Love's Near Enemy (Epiphany 4C)

 

Love’s Near Enemy
Homily delivered for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Feast of the Presentation

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
2 February 2025

9:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist 
Parish Church of St Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

“Love is not jealous.”

 

This line at the beginning of the Hymn to Love, today’s epistle, is part of a joke, a pun, by St. Paul.  Paul introduces the hymn by using the very same word "jealous," when he says “Earnestly desire (literally, “be jealous for”) the higher gifts” (1 Cor 12:31). He repeats the verb in resuming his letter after the hymn with the words, “Make love your aim, earnestly desire (or: be jealous for) the spiritual gifts” (1 Cor 14:1).    

 

So which is it Paul, should we be jealous or not? 

 

The problem of course, is that the word zelo’o means both zealous and jealous.  Its root meaning is deep attachment, connection, or engagement.  It means a sharp desire.  If this is a desire to take on something or someone that is not yet ours, it often is translated as “strive for,” or “earnestly seek.”  This can slide into “envy” if the thing desired already belongs to someone else.  If this desire is to keep something or someone that is already ours, it often is translated as “jealous.” 

 

The Hebrew word we often translate as “jealous” has a similar semantic range.  Thus “The Lord your God is a jealous God” does not mean so much “is overly touchy about his privileges and status, and domineering in the extreme” but rather, “is passionately engaged and committed.” 

 

Paul with this little pun is saying strong desire is a good thing, except when it isn’t.  His hymn to love tries to give us an idea of where the lines are drawn.  I translate the core of this passage as follows:

 

“What is love?  When you love someone, you are patient and kind with that person.  You are not jealous of those you love, and you don’t try to show them up.  You don’t talk down to them, or act rudely toward them.  You don’t try to have your own way at their expense, nor do you get annoyed or resentful at them.  … When you love someone, you put up with whatever they do, you trust whatever they say, you hold every hope for them, and you are willing to endure anything for them.  When you love, you never stop loving.” 

 

Buddhist teaching is very clear about the issues raised here.  It sees each virtue as having a polar opposite, as well as a closely related opposite that mimics but falsifies the virtue.  The polar opposite is called a “Far Enemy” of the virtue, while the distortion that mimics the virtue is called its “Near Enemy.” 

 

In standard Dharma teaching, the divine emotions all have polar opposites as well as false imitations. 

 

Loving-kindness is selfless good will and love for others.  Its polar opposite, obviously, is hatred or ill-will.  Its near enemy looks like love, but is distorted and sick:  it is selfish attachment or the so-called “love” that seeks to control exclusively and establish dependence. 

 

Compassion is empathy and sympathy for others.  Its far enemy is cruelty.  Its near enemy is pity.  Where compassion looks on a suffering person as an equal, pity looks down on the sufferers, sees them as inferiors. 

 

Joy in others is opposed by resentment or envy, while its near enemy is mere exuberance in social settings. 

 

Equanimity is the ability to see and feel about yourself as you see and feel about others, and is what I would call humility.  Its polar opposite is envy or jealousy while its near enemy is simple indifference, not caring about yourself or others. 

Paul argues here that true love is not possessive and centered on one’s own desires, but rather the desires of the beloved. 

For Paul, it is a grievous error to say that Othello killed Desdemona because he loved her too much.  What drove Othello was not love, but a desire to possess, a desire further twisted into murderous jealousy by Iago.  Iago himself is driven by envy and thwarted desire: at the opening of the play he swears revenge on Othello for promoting an Army colleague to a position for which he had hoped.  He poisons Othello with his own venom of envy and jealousy.
 
Paul is saying we must keep a clear distinction in our minds between love and its near enemies: envy or jealousy, and conditional, demanding, and self-centered sexual and emotional attachment. 
 
The boundary between love and its near enemies is implicit in today’s Gospel reading.  Jesus preaches at Nazareth, his home town.  One would expect him to be welcomed warmly, due to the affection, a minor type of love, we tend to have for one “of our own.” 

