Do you accept that Jesus is Lord?

Acts 10:34-43
Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

The question about what happened to the body of Jesus in the early dawn of that Sunday morning is not the essential Easter question.  The most important thing about the resurrection isn’t that something happened to Jesus.  It is that something happened to us.  Strictly speaking, we can’t really know what that something is, because the resurrection is a process that is still ongoing.  The Letter to the Colossians is very clear on that point, when it says, “your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” 

This is what Mary Magdalene and the other Mary found out when they went to the tomb that morning.  They went there full of grief, still reeling from the shock, trying to make sense of what had happened to Jesus.  They went to mourn and to cherish the memory of what had been lost, and they found something, something new, that now belonged to them.   They went to the tomb to say goodbye to the past and they came away as bearers of a message about the present and the future--a present and a future with Jesus.

Still, there is no getting around the fact that this message came to them at the tomb.  Resurrection gives new life and meaning to the story of Jesus, but it is still the same story that came to a head at the cross.  Easter does not reverse Good Friday.  But Good Friday and Easter together confirm what the story of Jesus is all about.  You could boil it down to a couple of points, and they were exactly the points that Jesus kept trying to make, and they were what got him into all that trouble.  The first one got him into trouble with his disciples, and I suppose it still does, and that was the point that his mission really wasn’t about him.  It wasn’t about his charisma, or his remarkable abilities, or his chances for success.  Jesus lived and died for us, for our repentance, our instruction and empowerment, our forgiveness, and healing, and liberation. 

The second point got Jesus into trouble with the religious leaders and political authorities, and it also still gives a lot of people problems.  And it was that the author of his life, the power behind his deeds, the source of his wisdom, and the driver of his mission was God.  It was God who sent Jesus on the road that led him to the cross, though it was not God who killed him.  And it was God who raised him from the dead—so there could be no doubt who was responsible for the sending, and who did the killing.

The church, then and now, is the community that gathers to experience the death and resurrection of Jesus as a present spiritual reality.  This Spirit tells us that Jesus did what he did by the anointing of God, and he did it to show us how to live together in peace and forgiveness and love.  And the very first Christian communities came up with a shorthand, a phrase that encapsulates all of this, which is simply, “Jesus is Lord.”  The essential question about the resurrection is not, what happened to the body in the tomb?  It is, “do you accept that Jesus is Lord?” 

Now before you go rushing to answer that question one way or another, let me state very clearly, just so nobody gets the wrong idea about me, or about this church, that any answer to that question is permitted here.  Seriously—I mean that.  And let me also say that I think that the acceptance that this question asks about is like the resurrection itself.  It’s not a box you check, and then move on to the line about your address and credit card number.  It’s a process.  We’ve only  begun to glimpse what it would mean to fully accept the Lordship of Jesus, which is to say, the total transformation of the world into the paradise of God.

But back to the story: the resurrection proves that Jesus was telling the truth about himself, even though nobody believed him.  Well, almost nobody.  Mary Magdalene and the other Mary believed, at least enough to risk sticking around to watch his crucifixion.  They believed enough to want to go to his tomb and pay their final respects.  I guess that is what made it possible for them to witness his resurrection, and to receive the message that the work that God is doing through Jesus is just getting started. 

But the male disciples, according to Mark and Matthew, aren’t ready yet.  Their hearts are still too clouded with guilt and fear; their heads are still too full of the splintered wreckage of the grandiose dreams that they brought with them to Jerusalem.  They will see Jesus.  They will experience his resurrection.  But not until they follow him back to Galilee.  They have to go back, back to the beginning, back to the place where he first came upon them, casting their nets into the lake.  Not to try to recapture the past.  Not to go on some kind of nostalgia trip, but to hear again in the present the voice of Jesus saying “follow me.”  They have to go back, carrying with them the memory of his death, and their part in it, and begin again to learn how to be his disciples.      

26 years ago I spent a couple of months in Nicaragua, building houses and seeing for myself what the counterrevolutionary war was doing to that country.  A lot of wonderful things happened to me there, and most of all I fell in love with the people.  And while I was there I met a young American, a mechanical engineer, who was machining parts and fixing up old 1930s windmills around the country to help the farmers pump water.  And maybe it was he who gave me this mild case of the romance of revolution, and I started to imagine learning about organic agriculture and going back to Nicaragua or some other down-trodden tropical country to help the people. 

