The Baptism of Our Lord - 13 January 2012

“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