The Baptism of the Lord: Cycle C 21-22
THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD
Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7 | Acts 10:34-38 | Luke 3:15-16, 21-22
Almighty, everliving God, who when Christ had been baptized in the Jordan River and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, declared him your Beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water in the Holy Spirit, may always be pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
One of the things I began our program today with was the idea that this year I was praying for peace. I’ve been thinking about it. During that piece of music, I was realizing that this gift of peace is something that is not just something we should hope for but is something that we’ve been promised. We’ve been promised an inner quiet, a sense of reverence for the things that are unfolding before us that we can’t fully understand because of a belief and a conviction of a God who is nothing but love, nothing but compassion, nothing but understanding. Yet we have a long history of misunderstanding God, or at least I should say it this way: that God has revealed himself slowly, over so many centuries of human life, and we grow slowly into the fullness of who he is. And it doesn’t come until the person of Jesus, and the person of Jesus is the key, because he is us. This God/man is both God, but he’s also you, and he’s also me. And so one of the things that I want to begin with is an understanding that, when you have this gift of peace, it isn’t something that means there’s no anxiety or no tension.
There’s a critic that lives inside of all of us. We can never quite get rid of the critic, and the critic is the judge, constantly judging us, often at 3:00 in the morning, that we haven’t done the work we should have done the day before, or we’re failing in some way. But there’s this really uncomfortable, gnawing feeling when you’re under the influence of the critic. It’s a kind of form of evil that I just feel we all have to live with. I’d love for it to go away. I would love to say there’s a way in which you can never — could be free of that, but we never will be fully free of it, because somehow evil is in the world for a reason, and we don’t know why. But somehow it constantly calls us out to something beyond ourselves for help, for support, for something that we’re missing. And I would say the biggest thing we end up missing is this awareness of who God really is and what ultimately our relationship with him is like. It’s not something that we consistently have to fight to keep by avoiding sin. That is a very common way of imagining our relationship with God, but it’s not. It’s not what it is. No, his compassion is beyond our imagining, his forgiveness beyond our hopes. It’s something we have to train ourselves, in a sense, to enter into.
So I want to — this Feast of the Baptism is so fascinating that I want to start with the second reading, because it has something in it that I think is interesting. It’s a time in the history of God’s revelation to human beings when, for the first time, it was revealed, through Jesus, that God has no real partiality to the creatures he has created, even though in the Old Testament, it was very clear, and it came from God, that he would tell people that he wanted them to know that they were special to him. And so he started off with a kind of basic response to our human nature, and that is that we like to be favored. We like to be the favorite one, and somehow when you say, “You are the favored ones, and everybody else is not,” there’s a kind of way in which that builds up our sense of we’re going to be protected by this God. That’s what all the gods did. They were territorial gods. They belonged to a place on the earth. They lived in the earth, and the people that they cared for were their special people. So that’s what people understood. So it was natural to say, “All right, this God, the God that came through Abraham, that this is the God that is wanting to tell the people that will follow him that they are special, and others were not acceptable.”
What that reminds me of is, growing up as a Catholic, I’ve been — gosh, I’m going to be 82 this month, and I’m thinking, “I’ve lived a long time.” And I remember, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was so clear in the teaching of the Catholic Church that, if you weren’t Catholic, if you weren’t baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, you were not going to be saved, you went to hell. And I remember hearing that as a child and thinking, “Gosh.” It was perplexing to me in a way, because it seemed like a horrible thing to happen to these people, and there was some deep sense inside of me that I thought, “Well, they haven’t done anything. They haven’t chosen to not be Catholic if they grew up in a foreign country or if they grew up in —” where I grew up in Chicago and in St. Louis and in Philadelphia, I didn’t think about it that much. But I do remember that I would think to myself, “Okay, those people don’t get to go to heaven.”
