January 9, 2011
Submission in 2011 - Matthew 3:13-17
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI am sure that you have made a few new years’ resolutions this year. Most of us do, anyway, and most of the time they revolve around things that we should do: lose weight, exercise more, daily devotions…, or should not do: quit smoking, quit cussing, quit eating too much, etc… Needless to say, submission is probably not towards the top of your list. If it is, then it’s something that you want to stop. We aren’t crazy about the idea of submission. I performed the wedding ceremony of Johnny and Allison Burgess last week and one of the things absent in their vows was anything about submission. We do not like submission. In fact, our country was founded in large part upon a refusal to submit. We were tired of submitting to Great Britain and so we declared our independence. Submission in some ways is the opposite of independence, and we like independence.
Yet the very first thing that Jesus does in Matthew’s Gospel is to submit. Jesus’ baptism is recorded in all four Gospels. Matthew’s version is the only one, though, to have this conversation with John, or to have this clear sense of submission. John baptizes Jesus in all of the Gospels, but only here does John hesitate, for what seems like a good reason. “I need to be baptized by you,” John said to Jesus. And yet, it’s not about John’s needs. John’s needs, in this case, are different than what God desires. In some ways, John is guilty of the very thing about which he warned us just verses earlier. “Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” he said earlier, or “follow God’s will and not your own.” Yet here, John seems worried about his will. And even though Jesus could perfectly agree with John, Jesus is concerned about God’s will alone, about the Kingdom. Throughout Matthews’ entire Gospel and Jesus’ entire life, that’s all Jesus was concerned about. Jesus submitted himself perfectly to God, to the Kingdom, to righteousness. “Not my will,” Jesus would pray the night before his death, “but yours be done.” By submitting to it, Jesus became the epitome of it.
Besides all of that, whether we submit is out of the question, is it not? We all submit to something. The question is what we submit to. I have been reading with interest the recent Charlotte Observer series on Type II diabetes. That kind of diabetes runs through my family, and I once thought that it was unique to my family. According to this article, though, every family has type II diabetes in it, because every family struggles with weight. George Will recently wrote that since 1980, the incidence of Type II diabetes has quadrupled, while obesity has doubled. You might recall an invention in the early 1980s that coincides with that statistic and that transformed American family life and health, the microwave oven. Food is easier to prepare now, and easier to consume, and we’ve gotten really good at both. Caloric intake has increased 22% since 1980.
We have also gotten really good at buying things. Like eating, buying things has become easier. All you need is a Walmart and a piece of plastic. A friend of mine once tried to get a credit card for his dog, and came dangerously close to succeeding. Like Type II diabetes, consumer debt has gone through the roof.
We also love our technology. In fact, I got a blackberry for Christmas. You may have noticed that I have sent you an email from it, which officially makes me cool. Once upon a long time ago there was nothing to do on a cold winter night but sit by a fire and visit. Then came the advent of the radio, when we would all sit around a radio and listen to one of those shows. I’m too young to remember any of that. I’m not too young, however, to remember sitting around a TV and watching Hee-Haw. Now, instead of one TV per family, there’s one TV per family member (or some other technological device like a blackberry) and we can spend all night together as a family and never once talk to one another.
“American life” writes Will, “resembles ‘a giant all-you-can-eat buffet’ offering ‘calories, credit, sex, intoxicants and other invitations to excess.” We have submitted to all of that. We have submitted to the wrong thing. We have mastered the wrong thing. That’s what submitting is, isn’t it? The more we submit to something, the more we master it, and the more it masters us. That’s one of the great ironies of submission. Jesus was the epitome of righteousness, the God of righteousness, because he submitted perfectly to it. A four-star general in the army gets four stars not because he defies the army but because he submits to it. If you’re going to get better at being a Christian, then you have to submit to it more, and more, and more. Unlike Burger King, God does not always do it like you do it. So you have to submit.
