It’s counterintuitive, the Christian life. If you want to live forever, you have to die to self. To grab for salvation, you have to let go of your grip on the world. If you want to enter the kingdom of God, you must become somehow as small as a child. If you want to be wise, you have to be a fool for Christ. And if you want to be great, you have to be a servant. The way up is down.

It may just be a matter of perspective, though. Our own Southwest Airlines pilot, Captain Jon Whitten, tells me that if you are flying a plane, you pull back on the yoke, or the stick, and the houses on the ground get smaller—you will go up. And logically, if you push down, the houses get bigger—you go down. Ah, but if you are flying upside down, with an eye toward heaven, so to speak, everything is reversed. Now if you want to go down, you pull up, and if you want to go up, you press down.

Matthew, like all the Gospel writers, tells us about the upside-down nature of the kingdom of God in his Gospel. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. And Blessed are those that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. These are just a few of Jesus’ beatitudes, but they give us a picture of his approach to life. And it’s an approach he himself lived for us as an example.

As the first act of his coming into public view as the messiah, Jesus approaches John the Baptist to be baptized by him. He goes down from the hills of Galilee to the River Jordan. John can’t believe it. And we wonder about it ourselves. John protests that Jesus should be baptizing him. But that’s because John thinks of baptism only as a way for sinners to have their sins washed away. If Jesus doesn’t have any sins to wash away, he ought to be the one doing the baptizing of others. And in one sense he will be the one baptizing. He will baptize with the Holy Spirit. And we’ll look more at that in a moment.

For now, look at Jesus. He is the only begotten Son of God, the eternal second person of the Trinity, and the one through whom and for whom all the worlds were made. How much he knew that, of course, during the time of his earthly life is debatable by theologians. I side with those who say that the Son of God emptied himself in becoming human to such an extent that in being like us in all ways, he had to learn who he was the way we all do. In other words, Jesus was not lying there in the manger looking up at shepherds and wise men and Mary and Joseph saying to himself, If you only knew what I know. But by the time he arrives at the River Jordan to be baptized by John, Jesus has enough understanding at least to realize that the bigness of God is in God’s ability to stoop low enough to eye level with us, not the need to remain remote and aloof and elusive in order to prove the superiority of god-ness.

If human beings are made in God’s image and are therefore supposed to reflect the character of God in the way we live, then our greatness is not in how well we do at puffing ourselves up, but how well we do at letting the air out of our pride. Jesus identifies with sinners by refusing to claim his own sinlessness, even if he could have done so. His god-ness is proved not in how different he can make himself from us; it is proven in how much like us he can make himself without becoming a sinner, too.

This humility challenges us. We most of us spend most of our lives trying to prove ourselves better than others, to distinguish ourselves from the pack, to make a name for ourselves over against others. The way up is up, we think, and the way down is down. Given those choices, most people choose to live on the up and up and not on the down side, don’t you know?!

But here’s the problem with that: if you try to go up on your own power, you will eventually run out of steam, and you will go down. Like a plane that runs out of fuel or a hot air balloon the runs out of hot air, you can rise only so high before you come crashing down.

Knowing that makes some people resort to powers outside themselves to rise to the highest levels, which means they are only delaying the inevitable. In business you might compromise your ethics to get ahead, or you might walk on the backs of coworkers. Many athletes succumb to this temptation. Marion Jones was sentenced this week to six months in jail for lying to a grand jury about her steroid use. All her Olympic medals and world records have been stripped from her. She has been humiliated completely. She built herself up, and now she has been brought down.

Did Roger Clemens use steroids to achieve his long career and many records? We don’t know. I found it unbecoming of Clemens this week to go on a campaign to restore his reputation by suing and defaming his former trainer, who was also a close personal and family friend. Brian McNamee told the Mitchell panel that he had injected Roger with human growth hormone. Roger denied it. If McNamee lied about that, I’m not sure what he had to gain. And the taped phone conversation that Roger played between them seemed coy and calculating, leaving lots of unanswered questions. But the thing that got me is that McNamee has a very ill son who is dying. Instead of compassion for his friend and trainer, who admits he is destitute and without resources beyond Clemens’ friendship, Roger was willing to throw him under the bus in order to preserve his own standing. I’ve got news for you, Roger—even if you are completely innocent, you have lost your standing with me because of the way you treated your friend in need, even if he hurt and betrayed you.

