Robert Quinn is an organizational psychologist who helps corporations change.

After Robert gave a talk on change, a man raised his hand and identified himself as being from a particular factory. It was one Robert knew well. Historically, the factory had been a place of poor performance and continual unrest. Everything about that place was bad. Then a complete turnaround took place. Management moved from the traditional assumption of control and distrust to a place of teamwork and cooperation.

Nearly everything shifted and the factory led not only the company, but the industry in excellence. The man who asked the question was very proud. Yet his question was, “How do you empower people when the corporation does everything it can to kill innovative efforts?”

Robert asked him to provide an example, and so the man did.

He told a story of a crisis that occurred on the shop floor. People from all over the plant willingly pitched in and stayed after-hours to solve the problem. Everyone got hungry, so the plant manager bought pizza. The next day, the finance guy stormed in red-faced and said he wasn’t paying for some after-hours party.

Robert stated, “What you’re telling me is that you have a highly innovated, highly successful factory that is different from other factories in the corporation. You’re regularly confronted by the pressure to conform to rules and regulations that would cause you to become a very ordinary factory. The corporation keeps trying to wear you down and make you ordinary, like the other places?”

The man agreed that Robert had understood the problem, so Robert advised the man to “give up. Give the company what it wants: become like the other places.”

The man said the advice was crazy and he wouldn’t follow it because it wasn’t the right thing to do. To which Robert said, “Good! There’s a high level of satisfaction in achieving excellence. There is also a great deal of pain involved. Every day, you meet some form of resistance, some force that would wear you down… Excellence is a form of deviance. When you perform beyond the norm, you disrupt the systems.”[1] Robert essentially advised him to “keep doing what you’re doing.”

John was about excellence. He wasn’t following what all the other religious leaders were doing. He had a clear vision and wanted the people to return to excellence. So people wondered if John the Baptist was the Messiah. He comes telling people to STOP doing what they are doing. They are not performing beyond the norm. The tribes of Israel, called to be God’s people in the world are failing in their calling. John asks them to repent. He tries to remind them to throw off the stuff that was keeping them from their mission: to be God’s people in the world. To be excellent.

In many congregations, repentance has been reduced to feeling sorry for personal moral transgressions. John isn’t just after the personal but the whole Jewish religion and society. He is after the wider ways in which the community is selling out their mission. He even calls out King Herod, and that’s what gets him arrested and eventually beheaded.

John hears people wonder if he was the Messiah. John answers, “No. I baptize you with water but the one that comes after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

In the Gospel of Luke, John has already been arrested when the baptism of Jesus takes place. The text reads, “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized, too.”

In Luke, it doesn’t say John baptizes Jesus. It does in Matthew and Mark, but not in Luke. In Luke, Jesus is just with the people. God is a face in the crowd.

Part of us must be shocked. No! This is God! God must be set apart! John MUST have baptized him. This is Jesus we’re talking about. He’s excellent, not like the rest of us regular folk. If we’re thinking like that, we’re missing the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is called “Emmanuel” which means “God With Us.” Why is it shocking that Jesus would have just been a face in the crowd, baptized by another face in the crowd (or by you or me)?

Jesus is baptized in community. He is actively joining a social group who is actively seeking God. This community is trying to turn their lives around and live as God would have them live. In spite of all the pressures to conform: to consume, to treat their neighbor horribly, women as property, and people of different races, creeds, party affiliations as enemies who aren’t human… well, not like we are anyway… Jesus is baptized into such a community. A community that says to everyone, “You are God’s Beloved, in whom God is well pleased!” The community that says to the outcast, stranger, foreigner, unloved, orphan, widow and widower, the youth, the aged, the middle-aged, the chronically ill and the spectacularly health, “You are God’s beloved.”

It is fitting for Jesus to be baptized into such a community because God is one of us. God is with us. And God IS Community with the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer. Baptism is never a private thing. It’s always public. It is a community promising to live differently than others; to be excellent to each other and their neighbor. Baptism is a communal act of naming and claiming one another to live into the Good News of God.

Joan Osborne sang the song, “What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin’ to make his way home”

I love that song. It’s all about trying to recognize Christ in our neighbor and in ourselves. It is a song that awakens the imagination to picture God with us and for us. Just a face in the crowd. A guy in the factory, a woman on the bus, a homeless infant born on the side of the road.

What if we repented of taking each other for granted? What if we thought the Holy Spirit could fall upon others if we spend time with them, listen to their stories and lay hands on them like the disciples did to the community in Samaria?

In our baptism, we are claimed by God and by a community. We are beloved and named and claimed. We aren’t called to settle for the same tribal lines or status quo. We are called to be restless at injustice, to cry out in pain when our neighbor is hurt, to mourn when creation is harmed. We do not work in the factory of misery that produces mediocrity, tribalism, and death. Our factory is more than that, higher than that, what should be the industry standard.

Yet living this way, you will encounter resistance. There will be the “remember-whens.” I remember when you were little and got into trouble. I remember when you were in trouble in college. I remember when you didn’t go to church, now all of a sudden you’re going? Who are you to go to church? Who are you to go to Costa Rica? Who are you to pray? Who are you to demand justice for the oppressed?

Who am I? Who am I not to?! I’ve been named and claimed. I have a multitude at my back. I have been nurtured by so many folks in my community. The question is, who are you to stop me? Everyone else will call you a goodie-two-shoes and try to get you to live like them, but ours is a different calling. We are to acknowledge the tension, and be excellent anyway. We know where we come from, but we’re trusting God anyway. We know we don’t even have the wheel, God is in charge of this. I wonder if Jesus drive automatic or manual? Trick question, he drives Emmanuel!

That was a horrible dad joke, but I said it anyway… which reminds me of a poem entitled “Anyway” is written on the wall in Mother Teresa’s home for children in Calcutta. Mother Teresa who is considered a standard of excellence through the Christian church, both Protestants and Catholics look to her and this poem is attributed to her:

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.
In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.[2]

You might feel like you are just a face in the crowd. Yes. You are. But look at the mission of this crowd! Yes, you are a face in the crowd. And so is God. And that is some pretty excellent news. God meets us in our everyday lives, in the concreteness of our place and time… not in an ethereal, disembodied realm of ideas, feelings, or spirituality. But here. Now. With us. Amen.

Works Cited

[1] Robert Quinn. Deep Change: Discovering the leader within. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1996. 174-176.

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1139478-people-are-often-unreasonable-irrational-and-self-centered-forgive-them-anyway

Joan Osborne’s Song can be found by clicking here.