DEEP WATER: CONTEMPLATING BAPTISM
Jesus has been baptized (has said “yes” to wanting what God wants, and the dedication of his life to that project), and now his ministry begins. Where does he go? What does he say? What does he do? What does he suffer? And what do these stories say about our own life of “yes” to God? (We’re roughly following the Revised Common Lectionary here, continuing our readings of Luke’s gospel.)
Don’t Get It Twisted. The wildest thing about saying “yes” to God is, the human mind (or a personified Enemy, you decide) can come up with a million ways to twist religious commitment into US getting what WE want. The one with a new (or renewed) enthusiasm for Christian faith can imagine all kinds of ways that this is going to make life better, easier, more prosperous… but we’re invited here to be extremely skeptical of that.
Good News? It Depends. We come back to this message again and again at Galileo: the gospel is good news or terrible news depending on the position of the hearer. If you’re waiting to hear that God especially loves you, and hates all the same people you hate, it’s gonna sting. This is the inaugural event of Jesus’s ministry in Luke’s gospel, and it makes his hearers so mad they try to kill him – already!
This episode of That’s What She Said features an original song written by Emma J, a musician from Alabama who found us on TikTok and joined our Inside Out livestream worship community. They recently released an EP, Generation Now, and you can check it out on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/album/1il4TaH5AjpbsWaKs3gchk?si=uHNN6WYMRzeJStAd_mJvVQ
Deep Water. This is Luke’s story alone, where Jesus invites potential disciples to fish in the “deep water.” Can we talk about that allegorically? Like, what is the deep water of our own Christian discipleship? Deeper than “going to church,” deeper than a list of do’s and don’t’s, deeper contemplation of God’s power and presence than we’ve been invited to before…
New Wine, New People, New Practice. Levi throws a party for Jesus; it makes people mad. Jesus eats and drinks all the time; it makes people suspicious. He’s experiencing too much joy with all the wrong people, and religion shouldn’t feel that way? His metaphor about wine and wineskins means new people, new practice. “It’s supposed to be delicious, you dingbats.”
Blessings and Woes, Love and Hate. There’s an economic punch in the Sermon on the Plain – “blessed are the poor/hungry; woe to the rich/well-fed.” But there’s also this reputational component – do people speak well of you (woe!), or defame your character (bless!)? The relationship between those two is worth exploring, as we (still) tend to villainize the poor and assume good things about the wealthy. I don’t mean the super-wealthy – just the normally wealthy, as if they followed the rules and worked hard and blah blah blah. This is the lie of capitalism – that good people can prove their goodness by working the system to their advantage. Jesus calls bullshit.
A Life Well-Lived. Someone said about Betty White, “Live your life so that when you die at 99, they will say it was too soon.” I say about Dan Patrick, “Live your life so that when you get Covid, no one will rejoice over your suffering and hope for your demise.” These little picture-stories from Jesus are about the quality of a life well-lived on the foundations of his example – what does it look like? In whom, other than him, have we seen it? Also, we dedicated a baby this Sunday!
The Centurion’s Pais. Oh this is a hard story, given all that we now know about enslavement, about sex between slaveowner and enslaved person, about power differentials… Does Jesus know these things? Is it a lovely story about queer love, or a painful story about Jesus’s tacit endorsement of a caste system? How do we recover a story like this from under layers of new understanding? What does it mean for us now? Could a sermon be a teaching opportunity for critical thinking/reading that is still faithfully exploring Jesus’s identity? Like, “Here is reading #1… here is reading #2… here is reading #3… here is what it means to receive the complications and confusion without losing your mind or your faith…”