manage to toss aside all the excessively pietistic
trappings that some then (and well even some now) often convince themselves
that a good and proper religion requires.
And interestingly
enough… to fact check my own claim here… scholars will tell you that early
editors of the Synoptic Gospels, (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) seriously considered
stamping 4 Pinnochios on this story from Jesus’ life, and leaving it out
altogether.
And let’s
be honest, many of us might’ve went right along with them way back then.
Because if you’re on the steering committee of brand-new religion whose
reputation teeters on a razor’s edge between flourishing or fading away…
You really
have to think twice before letting one of the first stories out of the
gate involve your Messiah stripping off his clothes and getting in a line with
a bunch of other naked strangers. All so he could be baptized by a man who,
when he himself is not also naked and standing in a river, thinks that a
leather belt goes with a camel hair tunic.
And what I
love about this story… and honestly you should love too all of you people
from Austin, Texas, Capitol of All Things Odd is that it’s proof in the
proverbial pudding right here on display for everybody and their mother to see…
that Jesus was a weird dude.
And this
is a truth we’ve all kinda, sorta, known for a while now. It’s been lurking and
waiting in that extra bedroom of the house shoved up under the bed with all the
other junk you can’t seem to get rid of.
It’s this
kinda, sorta embarrassing truth… that this messiah we’ve decided to
follow, and for centuries… that we’ve modeled the entirety of our faith and
practice around was not at all worried with whether or not those brave enough
to join him in those mystical waters were considered to be cool, or proper, or
respectable, or any of those other labels we cling to because they maintain our
“sense of standing” in the world.
And so for
years and years we’ve gone about putting words together like “First” and
“Baptist” because at some point in history when those two words got put
together and slapped on the side of a building it manufactured a sense of
esteem and reputation that went about sterilizing all the add and neutralizing
the weird.
And what
if… and I confess this might be a stretch… but I’m going to ask the question
anyway… what if maybe… just maybe we asked ourselves whether or not this church
has its own little predicament. That we’ve just gotten so used to all
the again and again and again and hear me say this…. I believe it
beautifully takes all the faithful “again and agains” to keep a place like this
going…
But what
if amidst all the again-ness we’ve left little to no room for the newness.
That maybe we’ve lost touch with the truth that we’re supposed to be coming to
a place like this place to take part in something brand stinking new.
In
liturgical circles we say that Baptism is the initiation rite into the
Christian Faith. It’s a dying to self and then being raised to newness of
life.
What if
this church had enough imagination to baptize our very name?
To finally
just bring this wonderful, powerful, and faithful label of our incredible
church to those teaming waters with Jesus. And we just stripped it down until
it was naked as the day it was born, and we were all baptized there together.
And all
those worries we have about what the neighbors will think, or whether or not
we’re living up to our title just got washed away in our naming and claiming as
God’s children.
And we
just finally let it all go.
Wouldn’t
that be so nice?
Because
for me, just how it felt that night as I hovered over those dirty dishes…
at every given moment whether I know it’s coming or not, whether I’m ready for
it or not… whatever it is that’s next for me is coming. It’s actually
right here in front of me. And I can either keep splashing around in the
shallow places with all of my memories of great things gone by, wondering what
else it’s going to take from me to go any further… and just stay there stalled
out like a motorist stranded on the highway…
or I can
do the weird thing. The odd thing. The thing that might bring me ridicule… the
thing that everyone else seems to be too scared and frozen to do.
I can get
in the water.
You see, I
think I’ve finally decided, and maybe you all might want to join me there… but
I think I’ve finally decided to go into the deeper parts where Jesus is hanging
out. To let my imagination run wild just a bit more, which I know sounds scary
to some of you, but to just let myself go ahead and explore the kinds of things
that always seem to get drummed up when anybody has ever had enough courage to
embrace just how weird this all is and had enough bravery to finally act
upon their naming and claiming as God’s beloved child.
Because
friends, I believe you have been named and claimed as God’s Beloved. And
whether you’ve been baptized or not in this church or any church… I believe all
of this is absolutely true for every single one of you. Others can disagree
with me all they want, but that’s a truth I hold closest to my heart.
But the
question I want to leave all of us with today… with the memory of our naming
and claiming hanging in the air, whether there was water involved or not… my
question is this… where in God’s name are you going to let your imagination
take you? What’s the “not yet” that you’re wanting to unleash on the “already”?
Because I
believe in the deepest parts of myself that for many of us in the room today it’s
our memories that are keeping us so hugged up to the muddy banks of that of
river, but it’s time friends, for you and for me both to let our imaginations
go ahead and take us all the way in. AMEN.
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