The villagers start out with affection, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”  But they expect Jesus to bring honor to the group, fame (and perhaps commerce) to the community.  So when he is unwilling to perform in his own home, they turn against him.  They know, perhaps, of his irregular conception and quickly turn the reference to Joseph into an accusation of illegitimacy.

Jesus’ teaching of mission—of going out to strange places and people to do God’s acts of love—is coupled with his view that the great prophets worked some of their greatest miracles with strangers and foreigners.  He notes that Elijah gave miraculous food not to good Israelites, but a woman in a pagan village.  It was not good Jews that Elisha cured, but the Syrian leper Na’aman. 

The Nazareth villagers’ familiarity with this native son does not grow into attachment and loyalty, but breeds contempt. Affection for a home-boy turns to murderous rage when it doesn’t deliver the goods they earnestly desire.   Like Othello for Desdemona or Frankie for Johnnie, their emotion is not love, but its near enemy:  a will to possess and dominate based in desire-fulfilment. 

Philosopher Rene Girard identified most of our socially generated evils with what he called mimetic desire: the urge to acquire what others have, or be what others are.  Our tendency to scapegoat is one expression of this:  we try to bond and become one with those we envy by defining others out, laying on them the fault of our not having what we envy, often blaming them with our own faults, especially those we can’t admit to ourselves, driving them outside of our “community” thus created, and then assaulting them with the very things we fear, the reasons for our wanting to imitate others. 

In Aesop’s fables, there is the story of a wild donkey who envied the pasture and care given a tame donkey until, one day, she happened to come upon the tame donkey pulling a heavily loaded cart and being whipped. The wild donkey, on second thought, preferred freedom.  There are two morals that usually go with the story.  The first is wildly known:  The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, that is, something that is not ours makes us want it, regardless of whether it is actually preferable.  The second, less common is this:  Between envy and ingratitude, we make ourselves doubly miserable:  we think either that our neighbor has too much, or that we ourselves have too little.  The Chinese proverb describing the human rat race says it clearly 患得患失 huàndéhuànshī “You worry about getting stuff, then you worry about losing it.” 

Note here the hallmark of corrupt mimetic desire:  it’s a zero sum game where someone else’s gain is our loss, and our gain their loss.  It’s all about comparison for competition, not for growing together.

Even Girard admits that there is one kind of mimetic desire that is good and healthy:  when we emulate those whom we admire.  Such a desire does not seek to deprive them of that good, but simply enjoy along with them.  In “How it Works,” the introduction to the Twelve Steps of Recovery taught by AA, NA, and Alanon, we read:  “If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it – then you are ready to take certain steps: (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 58).  This is what is at heart of 12 step programs’ policy of “attraction, not promotion.”  Madeleine L’Engle described Christian evangelism in similar terms: “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”   This is the basic reason for the Church, I think:  to provide us with community in which we can see close up and personal not perfect people or unattainable good, but rather real good lived out in real lives, the blessing of opening our hearts and lives to Christ and his teaching.

 

Again, as Paul teaches, strong desire is a good thing except when it is not.  Love of our own family, tribe, nation, and community is good, except when it is at the expense of others, of outsiders.  In a world where we are all in this together, there is little room for exclusion and stingy hoarding of resources.  There is absolutely no room for demonizing and dehumanizing others.  The solidarity Jesus calls us to fosters the common good, equal opportunity, welcoming of diversity and equity among people and nations, and peace in the world.  It is at the heart of what it means to be human, since we humans are essentially social beings, not isolated monads.  It is more than a vague feeling of compassion, common cause, or shallow sympathy.   It is in fact a commitment to our common life, a sign that we accept responsibility for each other. 

 

We should earnestly desire, strive for, the spiritual gifts of faith, hope, and love even while we confess that love is not jealous or envious.  We should desire and strive for the authentic good, the real thing.  “And the greatest of these is love.”  

In the name of God, Amen. 

 

Ain't that Good News (Epiphany 3C)

 

Ain’t that Good News?
Homily delivered for the Third Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
26 January 2025

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Ps 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

Today’s scriptures all in one way or another talk about how we think about God, whether in fear or joy. 

