You’ve
heard it is said that seeing is believing? Well, I’m here to tell you that believing
is seeing.
John
the Baptist believed that people were far away from God and needed to repent.
John the Baptist saw exactly what the world needed. What the world needed, John
saw, was to turn around— people needed a change in direction—away from error,
inattention, and imperfection and towards an intentional, deliberate, following
of the commandments and traditions of the Law.
Now
St. John Baptist was an innovator—he understood that people needed to begin where
they were, not where they were not. And for John, the starting place was our
sin, our brokenness, and our need for God at the very deepest, most practical
level.
He came out from the wilderness and began baptizing people—a strange ritual to be sure, but actually one that was really quite familiar to Jews of 1st Century Palestine. Part of the process for a Gentile convert to become a Jew was, in addition to learning the Torah and being circumcised, was to be ritually cleansed. But John’s innovation was that instead of going to the temple or the synagogue, he baptized in the river.
To be baptized is to be “dipped.” Have
you ever made a tie-dye a t-shirt? Right! You dip it, submerge it, into the tub
of dye to make it color you want. The word for baptism is the same word used to
describe this process. In first century Palestine, after wool was shaved off
the sheep, it was combed out and but before it be turned into thread for fabric,
the wool was dipped into a tub or a vat of
bleach. It is immersed and came out changed: all the dirt and all the various
shades of brown and gray in the wool came out, ready to be turned into cloth.
John
took the somewhat arcane ritual of conversion to Judaism—something an ordinary
Jews may have known about but probably never seen—and combined with something a
lot of people knew about in their daily lives. He is saying that if you want to
get right with God, you had better be converted in your heart and that is a lot
like being dipped and made clean.
Believing
is seeing. And for John, seeing meant looking at oneself as needed to be made
right, cleaned up, fixed up.
In
the process the fullness of the Triune God in the person of the man Jesus is made
known for the first time in public.
Now
Jesus and John share a mission. Like John, Jesus is aware of how broken, how
cynical, how willful, how blind, how prideful all of us are. He knows that we
are broken and need to be healed. He knows we need to be in relationship to
God.
Jesus sees us differently than John does. John brings a word of judgment because
John believes that we are obstinate, stubborn people who need to straighten up
and fly right. Jesus brings a word of blessing. Both know we need fixing, but
Jesus starts with the truth that God created us and blessed us with an
essential dignity that we all carry around and that Jesus’ redeeming
work is going to reclaim that dignity for everyone everywhere.
John
saw us exactly as we are, and he was not wrong. He followed the model of the
Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. He thunders at the corrupt leaders and
practices around him; he tells us the truth about ourselves and our sin, and John
gives us a prophetic sign—baptism—to show us the seriousness of the call to
turn around and be renewed.
But
Jesus is taking a new, different way. One that begins by his voluntary submission
to John’s baptism. He changes John’s baptism from a turning away from sin into
a turning towards God. Jesus shows us that God is joining with us: he is
walking the way of humanity, he is taking seriously our struggles to lives
whole, complete, healthy lives, following the way of the law to love God with
our whole being and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Like
John, Jesus sees exactly what we needed. But he sees us through the eyes of the
Messiah, not a prophet of the old covenant. Jesus believes that we are made by
God with dignity, with creativity and power, and he sees that we are a people
who are lovely and worthy of redeeming. So, instead of zeroing in on what is
wrong with us; Jesus sees us through the eyes of God’s love.
Believing
is seeing. That pretty well describes Epiphany season. Believing is seeing.
Epiphany,
from last Friday with the gifts of the Magi, through Jesus’ baptism, and all
the way up to the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday, is the season of Jesus
showing himself for who he really is. Believing is seeing.
There
is an old joke: the optimist sees the glass as half-full, the pessimist sees
the glass as half-empty, and the engineer sees a glass that is a little too big
for its specified use. We see what we believe.
I
believe that God sees us with clear-eyed, unfiltered realism. God sees us for
all our foibles, follies, and foolishness and God sees us as
God made us to be, with all our potential, all our possibility, and all our power. God
sees both our sin and our dignity.
During
this Epiphany season, we are invited to see Jesus more and more and to
encounter him in word, in sacrament, in scripture, and in Christian community. In
the Gospels in these next six and a half weeks, we’ll see again and again the
ways that Jesus showed himself. But most of all we will see in Christ how God
sees us. As a people who are broken, yes, and as a people who also are lovely, made
in the very image of God.
Believing
is seeing. Look deep inside and you will, with God’s grace, see yourself just a
bit as how God sees you. You will see obstacles and you will see potential. You
will see what could be as well as what is. You will know the sin and take it
seriously, and you, I pray, accept the forgiveness of the cross and the new
life of the resurrection that we took on in our baptisms.
Believing is indeed seeing. It is important that we trust in God with all our being, and love the people God gives us with all our heart because these will change and inform what we see. And, never, ever forget that from the beginning, God always believes in us, and that drives how we are seen.
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