January 10, 2010

Clay Nelson

Epiphany 1     Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

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Last September on holiday Lynette and I traveled around the American West. It was a time for introducing her to my family, seeing grandchildren, showing her a part of the world she had not seen, and having some relaxing time together. But there was another reason underlying it all. Many of the places where I grew up were near or on the way to seeing family. Having met me at 59 there were a lot of gaps in her knowledge of how I came to be the “me” she knows. Visiting these places spurred memories and stories that I could share with her. While she may have tired after five weeks of walking down my memory lane, she graciously did not show it. Such trips have the same purpose as sharing family photo albums with new friends. They are windows not only into our past but also into who we are now.

It would be nice to have such an album for Jesus. Yes, Matthew and Luke show us baby pictures and Luke has some snaps of a 12 year old Jesus getting side tracked at the Temple and being left behind by his parents, but I know of no respected biblical scholar that believes these are historic photos of Jesus early life. They have been Photoshopped to tell us how the early church understood the unique person of Jesus after his crucifixion. Mark doesn’t even have copies of these early photos, he jumps immediately into his gospel with Jesus’ baptism. Matthew and Luke skip quickly over the 30 years after his birth to his experience with John at the river Jordan. Thirty years is a pretty big gap. 

In truth we have nothing reliable about Jesus before his baptism, which seems perfectly normal to me. No one had any reason to think, “This kid is going to change the world, I better take notes.” Even his baptism was before he had made his mark, but all four gospels speak of it, even though their accounts differ. So even that first portrait has multiple exposures making it more than a little out of focus. However, what they all agree on is that Jesus had a uniquely intimate relationship with God. God was the central reality of his life, not because he believed in God, but because he had experienced the reality of God.

This raises the question of when did it happen? Was he a child, a teen or young adult or was his baptism the first time? Since there is no historical account we won’t ever know, which leaves room for the imagination. Author Christopher Moore took a stab at filling in the gap with his book Lamb: The Gospel according to Biff, Jesus’ Childhood Pal. While extremely funny, I don’t recommend it to anyone who was offended by our billboard. 

The story begins with the narrator, Levi bar Alphaeus, who is called Biff, meeting the Savior as a boy in the streets of Nazareth at the age of six, where the son of God is repeatedly resurrecting a lizard his younger brother keeps smooshing. Joshua (Hebrew for Jesus) and Biff become best pals, a dynamic duo of which Joshua is the earnest and good-hearted half, and Biff, the source of much mirth and more than a little mischief. They are like any other pair of good Nazarene boys – studying the Torah, arguing over who gets to play Moses and who Pharaoh, and occasionally smiting one another in the eye.

The story really picks up when Biff and Joshua leave Nazareth to seek out the three Magi who foretold the coming of the Messiah and were present at Joshua’s birth. In an adventure-filled trip to visit Balthasar, Gaspar, and Melchior, Joshua and Biff travel along the Silk Road to China and later to India and along the way learn the tenets of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; Joshua also studies yoga, and Biff, who frequently uses his chaste friend as a “chick magnet,” predictably studies the Kama Sutra.

The book is filled with some wonderful wisdom like Biff’s lamenting, “It's hard for me, a Jew, to stay in the moment. Without the past, where is the guilt? And without the future, where is the dread? And without guilt and dread, who am I?" But as much as I would like to think Jesus had a Biff in his life and took an OE to learn more about the world and his place in it, I accept it is only a story full of truth, not a true story. But it is also a story that reminds us that Jesus’ baptism did not just happen out of thin air. A dove from heaven didn’t just magically transform him into the beloved son of God, and give him the necessary gifts for his ministry. There is a prologue to this event.

What some scholars argue is that sometime in his twenties Jesus left Nazareth and journeyed to the wilderness where John the Baptizer was active. His decision suggests a deepening religious passion. Why else would he leave home and family to be with a wilderness prophet?

