Dr. King Was ALL WET!

For the next day or so we’ll all be very much reminded of both the achievements and the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He’s been gone long enough that, among the many lofty remembrances, we're likely to hear more about his clay feet.

We’ll be told that he was:
• reluctant to lead the Montgomery bus boycott
• hesitant about becoming president of the SCLC
• worried his opposing the Viet Nam war would dilute his message at home
• cautious with militant leaders like those in SNCC and the Black Panthers
• uneasy about supporting the sanitation workers in Memphis.
Of course, we may also be reminded of his darker side, as revealed by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance apparatus.

What’s most often left out of the larger-than-life King story, or the diss and trash King tales as well, is a central feature of his personal character. Martin Luther King, Jr., was baptized a Christian. He was ALL wet! His identity, his becoming, his personhood, was shaped by that claim.

I’m not talking about the claim King made, that Jesus Christ was his Lord and Savior. I’m talking about the claim God made on Dr. King. When the waters rushed over him and King’s pastor spoke the words of that ancient formula, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” that church community claimed with and for the boy King the promise God holds and makes for all of us. Namely, “You are my child, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

From that moment on what propelled Dr. King, despite his very human ambitions, aspirations, goals, doubts, fears, jealousies, worries, hopes, dreams, and sinfulness, was his understanding that before he was anything else, he was a beloved child of God. As such, Dr. King, like us, struggled to lean into the promise that God would never abandon him, and attempted to lean onto the promise that God would always find a way to lead and feed him.

See, God’s leading and God’s feeding called Dr. King, and calls each of us, to grow and to become the person God sees when God looks at us through the baptized Messiah Jesus, on whom the Spirit of God came to rest near the Jordan. I know we don’t usually talk this way about Jesus, about baptism, and about the Holy Spirit. That’s too bad.

See, most of us have been taught to think that what sets Christians, i.e., the baptized, apart from those who are not disciples of Jesus are the doctrines we say we believe. We reinforce that silly notion when we act as though being a Christian is mostly about remembering long ago persons, places, events and details that sound, frankly, rather absurd.

We seem more interested in demonstrating to the world that we can pass a quiz that asks:
• did the sky really open
• was the Spirit appearing as a buzzard, eagle, or dove
• how many were crucified on Golgotha with Jesus
• who found the empty tomb
• is Jesus’ really raised from the dead
• what does it mean to say Jesus is in the bread and wine?
Not only that, we seem to say that our passing the quiz is what God is most interested in. More than that, in our smugness, we encourage the world to think that because we can pass the quiz God will reward us by taking us to heaven when we die.

We don’t live in the time or place of Jesus. We live here and now. This time is after the walking Jesus, alive, dead and raised, is long gone. We live in the time that the Gospel of John tells us Jesus talked about when he said the things he did right before he died:
• I will not leave you orphans
• In a little while you will see me no longer
• Where I am going you cannot follow
• If I do not go the Advocate (Spirit) will not come.

We remember that it was God who sent the Spirit on Jesus, not to make him God, but to equip Jesus for his life-giving, freedom-bringing, home-making mission and ministry. Jesus’ baptism was the occasion and the encounter for his turning away from his own interests and turning toward God’s otherwise vision for the whole cosmos. So it was for Dr. King. So it is for us.

Baptism is still the way God makes God’s claim on us – enabling us to be ALL wet. Baptism is still the occasion and the encounter by which God invites us to turn away from our own interests and join God’s otherwise vision for the cosmos – to leave WET footprints in our wake. Baptism is still the way God’s Spirit comes to us and equips us to join God’s saving work, begun in Jesus – empowering us to be ALL wet.

Like as not we’ll walk our discipleship, as Dr. King did, with very human ambitions, aspirations, goals, doubts, fears, jealousies, worries, hopes, dreams, and sinfulness. We also come to our Baptism, like Dr. King and like Jesus, as those whom God chooses to love and accept even before we do anything.

Do you see that? Before Jesus:
• has completely left his old ways
• fights Satan’s temptations in the desert
• preaches, teaches, or works miracles
• dies on the cross
• is raised from the dead
God calls this Spirit-filled Jesus, my beloved; in whom I am well pleased.

Author Ann Lamott says, “God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay this way.” Baptism is our immersion into the amniotic fluids, those birth waters, by which God loves us out of staying inside our old ways and loves us into life in, with, and under God’s otherwise ways.

Living this way means we abide with Jesus as a branch abides (lives and brings forth fruit) in the vine. Living this way means we love one another as Jesus loves us (enough to lay down our life for the well being of another). Living this way means the world may not approve of our beliefs, nor applaud what we do because of what we believe If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world — therefore the world hates you. (John 15:18-19).

Jesus is no longer walking tall, and Dr. King is no longer walking at all. The only beloved ones on scene to live the abundant life Jesus came to make available, the only beloved ones still here to do even greater works than Jesus did, and the only ones left to walk ALL WET are us!

The clear and honest record of Dr. King’s and Jesus’ histories tells us that having walked in the Spirit throughout their lives, they each beheld a vision the night before they died. What lifted each of them up and carried them through the horror of the next day’s afternoon was their complete trust in the very talking God who spoke these words to Isaiah:
But now thus says the LORD,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
2When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
3For I am the LORD your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior (Isaiah 43:1-3).

This God, whose voice spoke in ways that the quietly praying Isaiah, Dr. King and Jesus heard, still speaks to us on whom the Spirit of God rests. In the quiet of our own hearts we know what waters God would have us pass through. In the quiet of our souls, gathered together here, we know what fire God needs us to walk through.

We know we’re neither movement leaders like Dr. King nor messiahs like Jesus. Still, Spirit led and Spirit fed, God has laid a claim on the smallness of our beings to grow into the grandeur and the greatness that belongs to all those whose walking ALL WET, by grace through faith, keep on Sharin’ Plenty Good News to all God’s last, lost, least, and little whom God sent Jesus and his disciples to set the captives free!