So what are you submitting to in 2011? If you’re anything like me, you’re submitting to lots of different things. I am submitting to my family. I’ve got a busy family life that requires my submission. I am submitting to my work. We have a lot of good plans for our Church and I want to help those plans along. I’m submitting to exercise. I want to be a good steward of my body, and I feel close to God when my heart rate goes up. I am submitting to growing my mind. God gave me a good mind and I intend to cultivate it and worship God with it. And, while I’m at it (I may as well come clean), I’m submitting to me and my stuff. I love my stuff. I love my way of life. I love my money. I love my desires. I love me, and sometimes I find it very hard to submit my love of me to my love of God.
Where does God fit in the picture? Is God even in the picture, or is God on the side of it? That’s a great place to put God, by the way, on the side, where you have him if you need him, but he doesn’t get in the way. Discipleship, though, is about putting God central to everything else, about submitting everything to God. What about work? That’s always a big one. What about money? That’s also a big one. What about our time, or our passions and (here’s a big one) our thoughts. And here’s another big one: how do you submit only one of you to so many of it? You know what I mean.
God ultimately submitted to us. God became one with us in Jesus Christ and continues to come to us in the Holy Spirit. That’s what the Cross is all about. That’s what Baptism is all about. And, it’s also about submitting ourselves to God. It’s like a wedding ceremony with God. “I am your God and you are my people.” We hear that all the time in the Bible. We also hear it in baptism. If you shorten it, or simplify it, it says this: “I am yours, and you are mine.” It’s kind of like a love letter, like a wedding. It requires submission. It’s easy to conceptualize, but difficult to live.
Johnny and Allison Burgess are about the same age now as Leah and I were when we got married. I remember writing a letter to Leah from Waco, Texas about a year before our wedding. I was moving down to Texas, and this was my first night in Texas. In fact, I was driving to Fort Hood the next day for the first time. I had my nifty little laptop with me and I wrote her a letter telling her, the expert that I was, what I thought was the key to marriage. The funny thing is, it was pretty accurate. It essentially was that I would submit my needs to her needs. That was the gist of it. I understood that very well at the time. Unfortunately for both of us, I have not lived it very well, certainly not as well as I thought I would. And yet, if my marriage, or any marriage, is going to get better, that’s what it’s going to take.
And that’s what we have to do with God, submit. It does not just happen, you know. That’s where I had it wrong when I tied the knot. I thought it would be a little more natural than it is. What’s natural is submitting to me. I’m really good at that. Yet we’ve got to submit to God. We’re ordaining and installing a new set of officers in two weeks. Their job is not to figure out what you want. If they were in Washington, then that would be case, but there’re in the Church. Their job is to submit solely to what God wants, even if it interferes with what you want. That’s what you elected them to do. That’s what you’re going to elect me to do after this service (at least I hope you do).
I’ve been the pastor here for almost three years. That’s hard to believe, isn’t it? It’s interesting when I look back on that time. If in 2008 I could have looked into the future and seen what we’d be doing in 2011, what would I have felt? I wonder how I’ll answer that in 2012, next year at this time. So here’s the deal. I want us to be very intentional about submitting to God in 2011. I’ll keep up with this, I promise. Did we fail or did we succeed in submitting to God? The President gives his State of the Union Address in a couple of weeks, where he lays out his agenda. Well this is my agenda. This is our agenda. It was Jesus’ agenda, too: To Submit to God in All That We Do. If by 2012 we can answer that more affirmatively than we do now, then I’ll be a happy camper. And, by the way, we all made a few vows once upon a time, at a particular service in a Church. Maybe our parents made them for us but we later accepted them for ourselves. We also got a bath at that service. Most of us had not the foggiest notion of what was going on then, and we still aren’t certain, but we’ve grown in it. We’ve grown into our baptism and we have become certain of this: God has kept his vows. We’ve got to keep our vows. We’ve got to submit to God, now and forever.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
