As most of you know, I’ve just returned from spending a week with my
family in my hometown in Texas. We all have been told that we can’t go
home again, and we all know that the saying is true in many respects. Those
of us who visit the scene of our early days occasionally also know that the
experience does brings us home again in ways that we can rarely anticipate or
predict.
Each time I get on the plane to go back to Ft. Worth, I know that I will learn
something new about my earlier years. I know that a chance remark by a family
member will give me a new insight about decades-old events and generations of
patterns. I know that the sight of a landmark or something from a family home
will trigger the memory of a long-forgotten event. I never know what is going
to happen when I go back to the home of my early years but I know that I will
return to my daily life with enhanced understanding of the path that led me
to this day and this place.
This latest trip has been no exception. Since my return, I’ve thought about the path that led me from Cowtown to Silicon Valley, and that got me to wondering about Jesus’ path from Bethlehem to his baptism in the Jordan. Scripture doesn’t tell us much about the years between Jesus’ birth and his baptism. Matthew tells us about the family’s trek to Egypt to escape from Herod and about their return. Luke tells us about the infant Jesus being presented in the temple and about the 12 year old Jesus teaching the elders in the temple, but there’s nothing about the other events in his life.
Some of the apocryphal scriptures—the books that didn’t make the cut for inclusion in the Bible as we know it—tell us stories about miraculous acts by the boy Jesus, including things like his making clay pigeons fly. We humans like our stories and tend to create stories if none are supplied, so it’s no surprise that over the centuries, a group of popular fables and miracle stories, sometimes called the “Infancy Gospels”, emerged to fill the story gap. These stories are about Jesus the super-boy. Some of them are delightful fantasies. My favorite is about Jesus wanting to play in the clouds. He walks up into the sky on a sunbeam. His playmates follow and are injured when their faith weakens and they fall back to the earth. Jesus instantly heals them and all is well. Other stories are less happy and involve things like Jesus withering a bully who jostles him in the street. An even more macabre set of stories show a vengeful Jesus who would be right at home in some of the more gruesome tales from the Brothers Grimm. As I reviewed these stories that have grown up around our ignorance of Jesus’ youth, I can only imagine that the original tales came from the tellers’ own propensities toward healing or violence.
All of these stories attempt to answer the questions about how Jesus came to understand his role in life. Did he always know what he was called to do? Did he learn about his path only as he walked it? What led him to the Jordan to be baptized by John? What did he know in that moment when he emerged from the water and heard the voice saying “You are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”? The truth is that it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know for sure about the path that led to that moment. It’s also unlikely that we’ll ever know what was in Jesus’ heart and mind that day.
We will probably never know how much Jesus knew about the path that lay ahead of him, but the gospels give us some clues. As his ministry progresses, we see Jesus growing into his role as healer, teacher and leader. We see him learning that his ministry is not limited to the Jews of his own community. We see him learning the price of his ministry during the night in Gethsemane.
We’ll never know the truth, but I think it’s likely that Jesus’ knowledge of the road ahead on that day of his baptism was just as limited as ours is at the moment of our own baptisms. Baptism is not the end of the path. It’s not the goal. It’s not the get-out-of-jail-free card. Baptism is the beginning—the beginning of our new relationship with God—the beginning of our new walk with Christ—the beginning of our new life with the Spirit. Baptism is the beginning of the path leading to the reign of God made fully present here on earth.
We enter the reign of God—the kingdom of heaven—one step at a time. Jesus was led by his understanding of God’s great love for all creation. We are led by Jesus’ teaching, by his example, by the prodding of the Holy Spirit, by our own experience of the Holy, and by all those who have gone before us. In our Episcopalian tradition, we are also led by the promises we make in the baptismal covenant.
Every time we read those promises, I’m struck that any one of them is the work of a lifetime. A focus on any of these promises would be enough to guide our lives, but we commit—at least four times a year—to live our lives according to all five of these promises. I freely admit that these promises seem daunting to me. These promises also make me take heart. Our response to each question is “I will, with God’s help.” With God’s help. We can’t do this by ourselves, and—thanks be to God—we don’t have to. God comes to be with us as we work to live in the way God calls us to live. As if that weren’t enough, God doesn’t seem to expect us to do it perfectly every time—or quite possibly—any time. What God does seem to expect is that we’ll do the best we can and trust in God to take up the slack.
When we truly do our best to live into these promises—when we truly do our best to bring our lives as individuals and as a parish family into alignment with these promises—I can only believe that God rejoices in the step we have taken to bring God’s reign into being.
So, as we enter this season of Epiphany—the manifestation of God’s love in the world—and enter this new year, I encourage you to do a bit of reflection at the end of each day. Think about the promises we will make in a few minutes. Think about your thoughts, feelings and actions during the day that’s ending. Offer all those things to God. And listen—listen for the voice: “You are my child, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”