The Baptism of Christ

The Baptism of Christ (10th January 2021)

Sermon by Claire Betts

Readings: Genesis 1.1-5; Psalm 29; Mark 1.4-11

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight. O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

This time of the Church year is always a peculiar one. Last week, at the feast of Epiphany, the Magi were visiting the tiny baby Jesus who had been born on Christmas day, with much celebration, even in this socially distanced year. Emmanuel – God is with us – for whom we had waited patiently throughout the shortening and darkening days of Advent.

Today we’ve jumped forward thirty years in a week and we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus. Mark’s Gospel, which we heard this morning, begins with the Baptism with very little preamble. In fact, all four Gospels mention this important event. Matthew’s Gospel has a long genealogy of Jesus’s ancestors, the birth story with the Magi visit, the flight to Egypt then it also leaps to the Baptism. John has the famous beginning with the Word and light in the darkness and then the Baptism. Luke has the birth story and the shepherds and Simeon and Anna in the Temple at Candlemas and then he gives us the only hint about Jesus as a child when he tells of him, aged 12, going missing from his parents until they find him in the Temple teaching the teachers. Then he too jumps to the Baptism.

In our book club last year on zoom, a group of us from the congregation talked a bit about what we’d have liked a biography of Jesus to tell us. Details of his life; his appearance; his childhood friends; his education; his likes and dislikes. We can assume that in those missing years, he was growing up in his father’s house in Nazareth, learning how to be a carpenter. I read an interview with an archaeologist who works in Nazareth, which is now a bustling city which attracts tourists from all over the world who are keen to see the place of Christ’s upbringing. She says she takes the opportunity whenever anyone is developing a new site to dig beneath the prospective building to learn about 1st century Nazareth and everything since. She said Nazareth in Jesus’s time was a small backwater because it was surrounded by hills with one main road in and out that didn’t go anywhere else. No one passed through Nazareth on their way elsewhere, you only went there if you intended to.

But I think this is the perfect image of Jesus experiencing the ordinary after the extraordinary events of his birth. Most of our life as humans is ordinary time. Most of the liturgical year of the Church is called Ordinary Time, the festivals are the smaller percentage of the time. To be fully human, Jesus needed to live as an ordinary human. Then, at his Baptism, as an almost middle-aged man in that time period, he accepted immersion under the water and immersion into our human condition; of frailty and eventual death. And Baptism is when God fully breaks through and transforms the ordinary. As humans, we too get to experience the extraordinary within the ordinary. God is with us – Emmanuel – but in every part of our ordinary time. Not packed away in the New Year with the boxes of Christmas decorations.

I was eleven years old when I was baptised because we attended a Baptist Church until I was ten and they don’t baptise babies. We moved to an Anglican Church once I was ten and I started attending confirmation classes at the time of my baptism, ready to be confirmed later that year.  I had plenty of opportunity to talk with our Rector about the Baptismal process and the theology of Baptismal water. I was baptised with my four siblings and then was confirmed by Bishop Brian, the then Bishop of Edmonton later that year and I think I’m quite lucky being old enough to remember it. At the time I also felt lucky, but for a different reason – I’d escaped the Baptist full-immersion baptism which I’d been really scared of! I couldn’t swim until I was about 8 or 9 and was still very nervous of swimming pools and certainly being immersed in them. Our gentle trickle of water over our heads was definitely my personal preferred experience!

Despite feeling lucky to have been old enough to remember my own baptism, I brought all my own babies to baptism well before their first birthdays. Partly, of course, this is the tradition I was raising them in. But also, in preparation for this sermon today, I was talking to them about it and we agreed that we also liked the idea of giving a gift to our babies of belonging. Belonging to the Body of Christ, the community of the Church. That they could never be alone, that they could choose to accept or reject that family in their adult lives but that it would be there nonetheless. And more than that, that it connected them to a timeline of Christians thousands of years in the past, back to John the Baptist, baptising the first Christians in the River Jordan and stretching into the unknown future. In the New Testament reading for today St Paul was baptising the first Christians in Ephesus. A continuous line of those baptised with the Holy Spirit and given the gift of knowing the extraordinary love of God.

One of the little things in today’s Gospel that particularly resonated with me was the specific choice of word that Mark selected just as Jesus is ‘coming up out of the water’. The heavens above him are ‘torn’ apart. And, I don’t read Greek unfortunately, but I understand it is the identical word he uses in the Good Friday story when the sun stopped shining and the curtain in the temple was ‘torn’ in two. This makes a link between the moment of his baptism, of the moment God speaks directly to Jesus to say ‘You are my Son’ and the moment of his death.

Water is cleansing and purifying, both literally and metaphorically. It washes us clean and it is life-giving. There is life here on Earth because of water, and the lack of it on other planets leaves them barren. In the Old Testament reading today we heard the beginning of the Book of Genesis, the creation of our world when the Spirit of God is sweeping over the face of the waters. The waters are there at the birth of the Earth itself. When I talk about baptismal water, I find myself with the earworm for Water of Life which we have sung here so many times – cleanse and refresh us, raise us to life in Christ Jesus. All you who thirst, come to the waters and you will never be thirsty again. It waters the Earth and brings forth life.

But water is also destructive, it is powerful enough to wear away rocks into canyons; to move enormous glaciers and icebergs. We have seen recently, news of devastating floods and landslips. The Psalm today, Psalm 29, refers to the ‘mighty waters’ and the voice of the Lord that is upon those waters which then breaks the cedar trees and thunders and shakes the wilderness.

Water is life-giving and destroying. It is birth and death. It symbolises the bursting through of the extraordinary love of God into our ordinary lives. Jesus immersed himself in water and accepted the ordinary, fragile and limited life span of his human body. But his Baptism and that moment of the meeting of his own transition or ‘birth’ into public ministry and his inevitable death, gave him and gives us life after death. The last line of the Water of Life earworm summarises it: Death shall no longer have power over us.

In this service we renewed our baptismal vows. Had we been here together we would have been sprinkled with holy water and sung Water of Life.  We must see that water as a force of transformation, giving us strength in the ‘ordinary time’ of our day to day lives.

Amen.