First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Luke 3:14-17, 21-22
Luke 3:14-17, 21-22
Fred Hedgepath was my pastor at
Conway Methodist Church from the time I was eight until the time I was
twelve. He still emerges as one of the
two or three most significant figures in my life when I think back over the
years of all the folk who have shaped me.
To this day, I remember many of his sermon topics, illustrations, even
poems he quoted. Once he said that if he
had only two sermons to preach he would choose one to be on the love of God and
the other to be on the forgiveness of sins.
I have thought from time to time what I would choose to preach on. I think without doubt my two would be the
incarnation of the Word made flesh and the resurrection of the body. Both speak of the union of human and divine,
of reconciling humanity with God, and above all with the human body as the
vehicle for God’s life. But if I had
only one sermon to preach I would choose to preach it on baptism. For in baptism, these two great themes come
together as nowhere else. So it is not
altogether by accident that I set this Sunday as my final one at St. Stephen
and the Incarnation. I just can’t quite
get enough of baptism, nor say enough good stuff about it. It is indeed, for me, the heart of the Good
News.
It took the
Church a very long time to accord Jesus’ baptism the importance it deserves.
That is because the oddity of Jesus wanting, let alone needing, to be baptized,
has just perplexed people. What folks
often have missed is that Jesus’ baptism is the point at which he thoroughly
and unequivocally identifies himself with humanity. I think most of us would agree that “sin,”
even when we think of it most deeply and broadly as the condition of alienation
from the Truth, from the Source of Life, from the best and most positive
intentions of the Creator of the universe, is a bit too narrow to describe the entire human condition. Of course, an argument can be made that human
beings are totally depraved (ask John Calvin and Joseph Casazza); but they too
exhibit qualities that simply don’t fit in the category of sin—or at least
Casazza does—I am not so sure about Calvin.
At any rate, Jesus in being baptized got as far down in that mud-hole of
a Jordan River as he could possibly get:
right down into the hungers and anxieties and regrets and shame of
stumbling, fallen humanity—and also into the unleashed potential, the capacity
for greatness, the quality of empathy, the talent for creativity that mark
human beings as well. We are not only
ashes, but also glory. For every demon
that lurks behind a human persona, there is an angel waiting to be a messenger
of the holy.
The thing
easy to gloss over in Luke’s account of the great epiphany at the Jordan River
is what John the Baptist says about Jesus.
For years I never paid much attention to this stuff: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and
fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand,
to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
It seemed only to belong to the rather wild-eyed and sideways-walking
nature of the old Baptizer. But I have
begun paying more attention to him and his description of Jesus. Rather than hear it as a raw condemnation of
non-conforming humanity, I hear it now as precisely what Christ does. He winnows.
He sifts, he sorts, he discerns.
He is not afraid to cast away what is opposed to life and health, to
healing and wholeness. He indeed plunges
us into a holy, spirit-driven life. Yet,
the baptismal water strangely ignites the fire of enthusiasm rather than dowses
it with cold, dull suppression of human energy.
And this is
why the Baptism of Jesus is the most profound witness to the incarnation, the
embodiment of God. The whole point of
God’s becoming human in Jesus is not to make and keep him special, but to take
not just human nature but the entire created order and reveal its capacity for
manifesting God. We are to be epiphanies
of God. We are to understand our lives
as being best and truest and purest and most honest when the very bodily
existence we have mirrors our Maker. And
we do it the way Jesus did it: by
praying, healing, feeding, listening, teaching, telling the truth, taking on
the know-it-all authorities, breaking the rules that keep people separated from
each other, transgressing the boundaries of social propriety in favor of
justice and mercy, and finally by owning yet detaching from our deepest and
controlling fears by dying courageously, trusting only in the power of
Love. That is it. We are to be the Word embodied, so much so
that people can actually look at us and see the Body of Christ.
But baptism
is not only a radical statement of incarnation.
It brings us to resurrection and resurrection to us. And it does it in a most peculiar way: the way of death. Rather than actually dealing with death, the
Church is always trying to put makeup on it and take the sting of it away
before we feel it. Every Sunday we
gather at the altar and tell a story replete with images that ought to shake us
to the core: betrayal, crucifixion,
blood being spilled and body being broken.
But none of that hits home until and unless we realize that it is not
just Jesus’ story; it is ours. Not only
because our lives have their share of tragedy and suffering, which is true
enough; but also because there is no way of being mortal without experiencing
mortality. Back up to our list of things
that Jesus (and we) do to reveal God: we
don’t get to march in the light of God praying and singing and healing and
feeding and telling the truth and taking on authority by playing it safe. We don’t do it by refusing to grow. We don’t get there by resisting change, let
alone by insulating ourselves against transformation. No, it takes a dying, a dying to the false
and inflated self—a real and conscious choice to let ourselves be “handed over”
to the possibility of letting everything go—even the things we give our lives
to—so that we can get to the bottom of it all.
And you know what’s at the bottom. Love.
Loving your Self. Loving your own
body. Loving your nature, rather than
denying it. Loving profligately, so that
love spills over the brim and runs down the crevices of your life and out into
the streets and into the fields and streams so that boundaries disappear
between you and people, you and nature, you and animals, you and the earth, you
and the sky, you and the sun, you and the fire that burns unquenchably in every
star, in every planet, in every atom in this cosmos. We don’t get to cross that Jordan without getting down, down, down into the Source of the
water itself, into every blessed molecule, every atom, quark, hint of being and
lying helpless and defenseless. You
probably will never get there unless you either have to, like Julian of
Norwich, falling so sick that your conscious mind is overruled by clear
insight; or because you grow old enough to see what you simply cannot
comprehend when you are busy becoming important (or conforming to those who you
believe to be important) which is what all of us do during the first half of
life. When Julian, in the twilight of
the 14th century, got to the bottom of everything she had learned in
the revelations of divine love to her in her illness, she wrote:
Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s
meaning in this thing? Learn it
well: Love was his meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love.
What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love….Thus was I learned that Love was
our Lord’s meaning.[1]
And that is resurrection. Not some existence in the sky by and by, but
a radical affirmation of the body, and thus of mortality. Resurrection is the only thing left at the
end and depth of life: the power of
Love.
So, wade in the water. Wade in the water, children. It won’t part until you stick your toe
in. And then it will roll back and stand
at attention as you march through on dry ground, O Israel. Wade in the water with Mother Scott and Bill
Wendt and Jack Woodward and all those who have gone before. Wade with Moses and Aaron and Miriam. Wade with John and Jesus and all that brood
of vipers that slithered out of Jerusalem to come see what all that racket was
down at the Jordan. Wade in the water of
baptism until you are so human that you bleed love. Wade in the water until you catch the vision
of the Bread that is the Body of Christ become your body, and your body become
as dazzling as the body of the resurrected Lord. Wade in the water until you become as little
children and so enter the Promised Kingdom.
Wade until the dove alights on you and you hear a voice that says, “Come
on in. Sit and eat. I’ve been waiting for you since before the
world began.”
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016.
[1]
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine
Love, Kindle edition, first published 1901), p. 175, location 2273.
