Scripture readings: Numbers
11:16-18, 24-30; Matthew 3:1-17
I must have been five years old, the first time my
family went camping together. It was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains Kathie would have been
about three, and my sister Nanci was not going to be born for a few more years.
After that, we camped for a week or two almost every
summer. We always slept in a tent, because my Dad said that it wasn’t really
camping unless you slept in a tent.
We carried our water (for drinking, and cooking, and
washing dishes, and washing ourselves) in buckets that we filled at a faucet in
whatever campground we used. Carrying water became my job fairly early on.
The buckets were heavy. The handles pinched my little
hands. I didn’t mind it much because we all had our jobs; much more than we did
at home.
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| Photos taken at Desert Aire, WA, December 2014 |
I liked to help putting up the tent. My help was
probably more trouble than it was worth, but it made me feel important and
necessary. I was a collaborator. I was a kind of partner.
I believe the Bible teaches us that this is what we
are created for: to be partners with each other and even partners with God.
The God who can do anything without any help at all
created us and made us his partners. Adam and Eve were going to be partners in
God’s creation by working the earth and caring for it. (Genesis 2:15)
Who knows how that partnership would have grown, if
they had stayed committed to it? That partnership was part of God’s image in
us.
In a mysterious way it is an image of our partnership
with the Father , and the Son, and
the Holy Spirit. We can see that in the story of Jesus’ baptism. The Son gets
wet. The Spirit comes down. The Father
praises his Son. God himself is a kind of partnership that we describe when we
say that “God is love.” (1 John 4:8) God is one, and God is togetherness.
In some strange way, in the original human sin, we
tried to be God in the place of God, and so we broke the togetherness. We broke
the partnership. The image of partnership was not completely destroyed, but it
became dysfunctional. It stopped working right.
We see the dysfunction in the injuries we do to the
earth in our original partnership made in the Garden of Eden, because of the
separation that sin makes between us and God. I see our bad partnership in
caring for the earth when I drive on the freeways through Los Angeles
We see the dysfunction of the partnership portion of
our nature in all our human partnerships. We see it in marriages, in families,
in communities, and in government.
We can even see it in the church, because we don’t
stop being sinners when we start being God’s partners again. The church always
has sin in it, but the love of God is stronger than our sins.
In the Old Testament, God shared himself, in the form
of the Holy Spirit, to recreate a partnership with his people, even though they
continued to be sinners. We see this in the people called prophets. Moses was
given the gift of the Holy Spirit to help him be partners with God in order to
bring God’s people out of slavery in Egypt
The story we read from the Book of Numbers shows us
how Moses needed human partners in order to be a good partner with God. God
shared Moses’ gift of the Holy Spirit with seventy other members of God’s
people. There was some confusion in the way this happened and so Moses said, “I
wish that all of the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put
his Spirit on them.” (Numbers 11:29)
What God wanted to do, in order to make a new
kingdom, was somehow guessed at (and wished for) by Moses. God would make a new
kingdom, a new creation, by sharing his Holy Spirit with everyone who came to
him, with everyone he called to himself. “I will pour out my Spirit on all
flesh.” (Joel 2:28; Isaiah 4:2-6)
John the Baptist was the last of the Old Testament
prophet-partners of God. He was the bridge into the New Testament. He was a
partner with God and he would serve as God’s partner by equipping God himself,
who came into our world in Jesus.
John didn’t know what he was doing. He knew only that
he didn’t deserve to do it. Yet God brought him into this world in order to do
what none of us deserve to do; to be partners with God and partners of the kingdom of God
In Christ (in Jesus) the plan of God and the guess
and the wish of Moses came true. All of God’s people became prophets. All of us
who meet the Lord Jesus (who is God who has come into our world as a human
being) receive the Holy Spirit. (See Joel 2:28)
As John the Baptist said, “He will baptize you with
the Holy Spirit and with fire.” (Matthew 3:11) When the disciples received the
Holy Spirit, on the day of Pentecost, Peter explained it by referring to the
word of the prophet Joel this way, “In the last days, God says, I will pour out
my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men
will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men
and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.”
(Acts 2:17-18) (God started the last days when he came to earth in Jesus,
because he changed the way the world works. He changed the way he deals with
sin.)
The Holy Spirit is the presence and the power of God.
In the partnership of the Father ,
and the Son, and the Holy Spirit (who always work together) the Holy Spirit
holds us in the presence of Jesus, the Son. The Spirit holds us in the presence
of the Father . The Holy Spirit
safely holds within us the presence of all that God is.
We become prophets: partners with God. We speak for
him and work for him; His words and his work become real in our world through
the growth and the change of our character, and our lives, and our service. The
love of God who recreates us as his partners through the Holy Spirit, enables
us to live and act and follow him in such a way that shows God’s love for the
world and all the people in it.
At his baptism, Jesus said that righteousness was at
work in the way that it happened: in the way that he made John do it.
Righteousness means everything working right as it should. A righteous car will
be all that it is specified to be, or (even better yet) all that you have
souped it up to be.
For a human to be righteous means for that person to
work right toward God, toward others, toward this world, and toward himself or
herself. Righteousness means that our relationships with God, and with others,
and with this world, and with our selves are wholesome, healthy, faithful,
solid, and right. It means that all our partnerships are in working order. This
would be a huge and welcome change in this world.
Jesus said that this strange partnership, in which a
human baptizes God, is what the new creation is based on. It is based on God
identifying himself with us. In Jesus, God bends his knee to us in love.
Our partnership is based on God taking on the role of
being a creature like us, to offer himself as a human being to God. He did this
in a way that we have all failed to achieve. In his baptism, he showed the
humility, the repentance, the change of heart, and the new beginning that come
so hard to us.
His baptism was part of great scheme to restore us to
fellowship with God, with others, with our world, and with ourselves. On the
cross he would pay the price of the consequences of the separation and the
injury that come from sin in all our partnerships.
Sin takes us outside of God who is the source of all
life. And so sin takes us into death. God came down in Jesus and identified
himself with us on the cross. On the cross he took our separation on himself.
He took our death on himself. He paid the price and took the consequences in
order to give us a new birth into himself; into life.
He died for us. Then he rose from the dead to give us
the life we could not achieve for ourselves. He gave us life as the man who
conquered death because he identified with us.
In our baptism we have become identified with the one
who identifies with us. Just as what we did became a part of him, so what he
has done has become a part of us and he has given us life.
Just as he has given life to us, as the beginning of
his plan to give life to the world, we are now part of that same plan to give
life to the world. We are called to be his prophets, his collaborators, his
co-conspirators: his partners.
The place where God puts us, and the people around
us, are the mission fields of our partnership with God. We are called to help
things work right. Just as God put others first, including us, so we are called
to put others first. He identified with others and so must we.
The Lord’s Supper is a reminder of this, to keep us
on track. Here is the place where all that he is and all that he has done feeds
us and quenches our thirst. Here we receive Christ by faith and we go out
carrying the bread of life within ourselves.
In a sense we become the bread of life for the world
because that living bread is living in us. We carry the bread of life into a world
that he loved so much that he identified himself with it.
We carry the bread of life into a world for which he
poured out his blood. So, for us, in a sense, the whole world is our communion
cup. Going out into the world is our way of being with him. As we serve Jesus,
in this world, we see what he loved and died for and our thirst is satisfied.
This is a very different way of seeing the world.
This is a very different way of living in this world. It only comes from
joining a new partnership with God.
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