A Good Beginning

Luke 3:21-22

Baptism of the Lord

January 7, 2007

Paul Simpson Duke

First Baptist Church, Ann Arbor

          If you could have a whole new life, what’s the first thing you’d do?  Imagine it this way.  Your past is unchanged.  Your present situation remains exactly as it is.  Nothing behind you or around you is any different.  But this incredible news comes to you: from now on, if you want it, you get to live a new kind of life.  How do you think you’d begin?  Would you write a list?  Set aside some days to think it over?  Seek professional guidance?  Go to someone you love and have a new kind of conversation?

          This of course is exactly the situation that all of us are in.  We can’t change the past and our present circumstances are what they are; but to live a new kind of life from this point on is an open possibility every day.  The question is: how would we begin?

          Many of us are inclined not to begin at all.  Maybe we’re paralyzed by failures, discouragements, or grief.  Maybe we don’t believe a new life is possible.  Maybe we lack the courage.  Others of us keep thinking our lives can change, but in the past when we’ve attempted new attitudes, disciplines, and behaviors, in  no time it falls apart; we can’t sustain what we started.  But what if the real problem is less about sustaining a new life as about the way we get it started?  Do you think it might make a difference if we revised our thoughts on how to make a good beginning?

          To this end, for a moment, have a look at Jesus on the day he makes a new beginning.  He is about thirty, which in his time makes him middle aged.  Up till now, he’s surely had other beginnings; but this one is decisive.  He’s chosen to go public now, to make himself available to his world; to exercise his voice, to pour out extraordinary compassion, and, at great risk, to confront the hypocrisy of powerful people and their institutional oppression.  Very soon he will enter this new way of living his life.

          So how does he begin?  He steps into a river and is baptized.  We’re also told that in this hour he is praying.  We know that shortly afterward, he’ll go into the desert to be alone and be tested, which is also a beginning.  But for now let’s keep our focus here at the river; he begins with a baptism and with prayer.

          Baptism is a great many things, but what I want to suggest at the moment is that baptism, the way we do it here and the way it was done in Jesus’ day, is literally a surrender.  You place yourself in someone else’s hands.  You let them take hold of your neck; you let them cover your face; you let them lay your body back into the element you were carried in before you were born, in which you cannot breathe.  You’re immersed in that till the one who holds you pulls you up.   That’s how Jesus makes his entry into a new kind of life: letting himself go falling back by other hands, letting go of himself and his power, even his power to breathe.  It sounds passive, but it’s not; it’s his choice.  It’s his first choice, and to me it’s instructive.  I don’ think a good beginning means resolving anything; it means to surrender yourself.

          In addition to this baptism at the outset of his new life, we read that he is praying.   What he prayed we cannot know.  But in simplest terms there are three kinds of prayer: thanks, help, and here I am.  Maybe the prayer of Jesus is all three: lifting up gratitude for all good gifts and for the One who gives them; asking for help in every circumstance to be true and free and strong; then simply presenting himself to the presence, the purpose, and the fathomless love of God.

          This also is a good beginning toward a new way of life.  We say our thanks, we ask for help, and, to the extent we can, we make ourselves simply present to the nearness and the purpose of God.  In his baptism, Jesus began by surrender; in prayer, he began by reaching for connection, strength, and communion with God.  The linking of these was the good beginning that he could continue for the rest of his way.

          To stay on his course, you know he had to do it again, to repeat his beginning over and over.  A good beginning is the kind you repeat many times.  I think it’s the meaning of the morning – to get up every day and choose all over again to be surrendered and to be reaching for gratitude, strength, and the holy Presence.  We’ve got good reasons for daily beginnings like this.

          The most wonderful thing is how we can do this all over again even after we’ve left it all behind, or forgotten it and lost our way.  In all the world, there is no failure, no grief, no guilt, nor any place of mental, emotional or moral darkness that lies beyond possibility for good new beginning. When we fall down, says Desmond Tutu, “We don’t have a God who says, ‘Gotcha.’  We have a God who picks us up and dusts us off and says, “Try it again.”  It is never too late, not for any of us, for a gracious new start.

          The theologian Jürgen Moltmann has written this: “If a child falls over it is no bad thing, because it then learns to get up again.  Christian faith is faith in the resurrection, and the resurrection is literally just that: rising up again. . . . ‘Christians are the eternal beginners.’  And that is the best thing that can ever be said about believers, lovers, and the hopeful.” 1

          When Jesus began with his surrender in baptism and his reaching in prayer, we’re told that something extraordinary happened.  The Spirit descended on him then, and a voice came saying, “You are my Son, the beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  Having taken a step on his new path, he hears who he is: he is God’s child, he is loved, God delights in him.  I suppose it always happens when we make the good beginning, no matter how late, or how often.  We take the step and find that Someone was waiting and is saying: “You are my child, the beloved; in you I delight.”  All our good beginnings take us toward that blessing.  And it’s that blessing that takes us into all our good beginnings.