“Relationship”
The Baptism of Our Lord
13 January 2013
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
San Francisco, CA.
Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
St. Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
INI
I
was so glad when your Rector, Dana, sent me an email asking for a brief bio and
a photograph. It is a risky
business on our parts, yours and mine, to come to this place and to engage in
the interactions that surround the enterprise of preaching. One might think that I might come here,
bestow my wisdom upon your, and leave it at that. Preaching, however, is a more fearful enterprise. It is a dialogue, if only in all of our
minds, but hopefully in our future as well.
In
a sense I come to you as a stranger, at least for some of you. And in another sense I come as no
stranger at all. It seems that we
have been joined together at that font, over there, or at fonts like it all
over the world. We enter this
place with the same name, the same identity, the same claim to authority. We enter in the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit – for that is the name that embraces each of
us. So now that we have been duly
introduced, and have established that we have at least some experience one of
the other, let’s jump into the texts for this morning.
Related to God
The
second of the Isaiahs puts words into God’s mouth and they are words that this
Isaiah trusts, and words from which he attempts to construct a future for
Israel. God is described before
Isaiah bares witness to what God wants to be. “The One who created you.” “The One who formed you.” At the most primary our relationship to God is as one is
related to the one who made us – I like the wording, “who formed you.” Jeremiah would use this same notion and
supply it with an image as well, that of the potter, moulding the clay. It is from this platform of being
formed and made by God that all else will follow, and interestingly enough, all
will end.
If
we or our world are formed by anything, it is the voice of God. In the first creation story, God
speaks, “Let there be light.” and there is light. The voice and the hands of God are at our very
beginning. It is a powerful voice
as we see in the psalm for this morning.
The voice is a powerful voice, it is a voice of splendor, it breaks
forests of trees, it thunders, it splits the flames of fires. It is a voice that gives us a voice –
for we cry out “Glory!” Why? What does this glory mean? The glory of God is all that happens
about us in heaven and upon earth, all over which God has suasion and
power. Thus, we are God’s glory
along with the awesome night sky.
How might that be? I forgot
to mention one of the things that the Voice is – it is a voice that “is upon
the waters.” Now this has a great
deal of meaning to those see the God of Israel, for it brings a memory of the
Red Sea, or of the Jordan River where God’s voice indeed was upon the
waters. God has been upon the
waters of the new Israel as well.
God has roiled the waters of your font with the wind of the Spirit, and
all who are born again there are infused with that Spirit and that voice. Yes, our relationship in word and
water. We related to one another
in Baptism, and God as our parent, our mother, our father in the same water.
Redeemed by God
Isaiah
recognizes in this God the one who redeems us. To help us lean into this phrase we need to leave some of
the theological baggage that accompanies this word, “redemption”, and invest it
with more meaning. The notion here
is that someone else has us, has control over us, has acquired us, and is
requiring a payment of some kind so that we might be returned to the original
owner. Isaiah’s ideas are more
real, however – real for the people of his time. The reality?
Well, it’s wartime; and there has been deportation, exile, separation
from home and family, longing, waiting for a reunion. Sound familiar?
It should for it is the stuff of our time, of every time really. It is from these realities that God
wishes to redeem us. For the
ancient Israelites it was redemption from the huge powers of Egypt, Babylon and
Assyria that had meddled with the people of God. Redemption is made not only at the heart of theological
problems, but at the heart of real life as well.
We
know the times of which the prophet speaks for we know the story. The story we know even better is the
story of our own lives. Isaiah
sees God as allowing God’s people to pass through the waters, and walk through
fire. Life can seem that way
sometimes, and probably is. It is
interesting to listen to John the Baptist for a second, with these promises
from Isaiah yet in our ears.
“I baptize you with water; but one who is more
powerful than I is coming…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with
fire.”
This
reacquisition of our lives by the God who first created and formed us is the real
and spiritual redemption for which so many long. The question that will follow in these Sundays after the
Epiphany is “What shall we do with these lives that have survived
difficulty?” And we wonder whom
might we yet notice who has yet to understand this redemption given to us in
water and word. Why would God
redeem us if not for some kind of purpose or usefulness – perhaps to serve as
an example to someone for whom God is a stranger? Perhaps a quote from Carl Jung might help us here:
“The meeting of two personalities
is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both
are transformed.”
Brought together by God
Do
you know the person next to you?
If not, at the peace, you can meet them and understand your common
relationship in God. What is quite
remarkable is the new ground that this second Isaiah makes in our understanding
of who is related to God and why.
Before this time, the common understanding was that God was the God of
Israel. Although there are legal
provisions in the Hebrew Scriptures for welcoming the stranger and the
foreigner, God is still the God of Israel – a national god. Isaiah sees something that exceeds this
idea. Following a recitation of
lands (Egypt, Ethiopia, and Seba) given up for the sake of Israel, God talks in
an expansive way about those who are God’s own:
“I give people in return for you,
nations in exchange for your life.
Do not fear, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
I will say to the north, "Give them up,"
and to the south, "Do not withhold;
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 my glory,
whom I formed
and made."
There
is a small battle going on amongst Christians about baptism. Is it a sacrament that keeps people
out, or is it an invitation, an open door, a promise of belonging, a chance for
a new life? We may be having this
battle because we don’t talk about baptism all that much. Isaiah can help us in that regard, for
he pictures a God, a profligate God, who invites all. It is not only the chosen, who have been created and formed
by God, but also all the nations, and all the people. Perhaps we need to begin with ourselves. That is what Jesus does. He is baptized (the details are not
offered and the specifics left unstated) and then has a grand realization of
what he is and what he is to do.
“You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”
If
this can be our understanding of our own status in God’s sight, “you are my
daughter, you are my son, I am well pleased,” then we can begin to live life
differently and relate to not only God, but to our neighbor differently. “Bring my sons from far away, and my
daughters from the end of the earth.”
That is our challenge on this day, not only to know ourselves as the
redeemed, but all as the object of God’s redemption. In the second reading for today, St. Luke in the Acts of the
Apostles relates the story of the apostles who go up to Samaria (the land of a
hated people) to confirm that some gentiles had been baptized. They lay hands on those who had been
“baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus”, so that the Spirit might come upon
them. This is a hard lesson for
Peter and John, but it is one that they learned – Jesus is Lord of all. How will we learn it? What shall we both remember and
do? Perhaps as Luke notes about
the people who meet John the Baptist in the wilderness, we also need to be a
people who are “filled with expectation.”
SDG
