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RCL Year C, The First Sunday after the Epiphany, January 7th, 2007
The Feast of the Baptism of Christ
Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; St. Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
St. Edmund’s Episcopal ChurchThe Reverend George F. Woodward III
All three of the radio stations to which I regularly listen have been asking how listeners are doing with their New Year’s Resolutions. STAR Radio is even offering a contest for a gym membership so listeners can “get their sexy back.” I’m regular at the gym and surely want to get in better shape, but that’s just placing the bar too high! New Year’s resolutions are all about living better, and turning away from negative habits that aren’t serving us so well and they are not a bad introduction to the subject of John’s call to repentance and Christ’s baptism in the River Jordan.
To live well is difficult. In order to live well we must to some degree know ourselves and what we value. We must have developed a conviction about the meaning and end of human life, and taken our measure in relationship to that end. Those who have an inadequate vision for life will not live well, and neither can those who have attained to worthy vision, but will not summon themselves to consequential accountability.
Jesus lived well. When we say that Jesus was “God Incarnate”, what do we mean, what could we possibly mean, but that God chose Jesus to actualize, to effect, to embody what it means for a human being to live in sync with the Divine, to achieve full human potential, to be alive, loving, moral, humane and spiritually engaged? Jesus achieved such synergy with God that generations since have had no other way of saying what must be said but that Jesus was God’s own in a way that no one else has been before or since.
So we look, Sunday by Sunday, and day by day if we are disciplined in our inquiry, at specific incidents in Jesus’ life to see how He cooperated with God and embodied human potential, not because any of us will ever be Jesus, but because every human being has the challenge of living in sync with the Divine, of actualizing all that can be actualized in our circumstance and condition.
This morning we discover Jesus at His baptism in the Jordan River by the wild and uncompromising prophet John who affirmed Jesus as God’s own Messiah, and who later came to have doubts about Jesus, because Jesus was not fulfilling John’s expectations of what a Messiah should be. This morning Jesus submits to baptism, and after He does so, while He is praying, the Holy Spirit descends like a dove and a voice is heard.
Something about this particular incident is extremely important. The baptism of Jesus was an embarrassing incident for some of the fringe strands of early Christianity. They wanted to make Jesus wholly other, someone who would not have had need for a baptism of repentance. Yet the baptism of Jesus was uncontrovertibly central to the new Faith. The Gospel of Mark begins, not with Jesus’ birth narrative, but with His baptism. This baptism became so central that soon no one would be considered a genuine follower of Jesus unless they, too, had submitted to a baptism of repentance. “Baptism now saves you,” says St. Paul. How in the world can that be true?
This week it came to light that the parents of a nine year old girl known as Ashley had made the unusual decision to intentionally and prematurely stunt her growth through the administration of a two year course of heavy estrogen treatment and a hysterectomy. The girl has the mental capacities of a very young child. She is unable to walk, to dress, or to care for herself in any way. She is entirely dependent on her parents for every aspect of her life and well-being. The parents were concerned about how they would care for her as they themselves aged. After much deliberation and consultation with a board of medical ethics, their physicians recommended this course of treatment so the girl would remain of manageable size as she physically matured, allowing the father to lift her from her bed and carry her to her chair or stroller each day. Predictably, as in the Terry Shivo case, a chorus of voices were raised in condemnation of that poor family.
As I read about this case, it embodied for me many of the issues confronting our culture as our medical technologies develop, as our understanding of genetics deepens, and as our institutional resources for ethical reflection fray and diverge in an increasingly pluralistic world. It is hard to think deeply about how to live well, and there is precious little useful guidance for doing so. In such an atmosphere fundamentalisms always rise and present easy, often stupid, answers, and we are living in that sort of age, an age with many difficult, trenchant questions, and with too many too quick and facile answers.
When the Spirit descends on Jesus, like a dove, we are told; when the Spirit descends, note what is heard: “You are my Son, the Beloved, and with you I am well-pleased.” It is not too much to say that Jesus takes to heart what God said in Isaiah to an entire people, but which an entire people could not seem to hear. “I have called you by name, and you are mine,” God says through the prophet Isaiah. “You are precious in My sight, and honored, and I love you.” “Do not fear, for I am with you.” “Everyone who is called by My Name has been created for My glory, all whom I formed and made.”
It is not too much to say that Jesus’ ministry began with a voice of tremendous affirmation, a keen and orienting and penetrating self-knowledge that He was profoundly loved by God, accepted by God, shaped by God for purposeful living, and created for God’s own glory.
The heart of the meaning of our own baptism is that we are to live in that kind of awareness, that we are most profoundly loved and cherished by God. How can we know our true end if we do not understand that we are loved? How can we know that there is anything to aspire to in life other than what pleasure can be taken between birth and death if we do not first know this. The good life, the good person, is characterized by a certain simplicity that smiles on the just and the unjust and treats each with equal gentleness because they know that they themselves, with all their fragility and fault, are loved and cherished.
That is why Christianity fails when it becomes moralistic, and gentleness and largeness of heart are lost. The many trenchant ethical dilemmas of our day require not moralism, but a largeness that dares travel in another’s shoes. That is why Christianity at its strongest and best speaks the language of grace. Blaise Pascal understood this when he wrote:
“I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, who possessed extreme courage and extreme kindness. We show greatness not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.” (Pascal’s Pensées)
That early Christianity understood this is evidenced in the broad net cast by Christ’s followers. “There is now no longer Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free, for all are one in Christ Jesus,” Paul taught, quite remarkably for his day; and in today’s reading from the Book of Acts the Word of God is received by the Samaritans, a race generally despised and hated, and they are treated as equals, and Peter and John are dispatched to pray over them that they might receive the Spirit of Jesus, for heretofore the new believers had been baptized only in Jesus’ Name. To be baptized in Jesus’ Name is not enough, they must be baptized with the Spirit that proclaimed Jesus cherished and beloved, and they must, if they are to live well, walk also in that Spirit of generosity.
I wonder if much of contemporary Christianity has not in a manner of speaking been baptized only in the Name of Jesus, somehow having missed baptism in His generous Spirit. I wonder if, in many places, moralism hasn’t managed to replace gentleness and largeness of heart, and if our Johns and Peters don’t need once again to be sent forth to minister the charism of charity.
So today as we commemorate the Feast of the Baptism of Christ we will want that baptism to throw a bit of light on our own commitments and determinations, and on the meaning of our own baptisms. Jesus pointed both to God and to the human heart and called us to repentance, and that word, “repentance” now has a tent revival ring to it that might obscure it’s meaning. There is a complexity of self-knowledge behind the word repentance, a call to reformation of mind, to placing things in right perspective with God, ourselves and others.
To live well is difficult. In order to live well we must, to some degree, know ourselves and what we value. We must have developed a conviction about the meaning and end of human life, and taken our measure in relationship to that conviction. “I have called you by name, and you are mine,” God says through the prophet Isaiah. “You are precious in My sight, and honored, and I love you.” “Do not fear, for I am with you.” “Everyone who is called by My Name has been created for My glory, all whom I formed and made.” To understand this, to take this to heart, is to begin to walk with the freedom and generosity and kindness of the One we name as Lord, and to begin to understand what it might mean to call Him our Savior. Amen. GFW+
© St. Edmund's Church