“Christ Is the One, John Is the One, We are the Ones”

(Luke 3:15-17, 21-22)

As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals.  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; and with you I am well pleased.”

            This past week we heard that Dr. Amy Acton has thrown her hat into the ring to run for governor of our state.  I was surprised because, as the head of the Ohio Health Department during the COVID epidemic, she ended up resigning because she had been so beaten up through the process.  But, apparently, she is stepping up, wanting to be a leader in Ohio.  She said, “I don’t want to look the other way when Ohioans are struggling.”

            In these tumultuous times, we are looking for leaders to listen to, not just in politics, but throughout our culture.  We are so in need of folks who want to fix what is broken, heal what is wounded and to transform what seems to have gone off the rails in our state, in our nation and in our world.

            Listening to the tributes to President Jimmy Carter that have been pouring in and to the speakers at his Washington D.C. funeral on Thursday, all this has reminded me of the man who stepped up to run for the presidency in 1976.  Perhaps, more importantly, of the man who, in his retirement years, worked doggedly for the common welfare of humanity.  Part of the scripture text that one of his grandsons read at the funeral comes from the book of Romans, chapter 8.  It seems appropriate to quote it today as it pairs well with the baptism of Jesus.  I, of course, will not read it in the King James version as Jimmy’s grandson did.  But here it is, from Romans 8, verses 28-30 (the Message Version).

            “This is why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.  God knew what he was doing from the very beginning.  God decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son.  The Son stands first in the line of humanity that he restored.  We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in Christ.  After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name.  After God called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself.  And then, after getting them established, God stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.”

            I see the parallel between the Baptism of Jesus narrative and this one in this way.  The Spirit appears while Jesus is baptized saying, “You are my Son, my Child, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  And then in Romans, Paul writes in the NRSV version, “For those whom God knew, he planned that they would be made in the image of the Son.  That way the Son would be the firstborn of a large family.”  At OUR baptisms, God has called us by name, joining us into this family of Christ. 

            So it is that we are part of this large family of which Christ is the firstborn.  And we have both the privileges of coming after Christ and the responsibilities of this life as Christians, as part of the Jesus House.  We have been called into it just as John the Baptist was called.  He had a mission to live out, and he was passionately doing just that, but the people wanted to know, “Are you the one we’ve been waiting for?” 

            John assured them that he was not, but that one greater than he, was coming, and then John baptized Jesus.  But you can see that John was answering his own calling from God.  Though Jesus is the main player here, don’t minimize John’s role.  Don’t minimize your own role in your community—in our community.  John’s community was hungry for his ministry and what he was bringing to them. 

Our community, our state, our nation, our world, longs for what each of us, as baptized people, as Jesus People, can bring to the table, can bring to the conversation, can bring to make this a better world.  Jimmy Carter did.  Amy Acton has the intention to do so. 

The community that surrounded and surrounds them and us encourages and empowers all to do good, to do Jesus’ work.  Listen again to Paul’s words from Romans: “God knew what he was doing from the beginning.  God decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of Jesus….  After God made that decision of what his children should be like, God followed it up by calling people by name….

That’s us, folks.  We have been called by name to do the work of Christ in our world in the context of our community.  We’ve been called, not only as people who are saved, but as those who are empowered to do our work and to make our mark. 

Sometimes we excuse ourselves, we minimize what we can do and be by saying, “I’m too old, I’m too shy, I’m too tired, I’m too small, I’m too private.”

No, we are so connected as a community that we cannot fully figure things out by ourselves.  Hear this now, some truths can only be known, some mysteries can only be solved, when we do it in community together.

Yes, Christ is the one, John is the one, AND we are the ones that the world is waiting for….

“Sweet Honey in the Rock” is one of my all-time favorite musical groups.  Their song “We Are the Ones” is based on a poem by a woman named June Jordan.  Its title is “Poem for South African Women.”  It’s in memory of those 40,000 women and children who protested apartheid on August 9, 1956.

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands

by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land

into new dust that, rising like a marvelous pollen, will be fertile,

even as the first woman whispering imagination to the trees around her

made for righteous fruit from such deliberate defense of life as no other, still

will claim inferior to any other safety in the world;

The whispers too, they intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit, now aroused they,

carousing in ferocious affirmation of all peaceable and loving amplitude sound, a certainly unbounded heat from a baptismal smoke where, yes, there will be fire.

And the babies cease alarm as mothers raising arms and heart–high as the stars so far unseen,

nevertheless hurl into the universe

a moving force, irreversible as light years traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up, and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and, if necessary, even under the sea.

We are the ones we have been waiting for….