MOMENT OF TRUTH [1]
Isaiah 43.1-7 Psalm 29.1-11 Acts 8.14-17 Mark 1.l-11
January 13, 2013
The Rev. Dr. Warner M. Bailey
I never knew a day when my father did not smoke. Even when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he continued to smoke heavily. Four months after he and my mother had celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, he was struck down with a serious lung illness. The night before he went to see the doctor, he gave all his cigarettes to my mother and told her that he was through with them. She said, “Well, it’s too late now, Jack.” He was hospitalized, and in two weeks he died of lung cancer.
A moment of truth. A moment when all becomes crystal clear. When there is no more hiding, postponing, prevaricating. A sad moment for my father on which to end his noble and inspiring life.
Another moment of truth. When we moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to Indiana in l970, my wife, Mary, and I took a group of college students to an ice skating rink for an evening of fun. Neither of us had ever been on ice skates, but Mary, because she had roller skated, took off like a flash. I was seized by panic and wobbled around the rink, one hand on the rails, while Mary whizzed by. But I was determined to skate and began to venture out into the rink. The next thing I knew I was flat on my face, and when I raised my head, there was blood on the ice and my glasses were shattered. I spent the rest of the evening in the emergency room, and I never skated again for the next five years.
When our son, David, turned six, he was able to take ice hockey lessons in that same rink. The rink had family skating sessions on the week-ends, but I did not go. That Christmas I received an envelope in my stocking, and on opening it, I found inside a dollar bill and on ruled paper a message in David’s six year old hand. “Dear Dad. Here is one dollar. I wish you could skate. Merry Christmas. David.”
My moment of truth. The rink taught skating lessons for a small fee. I got the message and enrolled the next day. I cannot skate to this day, but I am a changed man.
We all have our moments of truth, times when there is no more room for delay, dilly-dallying, and dissembling. Times when the options are clear and squarely before us, and we must act or face the consequences.
It was to that kind of moment, that moment of truth, that the preaching of John the Baptist drew crowds into the chalk wilderness of the Dead Sea. It is a moment where options are clear and square, a moment of action or facing the consequences. John did not preach in a comfortable church like this one. He held church in a barren, inhospitable, hostile place—the wilderness. People go hear John preach in this wilderness. A place where the old and familiar is wiped away by the power of the surreal and hallucinogenic. A place of stark moments of exposure and stripping away. But a place as well of the sunrise of new beginnings in all their haunting beauty and the sunsets of completed life in all its rich splendor.
The message of John is the opportunity for a new birth, a new chance at life. The demand of John is that you face into your moment of truth and confess that you need this new chance, this new birth of life. John preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The people who came to John from the city of Jerusalem and from the Judean countryside faced into their moment of truth. They confessed that they were sinners and that they desired to put their old lives behind them. Their baptism signified their desire to be rid of their old lives, and they looked to God to free them from their pasts, by forgiving them their sins.
In this wilderness people meet their moments of truth. In this wilderness where water is priceless, people beg to be washed in priceless water to show the depth of their desire for a new start, a new chance, a new life.
I can picture a line of people shuffling slowly toward John as he stands in the waters of the Jordan. Men, women, children. In their moment of truth they have pierced into themselves deeply and asked of themselves, “How have I measured up to what God looks at me to do and to be.” The answers come back at them: Screw-ups, losers, inadequate, pathetic. In their pain they cry out: Can I have a fresh start? Can I have a new chance?
But look, my friends, Jesus himself is standing in that line with a bunch of sinners. Jesus is there, not saying much to anybody, just shuffling forward. No one recognizes him, not even John who is his cousin! When it is Jesus’ turn, John looks him in the eye, they speak, but no differently than anybody else. Jesus goes down into the waters with the sinners, as a sinner.
Here is his moment of truth: When Jesus went down into the waters, he showed us that there was enough sin to go around for everybody to come to their moment of truth. Loser, screw-up, inadequate, pathetic. But that’s not the whole truth. Upon coming out of the waters, a voice from heaven proclaims, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” When Jesus came up out of the waters, he showed us that there was enough grace to go around for everybody to grasp for their moment of hope.
When Jesus heard, “You are my beloved Son,” he heard words that promised an intimate fellowship with his heavenly Father not experienced by any other person. His ability to be touched in his heart by who you are comes from how much he knows the heart of his heavenly Father. This unique fellowship was the secret of his untiring work for others.
When Jesus died on the cross, he finally came to know the utter degradation of human life. He becomes God forsaken. And even when he is God-forsaken, he still is telling us of God’s love for us! How can it be that God is still loving us when God forsakes his only Son? Listen! Through God’s forsaking his only Son, God lets us know that God will be the God of all who think they have no God. “I have made myself to know what it is like when you feel that you are nothing more than a tool in someone else’s hands, a thing to be manipulated, cannon fodder, a mockery, vulnerable, exposed to shame, whose gross mistakes have been shown up, who are cast into extreme privation, who have been made an object of gloating and leering gazes.” Our God feels like that.
To us of sensitive spirits who grieve because all the reservoirs of our feeling have been sucked dry and we are unable to deal with evidence of mass graves and holocausts, God says, “I am with you.” To us who are worried because we have no ability to imagine what we will be like in 15 years, God says, “I am with you.” Are you frightened to the core of your being over the signs which point to the breakup of the social contract and the onset of a barbarism of survival? God says, “I have been there.” Are you fed up with the rhetoric of madness being put forward as the logic of rationality? Do you sorrow deeply in your hearts for our children and all that will assail them? God says, “I am with you.”
When Jesus came up out of the waters, the heavens were torn open and the Spirit descended upon him like a dove. It is with this same Spirit that he baptizes everyone who joins with him in the waters in the font or in the baptistry. Whenever we are touched by the waters like he was touched by the waters, we receive the Spirit like he has the Spirit. This is the Spirit that death cannot conquer.
Christians, the Spirit gives us weapons to fight down despair, to hope against hope, to be unceasing in prayer. Christians, the Spirit gives us the courage to take the risk and share our all. Christians, God gives us the right to expect that what we share will bring out in others a harvest of their sharing and there will be abundance for all.
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[1] Special thanks to Amy Miracle’s sermon at the 215th General Assembly and to Fred Craddock’s sermon “Have You Ever Heard John Preach?” in A Chorus of Witnesses, Model Sermons for Today’s Preacher edited by Thomas G. Long and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishging Company, 1994), pp. 34-43, for insightful interpretative moves.__________________________