 

In the Hebrew scripture reading, the scribe Ezra reads the book of the Law before the people who react by bursting into weeping, totally dismayed at its severity. Ezra’s liturgy police  react:  no weeping or mourning allowed, only feasting shared with the poor, because “LAW IS GOOD” no matter what!  Put on a happy face, even if this stuff is killing you!

 

The Psalm says that we can learn much about God in looking at the wondrous stars and planets in the skies above us, as well as by reading the Law, a “perfect” and “sure” teacher that “revives” and “makes wise” the heart by stirring it up to “fear” and prayers that our words and thoughts be acceptable to the God thus revealed. 

 

The Gospel reading is Luke’s portrayal of Jesus’ first public sermon. He reads from Isaiah 61, beginning

 

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because

he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me

to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,” 

 

But then, instead of the next line, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God,” Jesus ends the reading by throwing in a line from another part of Isaiah (58:6) and saying: 

 

“to send out into freedom those once downtrodden,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

 

He deliberately deletes Second Isaiah’s reference to “the Day of Vengeance of our God” and replaces it with a line from Second Isaiah’s great song about what true worship is:

 

“Is not this the fast that I choose:
    to loose the bonds of injustice,
    to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to send out into freedom those once downtrodden,
    and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
    and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
    and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”

 (Isaiah 56:5-7)

 

Jesus applies this all to himself, and thus announces his mission.    Like Gabriel Fauré in his Requiem as originally written, Jesus deliberately leaves out the Dies Irae.  By deleting the reference to the Day of Vengeance, Jesus focuses his message on Good News, hope and forgiveness, rather than fear.  Jesus is to break the bonds, and then send out those who were once downtrodden into freedom, as sent ones, or apostles, with his message of liberation to others. 

 

We will read of the congregation’s bitter reaction to Jesus’ sermon next week.  And as you shall see later in this homily, a sermon that announces good news can trigger a bitter response.  But the story we read today is clear: Jesus’ mission is to bring joy not fear, hope not despair. Forgiveness, not punishment: a Happy Announcement, or Good News. 

 

Mahatma Gandhi said “I love your Christ. It is you Christians that frighten me.”  The Church’s occasional obsessive and fear-inducing focus on pure and legal has driven many, especially the young, from what they call “organized religion.”  For many, it is not “Good News,” that Christian Churches proclaim, but rather, “bad news”: you don’t measure up, you need to shape up or ship out, and even if Jesus wants to love you, you are simply not worthy, not up to snuff.  God with a capital G really is annoyed with you, and especially with the fact that you don’t feel properly convicted of your evil ways.  The things that give you pleasure and joy are all forbidden, you yourself are deficient and hopeless, and only by throwing yourself at the mercy of the Church, with its abusive hierarchs, hypocritical congregations, pointing fingers, demands for mindless submission and faith, and constant demands for money and time, you might be able, just possibly, to gain a bit of favor from the overarching, homophobic, woman-hating, sex-hating, drink-loathing, KILLJOY IN THE SKY.  

 

But we need to understand that Jesus’ message is a message of GOOD NEWS, no matter where you are. 

 

I used to sing my children to sleep by singing lullabies and African-American Spirituals.  One of their favorites was this: 

 

I got shoes in that kingdom, ain’t that good news?  (repeat)

I’m gonna lay down my troubles, and shoulder up my cross,

Good God, I’m gonna bear it home

to my Jesus,

Now ain’t that good news? 

 

The other verses followed suit: “I got a robe in that kingdom,” “I got a house in that kingdom.”  “I got a crown in that kingdom.”

 

The point is that in Jesus, we have a promise for what we need, even things like shoes, shelter, and food.  We have a blessing in him to receive the true desire of our hearts.  It doesn’t mean that all we think we may want is right, or that he has promised bad things for us because we in our brokenness want the wrong things. But it does mean Jesus is good news, not bad.  

