Monday, January 13, 2025

Clowns, Jokers, Sinners, and Jesus--January 14, 2025


Clowns, Jokers, Sinners, and Jesus--January 14, 2025

"[John the Baptizer] went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.... 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 dover. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased'." (Luke 3:3, 21-22)

Call it the Gospel according to Stealers Wheel. You probably know their song with the catchy refrain (forgive me if it gets in your head now):  "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right--here I am, stuck in the middle with you."  Well, in an important sense, the New Testament writers tell us, the way of Jesus takes him much in the same direction--right into the midst of the clowns and jokers, the sinners and sell-outs, the outsiders and outcasts. And in their midst Jesus takes his stand in solidarity, even from the waters of baptism.

This is a detail of the story of Jesus' baptism that I think we often overlook, perhaps because most of us church folks think of baptism as a perfectly pious, Respectable Religious thing to do. These days, having your child baptized, or being baptized yourself, can carry a whiff of "virtue signaling" to it. That is, it's the kind of action that sends the message to other people, "We are devout, good, God-fearing people! Look--we are doing the ritual that demonstrates our devotion!"  It is worth noting, as the Gospel-writers do, that was the precisely the opposite of what it meant to be baptized in the first century.  When John plunged you into the river waters out in the wilderness, the message you were sending was, basically, "I'm a sinner.  I'm owning it. And I'm trying to start over."  

The people who went out to be baptized by John in the Jordan were admitting their status as mess-ups and stinkers. Luke our narrator points out that John made no bones about what he thought he was offering there at the waters: if you went to him, it was for "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins."  This was less like a proud moment to announce in the newspaper and more like getting up in the circle of chairs at an AA meeting to say, "Hi, my name is... and I'm a sinner." And, as it turns out, there were lots of people living in Judea around then who apparently knew that this was just what they needed: the chance to begin again and to be freed from the baggage of their sins.  So the fact that John the Baptizer had big crowds of people coming out to be baptized isn't so much a surprise.  The real conundrum for Christians is, What is Jesus doing out there, too?

Classically, Christians have affirmed that Jesus is the one person in the history of the universe who shouldn't have been there getting baptized as an act "of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" because he is the one person who didn't have sins for which to repent!  Surely Jesus was aware of what John was offering at the waters, so didn't Jesus know that if he got in line alongside "all the people" who were also being baptized, he would be lumped in with them and reckoned one more sinner in the middle of a bunch of other sinners?

Of course he did, Luke would seem to say.  That's the whole point.

Jesus chooses to stand in utter solidarity with a world full of us sinners, to the point that he doesn't need to keep any of the other clowns and jokers at arm's length.  Jesus doesn't blush at being lumped in with the mess-ups or hold his nose when he's in line with trespassers at the river's edge.  Jesus chooses, from at least this moment onward to be stuck, as it were, in the middle with all of us. Jesus' way of living out his identity as the Son of God (with whom God is apparently "well pleased," knowing full well what Jesus is doing, mind you!) is to get himself counted among the sinners who are all lined up at the water for the expressed purpose of publicly declaring that they are sinners. Jesus' way of fulfilling the will of God is to go out beyond the bounds of what looks respectable or what presents itself as pious to be identified with the whole sinful mass of us--the ungrateful and the promiscuous, the cheats and the sell-outs, the crooked and the dishonest, the clowns to the left and the jokers on the right. Jesus is here, letting himself be counted among all of us.

As we explore this season what it means to let our faith as Christians lead us beyond our comfort zones, we can't get away from this foundational story that begins Jesus' public ministry.  Jesus doesn't see his mission primarily in terms of staying safely inside the walls of Respectable Religious Institutions (and, honestly, when he does to go to those sorts of places, like his hometown synagogue or the Temple in Jerusalem, he often makes a good bit of trouble for himself there). Rather you see him hanging out with the ones who got labeled "sinners," not for the purpose of looking down on them or scolding them, but standing in line beside them as one of them, without worrying about some outside observer "getting the wrong impression" and without a fear of being seen as "soft on sin." These things don't register as meaningful concerns to Jesus, apparently, as he comes up out of the water where everyone else has gone to publicly declare themselves sinners.  This is how Jesus embodies the Reign of God: looking at the whole lot of us misfits and messes and saying, "I'm with them." If that's how Jesus lives out the way of God, where might we be sent today?  To whom will we be directed, not to scold or wag our fingers, but simply to say, "I'm with you"?

Maybe the way we will show people the face of God is not by sticking our noses up in the air and keeping our distance from the transgressors and trespassers, but right in line beside all of them--you know, the clowns, the jokers, the sinners... and Jesus.

Lord Jesus, lead us beyond what we're used to and help us to love the people around us, regardless of whether they have been reckoned as good or bad, sinners and saints together.

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