Hope That Gets Its Feet Wet

Hope is not waiting for God to fix things—it’sstepping in. In Jesus’ baptism, we see a Savior who refuses distance, wading into dangerous waters with the condemned. This sermon on Matthew 3:13-17, calls the Church to a hope rooted in solidarity, action, and love that refuses to stay dry.

Transcript

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You're listening to The Word on Baker Street, a podcast from Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Bakersfield, California. Each week we share the good news of God's love through the sermons from our Sunday worship. Wherever you are in your journey, you are welcome here.

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The Holy Gospel according to Matthew 3, 13 through 17. Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me. But Jesus answered him, Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were open to him, and he saw God's spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. The gospel of the Lord. Please be seated. Let us pray. Gracious God, may these words in all of our meditations draw us closer to you today. Amen. So last week in worship, we drew our star words. I got hopefulness. It's where we draw those words that are gonna guide us through the year. Give us something to meditate on, maybe inspire you. So, you know, I reached into the basket and I pulled out my word, and there it was. Hopefulness. I'll be honest, I wanted to put it right back. Hopefulness. It's a word we're supposed to love, right? But hope it's so often it becomes a reason to wait. A reason not to act. Hope can become passive. It can it can let us kind of off the hook. Like, you know, well, I hope things get better. I you know, I hope I hope someone does something. I hope God fixes this. But then, you know, actually just kind of sit back and do nothing. As if hoping hard enough is gonna change everything. I like what how Greta Thurberg puts this. She does it, she says a lot better than I can. She says, the one thing we need more than hope is action. Because once we start to act, hope is everywhere. And this isn't theoretical or abstract. Last Wednesday, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent on a residential street in North Minneapolis. And it's less than a mile from where George Floyd was killed just a few years ago. And she was acting on the behalf of a neighbor. And videos from multiple angles, you know, they show what happened. And the community watched, and people were screaming shame, and Minneapolis public schools, they closed for the rest of the week. This is my hometown. And it's grieving and angry and terrified. And the federal government, its immediate reaction was to call her a rioter, you know, who weaponized her vehicle. And before any investigation or before her family could even begin to process what was going on. What do we do when hope, and hoping feels like a luxury we can't afford? When people are dying in our streets and when families are being torn apart, and when our neighbors are living in fear. Our scripture lesson today Jesus, he's at the edge of the Jordan River. He's with his cousin John, and Jesus wants to be baptized. But John, he's like, I need to be baptized by you, yet you're coming to me. And still Jesus insists. So he receives John's baptism of repentance, and he as he comes up out of the water, the heavens, they open up, and the Spirit descends upon him like a dove, and this voice, God's voice, declares, This is my beloved son, whom I'm well pleased. And then the thing that really stands out to me this year in this lesson, that we get baptism of Jesus every year, is that Jesus didn't wait for some perfect moment to reveal himself. He didn't wait till things were safe or settled or sanitized. He waded into those murky waters of the Jordan with all of the messy and all those struggling people, all of those broken-hearted people that were there, those ones who were labeled and dismissed by the powerful. Jesus stepped in. And they convinced me that my baptism, the one where my parents and my grandparents and sponsors all held my infant body and presented to me to God, that that baptism wasn't valid. That I needed to be baptized again, which for me ended up being in the shores off Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, which I guess if you're going to go ahead and get dunked again, it's at least a great place to do it. I didn't understand this then, but I do now that in the evangelical faith, that that tradition that I was a part of then, baptism is understood to be a symbolic stepping out from the world, stepping out from the crowd, a personal declaration of faith. I choose to follow Christ, choose to identify as a Christian, I choose to make this public declaration without apology, without shame, of my private beliefs. And the question that I had to answer then, before my peers, would plunge me into that water was a creedle question. It was a, you know, do you personally accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior? And I can see the value of making this kind of public statement to be different. But when I read the story of Jesus' baptism in this week's gospel, I don't see a stepping out kind of story. I see a very intentional stepping in, a stepping