Normally, the Church
celebrates the feast of the Baptism of Christ on the Sunday after Epiphany.
This year is strange, in that with Christmas being on a Sunday, the Baptism of Christ
got moved to last Monday (when the local Church here was celebrating the feast
of ‘not dying on icy roads’) and this is the first Sunday of Ordinary Time,
which (confusingly) is the Sunday of the Second Week of Ordinary Time (which
started with a half week last Tuesday). Confused yet? All of those arcane calendrical calculations
aside, in a coincidence, or probably act of Providence, this week we’re
assigned a reading which is about the Baptism of Christ, albeit in a rather
different sense than the Feast we observed on Monday. That feast is about the
Baptism of Christ, as in, the time when Christ got baptized. This reading from
John is about the Baptism of Christ, in the sense of the Baptism with which
Christ baptizes. This reading is the kernel of the gospel, that God acts in
Christ for us. In this case, the promise that Jesus will baptize us.
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. It was a few weeks after my ordination as a
deacon, and I’d been building this baptism up in my head. I was the one who
scheduled baptisms at my parish, and when I put hers in the calendar, and
realized it was the first one I was scheduling for after my ordination, it was
really exciting for to me put my name down as celebrant, and I prayed for the
baby girl as my ordination approached. But, when it came, I was so concerned to
get every detail right, that I almost didn’t pay attention to what was really
going on, to what God was doing. It was when I was praying in my room after the
baptism that 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. In Christ, 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, leveling the path to virtue
that sin makes mountainously arduous.
Baptism with water would be beautiful enough. But he goes further. Christ baptizes us with the Spirit that first
rejoiced to cling to him. We are immersed
in God’s own relationship of love. 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 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 always the Light of
the World, but in baptism we are enlivened with that light too. That’s what we ritualize in the baptismal
candle, lit from the Paschal candle that was first lit last year at the Easter
Vigil. That Easter light makes us lights to the world too, gives us a message
of resurrection and hope to bring to the darkness that can never extinguish it.
Tomorrow, we celebrate the
birthday of Martin Luther King, someone who I think powerfully shows us what
being a “light to the nations” looks like. There are many parts of Martin
Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech that people can quote, but I wonder how
many people know the first line? He begins by saying “I am happy.”
“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the
greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of this nation.” “I am
happy.” Even while standing smarting from imprisonment and the bad check
he was handed marked insufficient funds, he begins his speech “I am
happy.” He will decry with passion the sin of racism, but he will not
refuse to confess and proclaim his happiness, in his words, he will not “wallow
in the valley of despair.” The light he shined was a true Christian light,
one that doesn’t shrink from prophetically denouncing sin and injustice, but
one that refuses to give up the joy of the closeness of the Spirit, one that
disclosed the fiery furnace of God’s love from which his candle had been lit.
The beacon of resurrection light
is not at full glare yet. But let us still dare to rejoice in the closeness
of God’s Spirit, and the light we’re given to shine.
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