The Baptism of Christ
Mary Holmen

Isaiah 42:1-9 Psalm 29 Acts 10:34-43 Matthew 3:13-17

Well, this is where it all begins. Today, the first Sunday after Epiphany, is the beginning. What, you say, what about Christmas? Isn’t that the beginning? Well, in the western Church, maybe. But today, the Baptism of the Lord, is bigger than Christmas in much of the Christian world, especially the churches of the Eastern tradition. This is where Christ is revealed and made known. Eastern Christians call today the theophany – the occasion where Jesus is revealed as God in human flesh.

Today is also the beginning of the season of weeks after Epiphany. From now until the beginning of Lent, we will have the opportunity to reflect on accounts from the gospels that tells us something about who Jesus is. We will read and hear accounts of events or actions or sayings of Jesus that show us – yes, this really is the Son of God. And so, we begin today with Jesus’s baptism and the heavenly voice announcing, “This is my beloved Son.” This is the most public of the accounts of Jesus’s baptism. In Luke’s telling, the voice is addressed to Jesus alone: “You are my beloved Son…”. But in Matthew’s telling, the voice is for everyone who is there.

What can we draw from the story of Jesus’s baptism?

1. Jesus’s baptism is the occasion of his call to ministry.

Jesus submits himself to John’s very popular movement – we are told that great crowds came to John as he baptized in the Judean wilderness. And Jesus has a life-changing experience. God’s Spirit descends on him, and a heavenly voice announces, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Perhaps it is a realization or confirmation of his sense of his role and commission. The voice echoes the words of Isaiah: “Behold my servant, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” It’s almost like an official introduction – here he is; this is the one. And God says, “I have put my Spirit upon him.” It is the Spirit who gives power to the servant, power to Jesus, to carry out the task he has been given.

The baptism is followed by Jesus going into the wilderness to pray – or as we might say, to unpack the meaning of what has happened to him. I think it’s clear that Jesus understood his ministry in terms of the Servant of God as portrayed in the writings of Isaiah. Isaiah describes the servant’s task: to bring justice to the nations, to open blind eyes, to liberate prisoners. This is nothing less than a total reordering of the world that God is bringing about. The mission and message of the Servant is salvation and hope. That is how Jesus understood his mission. Peter’s sermon in the reading from Acts is a summary. God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit and with power; Jesus went about doing good and healing. Even Jesus’s words to John in the gospel reading show this understanding. In saying, “It is proper in this way for us to fulfill all righteousness,” Jesus states that he will put God’s plan of salvation into effect. God is righteous when God acts according to God’s promises. Jesus affirms that he is called to bring about God’s promise of salvation, just as the angel had told Joseph at Jesus’s conception, “He will save his people from their sins”. This plan and call will lead ultimately to the cross, and we may recall that Jesus referred to his death as a baptism. Jesus’s baptism is the occasion of his call to ministry, and it is the ministry of a servant.

2. In his baptism, Jesus identifies with those whom he has come to serve.

A question the church has had to wrestle with is “Why was Jesus baptized?” John preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The ritual of immersion in water signifies, among other things, cleansing and purification. It was required for Gentiles who wished to become Jews, a part of the process of changing from an outsider into one who belonged. Jesus did not need to do that. He already belonged to the covenant people. Jesus’s baptism is a demonstration of his faithfulness. In his baptism, he identifies with outsiders. He chooses sides. He chooses to be one with sinners, with the brokenness of individuals and of the world. He accepts human sinfulness, alienation, and brokenness as his own, because it is the only way he can heal and liberate. At his baptism, Jesus identifies with those he has come to save. God acts in calling and commissioning Jesus; Jesus acts in choosing sides.

All this has consequences for our understanding of our own baptism. And so,

3. In baptism, God gives us the Holy Spirit and calls us to ministry – each one of us and all of us together. We are adopted as God’s children – God’s sons and daughters – and commissioned as God’s servants.

In a few minutes, we will renew our baptismal covenant, our baptismal relationship with God. We get to do this several times a year: primarily at the Easter Vigil, every time we witness and participate in the baptism of a new Christian, and on the occasions in addition to Easter that the church reserves as especially appropriate for baptism: today, the feast of Pentecost, and the feast of All Saints. Every time we do this, we renew our commitment to turn away from evil and follow Christ, and we confess our faith in the Triune God. Then comes a series of what I sometimes call the “so what” questions: so, we say we believe in this God – what difference does that make? How will we live? And so we promise to continue as faithful members of the worshipping community, to be engaged in reconciliation, to share the good news of God in Christ, to minister to Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect and protect God’s creation.

Every time we baptize someone, we pray that God will teach them to love others in the power of the Spirit and will send them into the world in witness to God’s love. We are given the Holy Spirit in baptism so that we may be empowered to carry out our ministry. And it is the ministry of a servant. We are to bring justice – to work with God and each other to remake the world so that it becomes what God intended it to be. We are to set free those who are in any way oppressed. Our baptism is the occasion when we are joined to God’s mission. We receive our identity as God’s people when we participate in that mission.

In Jesus’s baptism, God acted by calling and empowering him, and Jesus acted by taking sides. So too in our baptism, God acts by calling and empowering us. And –

4. We act by choosing sides.

The baptismal liturgy asks us to make a decision, a commitment. In the Anglican Church, we are so used to seeing baptism administered to babies that we’ve come to think of it almost exclusively as a rite of infancy. And that is our loss. We have inherited a diminished understanding of baptism. Read those questions again. Baptism is first and foremost about an adult commitment and is administered almost by extension to the children of believing parents. Look sometime at the order in the liturgy in which the candidates are presented. Adults and older children who can answer for themselves are presented first, and they are asked, “Do you desire to be baptized?” Infants and younger children are presented second, and the parents and sponsors make promises for what they will do to ensure the child they present is brought up in the faith and life of the Christian community.

The promises of baptism ask us to take a stand against evil and for God. In our baptism, we choose sides. We give our allegiance to God as God is known in Jesus. We commit to following him and no one else. And that is a commitment we need to renew daily, not only publicly at occasions like this, but in living as disciples of Jesus, in all the decisions and actions of our lives. When we identify with Jesus, we also identify, as he did, with the people we are called to serve. We take sides with the poor, the oppressed, the outsiders, the alienated, and those who are broken by the world’s injustices and life’s disappointments.

Baptism, then, is at the core of everything we do as Church, not because of the ritual but because of what it signifies. It is about what we do, but even more about what God has done and is doing. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are at the heart of Christian life. In baptism, we are joined to Christ. Paul’s letters make this clear in several places: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4). Baptism is Christian initiation. It is not the destination, but the beginning of a journey. The Christian life is a process of discovering more and more what God has done in Christ and is doing through us, of discovering that we are God’s children and God’s ministers, that God both calls us to this work and empowers us to carry it out.

On the day of our baptism, God looked at each one of us and said, “You are my beloved child, and I am well pleased with you.” Each day, that voice sounds again, “You are my child. I like you!” – even if we forget or drown it out or lose our way. We are God’s new creation, pronounced not just “good” but “Very Good!” May we, in the ministries to which we are called as individual disciples and as the Body of Christ, reveal God’s glory by demonstrating God’s love for all of creation and all its inhabitants. That is what Epiphany season is about.