In Recovery Together--December 9, 2025

In Recovery Together--December 9, 2025

"Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to John [the Baptizer], and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins." (Matthew 3:5-6)

All those people who lined up by the riverbanks, those crowds who left their villages and towns and went out to the middle of nowhere to hear John and have him wash them in the flowing waters of the Jordan, do you know what they had in common?

Only this: they were mess-ups.  They were wrongdoers who felt trapped in dead-ends, looking for a new beginning.  They were, in a word, sinners.

The people who went out to John were manifestly not the role model/good example types on the cover of Respectable Religion magazine; if they had been, they would have been perfectly content to follow the traditional instructions of the Torah for addressing little offenses and minor infractions, and they would have been content to listen to the advice of the official priests and credentialed rabbis for making amends to their lives.  You went to John if you were at the end of your rope--if you were ready to admit that you needed more than a little spiritual pick-me-up or minor course-correction to your life, but a complete overhaul of your life.  You went to John, maybe not unlike those who show up at their first Twelve Step meeting, because you had hit rock-bottom and you were ready to admit that your life had become unmanageable.  All those folks at the river's edge were brave enough--or desperate enough--to declare publicly by their presence that they were royal screw-ups aching for the chance to start over.  That's the kind of people that John--and the God for whom he spoke--drew to himself: an assembly of sinners.

In a way that seems obvious: after all, if the people who went out to the river to be baptized by John came "confessing their sins," they must have had some hefty guilt about their failures and trespasses to deal with.  But we are so used to hearing the word "baptism" and picturing it as a ritual of respectability and polite piety.  For many it's a ceremony to be proud of these days, not like standing up in that church basement AA meeting and saying, "Hi, I'm Steve, and I'm an alcoholic" (there's a reason that the Twelve-Step groups and programs all have "Anonymous" in their titles, after all).  We might easily (and wrongly) imagine that the people who went out to John in the wilderness were doing the socially accepted thing to do by being baptized, but it's really just the opposite. John didn't fit the mold of a well-appointed and highly respected priest, or the formal schooling and bona fides of a rabbi.  He shows up like one of the prophets of ancient Israel, claiming no more for himself than that he was a "voice crying out." And his invitation was for anybody and everybody who was finally done with pretending that they were perfect. The people who came out to John were ready to give up the act that everything was fine and be turned at last in the right direction.  Those are the folks who went to the Jordan: people who were willing to set aside the cookie-cutter routines of their regular lives to go out to the middle of nowhere looking for a new beginning.

Maybe that's really the only kind of people God gathers: folks whose only thing in common is that we bring mistakes and mess-ups, sins and transgressions, into God's presence, desperately hoping that God will take them from us and bring us up out of the water as new people.  Like the lyric of Jon Foreman puts it, "We are a beautiful letdown, painfully uncool/ The church of the dropouts, the losers, the sinners, the failures, and the fools." Or as the old cliche goes, "the church isn't a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners." That's the only kind of community you'll find out there with John in the wilderness, because honestly, it's the only kind of community God can work with. And when we show up on Sunday mornings, it's not because we are there to model our holiness like a fashion show, but to be honest about our brokenness like we are all in recovery together.  We are.

This is the kind of community we belong to, and the good news is that in that kind of community--the found family we call "church"--there's no need to pretend anymore that we've got it all figured out or that we're better than anybody else.  There is instead the freedom to admit our failings, let go of our sins, and be pulled up back on our feet to walk in a new way.

There's a place for each of us there in the wilderness... just like there's a place for us on Sundays.

Lord Jesus, take us as we are, and make of us what you will.