But on my way back to the States I came through customs in the Houston airport.  And as I stood in line in the cavernous, dreary, understaffed, customs station, and I looked around at my own people—stressed-out, short-tempered, homesick Americans--it struck me as clear as a bell that the only difference between this place and Nicaragua was a few dollars, and they wouldn’t last forever.  In fact, that wave had already crested.  And I realized that if I wanted to help people, and develop and strengthen communities, and build the foundations of a just and sustainable society, the most important place in the world for me to do that work was right here in the good, old US of A.

In the 10^th Chapter of Acts, Peter tells Cornelius, the Roman Centurion, that Jesus is Lord of All, by which he means Lord of all peoples.  But he might as well have meant Lord of all times, all circumstances and situations.  As the exalted Son of God, Jesus is Lord of the Universe; and as the man who died on the cross, he is the servant of every particular thing in it.  He is Lord of Nicaragua and Lord of Petaluma.  He is Lord of your house, and your office, and your spouse and children.  He is Lord of your bank account, of your car, and the highway you drive on.  He is Lord of your bedroom, and bathroom, and the dishes in your kitchen sink.  He is Lord of your dreams and of your fears, of your proudest achievements, and your devastating losses.  And as many times as you forget him, or discount him, or betray him, he calls you back to begin again, a little humbler, maybe, a little wiser, to find his place in your life, and yours in his.

 When you leave here today, maybe humming one of those catchy Easter hymn tunes, and the flowers are blooming, and the hills are still green, and the color and the fragrance of spring are everywhere, everything you see will be a sign of his resurrection.  Everyone you meet will be his glorious image.  Nothing that happens to you, now or in the future, will be able to put him back in his grave, or remove his name from your lips or his word from your heart.  Or so I’ve been told.  And today I could almost believe it.            

Opening scene

Isaiah 42:1-9
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17
Psalm 29

My daughter was born late in the morning in our student apartment at the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley.  That night, my wife and I swaddled our new baby in a cotton blanket and lay down to sleep in the same room where she’d been born.  Meg was exhausted from 20+ hours of labor and significant loss of blood, so I lay on my back and put the baby on my chest to sleep.  And as she lay there, pulsing with her new life, the warmth of her body spread downward into mine and filled my heart.  From there it moved outward, a sensation of deep healing and peace that flowed to my extremities and relaxed my whole body.   It felt as if the presence of this tiny stranger was opening a treasure within me I didn’t even know I had.  The energy of bonding that circulated between us was like a key opening a locked chest called “fatherhood”, full of emotional and physical and spiritual treasures—joy and laughter, generosity, courage, sacrifice, patience, and love.

The story of the baptism of Jesus is also about an opening.  The water opens to receive him, and opens again as he rises up, and then the heavens open.  And from that opening something comes down and touches Jesus, the presence of the Spirit of God.  Along with the Spirit comes a voice, the voice of a Father who loves and is well-pleased.  And so opens a channel of communication between Jesus and the One he calls “Father.”   So Jesus discovers their deep personal bond.  And whatever the Gospel writers tell us about this moment, it has an intimate aspect that is hidden from us.  We can’t know what this opening felt like for Jesus, except perhaps, by analogy, to our own experiences of opening in love. 

But that doesn’t matter, because this is also an opening of the curtain on the first act of a play.  So far in Matthew’s prologue we have learned about Jesus, about his ancestors and his parents and the dangerous circumstances of his birth, and the stage has been set for him with the introduction of John the Baptist, but here at last he himself appears on center stage.  And this opening scene, brief as it is, reveals something very important about him.  It gives us the key to understanding everything that follows.  We can’t know what it was like to be Jesus, but we can know why he does what he does.  He does what he does because he is anointed by the Spirit of God, to be an open channel of God’s communication, because his heart is uniquely open to the Father’s love.   As Jesus goes on from the River Jordan, to preach and to heal, to cast out demons and challenge the authorities, all these words and deeds will dramatize a single message—that this is how God speaks.  This is how God acts.