John was a prominent, larger-than-life kind of guy who even Herod feared. He was anti-establishment and anti-Temple in his views scorning both political and religious leaders. His baptism of repentance was not ritual of remorse for sinfulness as it came to be understood by Christians later. In Judaism at the time repentance meant something else. For John, to repent meant to return, to follow the way of the Lord from exile into the Promised Land. It had a connotation of going beyond the mind you have – going beyond conventional understanding of what life with God is about. [i] 

Clearly Jesus’ time with John was formational. We don’t know how long he followed John or even what kind of relationship they had, but we do know John served him as a teacher and mentor. For Jesus’ later ministry showed the marks of John’s radical views. We also know Jesus regarded him highly, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist.” [ii]

At some point in his time with John, Jesus decided to participate in John’s baptism of repentance. We don’t know what went into that decision. Was it a spur of the moment impulse? Was it carefully considered? What expectations did he have, if any? Did those around him encourage him or was it solely his idea? Was there self-doubt? Like Biff did he suffer guilt about his past? Did he dread the future? Was he suffering any kind of identity crisis? We don’t know what it was like to be him at that moment. We do know that reluctantly or eagerly he waded into the Jordan with many others to see what might come of following in the way of the Lord.

While Mark, Matthew and Luke differ on the details, they agree Jesus had a mystical experience that day that may have been both visual and auditory. He had a God experience that may have given him clarity of vision. It appears that at least part of what was revealed was that his formation period was over; it was time to carry out his calling. 

Since many consider him to have been a mystic it may not have been his first God experience or his last, but it was still surely a surprise. 

In our post-modern world we look a little askance at anyone with the temerity to say they have had a mystical experience of this kind. Some end up being tended to by Lynette, a nurse, in the mental health ward. We are tempted to consider such experiences solely the provenance of the unstable or the fanatical. We are more apt to consider them to be delusions than having any sense of reality. But such experiences I suspect are not all that rare, only under-reported, for obvious reasons. 

The religions of the world are filled with stories of experiences with God or the sacred. Historians of religion, anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars of mysticism have studied them. American psychologist and philosopher William James spoke of such experiences as being the most striking and extraordinary psychological phenomena known. He called them “the unseen.” Abraham Heschel, a famous Jewish theologian of the last century described them as “radical amazement” in which we experience a sacred reality beyond all our categories. Martin Buber, his contemporary, described it as encountering “the You” [with a capital Y] beyond the you and me of our ordinary experience. Psychologist Abraham Maslow named them “peak experiences.” Historian Rudolf Otto called them the tremendous mystery that fills us with awe. Scholar of world religions, Huston Smith described it as another level of “what is” beyond the observable.

Those who study such events believe they fall into two categories: experiences of the sacred as a person or being in another level of reality such as Paul’s experience of Jesus on the road to Damascus and experiences of the sacred as a presence flooding the whole of reality. In the latter everything and everyone is what you would expect them to be. There are no visions or extra beings but everything looks different – wondrous, radiant; glorious.

Whatever one makes of these kinds of experiences and whatever one thinks their implications are, we need to take seriously that they can happen, even to us. They can even be nurtured through various spiritual practices – solitude, fasting, prayer, chanting, drumming, rhythmic movement, contemplative or centred prayer and meditation. Simply meditating on a verse from the Psalms like, “Be still, and know that I am God” (46:10) can surprise us like Jesus was surprised in the Jordan. But there is a risk in such practice – experiencing God.

When we do our life, our being is forever transformed. After his baptism we have lots of photos showing the way Jesus lived, with whom he associated, whom or what he confronted, what he taught. They reveal his compassion, his ethic and his imitation of God. No Photoshopping required. 

We are now in the season of Epiphany, a time of revealing. Its focus is on a divine presence full of surprises about where it can be discovered – from the magi from another land and faith tradition to Gentile converts; from seeing the divine in strangers and enemies to, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, in our own lives. The lesson is if you don’t want to radically change your life, beware of the sacred.

[i] Borg, Marcus. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, Harper One: 1989, p 118.

[ii] Mt 11:11; Lk 7:28; and Q