into history, a stepping into the lineage, a geography, an identity. In receiving this baptism, Jesus doesn't set himself apart from us, he aligns himself with us. Baptism in Matthew's gospel story is not about othering, it's about solidarity, it's about joining. And this week, when I think about Renee Good and her family, when I think about the her Somali neighbors who are terrified to send their kids to school, and when I think about communities across our nation, and here in Kern, like our three detention centers here in Kern, and how they commit acts that can only be described as torture. I think the question is clear. Are we gonna step out or are we gonna step in? On the day that I was baptized that second time, I had no sense that I was giving myself over to something that was larger, older, or wiser than my own one-on-one relationship with Christianity. You know, baptism was all about my own effort and my own obedience and my own responsibility, and all of it depended so much on me. There were so many ways that I could mess it up. I mean, sure I was choosing to love God, but that paled in comparison to God's choice to love me and the whole of humanity and creation along with me, and what I didn't understand is that God had already ushered me into a story, a huge, sprawling story that gave an eons. Before I was held by those closest to me and presented to God as an infant by those evangelicals, I was being told to reject that paradoxical power of stepping in, of giving myself over to something deeper and more trustworthy than the shifting sands of my own opinions and doctrines. We have this ancient cloud of witnesses, this liturgy that endures, this baptism that binds us not only to the people that look like us, think like us, and vote like us, but all of humanity. To Renee Nicole, good and her children, to our immigrant neighbors, to everyone who has been labeled as other and pushed to the margins, Jesus stepped into the Jordan and said, Let it be so, into the Jordan River, rich with this sacred history, the Jordan, where the ancient Israelites entered into the land of Canaan, the Jordan where the prophet Elijah ended his prophetic ministry, and where Elisha, his successor, began his, the Jordan that flowed under the same open sky that God first opened in the beginning, at the very dawn of creation. In this moment, in this one act, Jesus stepped into the whole story of God's work on earth. He stepped in with the vulnerable, with the condemned, and with those the powerful had labeled as dangerous. I'm still coming to terms with the truth of my baptism, and I and I suspect I'll be doing that for as long as I live. I hold that my first baptism was my true baptism and the only baptism that I ever needed. But I also don't think that the other one hurt. I don't worry about belief the way I used to. I believe and disbelieve a hundred times a day. And yet my baptism holds. That's the point. I am held. You are held. It's not a profession of faith that does the holding, but the saving power of the one who holds history, holds time, holds earth and the sun and the wind and the sky. That's what holds us. The one who parts the clouds and blesses the water and calls us their beloved child. The one who holds Renee, Nicole, good now, the one who holds her children and her wife and her parents in their grief, the one who holds Minneapolis and our nation in this time of anguish and rage holds us too. I'm still not sure what to do with this hopefulness. Maybe hope isn't about waiting for God to fix things. Maybe hope is what happens when we step in, when we wade into that murky water, when we align ourselves with the messy, struggling, broken, beautiful human family, even when it's dangerous, even when it costs us something, even when the powerful tell us to stay quiet. Yet Jesus didn't stand on the riverbank hoping things would get better. He stepped into the water. He stood in line with the condemned and he let himself be marked as one of them. And that's where God met him. That's where the heavens opened, and that's where the voice rang out and said, This is my beloved. That's where hope lives. Not in passivity, but in participation. Not in waiting, but in solidarity. We are God's beloved children. And so is Renee Nicole Good, and so are her children, and so are our immigrant neighbors, and so is everyone the world has labeled as disposable. Our baptism, it binds us to one another, and it calls us to step in. Step into the mess, into the pain, and into the places where people are hurting. And that's a hope I can live with. The kind that gets our feet wet, the kind that refuses to stay silent, the kind that steps in. The kind that wades deep in the water with one another. Let us pray. God of the river, you call us deep into the water, not to watch from a distance, but to wade in together. Give us the feet that move, hearts that stay open, and the courage to follow where your love leads.

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Amen.

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Thanks for listening to the Word on Baker Street. If this message has spoken to you, share it with a friend. More sermons and reflections can be found at emmanuelbakersfield.org. May God's grace and peace be with you today and always.