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“New Beginnings”
The Rev. Mark Byers
1 Epiphany- January 13, 2008

Last week, we heard about the wise men who visited Jesus just after his birth, and about King Herod, who feared what this “New King” might represent. We missed what occurred immediately after, because we didn’t meet the Sunday after Christmas Day. This section, commonly called the Massacre of the Innocents, describes Herod’s response to his situation after the wise men leave without telling him where his rival is. Briefly, he takes what information that he has, which is that the child is an infant born in Bethlehem, and has his followers kill every child under two years old in that area. As shocking as this sounds, it’s important to keep in mind that in our world, things like this are still not uncommon. People make choices like this, thinking to protect themselves, frequently. Perhaps not on this scale of violence, but we must never imagine that Christ comes into our lives with only carols and presents. Jesus represents a startling and threatening new way that God is acting in the world, and both believers and evildoers sometimes struggle against him, even when it means doing evil.

Joseph was warned in a dream that Herod would seek out his baby, and escaped with his family to Egypt. After Herod died, Joseph returned with his wife and child to their home, but it’s hard to imagine that they ever forgot what had occurred, any more than we forget such things. We may ignore them, but we know they happen, and all too often.

Today, we come back to Jesus as an adult. The part we didn’t hear, immediately preceding this section, is about the appearance of John the Baptist on the fringes of civilization. John was a pretty odd character, dressed in very simple clothing, eating “locusts and honey.” He’s what we would call a prophet. This involves very specific tasks. First, it means that the prophet points out disconnects, meaning places where people’s lives do not fit comfortably with God’s will and purpose. There was, by the time of Jesus, a centuries-long tradition of prophecy within Judaism. John was calling upon the Jews to turn away from their current path and return to God’s path.

I spoke before about thinking in terms of the entire thread of the biblical story. In other words, that Jesus didn’t simply appear out of nowhere. He came as the culmination of a long succession of events, beginning with Creation and continuing with the ups and downs of history, especially the history of God’s chosen people, the Jews. I’m going to put up a timeline on the wall here, just as a reminder for us of how deep our roots go in this story. Just remember that Jesus didn’t pop up out of nowhere to meet people’s current spiritual need. He had long been anticipated, as the promised Messiah of God. He just didn’t look exactly like people thought he would.

Just a short while ago, maybe a year or so, when I would say something to my older daughter, Fiona, she had a funny reply. I’d say, “Fiona, don’t sit on the arm of the chair. I’m afraid you’ll fall off.” And she’d look at me and say, “What’s Deeda saying to me?” (Deeda is her name for me.) I’d always think, “How can I make this any clearer?” But I think in her mind, she was trying to piece together several things at once. Things like, “He sounds like he wants me to do something,” and “I wonder why he wants me not to sit like that,” and even, “Why does he think I’ll fall?” And of course, more often than not, if she didn’t listen, she’d fall, or bump her head, or whatever catastrophe I predicted. And I imagine, although maybe I’m wrong, that on some level, she would think, “How’d he know that would happen?”

Scripture is like this, in some ways. Over and over, people fall into the same old traps, and the same words from the same old scriptures talk about those things as pitfalls. But we still fall flat on our faces, or bump our heads, or end up in situations that might not be our fault, but are certainly no good for us. “What’s Matthew saying to me?”

The Gospel of Matthew starts out by saying, “The story that we’re hearing today is the same story that our ancestors lived.” It begins with a genealogy, going back centuries to the dawn of the arrangement, the covenant, that God gave to Abraham. And that genealogy, that boring list of names that now people sometimes joke about, runs down through David and the establishment of the kingdom of Israel, the first fulfillment of God’s promises to his people, through the Exile that came out of the disobedience of the people, and that now winds up with Jesus Christ, the Messiah. What we are hearing about in Matthew is a New Beginning, for all people in all places and all times.

The two most important events prior to the arrival of the Israelites in the Promised Land were these: the giving of the Covenant to Abraham, and the giving of the Law to Moses. The Covenant, briefly, was the promise of God to Abraham to bless Abraham and his descendants, to make a great nation of them, and that through them all nations would be blessed. The symbol of this Covenant was circumcision.

