A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation
The online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
10th January 2021
Luke 3.1-22
Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/check-your-privilege
Miniature from the Psalter of Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1185)
A question for you to ponder,
which we’ll
come back to in a few minutes:
Who, in your opinion,
are the annoyingly simplistic
prophets of our time?
Who’s voice and message drives you to distraction,
because it
fails to take sufficient account of nuance and complexity?
Who has you shouting at the TV or radio…?
Well, as I said, we’ll come back to this…
Our reading for this morning is often headed,
‘The
Baptism of Jesus’,
but actually, of course, the baptism in question only occurs
in the last two verses,
with the
rest of the chapter up to this point
being all
about John the Baptist’s ministry and death.
We’ve skipped on a couple of decades from last week’s
reading,
about the
young Jesus in the temple talking theology with the doctors;
and we’re thirty years on from Simeon and Anna,
welcoming
the infant Jesus to the temple.
Today we re-join Jesus and John as adults,
and we find
John in full-on Old-Testament-Prophet mode.
It’s not immediately clear how John’s proclamation of
repentance
and Jesus’
baptism relate to each other,
except that
Jesus for some reason comes for baptism by John,
so we’ll hold that tension for a few minutes as well,
and come
back to that.
So let’s start with John,
and his
fire and brimstone message
of
judgment and repentance
that was
drawing the crowds to him
in
the wilderness.
John was calling people to repentance,
because, he
said, they were living under judgment;
and in order for us to hear this right in our world,
I think we
need to de-couple it
from
our pre-programmed tendency
to hear any
language of judgment and repentance
as
being primarily about personal and private sin.
The judgment that John proclaimed
was far
bigger than any one individual,
and the repentance from it
was far
more wide-ranging
than the
seeking of personal forgiveness for individual misdemeanour.
Rather, John was telling people that their society itself was
under judgment,
that
something was profoundly out-of-joint with the world,
that
was causing oppression and injustice;
and he told
them in no uncertain terms
that
the time had come for this to change.
His message sounds more like an ideological revolution
than a call
to improved subjective ethical improvement.
This isn’t a simple ‘be nice’ from John!
He has more in common with Che Guevarra, or Leon Trotsky,[1]
than he
does with the purity preachers of the evangelical revival.
John’s condemnation, you see, was of the status quo,
and the sin
he identified, was the sin of ‘business as usual’.
Society, he said, is broken,
and now it’s
time for a change.
And so he called people to repent,
to turn
away from their complicity
in systems
that perpetuate oppression,
and to turn towards a different way of living,
where
poverty is challenged,
and where people
are released from tyranny.
So I wonder how we
can hear John’s call for repentance,
and his
judgment on society?
Particularly, I wonder, how can we hear it this week,
when we
have witnessed the storming
of the United States Congress
building by a rioting mob
as the
latest outworking of a proclaimed message of hatred and division?
So much of the division in our world,
from
Washington to London,
stems from assumptions
we make about privilege.
Identity politics drives people to hatred and violence,
by
diminishing our sense of common humanity,
and
building in its place a sense of aggrieved threat.
From white privilege, to gender privilege,
to
religious privilege, to straight privilege,
to
socio-economic privilege,
a failure to recognise or acknowledge one’s own privilege,
inevitably
creates and perpetuates a power imbalance
that then
will lead to oppression.
And this is nothing new:
John’s
message cuts right to the heart of this issue.
If we are to hear John’s proclamation in our world,
then we,
with his first hearers, will have to internalise a message
that has
the capacity to make us profoundly uncomfortable,
and that message is this:
Whatever
privilege we have, and some of us have a lot,
is never
ours by right.
It is simply the benefits that end up being ours,
because we
fit into a specific social group
or because
we have certain dimensions to our identity.
The message of John to the children of Abraham,
who came to
him for the baptism of repentance,
was that their privileged status as God’s children,
was not
something they could take for granted any longer (v.8).
They said, ‘We are the children of Abraham!’
And John
said, ‘If God wants children of Abraham,
he’ll raise them up out of the
stones’
They had to realise rather, their place at God’s table
depended
not on who their ancestors were,
but on the
fruit of justice and righteousness in their lives (v.9).
And this isn’t rocket science now,
and it
wasn’t rocket science then either!
As a response to the crowd’s anxious and despairing
question,
of what,
then, should they do,
in
the face of his condemnation
of
their addiction to ‘business as usual’ (v.10);
the answer John gave was unnervingly simplistic:
share your
surplus with those who don’t have enough (v.11),
don’t line
your own pockets from the public purse (v.12),
and don’t
extort money by threat or deception (v.15).
All of which has an disconcertingly contemporary ring to it,
doesn’t it!?
I’m thinking of the challenge last year of BLM,
and the
anguished hand-wringing on the part of many of those of us
who have
inherited white privilege.
‘What then should we do?’