 

This is not good news for the afterlife only.    It is about our lives here and now, about who we are, not just about how we should be.  It is about liberation from what binds us, what keeps us back, what holds us down, both individually and communally.   Liberation from addictions, obsessions, fears, and vicious habits.  Healing from illness.  Jesus went out from that sermon and healed people, and called them to help each other.    This is the heart of Christian mission:  Jesus sends out free those who were once held captive, once down-trodden, and asks them to free others. 

 

Importantly, Jesus here says his mission is to make the Happy Announcement to the poor, the downtrodden, to those who have the most to fear from the broken way the world is.  The very people that we have pledged to defend and support in our baptismal covenant. 

 

This brings us to a matter that has been on the hearts of many of us this week.  You made have hear about the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, the Right Rev. Maryann Budde’s short homily at the National Prayer Service held at National Cathedral the day after the Inauguration.  Addressing President Trump sitting there front and center in the first row of pews, she said this:

 

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.”  [She then gives a lengthy description of people who are at risk of deportation, stressing the fact that most are good contributing members of our communities and concludes:] “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world.”

 

For this, Bishop Budde was accused of “ambushing” the President, “acting inappropriately,” or, in his own words, being a “nasty” “left-wing radical.”   One member of congress called for her to be deported, though she is a native-born U.S. citizen. But then birth-right citizenship, guaranteed in our Constitution, has come under direct attack. 

 

One dear priest friend of mine, an old-style conservative republican wrote this about the matter:  The image that has come to mind is the rich young ruler and Jesus. Christ sees him and loves him.  He then tells him that to truly follow him would mean leaving behind what defined him, expressing a hard truth with love. The Bishop asked the President to set aside what defines him — a reflexive cruelty that is his brand now, and for some of his followers, one of his chief attractions.  No wonder it triggered such bile and anger.  It was perhaps not good political discourse meant to gently bring someone over to another way of thinking--but I suspect the Bishop held little hope that the President would actually relent based on her call for mercy:  just look at the response!  But when all is said and done, she was doing exactly what a priest or a bishop is called by Jesus to do, proclaiming by word and deed the “Good News” of Jesus. 

 

The Christian doctrine of Salvation is a far broader concept than “transferred Karmic payback for my sins.”  It is being rescued from anything and everything that is the matter.  And different things are “the matter” for different people.  So “Good News” can mean different things to different people.  And yet Jesus is proclaimer of Good News to all, of healing to all, of liberation to all, of deliverance to all.  And that includes both sides of our deeply divided and broken national community.    

 

That is the gist of today’s epistle reading.  Paul likens us to a body with all sorts of different body parts.   The very diversity of the body’s different parts is a good thing, and makes the body strong.   One size does not fit all.  And if it pretends to, it fits no one.    Paul calls on us to get along, and to value and respect—even honor—diversity. 

 

One of the great glories of the Anglican tradition is that we value diversity.  Historically, we are a broad tent, and include both very evangelically-minded protestants as well as sacramentally-minded catholics.  We include liberals as well as conservatives, and have a wide range of worship styles. 

 

As St. Paul notes, the key here in healthy community life in the Church is grounding ourselves in Christ.  It demands not just toleration—holding our noses and putting up with others’ habits and ideas that are not so attractive to us—but rather truly honoring and welcoming difference. 

 

Let us focus on being heralds of Good News—of liberation, healing, reconciliation, and love.   Let us work to set the captives free and break every chain that ties us down and holds us back.  Let us honor and respect all our fellow human beings, and embrace the glorious diversity that God created us for. 

 

In the Name of God, Amen.

 

 

The Good Stuff (Epiphany 2C)

 

The Good Stuff
Homily delivered for the Second Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
19 January 2025

11:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit

Sutherlin, Oregon

Isaiah 62:1-5 ; Psalm 36:5-10 ; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 ; John 2:1-11

