Keith's sermon Jan 13

Sermon at TCIC            

2nd Sunday of Epiphanytide: Baptism of Jesus

Stories, and the telling of stories, are at the heart of our Christian faith. Each week, when we gather for worship, we tell stories – from the Hebrew Scriptures, which we usually call the Old Testament, and from the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament.

And in fact the Eucharist itself is a kind of storytelling:
of Jesus at the Last Supper, part of the larger story of his whole life and work: his birth and growing up and preaching ministry, his arrest and death, and his resurrection –

And the calendar of the Christian year, too, is a kind of mega-story, – particularly from Advent into Christmas and Epiphany, and then on into Lent and Holy Week and Easter.

I love these stories at the heart of our Christian faith. As Christians, we’re not just stating some general principle such as “The universe is meaningful”, or even just that “God is a loving god”; we’re saying that it happened: that at this point in time and in this place, God’s reality and ours intersected in a unique way, in the life of this extra-ordinary man from Palestine two thousand years ago, Jesus.

And today, on the Second Sunday in Epiphanytide, we remember and re-tell one of the most significant moments in Jesus’ life: [a moment which was the starting point for his three years of preaching the Kingdom; leading to his arrest, trial, and execution; and the even greater story of his resurrection:] the story of Jesus’ baptism, by John, in the River Jordan. 

In the story-sequence of the Church’s year, the festival we call Epiphany – celebrating the mysterious scholars from the east who find their way to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem using a star as their GPS satnav –  comes right after Christmas. All across Christmas, we have the wonderfully rich narrative of the Nativity; and the story of the Magi, with the strange encounter in Bethlehem, is then the final episode: the first revelation of the Christ to the Gentiles.

[Chronologically, of course, this should lead to the terror of Herod’s slaughter of all the baby boys in Bethlehem, and the Holy Family’s hurried flight into exile in Egypt, but liturgically, we’ve already remembered that terrible part of the story, on 28 December.]

But this festival of the Epiphany, which we celebrated a week ago, is also Episode #1 in a new Season of the Church’s year. As many of your probably know, the name of the feast of the Magi, Epiphany, means in Greek ‘Showing’  or ‘Revelation’ – and that is why this following Season is called Epiphanytide that is to say, the Season of Revealings.

The structure of Epiphanytide, in the readings each week, is a new round of stories: stories which offer a series of epiphanies, showings, linked not chronologically, like the Christmas or Easter narratives, but thematically. Here, Jesus is revealed as God-in-Man

So, if you follow the Gospel stories over the next few weeks, you will hear about Jesus’ first miracle: the changing of water into wine, at Cana-in-Galilee; about his proclamation in the synagogue in Nazareth, that Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah was now being fulfilled; and in some churches, finally, just before we enter Lent, the story of his Transfiguration. In these stories, these epiphanies, then, we are given a series of glimpses of Jesus’ ‘other dimension’, as it were.

But what does baptism mean? and what did it mean for Jesus? For John, baptism was an act of cleansing from sin: Repent, be baptized, and be saved! And that meaning is also very central in the Christian understanding of baptism, too. None of us is free from the imperfection of sin; but through the act of sacramental washing, we are cleansed from the consequences of that imperfection and made full members of Christ’s church.

But what did baptism mean for Jesus? I think it was something he needed to do as a kind of rite of passage: a solemn turning away and moving on from what his life had been up to this point, to the new phase that lay ahead. We know very little about his childhood years, and nothing about his early adulthood; but from the fact that none of the Gospel writers have anything to tell us, we can perhaps assume that it was not so out-of-the-ordinary: helping in Joseph’s carpentry shop in Nazareth,  and perhaps, with his brothers, taking over responsibility for the shop when Joseph couldn’t run it any longer. That at least is how the local people seem to have thought  of him:

Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother called Mary? And aren’t his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And aren’t all his sisters with us? So where did this man get all this from?  (Matthew 13: 55-56)

But now, at the height of John’s mission of repentance and baptism, Jesus comes to him and asks to be baptized, — insists, when John protests. He says: Let it be so; because we must do all that God wants us to do. The Contemporary English Version translation, that we use for our Readings, paraphrases this very simply, and says: we must do all that God wants us to do; but the phrase that Jesus uses is to fulfil righteousness. This is probably a reference to a Hebrew concept, Tzidkat HaShem, ‘the righteousness of the Lord’, which is a phrase used about Moses, to highlight his holiness. In being baptized by John, therefore, Jesus is perhaps accepting the role which has been passed down to him in Jewish tradition: the role of the Messiah. And then there is this moment of epiphany, when the Spirit comes down upon him, and those present hear God’s voice: This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased (Matthew 3: 17)

For the God who is revealed to us is indeed the Trinity: God the Father, the Creator, beyond our knowing; God the Son, Jesus, the Redeemer, as human as we are; and God the Holy Spirit, whose grace is the means of interaction between God and humankind.

Afterwards, Jesus withdraws into the desert, and spends 40 days there, fasting, to come to terms with what he is now being called to do. He is faced with temptations about how to do it in the wrong way; but recognizes what is the right way; comes back from the desert, and begins his three years of ministry: healing the sick, and preaching the Kingdom of God.

So it is a crucial turning-point in Jesus’ own story.

And when Jesus is giving his disciples instructions about spreading the news of the Kingdom, at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, what does he tell them to do: Go to the people of all nations and make them my disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I have told you. I will be with you always, even until the end of the world. (Matthew 28: 19-20)

So, what does the Gift of Baptism mean for us as Christians? Surely, it means several things.

For many people, if they are baptized as infants, it is the moment when someone stops being just ‘Someone’, because they are given a name. In the tradition of John, it is a time of cleansing: of washing away the pollution of sin. But it is also for us, as it was for Jesus, a new beginning: the start of a new phase in our life: our own individual birthday-in-Christ.

Much of our thinking about Christian baptism actually comes from Paul, who makes it one of the central focuses in his preaching of what the Gospel means. Through our baptism, we are baptized into Christ, we share in his sufferings, and it is precisely through this, Paul argues, that we share in Christ’s risen life.

We don’t all go off into the wilderness for 40 days to meditate on Life, the Universe and Everything. But in our baptism, we become, as Paul says, baptized into Christ; and so his story becomes part of our story.