St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church
First Sunday after The Epiphany
Isaiah 42: 1-9
Psalm 29
Acts 10: 34-43
Matthew 3: 13-17
Meeting in the Midst
According to the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the human adult body is made up of 60% water. Of that 60% the brain and heart are composed of 73%, the lungs about 83%, the skin 64%, the muscles and kidneys have about 79% and, not to be ignored, the bones hold their share of a watery 31%. Some species are made up of even more water than any of these.
There can be no life on Earth without water. I don’t know what one needs to live in other worlds and in other universes, but I do know that, on this particular earth, nothing can be born, nothing can survive without water. Water is essential for all life on in and above the Earth.
To be sure, water can be a killer, too. Misused, misunderstood, misread, or dismissed, water can kill by drowning out the 40% that is needed for breath.
But when we think of water, we think of life. We are supposed to drink more, keep it clean more, spread its access to others more, and offer it to strangers more. Water is the stuff of life. The cleanser of body and, for those who choose to make it so, the cleanser of mind and soul, too.
The connection between water and God is easy to make. If God created all earthly things, then God created water to sustain life and to cleanse body, soul and spirit. Thus, it is just as easy to connect the creative power of God with the human need to return to its source at birth.
Each one of us here is a living testament to the miracle of birth. The miracle of conception, the continual multiplication of cells occurring faster and into more complexity that baffles even our most current computers, all bouyed in a protective watery sac that floats in water, where all is quietly safe, no matter the chaos outside the womb, until we have no choice but to be caught up into the powerful stream that unerringly thrusts us toward the light of life.
And we land wherever we land. With little or no choice about who gave us life, or to whom we are attached. Life begins with a clean slate, filled with possibilities, filled with opportunities for love, curiosity, discovery, pain, understanding and countless other emotions, actions, decisions and choices that our free will propels us toward.
And, I would venture to say, that most of us, at some point or another, wonders about that. We wonder what it would be like if we could get back to the starting point of birth, to start over, to begin again, with a clean slate and with the opportunity to travel roads not chosen before.
For Christians, to connect the importance of water as part of our creation and birth, our life and survival, our opportunity to cleanse and refresh, to the moment of our baptism, whether for you or I, or for Jesus Christ, is an easy step rather than a leap.
John the Baptist was preaching to people to repent of their sins, to cleanse themselves of all that was impeding them from recognizing God’s work in their lives. The people listened John and entered into the water of the River Jordan so that John could baptize them and give them new life. Jesus came, too, in order that John could assist him in preparing Himself to leave his old road of life and enter into the road of life for which he was destined by God. In recognition of John’s ministry, he has been called to the banks of the River Jordan, so that, led by John, he could descend into the water-like existence which once bore him into life, and can emerge once again, into the world, reborn into the destiny of his call from God.
The Baptism of our Lord is probably one of the most profound marking points of his life and of our Christian life. It is the first critical teaching moment of Jesus’ ministry. His baptism provides the foundation of his ministry to come, his time to start a new life and way of being, a time to leave his old ways and enter into the new. It is a transformative moment, a moment of complete change of direction, new purpose, new perspective, new readiness, anticipation and challenge. In a way, Jesus’ baptism was his rite of passage.
The Baptism of Our Lord serves to set the course of his life, his ministry, his death and his resurrection, just as it does for us.
Imagine, if you will, for a moment, that you are about to be baptized. If you remember your Baptism, then you might think back to that day and how you felt or didn’t feel, how you understood the meaning of it all, or didn’t. You may not remember your actual moment of Baptism, and that doesn’t matter. Or maybe you don’t remember if you actually have been Baptized, and that’s alright.
Perhaps you can remember a time when you went swimming in a swimming pool, or a river or a lake or in the ocean. You might have experienced the sensation of being under water, either by design, like swimming under water, or by accident, by falling into water.
You might still recall or imagine the feeling of coming up out of water into clean air, breathing it into eager lungs.
As a young person in Los Angeles, I used to swim out to catch the big waves off the beach and sometimes I would just miss the right moment to turn and the wave would catch me in its curve just before it reached up and over, sending it and me crashing into the sea before it, and then hurtling me up onto the shore like a piece of useless drift wood. It was great!
Perhaps you were baptized like Jesus, deeply immersed in a river or a lake, or maybe at a font in a church, like the font in the narthex of this church, when, at the moment of Baptism, water ran across your head and face, across your eyes and nose and mouth.
No matter your experience of your Baptism or your memory of it, or how you got there, or the nature of your being there. once underwater, you experienced a noticeable commonality of understanding the reality of the power of the water.
The first thing you notice is the cessation of all worldly noise. There is nothing of the world that you know of life on dry land when you are underwater. All is silent, even your breathing, which is still, unless you have some sort of oxygen equipment with you. Without these, your life underwater is limited and you know it. Under normal circumstances you come up for air, and as your nose and mouth find it, you feel pleasure at breathing freely again, with the freedom to be able to move under the water again, to find the quiet and the peace there, knowing that you will experience again the joy of emerging into life above water again.
