CRISIS POINT
January 12, 1992
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan |
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
-Isaiah 61:1-4
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

"...when Jesus also had been baptized...a voice came fron heaven,

"You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.' Jesus

was about thirty years old when he began his work." ne
Luke 3:21-23 (NRSV)

s

Sometimes it takes thirty years. In his new memoir, Dead-
lines, former New York Times reporter, bureau chief, executive
editor, James Reston, describes the youthful naivete and heady
optimism of his early life,

And then at thirty he found himself in London during the
Blitz, under fierce attack, separated from his wife. and new: baby,
faced for the first time with the possibility of death. He still
has the letter he wrote that night in London. to his infant son
Richard:

"To your mother I left everything I have, a few
doliars, a lot of books, and the memories of an
Short and happy life. To you, alas,I left noth- -
ing..." [see pp. 93-94] 7

Reston writes that he was glad later his son was too young
to read it. But thirty was for hin, clearly, a pivotal and
important time. ae

"Jesus was about thirty years old," Luke adds as a post-
script to the account of the Baptism, "...about thirty years old
when he began his work," to be precise about it..

Father Andrew Greeley's important research into contemporary
-.spirituality shows that "around the age of thirty serious prayer
begins for many people." It was reported in Newsweek in a cover
article on praying, "...at age thirty, when the illusion that we
are masters of our own fate fades adults develop a deeper néed t
cail on the Master of the Universe," (Newsweek, 1/6/92] a

And so, at the age of thirty, a young adult from Nazareth
stepped into the muddy water of the Jordan River and began his
life's work.

There is a major gap in what we know about him. Born in
Bethlehem, his mother and father returned-to their home in Naza-
reth shortly thereafter. And other than one solitary incident
when he was twelve and they went to Jerusalem for Passover and he
became separated from them for three days, we know nothing about
-the intervening years until he shows up one day on the banks of
the Jordan River.

We can speculate about his formative years, of course, on
the basis of what we know about his culture. There is some
danger to that, obviously, because it is always tempting to take
one's own speculations as the probable truth. William Barclay
was a beloved Scottish New Testament professor who did a lot of
creative speculating, irritating the scholarly community but
providing thousands of preachers with lovely, if slightly Scot-
tish sounding, Bible stories. .

Speculating on the eighteen year gap in Jesus's life, Bar-
clay is wonderfully imaginative. When they returned to Nazareth
after the trip to Bethlehem for the census, they resumed a normal
peasant life which, the way Barclay tells it, could well have
been in the Western Highlands. Joseph's carpentry shop was in
the front, living quarters in back. The little boy would have
Spent time in both places. He learned to read and write ata
village school and attended Synagogue with his parents. As an
adolescent he would have learned his father's trade. Joseph is
never heard from again, so the assumption is that he died and
that Jesus continued the business. Mark names three brothers and
sisters, so Barclay speculates that Jesus was supporting his
family after Joseph died and that when he was thirty, his younger
brothers were ready to take over. Ina particularly fanciful but
lovely bit of speculation, Barclay cites an ancient legend that
Jesus specialized in making yokes for oxen, and that one of these
yokes was placed outside his shop as an advertisement along with
the sign - "My yokes fit well." So when he used that figure of
speech later, people recognized its source.

Could be. What we do know is that something important
happens to people around thirty and that when he was thirty he
Showed up one day in a crowd of people who had come to the Jordan
River to hear a strange preacher by the name of John. John was a
member of a desert community apparently, perhaps the Essenes
whose Dead Sea monastery has been excavated. They were ascetic,
highly disciplined, celibate, and the Romans were very suspicious
of them. John fits the type. His preaching reminded people of
their national heroes - the prophets. He stirred people with his
references to the ancient traditions, their unique relationship
to God, the privileges and the responsibilities which attended

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their role. When they stepped into the water to be baptized,
they were affirming in a deep and profound way their Jewishness;
they were claiming their identity, and they were silently but
eloquently saying that they were not Roman subjects, that Roman
authority was illegitimate in this.land.God had given them. TI
imagine for them it was a moment of high patriotism.