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I was a boy, we would travel to my Grandparents’ house in Idaho about once every year. There, we would eat wonderful homemade meals that were not common in my mother’s home.  My mother worked outside the home, and had learned to simplify her cooking in the 1950s and early 60s by using processed foods like Bisquick, Campbell’s Condensed Soups, and even Cheez Whiz or Velveeta in her day-to-day cooking, often using recipes that included brand-name items.   Not so in my Grandmother’s House.  There, they raised most what they ate in their large garden, and “put up,” as they said, much of their garden produce for use in the winter.   I remember the first time I ever tasted real ketchup.  It came out of one of the white glass bottles that my Grandma used to preserve homemade ketchup, steak sauce, and chutney.  I was shocked.  It tasted nothing like the Heinz 57 Ketchup I was used to.  This was too tart and tomatoey, with a lot of fresh vegetable overtones.  I wondered to myself how my Grandparents could stand such stuff, a weak imitation of the real thing, all because they were too poor to buy real ketchup in a grocery store!  It was only years later that I realized that my Grandma’s ketchup was far better than any commercially produced stuff, and in fact, was the real thing.  Heinz and Del Monte were the cheap imitations.  

C.S. Lewis tells a story from his own youth about this kind of contrast:  stealing cigarettes from his father’s stash.  Occasionally when the cigarettes were so few that even one might be missed, he dipped into his father’s plentiful cigar stash, which he kept only for honored guests.  He says that when this occurred, he and a friend thought “poor us, today we’ll have to put up with cigars when we might have had cigarettes!”    Again, if the only thing we know is a weak imitation, or a distorted shadow, when we actually run into the real thing we may think it strange, and perhaps mark it as the poor substitute. 

Today’s Gospel reading from John tells the story of the first sign of Jesus’ glory:  at a wedding at Cana, Jesus simply says the word and turns water stored in jars for purification rites into wine.   I have visited the site of this miracle, in Cana.  There, in the undercroft of the church over the traditional site, is a museum display of first century stone jars for holding water for purification:  they are immense, each holding about 30 gallons!   There were six:  we are talking about 180 gallons of the finest vintage here: a scripture that definitely speaks to wine snobs though the ages!

 

At the end of the story, the steward tastes the wine, calls the bridegroom, and says, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the cheap stuff after everyone has become drunk and can no longer tell the difference.  But you kept the good stuff until now.”  The point is that the wine miraculously made by Jesus is better than any other wine, wine produced by the more pedestrian miracle of sunshine, water, grapevines, skill, and time.   The wine Jesus offers is “the good stuff;” all other wine, the cheap imitation.

John reveals Jesus to the reader through a series of marvelous acts: turning water to wine (2:1-12), healings (4:46-5:18), multiplying the loaves and fishes (6:1-16), walking on the sea (6:16-21), giving sight to a man born blind (9:1-40), and raising Lazarus from the dead (11:1-44).  John does not call these things miracles. He calls them signs, or pointers to the true meaning of Jesus.   He makes his meaning clear by interspersing between his stories of the signs speeches:  after multiplying loaves, Jesus says, “I am the bread that gives life.” Meeting the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob Jesus says “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in them a spring of water welling up.”   

 

In chapter 7, on the last day of the feast of Tabernacles, when priests and Levites formed a chain to bring up bucket after bucket of water from the Siloam pool up to the Temple to cleanse the altar, he says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.”

In chapter 8, at the Feast of Hannukah when the candles of the Feast of Lights are being lit (cf. 10:22), and again in chapter 9 just before he cures the man born blind, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.”

In the final sign of Gospel before the passion, just before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Here in chapter 2, Jesus as his first sign makes wine from water at a wedding. Later, in his last discourse before the passion, he says, “I am the true vine.”

The signs, symbols, and images are rich and varied, but all point to one reality, one truth: Jesus is God Incarnate, the ultimate measure by which all good things must be seen.   Bread, Wine, Vine, Water, Light, even Life—all these are good, very good indeed.  But they are mere hints of the real thing, the really good stuff.

 

In this world, where we are so used to cheap imitations, we often think that we are trying to do the right thing when in fact, in our brokenness, we are doing its opposite.  And that applies whether you want “to make America great again,” or you want to build social justice in the land.  That is why we must look to Jesus and what he taught and modeled as our standard.  As our former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says, “if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” 

John, in all these stories of signs and discourses on Jesus being true light, wine, water, bread is saying:  as good as the good things in our mixed lives can be, Jesus is the truly “good stuff.”   No matter how sweet, beautiful, and wonderful something in our lives may be, it is a mere hint, a dim reflection of what God truly has in store for us, of who Jesus is.  And he is the corrective for our brokenness and our mistaking imitation for genuine. 

