Remembering

Cooper
Luke 3:21-22
Jan 9, 2022

When Jesus had been baptized and was praying,
The heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him
In bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven,
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

We are so used to this baptismal story that we could be excused for missing its power. But that would be a terrible loss. For these words bring us back to the transfigurative moment in Jesus’ life, the point of no return, his point of no return, where whatever Jesus had been doing or being in the first thirty years of his life — and the gospels tell us pathetically little of that, and none of it is clear — all that past is gone. Jesus has been transfigured, transformed, metanoia’d, if there is such a word, spiritually moved, perhaps convicted is the right word, to take a new, unexplored fork in the road, and he follows that fork, that conviction dauntlessly wherever it goes, even, as it turns out, to his own crucifixion. And there is yet another wonder in this morning’s reading. For it not only presents for us the decisive moment in Jesus’ life; it also presents the decisive confession of the church, decisive in the sense that this confession brings into being a new community, the one we call the church, and that confession, for that decisive reason, is placed early on in all the gospels: Jesus, it is declared, is God’s beloved Son. I say this is the church’s confession, for it is not Jesus who is telling this story, it is not even some bystanders who might function as witnesses to the event — as is the case with Paul, in Luke’s telling of Paul’s transfigurative moment on the road to Damascus. No, the narrator of this story is just that, only a narrator, and if we ask ourselves who is this narrator, the answer lies before our very eyes: it’s the church, the community of believers, that wrote the gospels, and preserves them —no church, no gospels — the church is the narrator of this story, granted, in the person of Luke who, following Mark’s earlier gospel, is putting in written form what must certainly have been a long oral tradition amongst those believers who for decades, without written gospels, were going throughout Judea, Samaria and Syria proclaiming Jesus as the resurrected Christ, the long expected Jewish messiah. For I hardly need remind you that the earliest of our four canonical gospels does not appear until at least thirty years after Jesus’ death, and the latest one, the gospel of John, a good seventy years after his death, or even more. So let’s think for a minute about oral tradition. It’s a way of remembering, isn’t it? Oral tradition depends upon memory, for memory is one of the major ways we bring the past into the present, especially the past that has meaning for us. For what has happened in the past can only continue to have meaning for us into the future if it enters into memory, if it turns into memory. So here is the significance of this morning’s gospel story. It places before us, two thousand years after the actual historical event, the way the church remembers the decisive turning point in Jesus’ life, and remembers her own confession of her deepest, most meaningful, salvational truth: that Jesus is the beloved Son of God.

Let’s think deeper into this understanding. The church is a community of memory, a community loyal to that memory, trusting it. We experience Christ, his life, his works, as memory but it is impossible for us as believers to simply stop there, to be satisfied with saying that we know Christ simply as memory. And there’s a profound reason for our dissatisfaction in thinking of Christ simply as memory, and that reason goes to the heart of our faith. For in faith we do not know Christ simply as memory; we know him as a presence in our lives, as a living power. We confess Christ as alive. We may not know how this can be — how could we? — but we go on confessing this, go on talking this way, even wondering how we could do so. For as long as we are in faith, as long as by some great miracle of God’s grace we find ourselves staying in faith, it is impossible for us to say, impossible for us to know, Christ as dead. What can we say then about his living presence amongst us? Certainly that we know his presence in his spirit, the spirit of Christ, and we can recognize that spirit whenever we sense it, feel it, hear it, inwardly, perhaps as a still, small voice, small but not ineffectual, (we are able to recognize Christ’s spirit, his presence, his voice) because we have the church’s memory of it: all those gospel stories of his forgiveness, mercy, humility, healings; all those stories remembering Christ’s compassion for all us humans entangled in the flesh; his dying for all, dying for the lowly. We hear those stories in every worship service and we remember those stories, we try to let them inform the way we lead our lives, even if we do so only in small ways. It is our way of keeping faith to the spirit of Christ.

When we ask why we find in ourselves the desire to keep faith to the spirit of Christ … no, that’s not the right way for me to frame the question. It’s more when I ask myself that question, and it’s only of late that I have begun to do so, I find myself thinking about what scholars have long pointed out: that it was only the disciples, Christ’s closest followers, that the church’s gospel memory testifies to witnessing Christ’s post crucifixion appearances. Skeptics like to take that as a discrediting fact, but there’s an entirely opposite way of thinking of this, which is this: Christ appears to those who love him. His living presence is manifested to those who love him, love is the moving dynamic of our faith. Love is what moves us. It is love, love of Christ, that is love of his spiritual presence of compassion, humility, mercy, goodness, forgiveness, that opens us up to the living Christ, to the spirit of the living Christ . It’s a spirit, of course, which goes against so many of our inclinations — which can be narrow, self serving, destructive, murderous, as is all too evident in our polarized country today, let alone in every other country, and throughout human history. So when we call Christ, Lord, it is not because he mirrors who we are; and it is not because his life, his suffering, saves the world from ever ongoing horrible pain, murderous violence. It certainly does not do that. No, sisters and brothers in Christ do we not call Christ our Lord because we love his spirit, because his spirit appears to us as right and true; and in loving his spirit, and in recognizing how much we need it for own humanity, that is how Christ manifests his living presence to us. Love and need, love and need; that is the living Christ to us.

Praise God for this great good. Praise Christ. Amen