1 EPIPHANY, YEAR A
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY
13 JANUARY 2008
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Isaiah42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17
In Matthew’s gospel there are no shepherds. Matthew tells instead of the wise men who came to Bethlehem from afar. Those wise men came and they saw the Holy Child and they were filled with joy. We celebrate that revelation of Jesus’ identity as the first epiphany or manifestation of who Jesus was to become.
Fast forward now some thirty years. Today we stand with the crowds on the banks of the Jordan River. Jesus is an adult. His cousin John is busy baptizing Jews who come to him to be washed clean, after repenting their sins. Jesus comes, too.
And as Jesus comes up out of the water, suddenly the heavens open, the Spirit of God descends and announces to all who can hear it (and we still do!): “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
At last Jesus’ special relationship to God was revealed by God’s own self. Another epiphany. Jesus knew, then that he was beloved of God and had been right along, that he belonged to God and to no other, even to himself. This was Jesus’ own “coming out” event. Jesus accepted his belovedness, we know, and his life began anew.
The thing about Jesus’ baptism that was different from all previous baptisms is that it showed that the gift of belovedness belongs to everyone. “God shows no partiality,” said the apostle Peter. To become God’s children, there is no entrance requirement, no clubiness. We don’t need to be baptized in order to become God’s children. We are all of us children of God; God has known us from before we were born, says the psalm, from way before we ever heard of repentance. We are all children of God. Our beloved son-ship and daughter-ship is a given. Baptism is the outward sign of our status.
So let me ask this question, which might be buzzing in your own minds right about now. If God loves us all anyway, no matter who we are, why bother with baptism?
Here’s what I know to be true. I know that we are loved and cherished by God from our very beginnings. I know that God hates nothing that God has made. I know that God longs for all of us, longs for a relationship with us. That’s what righteousness means. It’s what Jesus was talking about when he said he needed to be baptized “to fulfill all righteousness.” We can read about God’s longing all through the Hebrew scriptures. One day we come to our senses, like the prodigal son, and we realize that God really does love us and has loved us forever. We recognize that and it dawns on us. Or, if we are too young, someone else, a parent, perhaps, recognizes our preciousness. So we come or we are brought to baptism. Imagine God’s desire being so strong that God plunged like a dove through the heavens to break in upon Jesus to let him know about it. Imagine God longing for us so deeply that God plunges like a dove to us. “Behold my beloved son….here is my beloved daughter…..Look what I made. Look at the object of my devotion…..Here she is!……Here he is!
The big thing about our baptism, as it was with Jesus’ own baptism, is what we do afterwards about our belovedness? Do we stand there dumbfounded? Do we dry ourselves off and say, “Well, that was nice. Now what’s for lunch?” Do we lord it over those other children of God who are not yet baptized or may never be baptized? What’s OUR role in our baptisms?
I read the other day from the journal of Nora Gallagher, a woman writer who had returned to church, to the Episcopal Church, after a long, long absence. She was moved by the liturgy. She was faithful in her attendance. She felt good about coming back.
But something was missing. Nora Gallagher wasn’t quite sure what it was. One day a friend invited her to go on a ten-day trip to Nicaragua during the waning days of the revolution. Nora decided at the last minute to go along. She was stunned to discover that the working class there was, as she put it, “in the saddle,” that people she would have written off as nobodies or even undesirable were part of the body politic, that everybody worked together for a common purpose, and that people actually talked to each other as if they were equals. “God shows no partiality.” When she returned to the US, Nora realized she did not want to become a revolutionary. But she began noticing people she had dismissed or not even noticed before.
And most importantly, Nora realized what had been missing in her life, even in the church. That what she had been yearning for all along was that she might feel her faith in her flesh. She wanted to embody her shaky faith, to act it out, to incarnate it. (Things Seen and Unseen p. 72)
What was missing for her was the part of baptism that involves us and our response to God’s announcement that we really and truly are divinely cherished. Our own acceptance of who we are. Making it real in our lives. Turning our lives into signs of who we are, signs of God-in-us, signs of Jesus, whose baptism we have also been baptized with. Our actions, our lives then disclose our true Jesus-selves to others.
Baptism is a sacrament, an outward sign of the inner mystery which is that we are valued by God. We, too, are sacraments of that inner mystery. We, too, are outwards signs of the incredible inner truth that God loves us—and we know it, so we show it!
The promises we make at our baptisms are outward signs, words visible on the page and audible to the ear when we recite them.
…that we continue to come to church, gathering with others of the Body of Christ in worship…that we recognize our lapses when they happen and we repent and turn and return to God…that we show, demonstrate, live and incarnate in our lives the Good News of God in Christ, the news of God’s love for us and every single other human…..that we serve Christ in everyone we meet, loving them as we love ourselves, which means, of course, that we love ourselves, too, as we know God loves us….and that we strive for peace and justice, that is, right relationship among all people and that we respect the dignity of every human being
Those are the promises we make to God, our part of the covenant, our thanks for the gift of God’s love, the gift we give back to God. God’s love for us continues even when we don’t keep those vows—so knowing that, how can we NOT keep them?
May we know that we are living sacraments of Christ to the world. May we, as individuals and as a community of souls, help each other seek to find ways to practice those promises, day after day after day. May we recognize that we, baptized in Christ, are sacred epiphanies of the living God!