Think of the things in your life that truly make you happy.  Think of the things that give you joy, and that take your breath away or make you weep in awe. 

Today’s Gospel, through this sly remark “you left the good stuff till last,” is telling us that these good things, these points of joy like copious wine at a wedding, these, as wonderful as they are, are just shadows, cheap imitations to be followed by the really good stuff.

In Jesus, we find all that we need. Now that is not to belittle other real needs. To say Jesus is the bread of life is not to say that we have no need to work to earn our daily bread, or to help feed the hungry with real bread.   It is simply saying something like Jesus says in Matthew, quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, “A human being does not live by bread alone, but by the word of God.”   

This week, I want you to take some thought about the truly good and wonderful things you enjoy.  Make a gratitude list. And then reflect on what the real thing in which they participate is, what the good stuff for each might be.    Where in our life are we accepting cheap imitations or pale reflections of and rejecting the real thing?  Where in our lives can we be signs to God’s greater love and care? 

Jesus says, I am true wine, the bread of life, the true light, the living water.  I am the vine that gives true wine; you are that vine’s branches.  Trust me. Have faith in me. Be fruitful and make wine for others.

May we so live, and that each day.

In the Name of God, Amen.

 

Solidarity (Baptism of Christ)

 

Solidarity
Homily delivered for the First Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
12 January 2025

11:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit

Sutherlin, Oregon

Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

 

On July 11-13, 1995, in and near the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia, soldiers and irregulars of the Bosnian Serb army rounded up and then murdered en masse over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, dumping their bodies into bull-dozed grave pits.  This act of genocide was part of a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” trying to create a “pure” Serbian enclave. 

 

The horrors of Srebrenica reveal the costs of identity politics: building power by appealing to people’s sense of belonging to one group or another.  Before the war, Bosnia/Herzegovina was a multi-ethnic region with about half its population Muslim Bosniaks, a slightly smaller number of Orthodox Serbs and about half that number of Catholic Croats.  Many people lived in perfectly happy mixed neighborhoods, and many of them in mixed families. 

 

When the war ended three years later, the entire population had been brutalized.  100,000 people were dead.  50,000 women, the vast majority of them Bosniak, had been raped.  2.2 million people had been driven from their homes, most of them destroyed.

 

Bosnia is not alone in showing how dangerous identity politics are.  Think of Northern Ireland, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, religious wars throughout history, the purges of class warfare throughout the world, Rwanda’s genocide, and on and on.  Think of how divided our country is right now, and how the bitterness of this division is driven by group affiliation.  In all of these examples, horror was committed in the name of community.  Politics based on group identity is a deal with the devil. 

 

I took a course in mediation, peace building, and reconciliation from one of the chief U.S. negotiators behind the Dayton Accords, which created the framework that ended the Bosnian War.  I remember well: Ambassador John Menzies told me the single hardest difficulty he had to work to help people overcome was the deep distrust generated when religious and ethnic identity are brought into the political mix.  The desire for revenge for atrocities only complicates these. “Group hatred is a genie that, once out of the bottle, is almost impossible to put back in.”  

 

Identity politics is such powerful stuff because group identity is deeply ingrained in us as one of the great sources of joy, comfort and solace: our families, our people, our tribe.  In identifying with our group, we find ourselves and feel we have a place in this world.  Because it runs so deep, it is prone to powerful abuse. 

 

Rejecting identity and group affiliation as prime motives, and replacing them with mutual obligation and solidarity: that is what today’s story, the baptism of Christ, is all about.  Jesus, a Jew, does not go to Jerusalem to find his path.  He goes to John in the desert, inviting people to undergo baptism expressing a change of heart.  John, who probably originally had connections with the Dead Sea Scroll Essenes whose mother house at Qumran was just 5 kilometers away, is using a ritual washing like theirs to mark a new relationship with God.  But where theirs is the entry point to an exclusive and somewhat cranky sect, John invites all and sundry regardless of their affiliations, even tax-collecting traitors and Roman soldiers, without asking them to change their affiliations, just to better how they treat others. 