Well, it’s
not rocket science.
I think John would say to us what he said in the first
century in the wilderness:
Stop taking
your privilege for granted, and then do something.
Share with
those who don’t have.
Stop lining
your own pockets on the basis of who you are.
Don’t
extort money by threat or deception.
Simple though it may sound, as the best ideas often do,
this
condemnation of entitlement, selfishness, avarice, and extortion,
is as revolutionary today
as it was
in the first century,
because it challenges the universal human tendency
to look
after No.1, and kind-of forget about the rest.
It is a call to a different way of living,
where
‘enough’ is genuinely enough,
and where
the humanity of the other is respected and nurtured.
It’s a call to the politics and economics of the common
good.
The three groups who ask John what they should do are:
- the ordinary
person who is told to share their cloak
- the tax
collector who is told to stop lining their pockets,
- and the
soldier, who is told to stop extorting
It’s the ordinary people, it’s money, it’s military power.
In all of this, there is a call
to the
politics and economics of the common good.
And this is what we need to see then
in the
story of John’s baptism of Jesus.
People sometimes ask, ‘why did the sinless Jesus need to be
baptised by John?’
After all,
it’s not as if he had some deep personal sins that needed forgiving.
Well, Jesus came for baptism to align himself
with a
turning away from a society
hell-bent
on entrenching privilege,
and a
turning towards
a
way of living that is ‘good news’ (v.18) for ‘all flesh’ (v.6).
But then as with everything Jesus does,
he then subverts
people’s expectations of him.
John’s judgment language has been strong,
he has
called people a ‘brood of vipers’, as he exposed their hypocrisy,
and he has
warned them that their lives of unfruitful living
will
be thrown in the fire of God’s judgment.
You might have thought, on the back of that message,
that Jesus
coming for baptism by John
was him aligning
himself with a revolution of fire,
a burning away of the old order
as
a precursor to the forcible establishment of the new.
But as Jesus is baptised, a new epiphany, a new revelation,
is given,
and the winnowing
fire of God’s Spirit
is
revealed in the form of a dove,
descending
on Jesus at his baptism
as a precursor to the flames of the same
Spirit
that will descend on Jesus’
disciples at Pentecost, later in Luke’s story.
The revelation of God is not seen as a Roman Eagle,
poised with
talons bared
to shred
all those who fail to capitulate to the new order.
This isn’t the overthrow of one violent empire by another:
God’s
judgment is not meted out on people for non-compliance.
Rather, the burning fire of God’s Spirit
is
experienced as a dove of peace: gentle and loving.
And each of us who follows Jesus through baptism,
are aligning
ourselves with this alternative revelation of God,
as the chaff in our lives is burned away,
and we are
purified, forgiven, and prepared for the task
of living
God’s kingdom into being in our world.
Too often, preachers of judgment
stand ready
to call out the sins of others,
and to
preach against other people’s faults.
But John calls people to turn from such practices of
condemnation and division,
and to
discover instead that the path to revolution
lies in the
choices we each of us make;
as we turn away from ‘business as usual’,
to embrace
ways of living that bear the fruit of generosity and love;
and, acknowledging our privilege, turn towards those
who would
otherwise be distanced from us.
Giving up that which we have inherited,
so that
they too can share in God’s blessing.
So, to return to the question with which I started,
who are the
annoyingly simplistic prophets of our time?
Are they, perhaps, the unambiguous prophets of the climate
emergency,
Greta
Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion?
Do you find yourself saying, as they stand there declaring ‘Something
must change’,
that they’ve
got to get to grips with nuances of the global economy.
Are they the prophets of Black Lives Matter?
Making many
of us feel profoundly uncomfortable in our own skin.
Are they the prophets of the MeToo movement?
Highlighting
for half of us what it means to be a man.
Sometimes the binary call to justice, to repentance,
to the
acknowledgment of privilege and responsibility
can be hard to hear,
but that
doesn’t mean it isn’t right.
I suspect that in all
of these and more,
we can hear echoes of John’s simplistic
proclamation in the wilderness,
that people should
stop exploiting their privilege,
and instead should live and work
to bring to bear in the
world
the fruit of justice, righteousness,
and equity.
And as we consider the baptism of Jesus at the hands of
John,
we might
want to think of our own baptismal moment,
and to consider what it means for us
to embrace
the social implications of our baptismal vows,
moving beyond reassuring narratives of personal salvation,
to a life
lived in dedication to God and to others.
And if you’ve not yet been baptised,
and are
challenged today to explore this in obedience to Jesus’ example,
please do
speak to me about this.
I haven’t worked out how to do an online baptism,
but I have
hope we will be in a position to gather again around our baptismal pool
before too
many months have passed.
And for all of us, I wonder if we can hear John’s call to
repentance,
to turn
away from ‘business as usual’,
and to turn
towards the in-breaking kingdom of God?
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