Perhaps there were Roman officials, or soldiers too, watch-
ing, remembering who among them had stepped: into the water. They
. continued to hound John. Their puppet, Herod Antipas, had hin

- imprisoned and finally executed.

John was the one who inspired Jesus to step forward and
commit his life. It was John who inspired Jesus of Nazareth to
begin his true vocation.

What did it mean for Jesus? What was he doing there in the
crowd that day, listening to John preach? Perhaps he was free of
his responsibility of caring for his family, free to do what he
wanted to do. Perhaps he was restless, bored. Perhaps, as
Andrew Greeley suggests, he was thinking about the meaning of his
life and what he really believed and perhaps he was doing some
serious praying.

Walter Burghardt, a Jesuit who teaches at Georgetown, has
written a book on the Seasons of Life and suggests that the
Summer of life, the midsection, where most of us are, even if we
have to be a little flexible with the outward perimeters, is when
we make the major choices which define our place in the world and
our identity - who we will be. Burghardt and others help us to
understand that while we may make occupational decisions, where
to go to work and relational decisions, who to hook up with, long
before - perhaps in ovr 20s or even our teen years - these deci-
sions about place in the world and personal identity actually
come later, beginning around thirty, and in some sense continuing
for the rest of our lives. [Seasons That Laugh or Weep, Musinas
on the Human Journey, p. 33 ff.)

The sequence, to use Jesus as an example, is crisis - decid-
ing to leave routine and Security and go out to hear what's going
on at the River; experience - for Jesus, the act of baptism;
decision - the commitment to a new ideal, a larger vision and the
courage to follow it; and finally grace - the word of affirma-
tion. "You are my son, my daughter, the beloved; with you I am
well pleased."

It is a critical sequence - and social scientists are tell-
ing us, given the peculiarities of our time and place, not at all
a simple or easy sequence.

For one thing, we don't have a lot of latitude from the age
of thirty on. Thirty means really digging into one's career,

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having babies and parenting young children. For M.D.'s and
J.D.'s, M.B.A.'s and Ph.D.'s, thirty means that the’ accumulated
bills of a decade of higher education must be paid so it's time
to generate serious income. From the perspective of just twenty
_ years or so it's hard to remember what you felt like at thirty -
primarily because you were too busy earning, paying bills, rais-~-
ing children, to feel much of anything but exhaustion. So some-
times this important deepening which results in our knowing who

Furthermore, there are major societal factors that mitigate
against this creative sequence,

A University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Martin Seligman,
analyzes the epidemic of depression in our culture. He writes,

"Since World War II, depression has been on the rise.. Young
persons are ten times likelier to suffer severe depression than
their grandparents." [Learned Optimism, p. 282]

The reason, Dr. Seligman proposes, is that we have experi-
enced "the waxing of the self and the waning of the community."
The solitary self, he argues, has more power and authority to
make decisions than ever before. A trip to the drugstore can
become a psychological trauma simply because you have so many
choices. Have you purchased cough drops lately, or cold tablets?
The options are enormous, row upon row, shelf on top of shelf -
there are literally hundreds of alternatives. You can have an
attack of acute anxiety standing in the aisle at Walgreens trying
to decide. No wonder we get depressed.

More seriously, the emergence of the self has prompted
rising expectations for self~-satisfaction, gratification and
meaning immediately, not some time in the future when the ship
comes in, but now. A job is no longer simply the way to generate
income; it must produce meaning for life. Marriage, Seligman
observes, is not just for producing the next generation. "our
mate today must be eternally sexy, and thin, and interesting to
talk to, and good at tennis." [p. 283]

"Maximal self," Seligman calls us. "The modern individual
is not the peasant of yore with a fixed future yawning ahead. He
or she is a frantic trading floor of options, decisions and
preferences." The result is depression and a loss of community
and a decrease in commitment to the common good ~ "the waning of
the community."

