January 7, 2007
(First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ)

Our Baptismal Resolutions

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Isaiah 43:1-7  •  Psalm 29  •  Acts 8:14-17  •  Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
(From The Lectionary Page)

The YMCA was filled with new faces on New Years Day. Some were obvious newbies, trying to figure out how to change the settings on the weight machines. Others were veterans who were probably just doing their workout at an unaccustomed time of the day. All of us there that morning had that look of New Year’s resolution about us. This year, by heaven, I WILL stick to a program of healthy eating and exercise. I WILL lower my cholesterol by 50 points and get rid of that stubborn 20 pounds I’ve been lugging around. Resolutions are the yearly triumph of hope over experience. We make them because essentially, we are a linear people, and we are a hopeful people. Encoded in our cultural DNA is the notion that change is possible, given sustained effort, determination, and willpower.

It’s probably no coincidence that the lectionary framers chose a Sunday early in the New Year as the feast of the Baptism of our Lord. To be sure, the season IS Epiphany – a time of revelation, newness, and transformation. Jesus, whose coming John the Baptist has foretold, is ready to inaugurate his ministry and what does he do? He gets baptized. It’s a new birth, a new start.

A lot of ink has been spilled over the centuries as to the meaning of Jesus being baptized. Luke, unlike Matthew and Mark, at least spares us some theological confusion by not identifying baptism with repentance. In the way that Luke frames the account, and especially in the sentence structure and grammar that he uses, the key point of the passage is not Jesus’s baptism per se, but rather what happens afterwards. Luke makes a point of telling us that it was after Jesus was baptized and while he was praying that the Holy Spirit descended upon him and that the voice from Heaven proclaimed him to be the Son the Beloved, the one with whom God is well pleased. Jesus came in faith to the Jordan, stood in solidarity with other beloved sons and daughters of God, and thus began his new life – a life that would, indeed, transform those who came to follow him, those whose lives he touched. It was a revelatory moment because God’s gracious gift of unconditional love is revealed in baptism – an unconditional love to which Jesus would respond, and out of which he would live throughout his earthly ministry.

In a very few moments, we will baptize three beautiful baby boys. We all are witnesses of this act of faith which their parents and godparents engage in on their behalf. In faith, we believe that, though with perhaps less drama than there by the shore of the Jordan River, the heavens will open and the Holy Spirit will descend upon Miles, Logan, and Russell; that they, too, will live the whole of their lives knowing themselves to be beloved children of God.

That’s the whole point, you see. Baptism isn’t about inclusion in a special club. It isn’t something we do to make God love us more than other people. It isn’t a magical incantation that prevents awful things from happening. It is an act of faith that inaugurates in each of us a new beginning.

Luke devotes a grand total of two verses to Jesus’s baptism. He will devote over 1,000 verses to the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. In much the same way, photos will be taken later today, parties will be held, and certificates and other keepsakes carefully put away in lockboxes or scrapbooks. It is a day of blessing AND it is a day that will be but a moment in the whole of what we pray will be long lives for Miles, Logan, and Russell. As baptism was the beginning point for all that would happen in Jesus’s earthly ministry, so it is the beginning point for all of us who come in faith to be baptized. But its importance is most closely revealed in what unfolds next, as God’s beloved sons and daughters put that gift of God’s unconditional love into action in the world.

The baptismal covenant is our template for putting the gift of God’s unconditional love into action in the world. In it, we set our hearts on God as we experience him in the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We commit to lives of corporate prayer, worship, and learning; we commit to lives of ongoing newness and repentance whenever we miss the mark; we commit to sharing the good news of Christ both in word and in deed; we commit to living as Christ himself lived – in radical love for one another; we commit to living as fully as we can the godly virtues of justice and peace.

This covenant is our life’s work, set before us. There’s nothing about a sprinkling of water and a dab of fragrant oil by themselves that magically makes that happen for any of us. But neither is living into our baptismal covenant all up to each of us alone. The difference between a New Year’s resolution and embarking on a life of baptismal ministry is that success in the former is entirely up to us. We blithely make a resolution, for example, to adhere to a program of healthy eating and exercise. More often than not, unfortunately, it works for a while, and then we discover that the pounds aren’t coming off as quickly as we wanted and we get discouraged. Or we get sick or have a series of early morning meetings and miss our exercise routine and weeks go by and the only thing remaining of our resolution is the health club fee charged against our bank account monthly until we formally admit defeat and stop that too. Many of us have learned how to set ourselves up for opportunities to fail and to feel bad about ourselves so that we can go to our sources of bad behavior for the comfort they give us. (Not that I know from personal experience or anything!)

By contrast, the baptismal covenant that is begun today for Miles, Logan, and Russell and which all of us will reaffirm in ourselves, is a joint venture. It is a covenant, a transformed way of being, something that we share with each other and with God and in which we rely on God’s help. In this way, baptism is pure gift. And we get to respond this gracious gift of God’s unconditional love by making a daily choice to lead Christ-centered lives. One way that we can respond is by intentionally placing ourselves into moments of Christian formation and trusting that with God’s help and over time, our own spiritual DNA will be written and rewritten.

And even as we imperfectly engage this Covenant, we can be assured that we – God’s beloved sons and daughters all -- are participating with God in God’s plan of salvation.

A Baptism Remembered

by The Rev. Bryan England, Deacon

Do you remember your baptism? In my admittedly jaundiced view of my Southern Baptist upbringing, one of the few things I can unreservedly celebrate is that I can remember being baptized.