In that passage that we have in that second reading, it’s the end of that system that still stayed on for a while, but the end of the system where the Israelites were told that they were the special ones was blown apart by Cornelius seeking the wisdom of St. Peter in that story. And the explosive thing of redemption is that not only are the chosen people saved through this mysterious act of Christ’s death on the cross, not only are they saved, but everyone is saved. Everyone is saved. Isn’t it amazing that that insight came into the church 2,000 years ago, and then it went away over centuries of misunderstanding? And when you think about it, it’s interesting that I lived at a time in the 19- — well, during my lifetime, actually when I was in the seminary, the Vatican Council came, and the Vatican Council was not unlike what was revealed through the question of Cornelius to Peter, is that the Catholic Church realized that this statement that we used to make, that people had to be Roman Catholic to be saved, was absolutely erroneous and that anyone who sought the truth and anyone who sought God would be saved, that all religions, if they teach the truth, are means to salvation. That was so freeing when I heard that as a 20-year-old, and yet it hasn’t really taken root that much, or it doesn’t seem, because there’s still people that like that image of being special, chosen by God. And there’s even a kind of mysterious, I don't know, egocentric feeling that, “If I’m the one that’s saved, then I’m better than.” What I’m getting to, I’m trying to get to, is there is that image in our relationship with God where God makes choices about our value and decides to save us depending on whether we have earned it through our performance. And if there’s anything I would want to free you from, it’s that.
I want you to look for a moment at what happened at the baptism of Jesus, because at that moment, something changed radically in the world of God’s relationship with human beings. I’m going to see if I can try to describe it for you. It’s not easy, but I think I can. But there’s something about that moment when Jesus was baptized. There is this sense of enthusiasm in that gospel passage, that everybody’s wondering who is the Messiah. They’ve been waiting for this one. It’s like you and I waiting for the truth of what this whole thing means. There’s an archetype for this longing for the truth that was in the historical revelation of God to his people through the Old Testament and New Testament, but it’s also in all of us, longing for this insight, this saving insight. And it’s there in that feast, or it’s celebrated in that gospel, and it’s part of the feast that we’re celebrating, the baptism of Jesus, because what happens in that moment, we see a human being, being honored and blessed by God in a unique way where he is being told, this human being — and now bear with me, but I want you to understand that Jesus is both divine and fully human. And unfortunately, when we think about the fully human part, we don’t realize that he’s just like us, even though — I think it’s perhaps because we’re told he was sinless, and we’re certainly not sinless. But just imagine Jesus in this moment is the human race, not — and he’s all men and all women, and what we’re seeing is God entering into the human race, the human condition with this longing to awaken in them a new way of seeing themselves in relationship to God. And so he pours out into him his Spirit, which is both the presence of God, which is love, acceptance, honoring who we are, and fire. It burns out everything that is not him, not us, not our true self.
And what’s so interesting to me about that image is that, when God entered into us to do that work, it wasn’t just a moment, boom, and it happens. It’s the promise that, when you live in the presence of God in your life, you’re going through a process called your spiritual journey, and in it, you’re constantly being purified, constantly being taken into a new level of awareness because of this indwelling, promised presence, which is never, never judgmental but always embracing your imperfection. It’s so essential that you believe this in order to find the peace that is our inheritance, because otherwise, we live in a constant kind of on again, off again, “I’m acceptable. Now I’m not acceptable.” Because of what? Sin. And yet we know that, in the mysterious fullness of who this God/man is going to reveal to us, the God who lives in him and lives in us, is a God of nothing but forgiveness, nothing but forgiveness. His judgment is on our actions but not our value. Yes, we can be told and shown by God and by those who represent him that there’s something about our behavior that is destructive and harmful to us and others. That’s not being judged and condemned for that. It’s being shown something. And when you look at what Jesus is receiving from God the Father, it’s a ministry from his Father into his life that radically kept him focused completely on what it was that he came to reveal: a new life, a new life in a relationship with God that is never, ever damaged by our mistakes, our sins, but only God invites us to let him minister to us in those moments.
