Four Seasons Landscaping.

Three words. That's all I've got to say, and you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know exactly which public relations fiasco I'm referring to.

November 7, 2020. The "episode" began when President Donald Trump tweeted that a "Big press conference" would take place at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. He was later forced to clarify that it would be at … wait for it … Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Now, you don't have to have been a marketing major in college or a seasoned campaign operative to know that if you're trying to make the case that you deserve people's trust to govern responsibly for another four years, you don't hold the press conference at a landscaping store wedged in between Fantasy Island Adult Books and the Delaware Valley Cremation Center.

Late-night comics dined for weeks on that toothsome morsel—a sweaty Rudy Giuliani as the lead pitchman for an incompetent political operation that was trying to convince the country that it hadn't just lost a presidential election by historic margins.

But, I mean, Rudy and the whole gang-who-couldn't-shoot-straight had some competition in Jesus' own political soft-launch at the Jordan River.

That's right, I said, "Political soft-launch." I know that talking about politics in church makes some people break out in hives. "Jesus was religious, not political," they say.

But, and again … hear me out. Even though it's a baptism, Jesus has got one foot in the baptistery and one foot in roiling political waters. The problem for us modern folks, 2,000 years removed, is that we think those are different pools of water.

And if you're thinking about the separation of church and state, that's a pretty good impulse in the world we're in right now, but it's about 1,700 years too late for Jesus. Until 1789, when the Constitution made its first appearance on the scene, there was no such thing as "separation of church and state." But more about that in a minute.

Even if Jesus was just soft-launching his new Palestinian Religious Broadcast Network, he went about it in the wrong way. He should have made his way down to Jerusalem, or at least sought out Jerusalem's envoys, to reassure the religious bigwigs he was on the kosher side of any potential religious disputes that might pop up.

It would have benefitted him if he'd made the trip to Jerusalem to make sure everybody knew where he stood, that he was on the same page as the keepers of the keys. He should have gone to the Temple.

Instead, he decided to have his coming-out party at that muddy little nothing of a river in the middle of nowhere—the Jordan River.

And does he present himself there to a proper priest or religious kingpin?

He does not.

Instead, he seeks out a wild-eyed, megaphone-toting, bug-eating lunatic, whose sartorial choices, let's just be honest, are never going to land him that spread in GQ. John the Baptist.

When Jesus steps down into the muddy Jordan, he isn't having a quiet little moment with God out in nature. He's walking straight into Israel's old stories, the ones everybody on that riverbank would've grown up on. That water is crowded with memory. To stand in the Jordan is to remember the Red Sea, that terrifying and beautiful night when God cut a path right through the chaos and led a bunch of runaway enslaved people out of the grip of empire and into the scary possibility of freedom.

So when Jesus chooses this water, the Jordan, he’s signaling something. A New Exodus is kicking off. He's standing there as "New Israel," the Beloved Son who will walk the path the nation couldn't quite seem to stay on.

But see, he’s not being baptized because he's "bad." He's being baptized because he’s one of us, shoulder to shoulder with every person who’s ever stared at a wall of water or a stretch of desert and thought, "I don't see a way through this. I don't know if God can get me from here to there."

And the Jordan isn't just about leaving Egypt behind. It's about finally stepping into what God promised. Jesus shares his name with Joshua, Yeshua, the one who first led those formerly enslaved people across this very river into the promised land to claim an inheritance they never thought they'd live to see.

With Jesus, the heavens rip open, the Spirit comes down like a dove, and you get this picture of a New Joshua getting ready to lead us, not into a patch of real estate, but into a new way of being human.