I’ve noticed a change in the marketing algorithms targeting me in the last couple weeks as I scrolled the internet. At this start of the New Year – the product placements shifted away from Christmas deals and self-indulgence to an emphasis on self-improvement. New Year, New You type products.
The ad that ironically got me to click on it was for Brick – an app that locks down your phone indefinitely until you scan a physical plastic “Brick” to unlock it. By hiding this plastic Brick and shutting down your phone, the app promises deepened relationships and greater focus, concentration and results at work. I didn’t buy one of these Bricks (although maybe I should!) – but I think the company is on to something. We humans generally struggle at sitting with vexing questions. It’s hard to hold gnawing expectations in our guts.
When we’re waiting in a line or find ourselves anywhere we’re mildly bored by, the phone is one of the first of many options aimed at distracting us from the questions and wonderings that weigh on us and poke at us.
Our gospel text for today from Luke tells us: “The people were filled with expectation, and everyone wondered whether John might be the Christ.”
Crowds of people followed John into the Jordan River wilderness because they needed to do something in their bodies with the expectations and wonderings churning within them..John came, not promising a New Year, New You, or quick fix Brick app to break you out of distraction, but John came preaching a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
John’s fiery message was that the One more powerful than him is coming and so if you have prosperity, share with the needy… if your work involves corruption and violence, find a way to do it with truthfulness and gratitude. And people responded to his intense message and his ordinary invitation to step into the muddy waters of the Jordan River and to experience a new life together.
Tax collectors came, soldiers came, people weary of the grinding life under the Roman empire came, those waiting for the coming of God’s anointed one came, they all came out into the wilderness.
John’s cousin Jesus, also came to the wilderness. He too was part of a crowd filled with expectation and questions. He too was baptized.
And as Luke’s gospel tells the story – Jesus’ baptism is lowkey. John is out of the picture because he’s been thrown into prison. All we get is that:
“When everyone was being baptized, Jesus also was baptized.”
It’s the ordinariness of it that strikes me. Jesus does what everyone else does.
To be baptized is to move our expectations, our hopes and our questions, out of our minds and into our body. Baptism is a step of faithfulness into life-giving waters, joining others in the story of God’s love flowing deep and wide.
Baptism is a step of faithfulness… where we commit to the God of love and forgiveness, affirm that sin has lost its grip on us, and are freed to lives of wholeness in community.
Baptism moves our expectations and questions into our body.
And God is a God who creates and loves and redeems and dwells in bodies.
Taking any step of faithfulness is to move those big questions and the expectations and yearnings for a transformed life and world into your body as an act of prayer. And acts of care and commitment inevitably lead us into conflict.
This happens to John the Baptist quickly – his incendiary rhetoric is an axe…cleaving out categories of good and evil. He speaks of broods of vipers… and chopping down trees that don’t bear fruit… and the coming Messiah who will take the grain into the barn but burn the chaff with an unquenchable fire. John is imprisoned by the ruler Herod for his criticism.
Jesus’ faithfulness will also direct conflict with political and religious authorities. Their examples remind us that conflict is an inevitable thread through life.
Conflict, as one person puts it, is that “gap between what we want and what we are experiencing at any given moment.”1
I hope that we can walk with God in that uncomfortable gap of conflict, knowing that the God of love is with us, and the Spirit working there, especially there, in our unmet expectation.
The crowds who come to be baptized all have their conflicts with the big picture imperial questions of the day – the brutality of the Roman army, the cruelty of farmers who’ve been crushed under the weight of taxes, the shame of tax collectors looking for a way out from a life of extortion.
But the other conflict, the other gnawing question – Is that if John the Baptist isn’t the anointed one, the one whom God promised will save us, then who is? We don’t want to get our hopes up for the wrong person, for a lost cause?
John proclaims that he is unworthy to even untie the thong of the sandal of the One who walks in peace and will one day have nails driven through his dusty feet.
What’s terribly poignant about Jesus’ baptism in the gospel of Luke is that John doesn’t ever end up getting to baptize Jesus – he’s sent away to prison.
It’s only after Jesus has been baptized with everybody else, presumably by someone else and Jesus is praying, that the heaven opens and the Holy Spirit descends and the Divine Voice blesses Jesus as God’s Beloved Son.
So when you feel that itchy feeling in your stomach that something isn’t as it should be, that something needs to change, when you feel a question rising to the surface of your life – I hope you pay attention.
Because the Spirit might be nudging you to prayer.
Because the Spirit might be drawing you to community.
Because the Spirit might be calling you to consider being baptized or to remember your baptism and all its murky mysteries.
Because in your wonderings and questions the Spirit is reminding you that you are never alone – that God has always been with you, from the beginning, and loves and calls you by name.
So in this new calendar year 2025, I’ll try to pull out my phone less, and you can too if it’s a distraction from hearing the whisper of God’s love.
But pull out whatever tools you might have more if you’re able to use them as instruments of encouragement and wonder and connection.
And for all of us – may we find ways to pray with our whole lives.
May the power of the Spirit lead us into our conflicts, questions, wonderings, and unmet expectations with our whole embodied, ensouled selves.
May we wade with curiosity into the swirling currents of life, stepping deeper into community, plunging into the full complexity where we find ourselves.
And when we feel the mud squish in our toes and the coolness of water flow over our heads, may we remember that Jesus, God’s Beloved Son is with us in the water, and the wilderness, and the whole way home.
- Nate Regier, Conflict without Casualties: A Field Guide to Leading with Compassionate Accountability, (Next Element Consulting, LLC, 2016), p. 14.
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