I greet you on this first Sunday of Epiphany in the name of our Lord and saviour, to whom the magi were led by a star, through dangers and temptations, to find God and worship him! Peace be with you. Amen.
Few years back I was helping out a friend who was moving houses. My designated place to work on and pack was the pantry. And among the cutleries, cans of food, burks of spice and crockery, I found a glass bottle carefully sealed, half filled with water, with a date and the initials of my friend on a handwritten etiquette.
Turned out that this bottle contained the water that was used at her baptism 60 years earlier. And through all her life and through all moving, she had kept this bottle with her baptismal water close. As a reminder of who she was and to whom she belonged to.
Today we are invited to contemplate the story of Jesus’s baptism as told in the gospel of Luke. I’d like us to focus on two things in today’s texts on baptism, the first being that baptism is God’s activity in the world and the second is that baptism is about our identity as God’s beloved children. I think we can draw from what we read about the baptism of Jesus a precious truth about the meaning of baptism in the life of the church and in our personal lives.
We are reminded of this already in the Isaiah text and the story of God’s people. Keep in mind that Isaiah’s words are spoken in depressing times as the nation is in exile in a foreign land. That is the context of God’s promise that we read:
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you, I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.
Here we already see the invitation and the intimacy set up for God’s people, no matter the circumstances.
And then we get a glimpse into the life of the early church, where the apostles are going out in the world, proclaiming the wondrous gifts that God’s holy spirit offers those who believe, empowering the new church for the life and mission to come. Let us notice that even this was at a depressing time where the followers of Jesus were being persecuted and scattered over a large area.
Luke’s account of Jesus’s baptism also reminds us about the dangers surrounding God’s people at that time. John, who is creating a movement and certainly interest, speaks truth to power and demands reformation – if not revolution – in the ways it conducts business. The whole crowd, soldiers and tax collectors – even the ruler Herod – listen to John’s condemnation on the wicked and unjust ways power is being executed.
Here I’d like to add that it’s important to remember that John’s speech was not all fire and brimstone, for it also says: And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.
John’s popularity and visibility did not protect him however. The ruler Herod – who like all the Herods in the Bible is egotistical, insecure and petty, in bed with the Romans and definitely clueless about God, gets him locked up for his uncomfortable message. Free speech has never gone down well with weak and corrupt authorities.
Then we come to the baptism of Jesus. And I want us to still keep in mind the two points about baptism – namely baptism as God’s activity and the consequence that activity has on our identity as God’s beloved children.
At the baptism of Jesus we get to live another epiphany moment, last Sunday it were the magi from the east who recognised the divine in Jesus, this Sunday it is God who addresses Jesus „as my beloved son“. This is the identity part of baptism – and the intimacy part – it teaches us who we are – God’s beloved children – and confers upon us the promise of God’s unconditional regard.
Why is this important for us today? I’d like to think that in an era when so many of the traditional elements of identity-construction have been diminished, we change jobs and careers with frequency, most of us have multiple residences in different communities over our lifetime, fewer families remain intact – there is a craving to figure out just who we are.
And in response to this craving and need, baptism reminds us that we are in relation to whose we are – we are God’s beloved children. Just as God proclaimed to his people in exile, in Isaiah’s words – You are precious and honored in my sight, and I love you – during Jesus‘s baptism, God who opens the heaven and sends the holy spirit, reveals to the world that this is God‘s beloved son.
The baptism of Christ is one of the richest stories of the gospels, in symbolism and images that the church has taken to heart and built essential theological ideas around. Those ideas have not the least taken form and been expressed in art and pictures like the ones on our worship sheets today – where the motive of Christ’s baptism appears in the contemporary work of Sergei Fyodorov. In the fresco in Rochester Cathedral in Kent, we step into the baptism of Christ in the river Jordan, John the Baptist is there, the holy spirit in the form of a dove is there, other characters from the salvation history are there – and we read/hear God’s voice. This artwork captures in remarkable way all three persons of the Trinity at the same time: The Son being baptized, the Holy Spirit descending, and the Father speaking from the heavens.
The lower part of the fresco is also very significant, namely it depicts the baptism of King Ethelbert by no other than st. Augustine in 597 – as well as the people of Rochester emerging from baptism in the River Medway.
Depicting biblical scenes and biblical stories in diverse historical settings has been a hallmark for Christian art through the centuries. It shows us how Christians have at all times seen the parallels between the biblical life and their own lives. All the wonderful renaissance paintings where gospel stories are set in the beautiful landscape of Tuscany come to mind. Even tiny churches in Iceland have altar pieces where Jesus and the disciples show up with local folks carrying out their daily duties in landscape familiar to the people who would come to church and had no way of visiting the holy land or any other lands than their own, for that matter.
So in the fresco from Rochester cathedral, the artist makes the connection between Christ’s baptism in the waters of Jordan and the baptism of the local people in the river Medway. Just as Jesus was claimed by God as the beloved son, the people of Medway – and all Christians at all times – find themselves belonging to God’s family through God’s act in baptism, that is carried out in their own sacred waters.
I’m still thinking about my friend’s baptismal water she kept in a bottle, as a reminder of God’s activity in her life and her identity as God’s beloved child. That water was probably not from some special fountain or well, but rather from a tap in her local parish church her parents brought her to receive the sacrament of baptism. Yet through God’s work and the holy spirit this water became the symbol and the foundation for her life grounded in God’s promise to redeem her and summon her by name.
So, as we gather today and find ourselves in this wonderful season of epiphany, where we still enjoy the glow from Christmas and the eternal and generous invitation to walk with the magi from wherever we come from, to join the crowds at the river of Jordan, may we open our hearts to the gift of the holy spirit, may we once again open our lives to Christ, and take God’s presence in the world to heart. May we once again claim the identity of God’s beloved children that are always in God’s care. May we confess God presence in our lives and enter the new year with the promise of no matter how depressing the times are, God is with us, and he calls us by our name. Amen.