 

The Lectionary includes it for the First Sunday after Epiphany as one of the great signs of “God in Man made Manifest” because of the voice coming from heaven at the end of the reading (Luke 3:21-22).    Note, however, how the Lectionary connects this epiphany to Jesus to us.   Isaiah says: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, … Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” 

 

This story of Jesus being baptized by John clearly embarrassed early Christians. The idea that Jesus sought spiritual guidance from John, or even received a baptism for forgiveness of sins, was just too much for them.  The various Gospels, trying to make sense of it, tell the story in different ways as a result.

 

Mark, the earliest Gospel, says John appeared in the Judean desert and preached a “baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.” Jesus of Nazareth comes and John baptizes him along with the rest. But when Jesus comes up out of the water, “immediately he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven.’”

Matthew changes Mark’s story in several crucial ways.  He deletes the fact that John’s baptism was “for repentance.”  He adds a dialogue—John says “I need to be baptized by you, Jesus, not you from me.” Jesus replies that he must be baptized “to fulfill all the demands of righteousness.” Jesus here does not get baptized because he needs his sins to be remitted but because other people do, an act of solidarity. 

 

Luke leaves in the fact that John’s baptism is unto repentance and adds a lengthy description of the Baptist’s preaching, how soldiers shouldn’t shake people down and tax-collectors shouldn’t line their own pockets.  But he avoids mentioning that it was John who baptized Jesus. Here, the opening of heaven, the descent of the dove, and the hearing of God’s voice occurs only after the arrest of John, “when all the people had been baptized and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying.”  Jesus here is simply throwing in his lot with the whole group of other people getting baptized, again an act of solidarity. 

 

In contrast to Matthew and Luke, who in their separate ways say that Jesus’ getting baptized was not for the remission of sin or a sign of his subordination to the Baptist, the Gospel of John simply deletes Jesus’ getting baptized altogether.  In the prologue of John, the Baptist appears purely as a witness to Light, the word made flesh. John bears witness of the one who is to follow, and identifies him as Jesus. Later, Jesus goes out to Jordan to baptize rather than be baptized (John 3:22-4:3). Though the Baptist is quoted as bearing witness that he saw the spirit descend on Jesus, there is no scene in John’s Gospel of the baptism itself. 

 

The early Church preserved these stories despite the discomfort it felt about the idea of Jesus playing second fiddle to John.  This is convincing evidence that the historical Jesus was, in fact, baptized by John, drawn to the Baptist’s message to all people of a living faith in an engaged God who would soon set things right in the world.  

 

In contrast to the sectarian exclusionary baptisms of the Essenes at Qumran, a couple of kilometers from where John baptized, John’s baptism was open to all who wanted to show they had had a change of heart, a change in thinking.  It was this combination--a call to authentic change of heart addressed to all, regardless of group affiliation or identity--that attracted Jesus to John. 

 

This is the important take away in what Luke is telling us in the story:  that Jesus was showing solidarity with people receiving John’s baptism, and indeed, with us all. 

 

“Solidarity” means showing your connectedness to others.  It is throwing your lot in with them, showing that you are one of them, that you are part of them and they are part of you.  It is an expression of the idea that “I” am not alone, an independent unity apart from all others.  It means “we are in this together” rather than “everyone for oneself.”  It means we owe it to each other to treat others as we would be treated.

 

Some people are uncomfortable with expressions of solidarity, because sometimes they can be exclusive or partisan, where our identity as part of a group is expressed as a function of who is not included in the group.  If you favor a co-religionist or family member in hiring, for instance, you by definition have disadvantaged people different from you.  

 

But authentic Christian ethics have always taught that our obligations of special beneficence to those who most have a claim on us, like family, kindred, nation, and co-religionists, should never preclude our obligation of general beneficence, the good that we owe all others because of our shared humanity. 

