The Baptism of Our Lord 2024

This Sunday I was supposed to serve at Trinity Church in Ware, but the nor'easter headed our way in New England has kept most of our congregations from gathering in person this weekend. For the folks in Ware and others who may be staying in today, here is what I would have preached if I'd been there. 

For many years now I’ve been connected to the life of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge through the Fellowship of St. John. The photo to the left was taken on a pilgrimage with SSJE to the Holy Land, at the renewal of vows service at the Jordan River. 

Some of you may know a ministry the brothers offer called, “Brother, Give Us a Word” – you can sign up for little tweet-sized daily emails from them that arrive in your inbox each day early in the morning. I look forward to receiving those every day, and sometimes I keep them as reminders.

One that came a few years ago during the twelve days of Christmas was from Brother Curtis and it said this about the word for the day: “presence.”

If this Christmastide you are asking the question, maybe desperately,
whether God is with you, I suggest you rephrase the question. The question
is not whether God is with you, but how is God with you?

Today is the first Sunday after the Feast of the Epiphany. That word, epiphany, comes from two Greek words epi-phanos: literally “to shine forth.” These six Sundays from now until we arrive at Ash Wednesday invite us to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation and the ways that God-with-us isn’t something that happened a long time ago in Palestine, but is still true today. Not whether God is with us, but how, as light shining in the darkness. And the darkness has not overcome it. This season is a time for us to pay attention to how God is being made manifest among and through us even now. To pay attention to the ways that God is made manifest not just inside the walls of this church but out on the streets and
neighborhoods where you all live and work.

So hold that thought; you have six weeks to reflect on it…

For today, this First Sunday after Epiphany, we recall the Baptism of our Lord. The name is pretty self-explanatory, and today’s gospel reading is pretty straightforward: Jesus comes from Galilee to the Jordan River where he’s baptized by John. Soon after, his public ministry begins. We actually heard this reading back in early December, on the Second Sunday of Advent. But then the focus was on John the Baptizer. Now it’s on the baptiz-ee – Jesus, God’s well beloved Son.

So we return to this first chapter of Mark now that the shepherds have gone back to their flocks and the angelic choristers are back in the heavenly choir room, and the magi (after leaving their gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh) have gone home by another way. Most of our trees have been chipped and our crèches have been packed up and put back into  their boxes until next year. New Year’s resolutions have been made, and a few have not yet been broken.

Jesus comes to John at the Jordan River. The Voice, speaks from the heavens: You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.

We are invited on this day to hear these same words spoken not just to Jesus, but to each of  us, by name. It is no “Messiah complex” to do so, but God’s deepest yearning as a Parent that we hear—and believe—these words. You are my Son. You are my Daughter. You are my Child, my beloved. and with you I am well pleased.

If Holy Baptism unites us with Christ (and of course that is exactly what it does) then I believe we are meant to hear these words addressed to each of us by name. So today we will remember our own baptisms, whether they happened in this font or at another font in another church, or in a river; whether the liturgy was Roman Catholic or Episcopal or Baptist. It’s all the same. 

One Lord. One faith. One Baptism.

Before anything else—before we can take up our crosses and before we can serve others or even attempt to live the ethics of Jesus—we need to soak in these words. They represent a pretty radical claim in a culture that treats us first and foremost as consumers, insisting that our identity is dependent upon the clothes we wear or the car we drive or the college we attend or the salary we take home. It represents the beginning of the faith journey and a Word we need to return to again and again in our lives.  You are my child, my beloved…and I’m crazy about you.

Before moving to diocesan ministry I spent two decades as a parish priest. And before that, I was a campus minister. If I learned anything at all from that work it is this: a lot of people struggle with self-image. Even those whom you might think on the outside have it all together very often struggle with wounds that go deep and are not easily observable to the naked eye. Even those who live in the biggest houses or drive the fanciest cars have a story. No matter how privileged our lives may appear on the outside, most of us are our own worst enemies on the inside. Old tapes sometimes continue to play decades after we’ve thrown away our cassette players, tapes that remind us that we aren’t good enough or thin enough or
smart enough to be loved.

