Sermon for the Baptism of Christ – 9th January 2022: Isaiah 43, 1-7; Acts 8, 14-17; Luke 3, 15-17, 21-22)

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

During these few weeks we are required to have a degree of -and maybe a degree in – liturgical dexterity. What do I mean? The feast days we celebrate over the 40 days from the time of the Nativity of Our Lord, jump backwards and forwards, and don’t follow the chronology of Christ’s life, which I am sure we would all feel more comfortable with.

Two weeks ago we were in the cave with its stable canopy, with a new-born baby Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes. This was an ‘earthy’ event, surrounded by animal noise and smell, straw and a complete lack of dignity and glory as we normally understand it. The birth of a king would normally be in a different location, and with different more luminary circumstances. This is more what we would expect.

St. Gregory Palamas says, ‘However great the heaven of heavens may be may be or the upper waters which form a roof over the celestial regions, or any heavenly place, state or order, they are no more marvelous or honourable than the cave, the manger, the water sprinkled on the infant and His swaddling clothes. For nothing done by God from the beginning of time was more beneficial to all or more divine than Christ’s nativity.’ (Homily 58).

This is, nonetheless, where we find ourselves in this narrative – in a cave with a baby. Today we find ourselves elsewhere. We are no longer in the company of the infant, visited by shepherds first, then on what we call Epiphany, visited also by Eastern potentates, but we find ourselves instead in the company of an adult Jesus, and in place of the earth, we are by the waters of the river Jordan, and we are told of the baptism of Jesus by the other great character of this narrative, John the Baptizer. No simple baptism administered by John is told to us, but rather, in this baptism there is a divine theophany. John may have poured the Jordan waters over Christ, but the divine presence imprints itself and Jesus, is declared the Son of God, the one on whom nothing less that God’s favour rests upon.

This great feast of divine revelation has been missing from the Anglican calendar until it was properly re-established in the liturgical reforms of the year 2000, and now it has a vital place in this season of the revelation of God’s glory.

So we have moved quickly from the babe to the grown-up, and for a few weeks we will read in our Sunday gospels events that further reveal the divine in the humanity of Christ – a season of transfigurations: water becomes wine at a wedding feast; the sick and suffering are restored to wholeness; people in brokenness and social isolation are reconciled. We get a head of steam then suddenly we are in the company of the infant Jesus yet again, for 40 days after his birth this Jewish infant is brought to the temple according to the custom of the Jews, according to the Law, just as he had been circumcised 8 days after his birth.

You see what I mean about the dexterity needed to keep up at this season of the year, where we have to move with alacrity between the infancy narrative, and those gospel related events where God reveals his glory through his ‘Only Begotten Son’.

The baptism of Christ is a pre-figurement of our own baptism. Yet there is a temptation perhaps to dwell too much on the physical side of using water in baptism, essential though it is, and to forget that at the baptism of Jesus something much more significant takes place. In this baptism, administered by John in the river, we are shown the presence of the Holy Trinity. The Father is in the form of the voice, the Son is in the physical presence of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is experienced in some way that can only be expressed as being like the presence of a dove.

When each of us is baptised we are baptised into the name of this same Holy Trinity. It may seem strange to us but we are entering through baptism into the ‘Divine Name’, being absorbed into the divine being, and living within the dynamic life of the Trinity. This is one of the paradoxes of the reality of our faith. Our humanity is absorbed into the divine life. We live in the real world of creation, and we live in the real world of the Spirit. Both are real, and neither are separated one from the other.

John says, ‘I baptise you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming… he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire’ (Lk 3, 16). Note that this time the Holy Spirit is likened to fire – such as was experienced at Pentecost.

So in baptism we as humans are invited into the divine way of life. We are not baptized into a club. We are baptized into the holy Church of Jesus Christ which is his body – his mystical body – to share in, participate in the divine life, which is the will of God for his people. God wills us to be one with him.

In the blessing we use at Christmas, we hear the words, ‘Christ who by his incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with peace and goodwill and make you partakers of the divine nature…’ (CW p 303), and for Epiphany, ‘Christ the Son of God perfect in you the image of his glory and gladden your hearts with the good news of his kingdom..’

It is easy to let these lovely words wash over us, but stop and think, ‘partakers in the divine image’ and ‘perfect in you the image’. In baptism God is saying to us, as he says through the prophet Isaiah, ‘Do not fear for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine…you are precious in my sight and honoured…bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for glory, whom I formed and made’ (Is 43, 1-7 passim).

In our faith we jump backwards and forwards – from the baby to the man, from the manger to the river, from the crib to the cross, from the swaddling clothes to the funeral shroud, from the birth of the only Begotten Son of God, to his death, from his baptism in the river Jordan looking ahead to him passing through the deep waters of death to new and resurrected Life – all of it is the story of our salvation brought about by the ‘Beloved son in whom God is well pleased’. (Luke 3, 22).