 

Blessed Emma, Queen of the Hawaiians who is commemorated on our Episcopal calendars on November 28, tried to serve her people, who had become outcasts and wanderers in their own land, by establishing hospitals and schools for the benefit of native Hawaiians.  But in so doing, she specified that these institutions should never exclude non-Hawaiians.  What she called “the strangers in our midst” were also to be served.

 

Such “Aloha” is the glue that binds us together.   Solidarity fosters the common good, equal opportunity, fair and reasonable distribution of the fruits of our economic life, equality among people and nations, and peace in the world.  It includes all the other principles and values that are necessary to create and sustain a truly good society.  It is at the heart of what it means to be human, since we humans are essentially social beings, not isolated monads.  It is more than a vague feeling of compassion, common cause, or shallow sympathy.   It is in fact a commitment to a common life, a sign that we accept responsibility for each other. 

 

Our modern American society is rife with values that work against solidarity:  greed, selfishness, inequality, discrimination, exploitation, oppression, partisanship, putting one’s own well-being, rights, and privileges above the basic needs of others.

 

For us Christians, the heart of solidarity is the life of Jesus.  Through the incarnation, God is in real solidarity with us and we are in solidarity with God.   By receiving John’s baptism, God-made-flesh showed solidarity with us, with all our limitations, weakness, and sins.  The social teaching of the Baptist and Jesus both stem from profound solidarity.  

 

One of the reasons we Episcopalians so value Common Prayer, prayer in community and for community, is that it is a primary way we express our solidarity with each other and with all creation. 

 

Note in today’s Gospel story that when Jesus shows his solidarity with us in a concrete act, God reveals himself.  The dove of peace, the Holy Spirit descends.  The voice of God, a voice of splendor and power, says, “You are my child. I love you.  You make me happy.”  

 

And so it is for us.

 

Let us show solidarity with each other, so that we might hear the voice of God, be bathed in God’s light, and hear God say, “You are my child.  I love you.  You make me happy.”

 

In the Name of God, Amen.

 

 

 

The Renewal of Baptismal Vows (BCP) 

BCP p 299

 

Celebrant    Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

People        And blessed be his kingdom, now and for ever. Amen.

 

Celebrant    There is one Body and one Spirit;

People        There is one hope in God’s call to us;

Celebrant    One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;

People        One God and Father of all.

 

Celebrant    The Lord be with you.

People        And also with you.

Celebrant    Let us pray.

 

The Collect of the Day

 

 

Reaffirmation of Baptismal Vows

BCP  p 303

 

Celebrant  Do you reaffirm your renunciation of evil?

People       I do.

 
 Celebrant Do you renew your commitment to Jesus Christ?
People       I do, and with God’s grace I will follow him as my Savior and Lord.

 

BCP 304

Celebrant  Do you believe in God the Father?
People       I believe in God, the Father almighty,
                  creator of heaven and earth.

  

Celebrant  Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?
People       I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
                  He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
                     and born of the Virgin Mary.
                  He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
                     was crucified, died, and was buried.
                  He descended to the dead.
                  On the third day he rose again.
                  He ascended into heaven,
                     and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
                  He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

 

Celebrant  Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?
People       I believe in the Holy Spirit,
                  the holy catholic Church,
                  the communion of saints,
                  the forgiveness of sins,
                  the resurrection of the body,
                  and the life everlasting.

 

Celebrant  Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and
                  fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the
                  prayers?
People       I will, with God’s help.

 

Celebrant  Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever
                  you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
People       I will, with God's help.

Celebrant  Will you proclaim by word and example the Good
                  News of God in Christ?
People       I will, with God’s help.

 

Celebrant  Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving
                  your neighbor as yourself?
People       I will, with God’s help.

  

Celebrant  Will you strive for justice and peace among all people,
                  and respect the dignity of every human being?
People       I will, with God's help.

 

Celebrant

May Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has given us a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and bestowed upon us the forgiveness of sins, keep us in eternal life by his grace, in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

 

The Asperges

 

The prayers of the people