The day before yesterday I spent the day at Point Loma Nazarene University with about 150 other pastors at a wonderful event that featured lectures from Philip Yancey, one of the best-selling Christian authors of our time. You may not know his name but you may recognize one or two of his book titles, which include The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace. He was also here to give a writing workshop to aspiring writers. One of the other events of the day was hearing from a handful of students about the impact their pastors have had in their lives, and that started me thinking about the pastors who have been influential in my own life. There are many, but of them all, two stand out the most.

The pastor of my little church when I was in junior and senior high and college was named John Browne. I can’t tell you everything about John that helped me know I wanted to go into ministry and I can’t tell you everything that he taught me. I’m sure there were ways he influenced me that I don’t even realize myself. Some of the big things, though, had to do with an attitude and approach to being a Christian pastor. John was from a small town in Arkansas. He had been a Marine drill sergeant and a chaplain at San Quentin. He was a plain-spoken, no-nonsense kind of guy. He was a loving and kind man, but also the kind that you knew you shouldn’t mess with! He taught me that you can be in love with Jesus and also intellectually thoughtful and curious at the same time. He taught me the value of trying to let your people know you love them. He taught me that sermons don’t have to be long to be effective. He also taught me that you shouldn’t leave a lit pipe in the ashtray in the dashboard of your Volkswagen Beetle, but that’s another story.

The other pastor was very different from John. He was David Poling, the senior pastor of the church I attended in college and later served as an associate pastor. That church was a big, downtown church. David was an accomplished author and had served as president of a well-known Christian magazine in New York. He came from a long line of distinguished Presbyterian pastors. He and John were very different people. Where John was plain and simple, David was erudite and sophisticated. David was a great leader whose sermons inspired as well as informed. He was very creative and always coming up with new ideas for ministry. He taught me the value of a passionate love for Christ expressed in the well-spoken and well-written word. He taught me about the strength of calmness when everyone else is anxious, and about how to survive and get through some of the tough times in life and in ministry. Of many memorable things he said to me, the most important came when I told him I was having a hard time preparing to officiate at a wedding in the very same spot where I had married my late wife. He said, “You cry in your study and then you go out and do your job.”

One of the priceless things that any human being needs is a mentor, a guide, a leader, an example. I’ve told you about two of mine whom I’ll always love and honor, and I know that you can think of your own. We need people whose words, experience, friendship and example teach us about how we can live our own lives. We need these folks to teach us how to be parents, how to do our jobs, how to just live life. Sometimes these people are not actual personal acquaintances but they still have an impact on us. Roger Bannister was an example and leader who showed us it was possible to run a mile in under 4 minutes. Wilbur and Orville Wright showed us that we could fly. Sir Edmund Hillary, who died just a few weeks ago, along with Tenzing Norgay, led the way up Mt. Everest. And of course there is no more important aspect of life in which we need such an example than in the spiritual aspect. We need someone to lead us into a relationship with God.

Since September we have been taking a long and hard look at what a relationship with God looks like. Our guide, our mentor, is Jesus. He told us that such a relationship is essentially about two things: love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love others as you love yourself. But Jesus did more than just give us some words to live by. In a profound and all-encompassing way, Jesus gave us himself and his life as well. Jesus is himself the supreme example of what it means to love God and others. His own life blazed a trail into that realm of relationship with God and it serves as a guide for any who would follow him. Scot McKnight, in his book The Jesus Creed, quotes the great New Testament scholar Tom Wright, saying that if Jesus is to bring the Kingdom of God to earth, “this is how he must do it; by humbly identifying himself with God’s people, by taking their place, sharing their penitence, living their life and ultimately dying their death” (p. 243). For the season of Lent, in the great preparation for celebration of the singular event that redefined the human experience, we are going to look at how Jesus loved God and others, and we are going to see how Jesus serves as an example whom we must follow if we are going to find our way into the Kingdom of God, here on earth and in the next life.

The event with which we will begin is the event with which Jesus began his public ministry and witness to God: his baptism in the Jordan River by his cousin, John the Baptizer. The gospels tell us that John was a popular and powerful religious leader in his own right. He saw the corruption of the Jewish leadership and the spiritual stagnation of the Jewish people and he was calling for a radical renewing and remaking of the entire spiritual makeup of the nation of Israel. He had gone to the banks of the Jordan, the same river that the Hebrew wanderers had crossed in order to take the land of Canaan and become the nation of Israel, and he called the people to go through the river again in the rite of baptism, to wash away their sin, to drown their old and corrupt way of life, and to emerge again on the other side as new people ready to go a different direction with their lives. Jesus came to John and asked to be baptized. But John thought it profoundly absurd. John knew who Jesus was. He knew that Jesus had no sin to confess, no corruption from which to repent, no need to get right with God because he was God. And yet, Jesus persisted. Jesus said he needed to be baptized in order “to fulfill all righteousness.” And there is the story.

McKnight reminds us that one of the major reasons Jesus came to earth in the first place was to do for us what we could not do for ourselves, namely, to get things straight between us and God. “To fulfill righteousness,” to make things right again, Jesus needed to confess for us the sins that we didn’t even realize, and to repent for us of waywardness that we didn’t even know was there, and to come out of the river cleansed and renewed and ready to be in the presence of the Living God. Just as Jesus would later die for us on the cross, now Jesus was confessing and repenting and coming to God for us. He was our substitute, our stand-in, the one human whose sinless nature made him the perfect person to confess sin for the rest of us. In that sense, Jesus was and is the ultimate spiritual trailblazer, opening a pathway back to God. That he succeeded was made clear when God actually showed up. Descending like a dove and coming to rest on Jesus, the very Spirit of God came from out of the heavens and said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Before that event, the good Jew knew that God rarely showed up in such a direct way into human experience. God was everywhere, of course, but not so immediately and personally present. This was new territory. In the act of baptism, Jesus did what every human being should do, confessing, repenting, and through those two acts coming into the place where God is, into the realm where God’s power is fully known, coming into the place from which we never should have departed. Just like the pilot Chuck Yeager was the first to break the sound barrier, so Jesus was the first to break the “spirit barrier.” Humanity’s sin had overwhelmed us. We were captive to it. We could never escape it. It stood forever as a barrier between us and God and God’s blessings. Someone had to break that barrier if there would ever be hope for us and the only one who could break it was God himself, come to be with us in our human condition as one of us. Only a God-Man could reestablish the connection between God and Man. Only Jesus could “fulfill all righteousness.”

