Out of the Cocoon, when God Invites Change; Jesus’ Baptism

Let’s begin with a couple of personal interviews.

      Has anything changed in your life in the last five years?

      Have you had to find a new way to live?

      Are you in some way a new person?

Let me show you something. (Two high school photos of me) Do you recognize him?  It is I! The question is, is the person in the photo the same person as I or is he somebody else? I am not now that 16 or 17-year-old football player and yet I am the same person. On the one hand, it may simply be the process of getting older or it may be the process of becoming mature.

Here is my first dictum for the day: “You can get old without maturing, but you can never mature without growing older.”

Here is dictum number 2 for today: “You can change without maturing, but you can never mature without changing.”

Our biblical theme for this month is taken from Ephesians 4:15. The passage talks about the church as the Body of Christ and declares that every member is specially gifted within the body so that the church, the Body of Christ, can fulfill the purposes of Christ in this world.

Within this passage, there is one verse that I want to lift up.

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind

of doctrine….But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ….

We are talking about growing up in every way into Christ. We are talking about the journey to spiritual maturity.

Let me tell you a story. The man was about thirty years old. He was single. His father had died and the man had assumed responsibility for the care of his mother, his brothers and his sisters. He earned his living as a skilled handy-man. He had inherited his business from his father and no doubt had learned the necessary skills. The area in which he lived had a surplus of limestone and he had learned to use that limestone in the building of houses and he was a skilled craftsman with wood. He was a carpenter.

He was a faithful Jew, a man of the synagogue. He was also a man of the Bible, extraordinarily well versed in The Torah, the first books of our Bible, as well as the instruction of the rabbis and other scholars of his day.

He was also a man well versed in the affairs of his community. He knew the realities of the life of his neighbors. He knew their hopes and dreams and he knew their disappointments and struggles. He knew about the awful burdens that some bore and some of those burdens were his own.

Six days a week he got up and went to work in the shop. Six days a week he went to the work sites where houses were being built or remodeled or repaired. Six days a week he fixed things in his shop.

And six nights a week he went home to his mother and his younger brothers and sisters. Six nights a week he supervised the life at home and managed the affairs of the house.

Every Friday night he observed the Sabbath and every Saturday morning he went to the synagogue. 

Work and family and faith constituted the rhythms of his life. Those were his priorities. That provided the substance of his life.

And now he is 30 years old. The overwhelming hormonal changes of adolescence are behind him. The vocational questions of young adulthood are behind him, or so he thinks. The questions of “who am I?” and “what shall I do” are all behind him and he has settled into his adult life. It has all been settled, or has it?

Now we come to a mystery. Something happened to our friend and we do not know what. But something caused Jesus to go to the River Jordan where his cousin John was preaching and baptizing people and ask his cousin to baptize him.

And we know that the baptism was only the beginning. Following the baptism, he was led into a wilderness retreat where he prayed and where he also experienced temptation. We know what happened after that wilderness experience. He taught and healed in the villages of Galilee and then he went to Jerusalem where he was crucified as the King of the Jews.

What happened to Jesus at the age of 30? What caused this dramatic and world-changing transformation? 

We do not have a biography of Jesus nor do we have psychological or spiritual histories, but we can make a pretty good guess. God spent the first 30 years of Jesus’ life preparing him for the ministry that would change the world.

• That 12-year-old experience in the temple
• Adolescence and young adulthood
• Taking on the family business
• The loss of his father
• Caring for his mother and brothers and sisters
• Participation in the life of his community
• His study and worship in the synagogue
• His personal prayers, his personal conversations with God the Father

Each event led to another until God saw that he was ready to fulfill his purpose in this world. 

Now the hard question is, can we really learn anything from Jesus? It is clear that there will never be another “Savior” of the world. I do not believe that any other soul will ever match his perfect relationship with God. So what can we learn?

First, we can remember that only one person was ever called to be Jesus. I love the ancient Hasidic story about the rabbi who died and went to heaven. He was really worried about his first interview with God. Like every man that I have ever known, he felt like a failure and he was afraid that God would ask him why he had not been more like Moses or why he had not been more like Abraham. But when his appointment with God arrived, God only asked him one very hard question. “Why have you not been more like you?”

It is clear that God takes us from time to time and place to place and age to age in our journey to maturity. Like Jesus, we have times of relative calm that seem normal and then there are those seasons in which God clearly invites us to become somebody new and to assume new challenges and meet new opportunities and struggle with new difficulties.

I cannot help but think about the butterfly that emerges from the cocoon or chrysalis. Life in that cocoon must be very very safe. It has to be quiet and comfortable. And the emergence from the safety of that cocoon must be traumatic beyond description. It hardly seems fair to demand that the butterfly leave the safety of the cocoon to fly the skies as a butterfly. And yet it was created to be a butterfly, not a cocoon.

God has called us to grow towards maturity in Christ, to grow up in every way into Him. In the journey there are the quiet times, times of nearly invisible growth. And then there are the seasons of dramatic and sometimes traumatic transformation. It is all a part of the journey in which God invites you to be you, the you that God intended when you were born; the You that God sees living with him in heaven forever.

Jesus made a promise. He said that he would never leave us alone but that he would send a Counselor, an Advocate, a Companion to walk with us. That Advocate is the Holy Spirit of God and through it all, the quiet years and the dramatic ones, God walks with us in our journey to maturity.