Whether you are in the water for pleasure, or whether by accident, if held there too long, there comes a moment, as your lungs begin to search for air, that you would give away whatever it is you have to give away, you would right whatever wrong you may need to right, you would forgive whatever perceived transgression or trespass has been inflicted against you, and you forgive all, and beg for forgiveness for all your own transgressions, if you could only leave that vulnerability, that closeness to death. If you believe in God, you pray to God to grant you more life and if you don’t believe in God, you pray to God to deliver you, anyway.
Whether we have initiated the experience of going underwater and surfacing again, or whether we are there by accident, every human being, faced with impending death, is ready to repent of all sin, if only the opportunity to live again is granted.
Regardless of your underwater experience, it is at the moment of surfacing, at the moment of breathing fresh air, that you understand for one brief moment the value of life. Then a beach ball bounces by you or a life-belt lands on the water within reach, and all is well, all is life again.
Baptism is like all of that and more. It is an experience of life ending and life beginning.
Regardless of you got there, either by choice or traditional expectation, it is both giving up and initiating the new. It is like letting all that should die…die…… and all that should live….. live. It is death and resurrection. It is leaving the “you” that once was you, be behind, and rising up out of the waters of life, to be born again, recreated for ministry in Christ’s name. It is not a final act but a beginning. It is not just a confirmation, but a commission. It is a time of claiming one’s identity as God’s own, created in God’s image, belonging to God forever.
In his humanity, Jesus was just as vulnerable as you or I under the water, and he trusted John to bring him up out of the depths into the air to breathe again. “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him 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.”
It was a holy moment. A moment when the humanity and the divinity of Jesus met in the midst of water and air. Jesus was renewed by God in baptism, and made ready to moved forward with his own ministry.
Baptism is nothing more or less than deep cleansing of one’s heart, mind and soul in the midst of the meeting of water and air. It is fleetingly holy moment…a time when water and air come together to bestow the divine grace of God upon human life again.
We rise up from our baptism called into life, death and resurrection in our own lives. We, too, are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism. We, too, are marked as Christ’s own forever. We, too, are the beloved child of God.
Jesus was called through his baptism into the kind of ministry that would resonate for two thousand years and more to come, that would be revered by 2.8 billion Christians the world around. God isn’t asking us to accomplish all of that, but we must each ask the question of ourselves, “What is the work that calls me as a beloved child of God?” In what way will I make God well pleased? In what way will the world benefit by my baptismal experience? What is the sacrifice I am prepared to make in the name of God?
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas write that those who claim Christianity are called to be a community, “capable of forming people with virtues sufficient to witness to God’s truth in the world.” How will we, the people of the community of St. Aidan’s work to become that? Forming each other to become sufficient witnesses to God’s truth in the world?
At this first Sunday after Epiphany, we have heard the words, “This is my beloved.” When we come to the Last Sunday after Epiphany, on February 23rd, we will hear again the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus, and again, we will hear God’s worlds, “This is my Beloved.”
How will we hear those words six weeks from now? Will we hear them as a community that gathers to learn, pray, worship and serve? Or will the weeks slip by us like a fast moving stream into the distance, bearing our best intentions away?
As we repeat the words of our Baptismal Covenant with God in just a few minutes, it would be well for us to consider the questions that invited us into the deep waters of Baptism: “Do you renounce, the spiritual forces of wickedness and evil, do you renounce all sinful desires that take you away from God?”….and as we begin to gasp with the weight and responsibility of our answers, we grasp a branch of hope to pull us up out of the depths and to keep us moving toward the stream of faithful witness, as the questions continue “Do you turn to Christ…is Christ your Savior….do you put your whole trust is his grace and love? Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?”
As we begin to rise to the surface searching for a breath of forgiving air, the questions still persist, “Do you believe…in God, in Jesus Christ the Son of God, in God, the Holy Spirit? Will you continue in ministry, prayer and worship, will you persevere in resisting evil, will you continue to repent your sins and turn back toward God for forgiveness and mercy, will you have the courage to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ, will you find the face of Christ waiting for you in all you encounter, waiting to love and be loved, trusting you to be just and to be a messenger of peace and respect?”
If the answers to these questions is yes, then my friends, let us leave our old selves behind us in the waters of our baptism and let us breath in the new as we begin a new life in Christ. Our Baptism was not a journey completed, but rather a journey just begun. And the truth is, just like a live birth, happening in this second, somewhere in the world, we land where we land. For some, the ritual of baptism was moving but had little movement in the Spirit, for others, the act of coming up out of the waters of life into the spiritual realm of God, born again, is nothing less than transformative.
Let us come up out of the waters of our Baptismal Covenant and set ourselves on course for a new journey of ministry. Let the earthiness of our Baptismal waters and the Holy Spirit that hovers around us, meet…… so that we will find God in the midst of that holy connection of the human and divine.
And, as we face the world in a new way, in a new direction, beginning again, starting over …. may we have ears to hear God’s voice deep within, “You are my beloved child, in you I am well pleased.”
Amen.
End
Written to the Glory of God
E. J. R. Culver+
January 12, 2019