The Baptism of our Lord (C), January 10, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of wonder, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today is the day in the church when we remember Jesus’ baptism and have an opportunity to remember and renew baptismal vows. It’s not the usual way of remembering – because none of us (not even Luke) was around when Jesus was baptized, and those of us who were babies when we were baptized can’t recall what it was like. But we remember by telling the story again and in a few minutes we’ll remember by renewing baptismal promises. After church today, if you’re lucky enough to have someone around who was there for your baptism, ask them to tell you the stories of your baptism that they remember. And if you were old enough, when you were baptized, that you remember it, or if you know because you’ve been told, tell someone else the story of your baptism. If you’ve never gotten baptized, I invite you to take a moment and imagine getting baptized! Under what circumstances would you ever consider making a public commitment to cast your lot with the kind of Christians who baptize with water in the name of the Trinity and make promises to support one another? Are there any circumstances in which you would be willing to wade into this troubled water to witness to the power of redeeming love made manifest in Jesus?

Although all four Gospels mention that Jesus was baptized, the Gospel of Luke has an interesting twist in the story of Jesus’ baptism that gets left out in our lectionary assignment. You know, I always say that you should suspect something when you see scripture readings that skip verses! See in the bulletin it says Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22. That should always make you think, “hmmmm” I wonder what verses 18-20 say! Well they’re the verses that end up with John the Baptist going to prison. They read: “So with many other exhortations, he [that is, John] proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.” The chronology is very confusing (which, I guess, is why the verses are left out of our church reading). In Luke’s version, it reads as though John was in prison when Jesus was baptized! So it might have been the baptism of John that Jesus received, but it was not the baptism by John according to Luke. It’s not that important to Luke to know who baptized Jesus, but it was important to know that Jesus was baptized. Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles is similarly confusing – it says that Samaritans were only baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus but they had not received the Holy Spirit until Peter and John laid their hands on them. It’s also clear in ancient documents that the early church had a lot of trouble with the idea that Jesus had been baptized – why did Jesus need or want to be baptized? Was it a real cleansing or was it just for show?

The reason it seems important to me to note these confusing ideas about Jesus’ baptism or the baptisms in the early church, is that it’s clear that there has never been a uniform or unified theology or practice of baptism across Christian churches – not then, not now. There is a wide variety of belief and practice of baptism, even if there is a great deal of agreement that baptism is the fundamental initiation or citizenship ritual for the Church. The words of our catechism and of the historical documents of the Episcopal Church are characteristically spacious in their definitions and descriptions – baptism is a sign of profession, a mark of difference, a sign of regeneration, of one grafted into the church, adopted into the Body of Christ.

My wife Joy once got interviewed by a Sunday School class. The kids in the class came up with a list of interview questions and the teacher sent them to her beforehand so she could think about what she would say. There were a lot of good questions on the list – but one of my favorites had to do with baptism. It started with wanting to know whether she was baptized. She was. Then the next part of the question was, “do you think someone has to be baptized to be close to God.” She doesn’t (– and neither do I, by the way). The last part of the question was what I liked. It said, simply, “what is the point?” What is the point of baptism?

Here’s what she said. She said that she likes to focus on the water of baptism. “Baptism,” she said, “is an invitation to help people enter into the stream of a particular community.” It’s like an invitation to be on a team. I liked that – that seemed to apply both to Jesus and to us. Then Joy added that it reminded her of her favorite event when she swam on swim team. Relay. A relay is when you’re part of a group that’s smaller than the whole team – it’s like a team within the team. You all stand together on the edge of the pool and you have your place in that group and your part that you do and so do your other team mates.

That’s how it is in our parish. We’re a group that’s much smaller than the whole team – and we stand together and we each have our place in the group and our part that we do. We’re not all good at the same things – and fortunately, we not all bad at the same things either. We need each other’s strengths because our strengths are all different. When I hear someone say, “I don’t need to go to church,” I always think, “But I need you to go to church because other people need to see you. No one else is like you and so when you’re not here, we don’t have the strengths that you bring to the team, and so we’re weaker when you’re not here. Even if you think that all you’re doing is sitting on the bench (or the pew), even if you are coming here to weep and to mourn, even if you’re not sure what you’re doing here, I can tell you that our team is not as good without you.”

