SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?
A Sermon Preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, January 13, 2008

Text: Matthew 3:13-17

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (RSV) “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (NRSV) “You must change your hearts - for the kingdom of heaven has arrived.” (J.B. Phillips) “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:1-12.)

So says John the prophet, the first Baptist, the foreteller of the coming Messiah, the truth teller about the judgment of God. On Tuesday I asked the Bible study what they thought would happen if this was the message brought Sunday after Sunday. There was pretty universal agreement that the church would be empty. No one comes out much for judgment these days. Of course, our context is radically different than that of first century Israel, but it seems important to consider this passage as the setting for today’s text, the baptism of Jesus.

It is true that considering the entirety of the third chapter of Matthew’s gospel evokes some painful memories. The preaching of hellfire and damnation is not so far removed that some of us cannot remember it, complete with difficult associations that do not reconcile easily with our image of a God, who is love. Mary Granholm shared some childhood memories of fundamentalist Baptists in Maine, in particular, one itinerant evangelist with the Dickensian name of Bennie Boober, who preached just such harsh judgment. Marylea spoke of leaving the Baptist church of her childhood to escape this kind of damning theology, though fortunately for us she found her way home through the prophetic ministry of another “John the Baptist,” Howard Moody. I myself can remember vague threats of condemnation and hell in the voice of a beloved Sunday School teacher who insisted it was better to frighten people into heaven than to let them burn eternally.

So what are we to do with these words of the writer of Matthew, this gospel message that hardly sounds like good news? David Bartlett offers “one way of understanding the good news in Matthew.” He says of Matthew’s focus on righteousness, “What we do matters because who we are matters. If our doing good is not good and our doing bad is not genuinely bad, if there is neither judgment or condemnation, then grace itself is thin and wasted.” He goes on, “It is good news that we are called to be responsible…God does right and invites us to do right as well. God’s invitations often look like commands; that is the privilege of sovereignty. But that the very God should command us – that is astonishing good news” (David Bartlett, What’s Good about This News? pp. 59, 60.)

I said earlier, somewhat facetiously, that John was the first Baptist. Whether or not this can be convincingly argued, there is a sense in which he is a real Baptist, for he is one who argues for believers’ baptism. There is no infant baptism here, no semi-magical covering of babies with a cloak of holy water. God will care for infants and small children in Her own way, but the time comes when one must take responsibility for one’s own life and choose to follow God or not. One must decide for one’s self to live life centered in the will and way of the God who made us all. One must step up to claim fully what it means to be a beloved child of God.

John’s message is not just hellfire and brimstone. Of the ethical categories we considered in last Sunday’s forum, I’m not entirely sure in which to place John, but he seems to have had a clear sense of what was right and what was wrong and he did not hesitate to speak his mind. He clearly condemned what he saw as evil, a practice that would eventually get him killed for his criticism of the king. But he was not just a “naysayer,” he also clearly stood for righteousness, a theme which we have already identified as crucial to Matthew’s gospel. He did not just eagerly and self-righteously condemn others; he came with an urgent appeal that others do right, that they live right, in the evangelical terms of my youth, that they “get right with God.” It is a heavy message; it is a hopeful message that offers to each and all the possibility of repentance, of turning around, of getting things right. Nor did John’s message spring from nowhere; what John came preaching was the result of a lifetime spent in devotion to God for whom he spoke and lived.

Apparently John and his message came at just the right time in the life of Israel. It had been some 400 years since there had been a real prophet in the land. It must have raised for them a question that gets asked in our own time: “Is God still speaking to her recalcitrant creation?” Under the stress of Roman occupation and the hard exigencies of life in a relatively poor and arid land, people were flocking to him from all over country. Baptism, which had previously been reserved in Judaism for the ritual purification of Gentile converts, was now being applied to Jews and Gentiles alike. Clearly there was a perceived need among the people for change in their land and in their lives. The ritual of repentance was one that demanded not only the conviction of sin and the ritual cleansing that followed but a deep change of heart and clear change of life style.

John had become so popular that even Pharisees and Saducees, the religious authorities themselves, were showing up to be baptized. But something about their presence at the riverside did not sit well with John. Something seemed phony to him, fundamentally dishonest. It was like they were looking to take out a kind of religious insurance policy, just in case their current religious practices were not sufficient to guarantee their salvation. But John’s view of repentance demanded social and economic change as well as religious. You can’t have it both ways, judging and oppressing your sisters and brothers, hoarding wealth and turning your nose up at the poor and disenfranchised, placing harsh religious expectations and temple taxes on God’s people, and then try to claim solidarity with them. You can’t hang on to the old ways and expect to enter the coming kingdom of God. In John’s world, you’ve got to do some real soul searching, which is likely to point out the need for some fundamental change, and then you have to decide actually to make those changes.

John is particularly hard on the common belief that one is saved simply by virtue of being a child of Abraham. No matter how righteous Abraham might have been, no matter how close to God, the Baptist insists that each person must cultivate his or her own relationship to God, in faithfulness and in righteousness. Ancestry and heritage do not seem to carry a lot of weight in the coming kingdom. They certainly do not promise one a position of power and authority.

