Will you pray with me?  Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts
be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

It was a remarkable day.  It seemed like everyone in the world had gathered there.  The rich and the poor were there, the young and the old, whole families with little kids.  Tax collectors and soldiers, even, had left their respective posts and jobs and come out to hear the exhortations and be inspired by, finally, some good news.  And the religious authorities were there, too, with their long robes and holy expressions, ready as ever to comment on the proceedings.

The people were filled with expectation.  Before some, a whole new future stretched wide and glowing, a new age of righted wrongs and second chances and hopes long-dead now resurrected and dancing.  Before others, a more somber picture emerged as they wondered at the madness they were hearing, and expected no end to the mischief the gathered people would wreak if they believed it.

But there was no stopping it.  The ballots were cast, the votes were in and counted, and Deval Patrick would be inaugurated the 71^st Governor of Massachusetts.  It was a remarkable day.  At the morning interfaith prayer service at the Old South Meeting House attended and led by religious leaders from across the state, at the first-ever outdoor swearing-in of the first-ever black Massachusetts governor, at the inaugural ball attended by thousands that night, the people were filled with expectation.  It was a big start.

There is a big start in today’s story from Luke, too: the baptism of Jesus and the beginning of his ministry.

This episode serves as Luke’s epiphany, or revelation, the moment in his story when the truth of Jesus is revealed to the reader and all those with ears to hear.  Now, Jesus’ baptism is recounted in all four of the Gospels, along with the descent of the Spirit and the proclamation from God, but Luke’s story is unique in one way.  In the other three Gospels, the proclamation of Jesus’ identity by a voice from the heavens comes immediately as he is rising from the waters of his baptism.  As those guys tell it, you can imagine water still dripping from his beard and Jesus still wiping it from his eyes when the Spirit in form like a dove falls upon him.  But not Luke.  As Luke tells it, there is a pause between the time of his baptism and the time of the Spirit’s coming.  Listen again: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.””  How long Jesus was praying after his baptism and before God’s voice thundered from the heaven we don’t know; it could have been anything from a split second to a year, but a pause there was, and it’s the pause I’d like to invite you to enter with me.

I like Luke’s version of the story because of that pause.  It’s truer to my experience than the others are.  Take what we’ve done today in baptizing Charlie, for instance.  Here at Old South, we don’t baptize babies because of some original sin that needs to be cleansed and leaves upbaptized babies in danger of Hell.  For us, baptism is a promise to Charlie and to his family about how we will treat him, what we will do for him, how we will be with him, and what we will expect of him and them in return.  It is a welcome, an initiation and a birth into this family.  It is a beginning.

Likewise with Jesus.  If Jesus was without sin as the creeds and the doctors of the church tell us, then his baptism must have been, like Charlie’s, the marker of a new beginning, a birth into a new way of being, the start of something big and something new: his ministry.  And then, Luke tells us, there was the pause, the time between the initiation and the time we find out the truth of who Jesus is and will be.  And so it is with Charlie.  Today marks the beginning of his growth as a Christian and another step in his growth as a person.  There is much we can say, and have said, about him already: he is a child of God, and made in God’s image; that we love him and will love him; that he is our brother.  But the fullness of who he is, of who he will turn out to be when the deep truth of him is made known by his life and by his actions—that is yet to be seen.  Whether all our hopes for him, all our expectations, will be fulfilled, is yet to be known.  For you see, we’re in the pause, the time between the initiation and the knowing, the time between the beginning and the fulfillment of all Charlie will be.

Which is why we made the promises we did when we were baptizing him.  We know that as the church, as his church, we have a role to play in his development, in his education, in his protection and upbringing, in his life.  So we promised to play and live that role for him the best we can, here in the pause.  And friends, if we’re gonna do that well, then we’d better take Jesus’ example as we do it.  We’d better be praying.  We’d better be talking to God, and listening to God, and sitting with God.  We’d better be working together, and loving together, and listening to God together as a church all the way through.  And with him, with all our children and all our members, we won’t just sit back and wait to find out his identity.  We will seek to shape it.  We will teach him, tell him something of who he is, and what we believe, and what we have found of God and God’s love in the world.  We will walk with him, and work with him, and be shaped by him as well.  And then, in the fullness of time, we will discover together who Charlie finally is, whom we have helped to make him, and we trust that it will be someone in whom God is well pleased.]