What I’ve just told you is very heavy and very important and very essential Christian knowledge and belief about Jesus. It is important that you and I know this about Jesus, but the knowing of it is only half the story. If we don’t know what that has to do with our lives today and tomorrow and the next day, then we will have lost out on what Jesus accomplished for us. It would be like holding a winning lottery ticket in our hand and then not cashing it in if we don’t go on to learn from Jesus’ example about what this says to our own lives.

In effect, Jesus’ baptism was a baptism on our behalf and it opened a new world of spiritual possibility to us. We have to learn what the mechanics of that spiritual possibility are in order to take advantage of them in our daily living with God and with each other. Michael DeBakey performed the first heart transplant, opening up a new world of medical possibility, but if no one else ever attempted to take a heart from one person and put it into another person again, then what would be the use of DeBakey’s work? What Jesus did for us and now invites us to repeat in our own lives has to do with four powerful spiritual laws: the laws of confession, repentance, forgiveness, and new life. These laws operate at the cosmic, spiritual level, and they also permeate every other level of life as well.

The Jews who came to John at the Jordan were ready to confess their sin, to realize and to admit that they had been wrong. Confession is the first step into the Kingdom of God. In order to learn how to do anything right you first have to admit that you don’t know how to do it at all, or that you only know how to do it wrong. I once hired a sweet young woman to be a secretary in a former church I served. Her first job was to type and print the Sunday bulletins. She hemmed and hawed and made excuses all week for why she hadn’t gotten it done, and on Friday afternoon I left the office with her promising to show up on Saturday to get it done. I came in on Saturday just to check on her and she was there, trying to produce the bulletin. The only problem was, she couldn’t type. And she had never really used a computer. And she had no idea how to run the copier. And so she no longer had a job at my church! She couldn’t bring herself to admit what she didn’t know and couldn’t do. You have to do that in order to start the process of learning how to do things right, or in theological terms, how to “fulfill righteousness.”

After confession comes repentance. They are not the same thing. Confession says you’ve blown it or you don’t know how. Repentance says you mean to do something about it. People confess to me all the time about things they have no intention of changing. That doesn’t hack it with God. Repentance means starting off in a new direction. Repentance can be very hard, but it is never as hard as continuing to do the thing from which you are repenting. If you don’t know how to lovingly discipline your children, then take a class or get some counseling and become a better parent. If you don’t know how to balance your checkbook or plan for your retirement, then get some help from your banker or your broker. If you don’t know how to get over the huge fight you had with your mother last week or how to get past that nagging problem in your relationship with your spouse, then see a counselor or talk to your pastor.

Admitting you are wrong and then starting to learn how to be right are only possible when you know that you are forgiven for the wrongness of the past. Forgiveness is part of the set of laws that Jesus enacted in his baptism. If you are forever going to be held accountable for what you did or didn’t do in the past that you should or should not have done, then why change now? If there is no chance that you can move forward as you repent and learn the right way, that you’ll always be stuck where you are, hopelessly lost, then why start learning at all? Looking back, I suppose I could have kept that secretary and required her to take a crash course in word-processing. Whether it is in a relationship with someone you love, or your relationship with your job and your boss, or your relationship with your own self, you have to be able to forgive and move on and open the possibility of getting better. If you have always incessantly nagged your spouse, and you want to change, then your spouse has to give you a chance to do that, maybe many chances, or the relationship is over. If you need to learn a new skill at work, then your boss has to forgive your inability and give you a chance to learn that new skill. If you have always mistreated your body and now have years of inattention and abuse to make up for, you have to forgive yourself, and then start living a more healthy lifestyle. You see how that works.

The last dynamic principle in this equation has to do with power. The actual spiritual power that is required to confess, to repent, to forgive or be forgiven, and to then change a part of your life, is power that comes from God. Jesus already had that power, of course. But he made sure that you and I can have it, too. That’s what the Spirit is all about. To live in the Kingdom of God right now means that you are connected to the power of God. God’s Spirit brings power, the ability to get things done. On the human level, Jesus’ connection with God was a connection between human and divine, a connection that was established once sin was confessed and a new direction was set and the past was forgiven. When your spouse says, “I forgive you,” or your boss says, “It’s okay you don’t know how but now you’re going to learn” or you say to yourself, “I can’t change the past but I can change the future,” that is being open to actual spiritual power from God that can alight on you just as it did on Jesus. When you admit that you are where you don’t want to be, when you decide to go a different direction, and when you know that where you have been won’t be held against you, then you are released from the grip of the past and you are ready to receive new power.

In baptism, Jesus showed us that loving God has to do with confession, repentance, forgiveness, and renewal of life through the power of the Spirit of God. When you and I allow Jesus to be our mentor, our teacher, our leader, and when we actually follow in his footsteps and do the same things he did for us, then we enter the Kingdom from which he came. The first thing Jesus did for us was to break down the barrier between God and us. When that happens, we can become new people.

Amen.