Turn Around

Turn around. 

Our scripture today is, in many ways, an appropriate image for the beginning of this New Year. An invitation into being born again, to step into the wonder of the unknown, to shed and let go of the old, to dream and to hope. 

It can feel like a liminal space, a threshold place – like an airport – where you’re not really in one time zone or another but juxtaposed and suspended – where the past is slowly but surely giving way to the future of what could be and is possible. 

Turn around. 

In other words, this time feels like a search for hope and in many ways that’s what we’re invited into during this season of Epiphany – a time to watch for God’s divinity enfleshed in the one who became incarnate, equipped with eyeballs and armpit hair and yet wholly divine.

Signs the magi once followed long ago. 

It’s a strange season, perhaps stranger and more unfamiliar to us than other seasons of the Christian calendar because it makes us ask… what’s the point of watching for Christ’s divinity? What difference does it make? And what constitutes divinity?

These, however, were not questions that were asked in our scripture today. For them divinity was directly related to their hope, their dream and their desire for a Messiah. They were sniffing, listening, watching, tasting and feeling for signs of justice, signs of peace, signs of liberation. For they knew no one else could do this work, no one else could accomplish the liberation they were seeking in the midst of unfathomable hardship and oppression. Only God could. And so, searching for these particular signs of a deliverer’s divinity was pivotal not just to confirm their ideologies, but to save their very existence. 

And we get a glimpse of their seeking, searching and yearning for the messiah in the first verses of our scripture in Luke: they were a people filled with great expectation, searching for who could be the Messiah. And then they saw someone doing the work, baptizing the people and, naturally, begun to question whether it was John. Intuiting their thinking, John corrects them by pointing them to one morepowerful who will baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And then John shares an image of the kind of baptism this Messiah will give. His winnowing fork will clear the threshing floor, he will gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. 

A baptism you or I might hesitate to participate in but a baptism that does not deter the crowds. For this is the kind of Messiah they have been waiting for to bring about the kind of salvation and liberation they were desperate for. And, if we’re honest with ourselves this is the kind of Messiah we are waiting for too. 

It may not look like we need a saviour as much as these crowds did – our lives are not in imminent danger, we are not on the brink of starvation, and we save ourselves quite easily, thank you very much. 

But we do. We need a Messiah and we need the kind of baptism Jesus is offering too. One that will burn the chaff of our lives – the parts of our lives that do not bring life so that we might truly experience what it means when Christ says we will have new life and have it abundantly. This, after all, is what baptism is for. A turning from our egos, our stubbornness, our obstinance and our grasping so that we might freely fall into our true identities and our true relationship in Christ: a Christ whose divinity is wrapped up in bringing a justice, a peace and a liberation we cannot accomplish on our own. 

And there is something about how dying to our death-mechanisms necessitates this new life.This is, after all, the story of all the people in the Bible, from Eve and Adam to Paul the Apostle.People who were continually invited to turn around and to turn towards the God of new life. And this is at the heart of our first reading today, in the book of Isaiah. A book filled with prophetic rebuke of God’s people – people who had turned their backs on God and turned towards arrogance and injustice instead. Isaiah doesn’t beat around the bush: he calls them out on their obstinance, on their self-righteousness and the ways that were leading them towards hardened hearts, closed minds and division. And it is here in our scripture where Isaiah reminds them who created them, who redeemed them, who led them from treacherous waters and unquenchable fires and who they belong to. 

Turn around. 

A phrase so simple and yet strikingly hard to do. We get set in our ways, we are influenced by the way in which our society, social media personas and world leaders resist this very notion of turning from our false selves. Only two weeks into the New Year and it was not hard to find signs of this obstinance… from the continual effects of climate change leading to the devastating fires during what should be L.A.s winter to the UN findings into the violation of the human rights treaty in Nauru, it is clear we are still grasping onto our death mechanisms, wreaking havoc not only on the environment, not only on our neighbours, not only ourselves but the God whose incarnation is wrapped up in all of it. This is why we need baptism but, more importantly, this is why we need to remember and embody our baptisms if and once we have been baptized. So that we might continue to turn from death towards new life, not once but again and again and again through the power of the Holy Spirit and through the way of fire. For there is much chaff that is holding us from believing and becoming our true selves in right relationship with God and right relationship with the whole of creation – something we might hope and dream about whenever January 1^st comes around, whenever we wade into the waters of Port Phillip Bay, whenever we huddle around a campfire, whenever we remember the Red Sea, or whenever we recount the burning bush. 

For our scriptures are not passive stories but urgent calls to action.

And here’s the thing: this is why we are watching for signs of Christ’s divinity during the next few weeks. Because in looking for signs of Christ’s divinity, we remember what St Athanasius once said: that God became human so humans could become God. This does not mean that we think of ourselves of Gods, but rather, through our baptisms we turn towards and participate in both the body and divinity of Christ – a body with eyeballs and armpit hair yet all wrapped up in the divine work of justice, peace and liberation of the whole of creation. 

So turn around, watch for and wade into Christ’s divine work not just this New Year but now and always.