The Lord's Baptism

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Homily for Sunday, January 12, 2014       Celtic Evening Prayer     Buck Mountain Church

I love being present for a baptism, and since they usually happen at our morning service, I hope you regular 5 o’clockers will someday attend a baptism here if you haven’t already. Generally, the ones being baptized are infants or young children. Their parents, godparents, and grandparents gather around the baptismal font. Our vicar Connie calls all of the older children to the front of the church so they bear witness and are  participants in this important sacrament, something they themselves experienced not so long before but likely do not recollect.  There is so much joy, the church is one big smile, and it seems to be a brightly sunlit day, whether the sun is shining or not.  The congregants break into spontaneous applause as Connie carries the infant all the way up the aisle and back and we are asked to welcome the newly baptized.

            The sun shone on Jesus the day he was baptized, or so it seems in the story.  In Matthew’s description, after Jesus is baptized by John, “The heavens opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.  And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’”  Imagine how startled John and other witnesses must have been! The voice of God, as described in the old Hebrew scriptures, including Psalm 29, was “a powerful voice, a voice of splendor,” a voice that could “split the flames of fire or make the oak trees writhe.”  How marvelous it must have been to hear the words of fatherly pride and love in that voice!  I am pretty sure this is the only time in the gospels when all three of the persons of the Trinity are physically represented together in the same scene. In that light, every detail of Jesus’s baptism is significant.

            Jesus chooses to be baptized by his cousin John, even though John demurs and says it would be more appropriate for Jesus to baptize him. Jesus insists, knowing that this “fulfilling of all righteousness,” as he expresses it, will be the public beginning of his ministry. The visible presence of the Spirit in the form of a dove and the proclamation by the Father himself were affirmations he may have needed as he began his journey, his ministry, whose terminal point in a brief three years would be the cross.

            Jesus’s full immersion in the Jordan River, as an adult, is very different from the infant baptisms involving a sprinkle of water that we witness today.  As much as we cherish having the little ones incorporated into the body of Christ and protected by that grace from infancy, there is an aspect of baptism that we lose when we are not fully immersed as adults.

            In the early centuries of the Christian faith, those wishing to be baptized [let’s call them catechumens] were adults who endured three years of work and study to prepare themselves for the sacrament.  In those days, all baptisms took place at Easter, and the catechumens participated in a full weekend of services. At 3:00 on Good Friday afternoon, they were publicly examined and anointed with oil for the first of three times, the sign of the cross being made on their heads to signify their turning toward the Lord. The Great Vigil of Easter consumed most of Saturday, and at its high point on Saturday evening, the catechumens stripped off all of their clothing.  Their nakedness represented a renunciation of everything in their past lives, the death of their former selves. At this time, their bodies were anointed with the oil of the Spirit.

            In the dark early morning hours of Easter Sunday, as the vigil continued, the catechumens were led to the baptismal pool, where a crowd awaited them and they were anointed and examined for the last time. After each one entered the pool, the deacon asked three questions: “Do you believe in God? Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” After each question and the response, “I believe,” the deacon held the catechumen’s head under the water, pressing it down.  This baptism was indeed a death and rebirth into new life. As St. Paul said in his letter to the Colossians (Chapter 2), “When you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God.”

            Not only was being held under water like a death and burial, but the nudity can be seen as symbolic of Christ’s nakedness on the cross. Where is the joy in such a baptism, you may ask?  In the resurrection, of course. The newly baptized Christians, knowing themselves to be born into new life in Christ, had undergone a thrilling demonstration of victory over death.  After three years of rigorous preparation, they were now finally members of the church, the body of Christ.  They lived in a world where identification with that radical group known as Christians might very well result in their martyrdom. 

The baptism they had undergone was not only a test, but a preparation. I’m sure many of them kept the story of Jesus’s glorious baptism in mind as an affirmation of their own faith. May we always do the same.   Amen.

Light and Darkness

Homily for Sunday, December 29, 2013   Buck Mountain Episcopal Church Celtic Service

From today’s collect:

Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word.

            In the grand story of creation in Genesis 1, God’s first recorded words are “Let there be light.” The separation of light and darkness, day and night, follows. Even though we think of these words as opposites, each one is necessary to an understanding of the other. Without light, how would we define darkness?  Without darkness, how would we appreciate light?  In John 1, our gospel lesson for today, we have a passage that contains the New Testament complement to the creation story. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John (the Baptizer). He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”

John’s words speak to the glory of the cosmic shift in our human relationship with almighty God, a shift engendered by the birth of an infant in a lowly stable—the new light that would come into the world. The God of Genesis, who simply by speaking the words of creation brought all things into being, is a God whose power is truly unfathomable to the human mind. Even so, as humans tend to do, we have striven to understand and explain God to one another, often with conflicting and disastrous results. 

Since we have made such a mess of comprehending God and translating that comprehension into action, God chose to be born as one of us, to live among us as the exemplar of all we are supposed to be. The infant Jesus became the light that dispelled the darkness. As the apostle John speaks so eloquently in the gospel, “From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. The law indeed was given by Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God, the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”  Jesus has shown us the face of God—as well as the kind heart of God.

The last time I led this Celtic service, I preached about the necessity, even the blessing, of accepting darkness.  That darkness, a result of our feeling distant from God, was called “the cloud of unknowing” by an anonymous early church father, who wrote about the need for letting go of our presumptuous interpretations of God’s meaning, letting go of our need to know exactly what God intends for us, and allowing ourselves to accept the mystery of God. Both God’s power and his infinite love for us are vastly beyond our ability to comprehend.  By letting go of our need to know, by welcoming the darkness of our incomprehension, we can simply relax into God’s loving arms, trusting in God’s great mercy. That trust in what we cannot see, cannot know, is the essence of faith. Often children, as we observe and may remember ourselves, are the ones who exemplify a trusting faith best of all, especially in the Christmas season.

Today’s lessons are all about the light that shines forth once we accept and move beyond the darkness. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul explains the simplicity of faith as something revealed to us. He writes, “Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed… But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” Doesn’t it sound as if Paul is saying that humans needed to attribute a harsh and demanding nature to God, needed to assign laws as the pretext for a relationship between God and God’s people? The laws provided necessary limits for humans—yes indeed! But these laws also placed imagined limits on God and God’s ability to respond to human need. Through these laws, interpreted and written by humans, we have presumed to understand God and express God’s will. We refuse to accept the darkness of unknowing when we make God into OUR idea of a disciplinarian. We refuse the lessons exemplified by the living Christ when we condemn ourselves and one another. Paul tells us that it is with child-like faith that we are freed.

            And what is the source of our freedom?  Clearly, God did not wish us to remain imprisoned by our false notions about God. Paul says, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as children.” It is no wonder we cherish the expression, “Love came down at Christmas.” In this way, the Old Testament Word entered the world as the new light of grace. The light of Christ’s message, the light signified by a star and offered to us through his humble birth and through his teaching, is the most simple Word of all: “Love one another as I have loved you.” 

Love, fully expressed and fully experienced, is grace upon grace.  The star of Bethlehem is the bright light of love.  AMEN.