This image of a ministry of God to us is the servant image that we have in the first reading. It is so beautiful, because that was revealed in Isaiah centuries ago, and it was always there, from the beginning, that we would finally discover the God that is creating us is not a God who is awesomely separate and distant from us but a God who is intimate and close. And he’s not there primarily to receive from us those things that we might want to honor him by striving for perfection, but he’s there to minister to us. He’s a minister. He’s a caretaker. He’s a lover. He’s a nurse. He’s a doctor. He’s a therapist. He’s all those things, and when you listen to a description of the things that he promises to be in us, they’re so beautiful, because he’s the one that has come into us to bring us insight, opens our eyes. Think of this: if you could just imagine God’s role inside of you, working patiently, consistently, lovingly, filled with forgiveness for our mistakes, saying, “If you will just let me do my work, let me minister to you, I want to open your eyes so you can see what you don’t see. Have insight into who you are and who I really am and what the world is all about.” And then he goes on to say, “Not only will I be there to help you open your eyes, but I will also be there to release you from every single thing that imprisons you from becoming who you are intended to be.”
Think about it. Think of the disposition you can place yourself under and have yourself feeling separated, isolated from other people, from God himself. It’s frightening that we have this capacity to be able to imprison ourselves through a misunderstanding of weaknesses. So the weaknesses make us seem to be unacceptable — unacceptable, unable to be a part of the culture around us, the society around us. Sometimes we feel our weaknesses are so strong that we have no value whatsoever in being able to bring something to other people. So we’re imprisoned in a world of shame and guilt, and what a tragedy. And God is there inside of you to enable you to find that kind of freedom.
And the last is the one that really just always makes me, I don't know, feel so blessed to have the God that we have in our lives, and that’s when he says, “I want to bring you out of darkness, out of depression, out of a sense of hopelessness.” If you realize that baptism is an awakening of your imagination to the presence of this interior God, this God living inside of you doing nothing but ministering to you, not demanding perfection — he is longing to awaken you to the things you don’t see, to the things that keep you from being yourself, and from a darkness that just robs you of something that I would just so long for us all to have. And that’s that wonderful inner sense of peace.
It’s not easy to change your image of God. It’s not easy to change it in a world where people are preaching and teaching the antithesis of what I’m trying to say, but all I can tell you is, if you believe it, if you imagine it as real and you begin to feel it, it is transformative. And you know what happens instead of people saying, “Oh, you’ll become so self-centered. You’ll think you can get away with anything.” No, it never works that way. The more you are loved, the more you are forgiven, the more you are cared for, the more you are given life, the more you will turn around and do the same thing for the people around you. It’s 1,000 percent sure to happen. The more you feel judged, the more you feel condemned, the more you feel rejected, the more likely you’re going to be that way to other people. We do enough self-criticism. We don’t need God to criticize us. We don’t even need a church to criticize us. We don’t need a religion that criticizes us. We need one that promises to call us into a place of real — how do I say it — awareness of a quality of favor. That’s what God said to the human race when he baptized — when Jesus was baptized, and we are baptized into him. And baptism doesn’t have to be the formal ceremony in a religion. It’s beautifully celebrated in religion, and it’s wonderful. But it’s also something that’s promised over and over again to every creature that God has created, that he will enter into them, and you, as you are, will find favor with him. “This is my Beloved, in who I am well pleased.” Don’t misunderstand that as a perfect Jesus that he’s pleased. Understand it that he’s pleased in you — you, the one that he loves the most.
Father, at times when we describe you as the lover that you are, it’s something that some people find difficult, because they’re so afraid that, if we don’t have someone there judging us and ready to condemn us, that we’ll somehow not perform at the highest level. And that’s because we’re constantly looking at our own stuff to be able to perform at the level that you want us to be, and that’s the biggest mistake we make. So bless us with this conviction of inner strength that is you, not just us but you and you in such an intimate way with us that you can’t really distinguish when we’re doing it out of your strength or when it’s our strength, but the two become one. So thank you for that gift. Thank you for our new life and for the peace it promises, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.