Jesus identified with the lowliness of humanity and did not try to defend himself or distance himself for his own benefit. He was baptized as a symbolic way of joining himself to every one of us who eventually go down to the grave when our spirit leaves us. Jesus’ baptism was a foretaste of his own voluntary death on a cross for us and our salvation. If you are the Son of God, they shouted to him on the cross, come down from there and save yourself. But his mission was not to save himself; it was to save all of us who think it is our job to save ourselves.

And that goes for those of you who already think you have had all the air taken out of you by the world. Some of you are thinking that this whole idea of humility is fine for those who are too full of themselves, but humility is not your problem; humiliation is. You live every day right on the cusp of your spirit’s failure. You don’t see how you can lower yourself more than you already are. You feel like you live looking up at a snail. Where is the gospel for you in this call to humility?

Here’s where the baptism of the Holy Spirit comes in. Notice that it’s not until Jesus goes down that the dove come down. It’s not until Jesus lowers himself to join those who are already lowly—already deflated by the world—that the Spirit comes to fill him up and lift him up.

The same is true for us, whether we have to humble ourselves or have to accept our humble estate. The answer is never to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps; it is to strap on the power pack of God. Let God fill you with God’s own Spirit. This is the same Spirit that filled Jesus in his earthly life and raised him up when he was buried low in the earth.

Baptism puts us in the proper position to be filled with Holy Spirit power. Only by dying to self and joining those whose spirits have been dying at the hands of the world already can we learn the paradoxical truth of the Christian life—that the way up is down, whether you begin up or begin down.

Today is deacon ordination. The six of you being ordained are not being elevated from the lowly to the high rank of deacon. You are being marked as those who have so learned the truth that the way up is down that we are pointing to you as examples of those who bear the sign of Jesus in your way of life. Once you are a deacon, you don’t stop being what you were in the congregation; you only become a signifier, a pointer to that way. You bear more responsibility for humble ministry, not less.

In her book, Out of the Saltshaker and into the World, Rebecca Manley Pippert tells about a student named Bill. Wild hair, T-shirt with holes in it, jeans, no shoes. This was literally his wardrobe for his entire four years of college. He was brilliant but eccentric. He became a Christian during college. Across the street from the campus was a traditional church, not unlike ours, that wanted to develop a ministry to the students, but weren’t sure how to go about it. One day Bill decided to go there.

Imagine the scene. He walks in late, dressed as usual. He starts down the center aisle looking for a seat. The church is packed, and he can’t find a place in the pew. People are getting uncomfortable, but no one says anything. Bill gets closer and closer to the pulpit, and when he realizes there are no seats, he just squats down right on the carpet. (Although acceptable at a college fellowship, this had never happened in this church before!) By now the tension in the air is thick. About this time, the minister realizes that from way at the back of the church a deacon is slowly making his way toward Bill. The deacon is in his eighties, has silver-gray hair, is dignified and resplendent, and is wearing a three-piece suit with pocket watch. He walks with a cane and, as he starts walking toward this boy, everyone is whispering that you can’t blame him for what he’s going to do.

It takes a long time for the man to reach the boy. The church is utterly silent except for the dull thud of the man’s cane. All eyes are focused on him. The air has gone out of the room. The minister can’t preach until the deacon does what he has to do. As he gets to the young man, the old deacon drops his cane on the floor, and with great difficulty he lowers himself, sits down next to Bill, and worships with him so he won’t be alone.

Everyone in the sanctuary chokes up with emotion. When the minister gains control, he says, What I’m about to preach, you may never remember. What you have just seen, you will never forget.

May the same be said for all the sermons you preach, whether you are deacons or preachers or any other kind of baptized Christians.