Please don’t mishear me: I do not believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ should ever be reduced to the power of positive thinking. Nor do I think that the gospel is the religious equivalent of “I’m ok, you’re ok.” But it is always—at the beginning and at the end, about God’s abiding love and affection for us. 

You are God’s beloved. We are God’s beloved. All of us. No exceptions. 

God does not love you “in spite of yourself.” God is crazy about you. Jesus loves the little children of the world; all the children of the world.

I have a new way of seeing what this all means that happened on November 15 when my first grandchild was born. My wife and I got to spend Thanksgiving week in Washington, DC with my son and daughter-in-law when they came home from the hospital with Julian. And then they spent ten days with us in December, made possible because both are still on family leave. 

In holding that dear sweet boy as often as I could and even when he might be crying, all I could feel is love. I think that this is a reflection of the divine love, which is not contingent on what we do, but who we are.

Such love isn’t earned. It doesn’t require perfection. I think that’s where our theology can go askew very quickly. As we grow in faith and in love, we don’t just tolerate the wounded places in those we care for, because each of us is a package deal. If a person is outgoing and gregarious, then there is always a shadow that sometimes she will be overbearing. If a person is quiet and reserved, there is always a shadow that sometimes he will become withdrawn and isolated. All of us have those shadow sides. There’s just no getting around that; it’s at the core of our humanity. It’s what being flesh and bones is all about.

But think about it: we don’t just love someone on the good days when they conform to our image of what we want them to be. We love them for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer. Our human love is a reflection of the divine love for each of us and God’s love is deeper and broader still. It isn’t: “I’ll love you when you stop drinking or smoking” or “I’ll love you if you lose fifteen pounds” or “I’ll love you as soon as you stop that annoying habit…” or lose that tic.  

God loves us from before our births and beyond our deaths and in every moment in between and nothing in heaven or on earth can separate us from that love. You are God’s beloved.

I saw with my own eyes how you all loved Randy through some challenging times in his own life, with his physical health. I am so grateful to you for managing that. What I think happens to us when we are truly loved in that way and we risk soaking it in, is that we desire to grow and learn and soften the hard edges toward growth in the full stature of  Christ. We don’t need to become perfect in order to be loved; but exactly the opposite—because we are already loved, we want to be better. We want to reciprocate that love. And we want to share it with others and the world. 

The beginning of faith is about hearing that Voice first and foremost over all the others – that Voice of the one who claims us and marks us forever, and calls us by name. It’s hard to hear in the midst of all the other voices giving us all kinds of different messages. But if we trust that Voice over those that tell us we aren’t good enough, then we become radically free to live against the grain and to commit ourselves to the way of Jesus and to follow him all the way to the Cross. To be the person we were meant to become.  

My dream for this parish is not that you will call a perfect rector, or that you will become the perfect parish, but that you will keep trusting that Voice of Love that has already claimed you and know that with love all things are possible. My hope for this and every congregation in our diocese is that no child—not a single one—will ever walk through our doors without getting very clear about the fact that they are each a uniquely beloved child of God. 

That is what these vows we recall today are all about: these vows define who you are and who you are becoming as a faith community. It is our work to model what is possible by living into our vocation as the beloved community, by treating one another with love and mutual respect and kindness. This is the work God has given us to do: love God, love neighbor.

 

Sin thrives when we suffer from a kind of spiritual amnesia and forget this abiding truth, when we literally forget who we are and whose we are. Compulsive behaviors and addictive behaviors and destructive behaviors all grow out in some sense from this deep-seated fear that we are not loved or that we are not worthy of being loved. Most of our sin comes most often from those places where we have been hurt or feel broken or unloved. So we can make all the resolutions we want toward self-improvement, but the journey of faith is to live more deeply into the person God already loves.

Love came down at Christmas and the question is not whether or not God is with
you, but how. You are God's beloved child; with you God is well-pleased. The work of Epiphany is to live into that truth. This is the good news that takes us to the very heart of what the Incarnation means and will get us all the way to Ash Wednesday.

Let your light shine for all the world to see.