Sermon for the 8th of January, 2023 - Baptism of Christ

When you came into church today, I wonder whether you noticed the holy water stoop at the entrance. The point of having this is to remind us of our baptism. And it’s what we do today on Epiphany Sunday.

I wonder what adjectives you might use to describe baptism?

Beautiful?  Solemn?  Ancient?  Holy? We have a baptism next week and no doubt the family and godparents will come beautifully dressed with a delightful wiggly baby in a special christening gown.

So you might be surprised if the word ‘wild’ is used to describe baptism. That what was going on in baptism 2000 years ago – it’s described in the language of the untame and the unpredictable. This is quite different to churchy decorum.

When John baptised Jesus, the language used is of the heavens ‘torn apart’, the Spirit descending like a dove, and the voice of God filling the desert air.

John the Baptiser appeared ‘in the wilderness’.  He did not conduct his ministry in Jerusalem, at the temple, the centre of his people’s religious life.  Instead, he drew the crowds away from the centre, asking them to repent and receive baptism in the wilderness.

And crowds responded – they travelled to the dessert to meet a locust-eating prophet wearing camel-skin.

It’s easy for us to miss the significance of this. Jerusalem was the beating heart of Israel’s spiritual life.  The temple was the place to meet God. It included rituals of purification by water. But there was something about this spiritual man John; something authentic and fresh that turned crowds away from the centre of institutionalized dogma and authority.

I wonder whether those who ticked the no religion box in our latest census, the majority of whom aren’t atheists, are looking for something fresh and authentic, but have given up on an institution that is seen as misogynist, homophobic and ridden with scandal. And are instead expressing their spiritual search in other ways…. Yoga classes, mindfulness. Both of which I’m a fan of by the way.

I regularly wonder how best to find bridges to those who have given up on religion. The coronavirus pandemic resulted in a 50 per cent surge in online searches for prayer I assume to cope with feelings of anxiety and hopelessness. I wonder whether one the best things we can do as a church is to be a place of prayer.

Jesus was baptised in a wild place.  Far away from the safe, the routine, and the familiar.  If we want to follow him in our own baptisms, we need to listen to voices crying out in the desert.  We, too, need to leave the ‘cities’ or ‘churches’ that make up our comfort zones.  We, too, need to allow a good but wild God to disrupt us.

There is also a wildness in solidarity. Jesus identifies with humanity in his baptism, along with tax collectors and sinners, people who could sully his reputation. But Jesus didn’t care. His first public act was an act of radical solidarity.  And in our baptisms, we vow to do the same. To embrace Christ’s baptism is to embrace the wild truth that we are interdependent, that we are all connected.  The bond God seals by water and by the Spirit is truer and deeper than all others.  It makes a stronger claim on our lives and loyalties than all prior claims of race, gender, nationality, politics or affinity.  In our polarised world and church, it asks that we bear all the risks of belonging.  Belonging to a group of brothers and sisters in Christ that we won’t agree with, look different from, perhaps even those we find rather odd.

Lastly there is wildness in God’s geography.

Steve Thorngate [“Holy Water Everywhere,” Christian Century editor], describes baptism as a sacrament that straddles the “locative” and the “liberative.”  We are baptized locally, in a specific time and place, into the spiritual life of a particular parish.  Baptism isn’t a cerebral, otherworldly abstraction.  Baptism insists that ‘this place, here — this ground, this water — is holy’.

At the same time, baptism liberates us into the global, the universal, and the timeless.  The water we step into at baptism is connected to all bodies of water, everywhere. It affirms that we cannot contain or constrict the sacred within any walls of denomination, dogma, liturgy, or practice.

In Epiphany, we hear stories of God parting the curtain for brief, shimmering moments, allowing us to look beneath and beyond the ordinary surfaces of our lives, and catch glimpses of the wild and the extraordinary.  This, of course, is another way of describing the sacrament of baptism itself: it is a place and a moment where the ‘extraordinary’ of God’s grace blesses the ordinary water we stand in.

Today we are invited to join Jesus as he stands at the water's edge, willing to immerse himself in shame and scandal so that the wild wonder of God might be ours to cherish.  Listen also, to the delighted voice that tells us who we are and whose we are in the sacrament of baptism.  Even in the wild, untameable water we stand in, may we know ourselves as God’s Beloved. Cherished, forgiven, unconditionally loved, and delighted in.

 

Reference: Debie Thomas