But the purpose of this message is not simply to impress us with the power and the uniqueness of Jesus’ spiritual genius.  It is to open a way for our faith.  It is to invite us to share, through him, in the communication of the Spirit, and the bond of the Father’s love.  The Spirit of God is not the Spirit of domination, but the Spirit of Love, and Love means freedom.  So Jesus is, not just God’s only beloved Son, but also God’s servant, sent to share the freedom of life in the Spirit with all who choose to receive.  He is not only our Lord and master, he is our brother, the truly human person Jesus of Nazareth, who humbly and obediently subscribed to the mission God gave him.  It is God’s mission, but it was and is realized through human beings, for the sake of human beings and the created world in which we live.

All of this is implicit in this opening scene.  After all, Jesus does not come to the Jordan to have a private mystical experience, but to take part in a mass movement.  The baptism that John proclaims is a dramatic act of communal repentance and renewal, and Matthew says that “Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan” went out to him to be baptized, confessing their sins.  And Jesus joins them, caught up in the anguish of his people, and the urgency of their desire to change.   When he gets there, as Matthew tells it, John recognizes him as his master, the one for whom his own work is just the preparation, and he tries to insist that Jesus should baptize him, rather than the other way around.  But it is here that Jesus speaks his very first line in the Gospels, saying to John, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness."

“To fulfill all righteousness”—in order to understand what that means, I found it helpful to refer to a book about the Hebrew prophets by the 20^th-Century Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel.   Heschel explains that for the prophets the concept of “righteousness” is closely linked with the idea of “justice.”  The two are inseparable but also slightly different.  Heschel writes, “Justice is a mode of action, righteousness a quality of the person…Righteousness goes beyond justice.  Justice is strict and exact, giving each person his due.  Righteousness implies benevolence, kindness, generosity. .. Justice may be legal; righteousness is associated with a burning compassion for the oppressed.”

The ministry of Jesus that begins with his baptism, is the superlative expression of this benevolence and compassion that goes beyond justice.  Demonstrating and dramatizing this kind of righteousness in the things that he says and does, he will open the way for others to see that this is what God is also like.  But to fulfill that purpose he must be not just be a Son, but also a servant.  With a heart open to those who are oppressed, whose lives are not their own, but are in thrall to the desires and ambitions of others, who struggle under the collective burden of sin, he must surrender himself.  In an act of submission that foreshadows the cross that lies ahead, he allows John the Baptist to push him down into the dark water.

What does all this say to us about our own baptism?  And what, in particular, does it say about the baptism of three-and-a-half-month-old Isabelle Magdolin Fraser, which we celebrate here this morning?  The first thing I would say is that it pushes us beyond a merely protective notion of what baptism is.  A friend of mine once told me that the birth of his twin sons opened him up to the possibility of both the greatest joy and the greatest pain that he’d ever known.  And that is what love does, whether it is the love we have for our parents, or our friends, or our spouses.  But it is perhaps especially true of the love we have for our children.  We know that our capacity to protect them is limited.  We cannot always even protect them from ourselves, let alone a world full of dangers and disappointments, false promises and outright lies.  So it is only natural that we would commit them to the protection of Christ, that through him God’s righteousness might supply them with whatever is lacking in what we ourselves can provide.

This is natural and reasonable and yet it does not go far enough.  Because baptism is not just a private gift that the Church bestows upon her children from her storehouse of sacramental grace.  It is the incorporation of one more unique and irreplaceable member into a body that is always open, the body of Christ.  Baptism opens a channel of communion, and forges a deep and irrevocable bond, but it is a bond of loving communion that includes innumerable children of God from every time and every tribe and nation.   We surrender Isabelle to the waters of baptism, as Christ surrendered himself, not to be hidden away from the world in the depths of God, but so that she finds in the world a way that is open.  Open, to the freedom and life of the Spirit; open, to the sufferings of the oppressed and the active compassion of righteousness; open, to the power of love and connection that is innately present in her as in every human being; open, to the teachings and example of Jesus Christ, who blazed this trail, and walks ahead of her, conquering every demon, vanquishing every foe, removing every obstacle that stands in the way of her playing her part in his great mission of salvation for the world.