Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Mark 1:7-11
Isaiah 42:1-9
Trinity,
Jacksonville
By this I mean, actually, a
spiritual inferiority complex. “Everyone
else’s spiritual experience is more real than mine—by comparison, I’m just
faking it. Everyone else around me is spiritually more mature than I am. Others
seem to have fruitful and satisfying prayer lives, but I feel like my prayers
just bounce off the ceiling.” I’m not
going to ask for a show of hands, but I am sure that there are some in this
church this morning, sitting right here listening to me, who are saying in their
hearts, “Bishop, you’re talking about me! I don’t have a very strong sense of
who I am in relation to God, or who God is in relation to me, or what
difference it all makes. I’m kind of going through the motions here: I’ve been
baptized and confirmed and I receive Holy Communion, and I’ve even had my kids
baptized and sent them to Sunday School. But there’s something missing.”
When I use the first person—“I”—I’m
not just putting words in someone else’s mouth. All these feelings are, at
various times, true of me. But there’s one advantage I have over many of you,
perhaps, and it comes from not being a cradle Episcopalian. It is, of course,
highly preferable to be born in an Episcopalian family and never have to know
anything else (!), but for those of us who were not so privileged, there is a
consolation prize: Many of us can
remember the day of our baptism, because we were eight or ten or twelve years
old when it happened. And we didn’t just have a few drops of water sprinkled on
our foreheads. We took the plunge, and got thoroughly wet. It was an important
and memorable experience. So when I hear
someone speak to me of the meaning of Christian baptism, I’ve got something
tangible and concrete in my
memory that I can call upon to make the teaching and the theology come alive
for me.
Now, in the proper context—that
is, when a child is born to believing and actively practicing Christian
parents—I support and encourage the baptism of infants. I had all three of my
own children baptized as infants. It sometimes seems, though, the way we go
about baptizing babies, the attitudes and assumptions that we bring to the event,
impoverishes the experience for everyone concerned. We have, as a church, certainly come a long
way from the time when baptisms were routinely done in the “drawing room” at four o’clock on a Saturday
afternoon. But, over the years I was in
parish ministry, I got regular requests from non-church members
to do such baptisms, and the attitude of that era persists even among church
people. It’s still felt to be very much a private and family affair, at which
others are now permitted to be spectators. And we still use just a token amount
of water, hardly enough to remind us even of a bath, much less a birth or a
drowning, which are the symbolic roots of the sacrament.
It’s no wonder, then, that most
of us have a very weak emotional and intuitive link with the event of our own baptism.
It’s remembered with the same sort of genteel fondness that we associate with
something like our first haircut! And so
it’s difficult to connect with preachers and teachers who get up and talk about
baptism as the primordial Christian sacrament, the event which anchors our relationship
with God and from which the entirety of our spiritual life flows. And we are
left with a spiritual inferiority complex, a poor spiritual self-image.
There is a form of spiritual
therapy that was popular some time ago called “healing of memories.” Healing of memories attempts to enable people
to re-visit times in the past which are thought to be the source of pain in the
present, and, conscious of the presence of Christ in those times, to respond to
them differently than they were able to originally. Without putting too sharp a point
on it, I would suggest that the feast which we keep today, the feast of the
Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ, offers us the opportunity to heal the
impoverished memories of our own baptism.
You see, in his wisdom and in his
love, the way God has chosen to save us, the means he uses to rescue us from
the power of sin and death, is to configure our experience to the experience of
his Incarnate Son. Jesus becomes a template, a pattern, a prototype: what happens to him happens to us. Chiefly,
of course, this is seen in the movement of dying and rising. Christ died—we die
in Christ. Christ rose from the dead—we
rise with Christ. But the pattern plays itself out other ways as well. Today,
in particular, Jesus’ experience of baptism becomes the pattern for our
own.
Jesus, as St Mark tells the
story, came down from Nazareth in Galilee, to the banks of the Jordan River as
it wound its way through the Judaean wilderness. Until this point, Jesus had been obscure, the
well-behaved son of a carpenter. It’s impossible to say, of course, how aware
he was of his unique identity, his unique relationship with God the Father. But we do know that, before he went
underneath the waters of the Jordan River at the hands of John the Baptist, he blended
into his environment, and after his baptism, just about everything he said and
did made him stand out from his environment. Before his baptism, Jesus was inconspicuous. After his baptism, he was so conspicuous
that, in a relatively short period of time, he found himself so at odds with
the religious and civil establishment that they put him to death. Obviously,
the baptism of Christ was a pivotal experience for him. It turned his whole
life around. It was one moment that put all the other moments in his life in
perspective.
Have you ever had the experience
of driving through unfamiliar territory at night, and during a thunderstorm? You don’t really know where you are, you’re
not exactly sure where you’ve been, and you certainly don’t know what lies
ahead. Father Ashmore and I, in separate
cars, had that experience last June driving back from an ordination in Salem. It’s,
at the very least, uncomfortable, and can potentially be downright terrifying. But,
then, a burst of lightning illuminates the entire landscape for several hundred
yards in every direction. It lasts for just a moment—probably less than a second—but
in that moment you get a glimpse of where you’ve been, where you are, and where
you’re going. The darkness and the storm
are not quite so menacing as they were before that momentary flash.
Jesus’ baptism was, for him, like
a flash of lightning on a dark night. It told him who he was: The voice from
heaven said clearly, “You are my Son.”
It told him what he was about: The voice continued, “I have chosen you.”
And it allowed him to see what was his destiny: The road that the momentary
flash lit up was the road to the cross, and beyond that, the road to glory. Jesus’
baptism gave him an identity, a mission, and a destiny.
And as we contemplate the mystery
of the baptism of Christ, we find revealed to us the mystery of our own
baptism. The same flash of lightning can
illuminate our lives too. At our baptism—whether we were
ten years old and plunged beneath three feet of water, or ten weeks old and sprinkled
with three drops of water—at our baptism, we were given an identity. We were
sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own for ever. We were
adopted as sons and daughters of the most high God, with all the inheritance
rights of natural born children.
At our baptism, we were also
given a mission. God chose each one of
us. The Father’s words to Jesus, “I have chosen you,” are his words to us as well. Each of us, at our baptism, received a unique
combination of gifts, and we are called to use those gifts in ministry, within
the church and in the world.
And at our baptism, we were given
a destiny, a future. As Jesus’ road led to the cross, so does ours. We are
bidden to take up our cross daily and follow him. This is the hard part of the
journey on which we were launched at our baptism. Just as the forces of evil
conspired to divert Jesus from this road, so they try to pull us away. They
must not be allowed to do this, and they cannot, as long as our eyes are fixed
on Christ. He has already completed the journey, and blazed a trail for us
which, if we will but follow it, will lead us beyond the cross and the grave to
eternal life with him.
My friends in Christ, I can
address you in this way only because of the experience we have shared in the
waters of baptism. The moment of that experience, whatever the circumstances,
and however it was done and when ever it was done, is the most surpassingly
important moment in each of our lives. I
commend to you a practice, one which is attributed to Martin Luther. By it, I remind myself each morning of my
identity, my mission, and my destiny. As
I get out of bed and my feet hit the floor, I make the sign of the cross and
repeat the words, “I am a baptized Christian.”
May the lightning flash of the baptism of our Lord light up each of our
lives this morning and for ever. Amen.
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