This past Thursday, we initiated a new governor, a new lieutenant governor, and a new government.  It wasn’t a baptism, to be sure.  But it was an initiation, a beginning full of promise and promises, and positively humming with expectation.  And now we find ourselves in the pause.

As we are with Charlie, as Jesus was in Luke, we are in the time between the start and the fulfillment, the entrance and the evaluation, between initiation and epiphany.  We do not really know how this governor, or this administration, will turn out.  Will our expectations prove true?  Will our fears?  What, in the end, will be revealed about Deval and Tim and their government?  And just how exactly should we, good citizens and Christians all, act as we wait to find out?

That last is a question that is not always easy to answer, and one on which good and faithful people and churches differ.  What is the role of this church—of any church—in the public square, in the halls of the State House, in…politics?

Well, I hope it won’t surprise you to hear me say that my hope for the answer to that question is not that we should just sit around and see what happens in the end.

My answer to that question is first that we will do what Jesus did in the pause between his initiation and epiphany: we will pray.  We will gather, week after week after week and more besides, as we have lo, these three hundred thirty eight years, and we will worship God, and we will pray.  We will pray for ourselves, and for our families, for our Commonwealth and our nation.  We will call out for transformation and for guidance.  We will pray for the world, and for God’s sweet and holy spirit to come down on it and make it new.

But we won’t stop there.  We will do for the Governor, and his administration, and all the Commonwealth, what we will do for Charlie: we will shape them, and we will teach them.

When they talk economics, we will tell them that Jesus preferred the poor to the rich and that he himself was homeless and out of work.  We’ll remind them that the Sabbath was created to protect workers from exploitative bosses and everybody from the incessant drive for wealth.  We’ll remember that God sent Moses to talk to the Egyptian head of state and advocate on behalf of the poor and oppressed, and we will do the same.

When they vote on gay marriage, we’ll remind them of God’s preferential option for the outcast.  We’ll tell them that God is still speaking, and that God created us in God’s image, and said that it is not good for us to be alone.

When immigration is on the docket, we’ll tell them about the Israelites wandering in the desert, about the Good Samaritan, who was a foreigner, about Abraham and Joseph in far lands, and about Israel in exile.  We’ll remind them of God’s call to hospitality as an act of justice, and about entertaining angels unawares.

When they talk of war, or the violence in Roxbury and Dorchester and Mattapan, we’ll remind them about God’s call to beat swords into ploughshares, and who it is that we call the Prince of Peace.

When prisons are the order of the day, we’ll teach them that Jesus said that showing kindness to prisoners is like showing it to God, that with our God you can always come home, and that we are the people of the second chance, wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

When elder care, when children and education come up, we will tell them that our God told us to take care of the least, and the last, and the lost, and to honor our fathers and our mothers.

And when they debate the environment, or global warming, we will tell them about how when the earth was formed, God called it good, and made us its stewards.

We will work with our partners in the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, in the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry, in the City Mission Society, at Pine Street in and Women’s Lunch Place and a hundred other organizations, and together we will seek to shape the future of this Commonwealth into the future God would have it be.

By our votes, by our words, and by the living of our lives, we will tell them what we have seen and what we have heard of our God and our God’s hope for the world.  We will be humble, but we will be loud.  We will listen to others’ truths, but we will not refrain from speaking our own.  We will not impose our beliefs, but we will vote our values.  When there is discourse, we will speak—gently but unashamedly—as Christians.  We will live as people who seek to love before they fear.  We will live as people who have hope.

In the end, whether those who were inaugurated and initiated on Thursday create something that is beloved and well-pleasing to God is not up to us alone, but it is ours to strive for, in the life of politics just as surely as in the lives of our members.  For here in the pause between the baptism and the final word, we are the Christmas church, called to birth God to the world.  We are the epiphany church, called to reveal the light of God to the world.  We are the church of God’s son, the Beloved.  And our work is just begun. 

Amen.