Jesus’ baptism is
clearly important. Mark pretty much opens
his Gospel with it, it’s narrated by more gospels than Jesus’ birth is,
one of our stained glass windows depicts, in fact the stained glass
window that I chose to put on my ordination holy card. Yes, Jesus’ baptism is clearly
important. But, Jesus getting baptized
isn’t what struck me as the most important thing in this gospel. Studying and praying with it over this week,
one sentence stuck with me: “He will baptize you.”
And he
has. The promise has been
fulfilled. Brothers and sisters, Christ
has baptized us. That’s what makes us sisters
and brothers! It was something whose
awesomeness I think I only realized after I’d first baptized. Praying in my room after the baptism, an awe
came over me, awe over the impossibility of neatly dividing up agency: I had
genuinely poured real, physical water over a flesh and blood human being, I had
said the words, said “I baptize you,” and God had done something. God had baptized Alyssa. I hadn’t cleansed her from original sin,
adopted her as my daughter, brought her into the fold of my disciples or
started her on the pilgrimage of ongoing growth in holiness. God had done that. But those were my hands, and my lips, words
my breath made mine, though I can never claim them as any other than gift, gift
from Christ, who baptizes us.
And it’s
not just with water, though that would be enough. Water, live-giving and cleansing, richly
evocative, calling out to us of healing from sin, of being brought out of the
confinement of sin which crumples and cramps up our potential for virtue. Baptism with water would be beautiful
enough. But he goes further. Christ baptizes us with the Spirit. We immersed in God’s own life. God’s life-giving creative breath, that
inspired prophets, that hovered over the waters of creation, covers us, clings
to us, inhabits us more deeply than we dare to probe ourselves. Yes, the Spirit of God is upon us, between
us, among us, and the Spirit’s doing wonderful things.
And in
that Spirit, we hear God’s voice. And
God says to us something new: “You are my beloved son, my beloved daughter. In you, I am well pleased.” And that’s something new, that’s something
that’s wrought in us by baptism, by the first embrace of God that tenderly
excites us to holiness enough that we walk, we keep walking until we rest
forever in His lasting embrace. And that’s
why, in a very real sense, each of our baptisms were more important even than
Jesus’. Because in our baptisms,
something new happened. We who were
estranged were brought near, we who were outside the fold were made sons and daughter, claimed,
embraced. Jesus was already God’s Son,
Jesus was already King, already prophet.
The declaration and reaffirmation of that belovedness must have been
powerful, must have helped sustain him in his darkest hours. In fact, it encourages us, as we read of
Jesus being met with rejection, dismissal, opposition, to be reminded of that
tender link with his father. The visual
reminder of God’s faithfulness to his word, the dove of peace that reminded
Noah that God stills storms and brings us to dry land, how must that have
strengthened Jesus when all around him seemed storm and people looked to him to
calm it?
But, to
us, to us, it’s something altogether new.
Baptism is more than a reminder for us, it’s a renewal. It’s a new embrace, a new adoption, a new
gift that we could never be worthy of.
In our Acts reading, Peter declares God shows no partiality, literally
God doesn’t take note of faces in the
Greek. It’s a pivotal moment in the
progression of Acts, this solemn proclamation, as Christianity moves from a
small Jewish sect to a rapidly expanding Church to which all are urgently invited. It’s an odd phrase, unusual. Could it mean that God doesn’t care about our
individuality, doesn’t deign to regard our face? No, nothing could be further than the truth:
God counts every hair on our head; God formed us, God takes us by the hand, as
Isaiah puts it. But, he doesn’t do that
because we impress him. He doesn’t do
that because of anything we bring to the table, not even our ancestry. No, we’re acceptable to God because we need
Him, and God doesn’t refuse us, won’t refuse us, because we need Him, because
being accepted by Him is all that counts in life. So he accepts us. Just because.
Because love. Because grace. Because he doesn’t take note of faces, but of
frailty. And we all need what Christ
freely chose to accept for love of us: the cleansing waters of baptism.
Pope
Francis recently lamented that we live in “a society which exalts the cult of
efficiency, fitness and success, one which ignores the poor and dismisses ‘losers.’” What a feast we celebrate today, then, that
God embraces us not because we’ve earned it, but just because we need it. Thanks be to God; Christ baptizes us.
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