And then Jesus complicates the picture by showing up for baptism, too. How can one whom John recognizes as the Messiah, the one many have come to see as the sinless Son of God, have need of baptism, especially a baptism so clearly focused on repentance? Scholars have wrestled with this question over the centuries and have come to posit some combination of the following explanations: Jesus was not turning from any sin, was not renouncing any guiltiness, but was letting go of home, was turning away from whatever comfort and security offered by his humble home in Galilee in order to follow the way God was laying out for him. In the strong sense that repentance is a turning around of one’s life and heading in another direction, Jesus baptism can be seen as symbolic of his leaving his past behind and taking up the ministry to which God was calling him.

Then there is a powerful argument that Jesus, even as God in the flesh, chose to stand in solidarity with the rest of humanity. “Jesus at baptism took upon himself the common sin,” says George Buttrick. “…sinlessness does not either parade itself as sinless or hold itself aloof from the world’s sin. That aloofness would be token that sinlessness had fallen into sin. Sinlessness can never be a negative scruple:” Buttrick argues, “it must be a holy and outgoing love. Righteousness without love ceases to be righteousness” (George A. Buttrick, The Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 7: Matthew, p. 267.) In fact, one might argue that, in Jesus’ coming to John for baptism, the very act is one of tenderizing John’s brand of righteousness with the compassionate and merciful love of God.

Finally, one could argue that Jesus comes to John for baptism as a confirmation of his calling and as a public witness to the beginning of his ministry, the very ministry John had been foretelling. At the same time, he confirms the rightness of John’s message and establishes continuity between the work of the forerunner and that of the promised one. David Bartlett calls it a kind of “coronation,” a symbolic “crowning” of the king of the coming, now in-breaking, kingdom of heaven. As Jesus seeks to “fulfill all righteousness,” Bartlett says that “In part this means that he acts like a righteous person, living out the commitment God requires of all. In part it means that he lives out the righteousness of God… (David L. Bartlett, New Proclamation, Commentary on the Gospels: Matthew, p. 21.)

So they gathered at the river, this motley crew. Here we find saints and sinners, the poor and dispossessed standing alongside wealthy Saducees, members of the leading families. Desperate truth seekers are next to self-satisfied Pharisees. Here we find a passionate ascetic in the garb of an ancient prophet calling one and all to repentance and to righteousness. Here we find the very Son of God, about to embark on his own ministry of right relationship to God and right living in the light of God’s truth. Shall we join them? Shall we gather at the river? Is there a place for us in this ancient drama?

For those of us who have entered freely and willingly the baptismal waters, does this ancient story still carry any truth for us? What did our descent into the baptismal pool represent for us? The words my father spoke as he baptized me are etched indelibly in my memory: “For we are buried with Christ in baptism and we rise to walk with him in newness of life.” Sometimes it is difficult to walk that walk. It’s much easier to talk the talk. But as John made clear so long ago, that doesn’t cut it. If we want to walk with God, we have to look long and hard at our behavior, our lifestyles, our values and priorities, not just once but over and over again. Am I walking Jesus’ way? Am I journeying with God? Am I taking responsibility for my life, for my part in the world in which I live, for my sisters and brothers everywhere?

I shared with the Bible study group my dis-ease with those who used to come forward repeatedly at every altar call to rededicate their lives. It has always seemed to me that if you made a promise to follow Jesus, you ought just to do it. But as I mature and mellow (hopefully!) I also recognize that we do change over time, along with the world around us. I was moved by a counselor friend of mine who worked with Catholic religious. In helping them wrestle with changes in their feelings about their vows, he would say, “There is not a molecule left in your body that was there when you made that vow.” That is not to say that vows and promises should be made or taken lightly, but they also need to be evaluated periodically and adjusted to changing realities.

In a few minutes, as part of our prayer time, we will have the opportunity to renew our baptismal vows. In light of what you have heard this morning about Jesus’ baptism and its context; in consideration of thoughts and feelings that have been running through your hearts and minds for some time now; in fairness to the changes that have come to your life since you first made your pledge of discipleship; in tribute to your growing understanding of what it means to be a child of God; in recognition of a need for repentance of something that has been blocking the faithfulness of your journey and keeping you estranged from God, others, yourself; in your ongoing quest to be wholly whom God made you to be, I invite you to renew your vows.

In the words of Tom Wright, here again is the promise, the good news of today’s text. “…those who in repentance and faith follow Jesus through baptism and along the road he will now lead us will find, if we listen, that the same voice from heaven speaks to us as well. As we learn to put aside our own plans and submit to his, we may be granted moments of vision, glimpses of his greater reality. And at the centre of that sudden sight we will find our loving father, affirming us as his children, equipping us, too, with his spirit so that our lives may be swept clean and made ready for use” (Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone, p. 22.) With that promise in sight, shall we gather at the river?