Prayer, Part 1: Being with Jesus in the In-Between (Luke 3:1-3, 15-17, 21-22)

First UMC of Pocatello

January 12, 2025

Baptism of the Lord

Luke 3:1-3, 15-17, 21-22

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There was an in-between time. A passage, very much like a rest note in a musical composition. Purposeful, patient, preparatory. It was the time between Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River and the remarkable vision he received of heaven opening and the Spirit descending and his Father affirming his belovedness.

Luke is the only one who writes the story this way, whose Gospel tells us about the in-between. Matthew and Mark, they pack all of it in, the baptism from below and the gifts of power and love from above forming a single vivid scene. “And just as he was coming up out of the water,” Mark says, “he saw the heavens torn apart” (1:10). Matthew agrees: “As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened” (3:16). But Luke slows things down a bit: “Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, heaven was opened” (3:20).

There it is, the in-between time. On one side, baptism. On the other, anointing and the blessing. And in between: Prayer.

Prayer is the only spiritual practice that Jesus’ disciples ever asked him to teach them how to do. “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1), that’s what they asked, and they asked it after they had spent many days witnessing the consistency, intimacy, and power of his prayers.

They were in between. He had called them to follow him, and they followed, but they were not yet all that they would be. They had realized over time that prayer was the foundation of Jesus’ life – his anchor, his center. The truth he spoke, the compassion he exercised, the healing and light he brought to others – it all flowed from prayer. And so at last they came to him and named their own deep sense of need for prayer to be a part of their lives, too.

None of us are strangers to in-between times, those critical passages that bridge our initial responses to God’s activity in our lives and our becoming fully grounded in God’s pleasure and power.

I’ve experienced several in my own life already. I was baptized as a baby, so there was a record but no personal memory. It took many years, until I was about 13, to begin having experiences that woke me to the reality that God was there and wanted something to do with me. If I’m honest, my vocational journey continues to have in-between quality to it. I’ve felt called to ministry as a pastor as far back as high school, but I still resist being fully anchored in God’s unconditional love for me and power through me, often for reasons I’m not aware of in the moment.

I wonder what in-betweens you might be navigating right now. Maybe you got baptized or you joined the church; you started reading the Bible or you started serving in leadership; you sensed that God was calling you to something new – a new perspective, a new vocation, a new spiritual practice – and you took some first steps; or you’ve started a marriage; you’ve become a parent; maybe you’ve gathered great courage to step through the doors of a church for the first time in ages, maybe for the first time in your life. Whatever it is, you’ve had some kind of beginning, an initial response to the movement of God, like Jesus going to the wilderness. It was real and good and true, but no you sense you’re in an in-between time.

There’s more to be had there. More riches of love and power to unlock and unleash. God is deeply pleased with you and wants you to live your life out of that deep sense of love, but you’re not yet grounded in that love. You’re not in touch with the delight God takes in you or with your anointing. Since we are imperfect creatures, the in-betweens are inescapable. The critical thing is that we can respond to them in different ways, and how we respond matters.

For example, sometimes we respond to the in-between as if it is a betrayal. Imagine Jesus coming up out of the waters of baptisms, getting dried off, and, after waiting around for a while, deciding that, since there was no immediate vision of heaven, no obvious spiritual breakthrough, that his intuition had been wrong, that God had tricked or abandoned him, and he’d better get on home to Nazareth and be much more guarded when the next opportunity presented itself. Sometimes the space between beginning and fulfillment devastates us, and we throw in the towel and decide it was all meaningless – those early whispers of grace, those first steps. And we just sort of fade away from what once seemed so promising.

But at other times we take the in-between to be a false destination. We convince ourselves that the initiation without the full grounding in love and power is all that there must be, the best it’s going to get. We try to forge and forge an identity and vocation out of the in-between, out of some element that’s in the vicinity of true faith but not essential to it: skills, knowledge, volunteerism, piety. Others might even admire us for this. But deep down we’re ashamed, and getting by on our own power and self-justification makes us legalist, judgmental, and envious or bitter toward others.

Jesus does not want us to run away from the in-betweens, to count them as failure. He does not want us to make an identity out of emptiness and absence. He wants us to come and be with him in in the in-betweens. He is already there, waiting for us to join him. And he’s showing us how to be in the in-between. He’s teaching us to pray. More than that, he’s calling us to rest with him in his own patient prayers as he waits for heaven to open and the Spirit to come down and the Word of love to be spoken unmistakenly to him.

In his new book Passions of the Soul, Anglican bishop Rowan Williams says that Christian life means being “[p]laced together in the place of Jesus…[and] the place of Jesus is the place of the one to whom the Father has eternally said Yes.” That’s really what this great baptismal story wants us to see. Jesus is the Beloved. And, at least as Luke tells it, that belovedness was fully revealed after the drama of the baptism, as Jesus quietly, hopefully, and persistently prayed. When we join Jesus in prayer in our own in-betweens, we will hear that eternal Yes declared to our hearts. That Yes has been secured for us by the Christ who waits with us. Which means it is with joy, with hope, with great anticipation and tenacity that we can come to him and say, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Let me try and make it plain: If you are here today, and you have heard that God loves you unconditionally but you feel far from that love, Jesus will wait with you in prayer and teach you how to pray – and the love will come.

If you are here today, and you have sensed that God wants to work wonders of love through you, that you have a purpose, but you feel far from the presence and power of the Spirit, Jesus will wait with you in prayer and teach you how to pray – and the power will come.

As the scripture says, the one “who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion” (Phil. 1:6).

Lord, teach us to pray.

And as it is for us as individuals, so it is for us as a community. In fact, I think we as a congregation are in an in-between time. We have made several good beginnings, we’ve responded to the movements of the Spirit. On the moral plane, we have become a reconciling community, honoring the full humanity of our LGBTQ siblings; we’ve made a public stand against the Death Penalty; we’ve provided for local childcare access. On the programmatic side, we’ve restarted classes for kids; we’ve got a full nursery; we’re empowering people to preach; we’re opening our building as a community resources and participating in local service. We even worked together to reimagine our worship space so that it more clearly reflects the nearness and kindness of the One we worship.

These are just a few things that come to mind, all good beginnings.

But there’s more, isn’t there? God wants us anchor us, as a community, in a deep trust. God wants us to know that we, together, are God’s Beloved Family, and that we will be cared and provided for, that God takes pleasure in us.

And God wants to send us the Holy Spirit so that we can love and serve with power, power exercised humbly, gently, patiently – and yet power that brings about healing; power that creates spaces of freedom and forgiveness; power that challenges injustice without bitterness or rage; power that feels the joy of one of our members as joy for us all, the pain of one of our members as all our pain; power that overflows and expresses itself as creativity, beauty, abundance; power to let go of old comforts and try new things; power that has something to do, something to say, about the overwhelming poverty, loneliness, and anxiety in which so many of our neighbors in Pocatello live.

Luke, the author of the Gospel, also wrote the book of Acts. And there are many ways that the two books mirror each other. Just as Jesus prayed in between his baptism and his vision of heaven, the early church also waited in prayer for their own spiritual anointing.

In Acts chapter 1, Luke tells us that after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, Jesus’ followers gathered in Jerusalem. “They all joined together constantly in prayer” (Acts 1:14). And on the morning of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out upon in the sound of rushing wind and in the signs of tongues of fire, they were “all together in one place” – praying.

May we – individually and together – ask Jesus to teach us to pray. May our in-between times be full of purpose and communion. We are God’s beloved children. We are God’s chosen instrument. Until we know it for ourselves, may we abide with Jesus in the prayer in-between, patiently and with trust.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Amen.