The Law was given to the Israelites centuries later, in Sinai, after they had been freed from bondage to Pharaoh by God. We usually think of the Law as the Ten Commandments, but of course these ten eventually became a highly organized set of beliefs, rules, and practices followed by faithful Jews. The Law is also referred to as Torah, which also came to be the name of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, where the ancient story of God and Israel is found and where all these beliefs, rules, and practices were first written down.

So when Matthew connects Jesus through genealogy to Abraham and the great story of God and Israel, he is also saying, “What Jesus is doing comes out of what God has done and promised in the past.” Christians often talk about the “New Covenant” of Jesus Christ. Less often do we hear the other part of this: there is also a New Torah.

John baptized Jesus in the Jordan. Jesus came through the waters just as Israel passed through the waters that God parted in the Exodus. When things like this happen in scripture, they aren’t usually just coincidences. Jesus wasn’t just taking a bath, and given who he is, he didn’t need to be baptized for the forgiveness of his sins. He said, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” In other words, just as it was impossible for Israel to be delivered from the Egyptians without passing, behind Moses, through the waters, so it is impossible for us to be delivered from our own bondage without passing, with Jesus Christ, through the water of baptism. New Beginnings do not simply mean, “I’ve changed the way I think about things.” Plenty of people change their minds without changing their lives. New Beginnings mean going from one place to another: from wandering nomad to covenant people, in Abraham; from slave to free, with Moses; from dead through sin and oppression to new life in Jesus Christ. But someone has to go before us. Someone has to establish the new way, so that we know where God is leading us. So Jesus, knowing this, went through the waters and changed baptism from being about “repentance,” as John had said, to being about “new life” or “new creation.”

When did it change? Well, presumably John baptized quite a lot of people in the Jordan, but it was not until Jesus “came up from the water” that “the heavens were opened to him” and “the Spirit of God” descended and came upon Jesus. And it was not until that moment that the one who spoke Creation into being in the first place said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

“I am well pleased.”

You may recall another place where God reacts like this. In the beginning of the Book of Genesis, all through the Creation, God sees its goodness, and the story finishes, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

You see, God was even pleased when He made us, and wants to be pleased even now. Everything, every creature, element, bit of matter, expanse of space is pleasing to God, because God never wastes creative acts and makes only that which is pleasing to Him. The lone exception to the rule, the only part of the cosmos that routinely defies God or is even capable of disobedience is humanity. Part of what makes us who we are is that we are given the ability to choose whether we love God, or even acknowledge His supremacy. Every other part of Creation is what it is: rocks are rocks, grass is grass, stars are stars. Every piece interacts with every other piece exactly as God willed them to do.

Yet for the sake of His love for us, God is willing to set aside our disobedience, of Torah, of Covenant, of our own nature, created in the image of God for relationship to God. In Jesus Christ’s baptism our Exodus, our new Creation, began.

New Beginnings, though, require fresh insight and firm commitment. A person must choose to be in a new place, rather than the old one. Change is the perennial buzz word in politics for a reason: it’s compelling. But the difference between how God changes us, and how politicians, or self-help experts, or anybody else say we can change, is that God is honest about what has to happen.

John talks about the “winnowing fork” and “fire.” When farmers would harvest wheat, up until relatively recently, part of the job required separating the grains from the rest of the plant. A winnowing fork picks up stalks of wheat, called chaff, but leaves behind the grain. It removes the part that does not nourish us and help us to grow and be healthy. John says that God, in this analogy, takes the useless parts and burns them up, and gathers the grain into his granary. Some think this means that some people are “chaff” and some people are “wheat.” I think it means that Christ has to use the winnowing fork on each of us, because it is simply the nature of wheat to be attached to chaff. You can’t become grain and then bread until someone does that work of separating useful from useless.

Notice that what we become, in this metaphor, is something nourishing not just to us, but to others. New Beginnings are not simply for each of us individually. My baptism and your baptism are meant to mark us as people who, because of and in the power of God’s love, are nourishing to those around us. Churches aren’t our refuge from the world: they are granaries, meant to feed the world and bring about New Beginnings.

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