Sermon – January 9, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
So, how many of you have already started failing on your New Year’s resolutions?
I’m happy to admit that I have, as always, already completely failed in every goal I’ve set for 2022, especially the ones that involve changing some kind of deeply ingrained habit, in the hope that a new year will come with a new me, as easy as that. Maybe you have, too. I’m willing to bet that more than a few of you already need a fresh start on your New Year’s resolution, if you made any, and I have the data to back me up. According to a study published by the exercise-tracking app Strava in 2019, 80% of people who make New Year’s resolutions have dropped them by the second week of February; the majority have stopped keeping up with them by January 19, which Strava dubbed “Quitter’s Day.” Which suggests to me that even now, eight days in, some of you are beginning to drop them.
And those data were, I remind you, from 2019, before the world’s baseline stress level went up about six notches. It’s been a difficult two years to be a human being, to say the least, so if you find that you’re still having trouble setting and achieving goals beyond survival and making it through the week, then… Well, who can blame you? Clearly not me.
To borrow Isaiah’s evocative phrase, over the last few years we have passed through some very stormy waters; we have walked through some serious flames. And while many good things have happened in many of our lives in the last two years, as individuals, and families, as a church and a community, it has still been a time of stress and unpredictability.
So maybe you need a mulligan on those New Year’s resolutions. Fair enough.
Today is, in our church calendar, “The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Epiphany itself, which fell on Thursday, celebrates Christ’s manifestation or appearance in the world. In the ancient church, it incorporated multiple events at once: his birth in Bethlehem and the arrival of Magi from the east, his first miracle at the wedding at Cana and most of all his baptism. And still in the Orthodox churches, the primary focus of Epiphany isn’t the visit of the Magi but the Baptism of Jesus, the moment at which God reveals Christ to the world with the famous words: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) In our calendar now, we space the events of Epiphany out into a whole season, so the Magi arrived on Thursday, the wedding at Cana is next week, and the baptism of Jesus is today.
And the baptism of Jesus raises some awkward questions. The Gospels are quite clear that John the Baptist’s baptism is “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” (Luke 3:3) But today we hear the story of the Baptism of Jesus—the one person in human history whom we say lived without sin—and in our church, we baptize sweet little babies, who can be loud and draining and demanding but… surely not in need of a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”?
It’s a little strange.
For me the crucial verse of this morning’s gospel is one that often passes by unnoticed, a mere bit of narration wedged between the terrifying warning of the chaff being “burned with unquenchable fire” (3:17) and the beautiful image of the heavens torn open and the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus “like a dove.” (Luke 3:21) The verse reads: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened” and so on. (3:21)
At first it seems like just a simple bit of narration, and it is. But this translation is ever-so-slightly misleading. A better one, in this case, comes from the New International Version: “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying,” etc.
“While all the people were being baptized,” Luke writes, “Jesus was baptized too.” It’s not a separation and a linear progression, in which “all the people were baptized,” and then Jesus was also baptized, in which all the sinners over there receive a baptism of repentance, and then Jesus over here is baptized so that God can say, “You are my Son, the beloved.” While all those people over there were being baptized, Jesus was baptized, too—and when he had been baptized and was praying, and people were still being baptized all around him, the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove, and the voice spoke over them all as they plunged into the waters: “You are my Son, the beloved; in you I take great delight.” (Luke 3:22; cf. NET)
Jesus’ baptism is a baptism not of repentance, but of solidarity and love. He plunges with us into the murky waters of our world not only to forgive us, which he does, but to be with us, so that the word God speaks to the ancient Israelites through the prophet Isaiah becomes the word God speaks to all of us who have been baptized through the baptism of Christ: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” (Isaiah 43:2)
At every service of baptism, we re-affirm what the Episcopal Church calls “The Baptismal Covenant,” a series of statements of belief and promises about our conduct—a kind of ecclesiastical New Year’s Resolution. (And in fact, even at services on baptismal days when there are no baptisms, we use it in lieu of the Nicene Creed!) This is easy to misinterpret. A “covenant,” after all, means a kind of treaty; so if you make these promises immediately before you’re baptized, it may seem to be the reward for keeping up your end of the bargain.
But God’s love is not conditioned on our keeping up our side of the covenant. God’s love is unconditional, and more than that, you could even say it’s preconditional; God doesn’t love us more or less if we are naughty or nice, but we can’t be very nice at all without God’s love. It’s why we pray that God will grant us grace “that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made.” We pray for God to bless us with God’s gift of love so that we can be good; not that God love us if and only if we are good.
This is the beauty and the power of Isaiah’s words today: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine… For I am Adonai, your God; the Holy One of Israel, your Savior… You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” (Isaiah 43:1, 4) God will give nations for you, God will give the world for you, God will give God’s very own self for you, no matter how badly you fail at things however trivial or however important, because you, like Jesus, are God’s beloved child, a person who is precious in God’s sight.
So when parents ask me why their sweet little baby needs to baptized for the forgiveness of their sins, I point out that you can receive the Eucharist every week, but you’re only baptized once. And you can take that two different ways: Either that you’re only baptized once, so you can only be forgiven once, so you should wait, like the emperor Constantine waited to be baptized, until your dying day, lest you sin after baptism and miss the chance of being forgiven. Or you can take it the other way: that you can only be baptized once, and you were baptized long ago with “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” and God has already forgiven everything you have ever done or will ever do, every imperfection and flaw that you will ever have, and if you ask God why you had to be baptized all those years ago, her answer to you is clearer than mine could ever be: “Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you… When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” Amen.