There is, I believe, something stirring in our culture. We
are beginning to understand these dynamics. Perhaps we've expe-
rienced the depression which results from being a "maximal self."
Perhaps we discovered that life committed to nothing larger than
itself is pretty meager. Perhaps it is simply a sense that I

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have one life to live and it is a matter of critical importance
to me to use it for some purpose other than my own amusement.

Newsweek said, "In allegedly rootless, materialistic, self-
centered America, there is also a hunger for a personal experi--
ence of God that prayer seems to satisfy."

Jesus went to the Jordan River one day, left the routine of
carpentry and decided to give his life to God. - which was his
vocation. Dr. Seligman teaches his students and counsels his
clients ‘to be deliberate about it. He observes that many of us
are willing to endure the physical discomfort of strenuous calis-
thenics because we know we will be healthier for it. So he
prescribes moral or spiritual "jogging." [p. 287] .

Give away five per+cent of your income he recommends, not

because he's a fund raiser or head of a church stewardship cam-

paign, but because you'll be healthier, happier and less: de-
pressed. — :

The next time a homeless person asks for money, stop and
talk for a few minutes and then do something outrageous - give —
the person. five dollars. There are, that is to Say, ways each
one of us-can put ourselves in a place to hear a word about the
purpose of our lives. It may not mean changing jobs at all. In
‘fact, it may mean a sense of confirmation: that what we are doing
is what we ought to be doing. The important. thing is to go to
the river and to listen and then to act. co

Part of what Jesus did during that period of time between
the age of twelve and thirty was what all of us do, namely get
ready for the rest of our lives; wait for,.wonder about, struggle
with the options, experiment with and generally try to identify
the ‘purpose of our being here ~ our vocation, our calling: That
task is rarely finalized. Rather there is a tantalizing sense in
which we are always in the process of deciding what we will be
when we grow up.

. It may be why we are here this morning - like Jesus standing
on the bank of the river, waiting to hear a word that will help
us know what to do with our lives.

‘Jesus responded to the word he heard by stepping into the ~
water. .For him that act meant opening himself to God, to God's
purpose for his life. And so I presume to invite you - to step
in, to do what you must do, to open your life to God, to give
yourself to God's purpose, to commit your life to some purpose
larger than your own security and amusement, to give your life -
and in the giving to become who God. wants you to be.

Dag Hammarskjold's diary entry for Whitsunday, 1961, cap-
tures the sense of it, and over the years has reminded me of the.

5
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responsibility each of us has to say "yes" to our own lives and

to put them to work for purposes which are important. Hammar-
skjold wrote:

"I don't know who -.or what -- put-the question. I
don't know when it was put. I don't even remember
answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to
Someone —- or Something - and from that hour I was
. certain that existence is meaningful and that,
therefore, my life, in self~surrender, had a goal.
From that moment I have known what it means ‘not
to look back' and 'to take no thought for the
morrow.'" [Markings, p. 205]

There are some risks. A few months after he wrote that,
Hammarskjold died in an air crash while flying to negotiate a
United Nations cease fire in Africa. Three years after Jesus

stepped into the Jordan River to be baptized, he was crucified.

Et may be safer to stay put, not to say yes, not to step
forward. It will certainly be less exhilarating, less exciting,
less alive.

Hammarskjold@ felt that his life had meaning and purpose -
after he said "yes." Ana Jesus, when the waters of baptism
flowed down over his head, heard a voice - No one else heard it,
by the way. But the sense of it is that the voice was for him
and it said something he had not known or heard before. The
voice said:

"You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am
well pleased."

After the crisis - affirmation; after the decision - uncon-
ditional love.

It is the word we want to hear and need to hear.

So today, in your heart of hearts - take a step; “say "Yes"
to your life - give it to God, and hear God say:

"You are my daughter -
"You are my son. The beloved.
"With you I am well pleased."

Amen.

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