In a sacramental church, God is the principal actor in the sacraments. In baptism, God adopts us as God’s own children, and makes us members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and inheritors of God’s kingdom. Since God is the one who is doing the work in baptism, it doesn’t matter how old we are when we are baptized. In the early church, entire families were baptized at the same time, and in response to high infant mortality rates, it became common practice to baptize infants, to incorporate them into the New Covenant just as Jewish infants like Jesus were incorporated into the First Covenant through circumcision when eight days old.

Since God is the one doing the work in baptism, it doesn’t even matter if the person to be baptized is conscious. Page 313 of our prayer book has forms for conditional baptism and emergency baptism for use when the baptismal status of a person is in doubt, and they are unable to respond for themselves.

In a non-sacramental church, however, such as the church I grew up in, I was the principal actor at baptism. I was making a public profession of faith in Jesus Christ as my personal savior, and participating in a rather bizarre aquatic ritual in an act of obedience, because Jesus commanded it. I was incorporated into membership in the church through a vote of the members, not through an act of God. Therefore, my decision to accept Christ, and to be baptized, had to be a mature decision, made by me.

However, “mature” is a rather relative term. In my case, I was a mature seven years of age when I was incorporated into the body of Christ, about a half-century ago, and my age, or more precisely, my height, presented logistical problems.

In most Baptist churches, the rite is performed by immersion in a “baptistery,” a large tank of water behind the presiding dais, which seemed to me to be about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. The fully-clothed minister would descend into the waste-deep water, followed one-by-one by the baptismal candidates, who would be immersed in the water by the minister in the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” The Holy Spirit was a ghost back then. As I stepped off the last step into the baptistery, however, I realized that water that is waist-deep to an adult is often slightly above the head of a seven-year old. I resurfaced sputtering baptismal water, having been immersed, but deprived of the application of the triune formula prescribed by the Gospels.

As the church in Samaria found in today’s reading from Acts, valid Christian baptism must be in the name of the Trinity, and I was once again dipped below the surface of the water, this time in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, to emerge and begin my life in Christ.

The first Sunday of Epiphany is set aside in the church calendar for the commemoration of Jesus' baptism, which we see in Luke’s account of it. The account of the baptism itself is only two verses long, but it says quite a lot. It is the first picture we have of the mature Jesus, about thirty years old, and ready to begin his ministry, and he began it with baptism. Not because he needed to be baptized for the forgiveness of sin, but “to fulfill all righteousness,” as Matthew’s gospel recounts.

These two verses also give us the first image of the Trinity in Luke’s gospel, with Jesus the son in prayer, the Holy Spirit descending from heaven in the form of a dove, and the voice of God the father proclaiming a parent’s pleasure and love.

Because of the commemoration of Jesus' baptism, today is one of the prime Sundays for celebrating baptisms in a congregation, since there is a natural link between Jesus' baptism and our own. At Jesus' baptism, he was identified as God's son. At our baptisms God adopts us as sons and daughters, we become members of Christ's body the Church, and receive new life in the Holy Spirit. And just as Jesus' ministry to the world began at his baptism, so ours begins at our baptisms.

During our baptismal service we establish a covenant, a contract with God. Open your order of worship to the baptismal covenant. We renew this covenant each time we celebrate a baptism, but have we ever looked at it as a contract?

In the covenant, itself, we are asked three questions that relate to our faith, and we respond with the Apostle's creed. We affirm our belief in the basic tenets of faith as they relate to the three persons of the Trinity. But our covenant with God does not stop with faith. To quote the epistle of James, "faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead." We promise God we will do certain things!

We promise to continue as a church, as a community of prayer and worship. The argument that some people present that you can be a good Christian without attending church somewhere doesn't really coincide with this promise. Christianity is a communal religion. We promise to come together as a community, and to support each other in our efforts to bring about the kingdom of God.

We promise to persevere in resisting evil, which kind of implies that we recognize what evil is, and that we are still capable of committing it. I used to see a bumper sticker that said, "Christians are not perfect, just forgiven." This is true, but it fails to recognize our obligation to look at our own lives critically and to pattern ourselves after our Lord. Even though we are not perfect, and will continue to commit errors, to hurt those we love, our bond with God still is indissoluble. But we need to recognize our faults, repent, and return to the Lord. We can’t get to Easter without going through Lent.

We also promise to proclaim. A long time ago I was talking to a parishioner who said, "I like to keep my religion as a personal, private thing." Nothing could be more wrong. Our obligation is to make our religion public. In today's gospel, Jesus' vision at his baptism was private and personal, but he obviously told somebody! Our promise is to proclaim by word and example. As Blessed Francis said, “proclaim the gospel. Use words if necessary.”

The final two promises are unique to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, they did not appear in previous prayer books. In all of the controversy that was raised with substituting modern English for Jacobean English, and standing for kneeling, we managed to slip these two under the radar. They were born in the social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, and emphasize our social responsibilities as well as our religious ones.

We promise to practice what we preach. If we proclaim a loving Christ to world, then close our eyes to the plight of the poor or the sick, or treat each other maliciously, what have we done but disgrace the cross of Christ? One of the most traumatic things that can happen to new Christians is to witness how people in their own parish treat one another. People expect us to live our faith, not just talk it.

Finally, we promise to be peacemakers and to help right the social wrongs of this world. Since the day he arrived, our dean has called us to be the cathedral of God in the heart of the city. We must speak out in opposition to violence, in our world, in our nation, and in our community. We must address moral issues, regardless of the monetary cost, or the cost in relationships. We must do what we can do to bring about the kingdom on God on this earth.

And the whole time, we do not kid ourselves about our own abilities. We can accomplish all this; we can change the world, but only with God’s help. We begin as Jesus began, in prayer, and empowered by God’s Holy Spirit, that we too may hear the voice of Our Father say, “You are my children, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”