Keeping all the promises made in baptism can be hard work – and the Episcopal Church just went from five promises to six promises! At General Convention this past summer, a sixth question and answer concerning the responsibility of Christians to care for creation has been authorized for trial use for three years beginning this past Advent. So, as I was saying, keeping all of the promises can be hard, but I bet that if we went through each of the six promises one by one and I asked you which was the hardest and which was the easiest, there would be a lot of different answers including, “it depends on the day!” That’s another reason why I think we need to be in the stream of a particular community – because we get strength from seeing others do things well; and also from knowing that those things that we do well, help strengthen others. When we answer the promise questions in the baptismal service, we acknowledge that we all need God’s help – and, as far as I can tell, the only hands God has are human hands. God’s help is surely all around us.

Some years ago, I took a voice class at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge taught by my friend/ Emmanuel’s friend Suzanne Ehly. Every day, each student offered a performance of spoken or sung words. One of my classmates read a passage from a great book called Jesus and Those Bodacious Women. (I just love saying that title.) It’s a book by a woman named Linda Hollies. When I heard this passage, I immediately thought of all of you – and how much I wanted you to hear it. In it Hollies reflects on the words, “I will.” She begins with the “I will” that the Divine spoke in the beginning. “God stepped out into space,” she writes, “and looked around at the nothingness, at the chaos and emptiness all around, and God said, ‘I will make me a world.’” God’s “I will” brought the world into being, she says. And then the “Ancient of Days,” she says, “breathed ‘I will’ into the nostrils of the lifeless and we became living souls.”

And then Linda Hollies addresses the reader directly, saying, “You are not a loser in the game of life. You are not doomed to come in last in the race with time. You are not forever destined to be one of the have-nots. It makes no difference what is going on in your life right this moment. It really does not matter what you do or do not have in the bank on deposit today. God does not care that you are overweight, too thin, too dark, or have no rhythm. What matters to God is what you are doing with that divine “I will” that was planted inside you “in the beginning.” This ‘I will’ [she says] can take you from where you are to where you ought to be in life. This ‘I will’ can move you from the dumps to the heights. This ‘I will’ can change your life and jump-start your future. You just have to access the ‘I will’ inside yourself.”

“I will make a difference! [she continues]…I will help someone along the way. I will love myself and attract love into my world. I will serve [the divine] with every breath I take. I will depend upon the power of the Holy Spirit to lead me and guide me along the way…. I will live a life in which the good of the universe is drawn unto me. I will have a body that is …in divine order. …I will dream impossible dreams and fight unbeatable foes. I will! I will! For my will is a gift from God. My will is a mandate for me to choose the creative, the artistic, and the beautiful [the compassionate, the merciful and the generous] for my life. My will is my ability to change my circumstances, to follow my divine path, and to live a life that is pleasing to God.”.[1] You know, some say that Jesus was the Christ because of how fully he lived out the Divine “I will” after his baptism. His “I will” changed the circumstances of everyone whose lives he touched. Jesus’ “I will” brought life and love wherever he went. He was so filled with God’s help that he became God’s help.

This is one of four days in the church year set aside to renew our baptismal vows, whether or not someone is being baptized. So let’s turn to page 6 in the bulletin (or page 292 in the Book of Common Prayer) to renew our baptismal promises. After that, I have some water from Miriam’s well in Ephesus, where I spent more than a week with Suzanne Ehly exploring that ancient and holy territory while I was on sabbatical in 2013. I filled a bottle with holy water and have had it on my shelf for the last 2 ½ years wondering when and how I would use it. This past week, I decided that today would be the day. I’m going to sprinkle you with the holy water so you can feel the splashing of the stream that we’re in together! If you’re not used to being asperged (sprinkled with holy water), the practice is to bow. Bowing to another in Church is an acknowledgement of the belovedness of the other.

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