The Baptism of our Lord (C)
January 13, 2019

O God of unquenchable fire, 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 Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, so this morning we heard the Gospel of Luke’s account of what happened when Jesus was baptized. Actually, we heard a little more than the Gospel verses that were appointed for today. Maybe you noticed the brackets around verses 18-20. That’s my way of indicating that I added verses that weren’t assigned. I don’t know why the three verses get left out – they’re not very long. I guess they seem like an interruption to the flow of the story. But for Luke, at least as it was handed down to us, they’re essential. They are very much a part of the story. They are 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 confusing (and maybe that’s why the verses are left out of our church-assigned reading). In Luke’s version, it reads as though John was already in prison by the time 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. Perhaps you remember how John responded to folks worried about what to do to flee from the wrath to come: “Share your clothing and your food. If you have only a little, share a little. If you have a lot, share a lot. Do not take more than your portion – curb your fear that you won’t have enough. Do not extort money by threats or false accusation to increase your wages. Exercise restraint. Stop victimizing people to leverage your own power by sucking up to people who have more power.” It seems to me that Jesus’s teaching picked right up where John the Baptist left off.

For Luke it seems that it’s not that important to know who baptized Jesus, but it was important to know that Jesus was baptized right along with “all the people.” 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? And what was this spirit of holiness (no title here in Greek, just “a spirit of holiness”) descending upon Jesus in bodily form like a dove after he was baptized and while he was praying? How long after? And did Jesus not have a spirit of holiness prior to this moment? Was a spirit of holiness so powerful, so palpable, what he needed to begin a more public ministry? And, although John the Baptist says to the people filled with expectation about whether he might be the anointed one, that one more powerful will baptize with a spirit of holiness and with fire, none of the Gospels report any baptisms that Jesus did (not with water, or spirit, or fire). Indeed, in John’s Gospel, Jesus promises to send a spirit of holiness to his followers after he dies. Earlier in the Acts of the Apostles, a spirit of holiness arrives like a rush of wind on Shavuot (or Pentecost), not at a baptismal ceremony.

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 understanding or practice of baptism across Christian churches – not then, not now. Many times churchy people think they know the story of Jesus’ baptism and also how baptisms are supposed to go, or at least how they went in the olden days. In fact, here is a wide variety of belief and practice of baptism, even if there is a great deal of agreement that baptism is the principal initiation or citizenship ritual for the Church. So we can love our way of understanding baptism, but I think we should see other people.

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, a sign of one grafted into the church, adopted into the Body of Christ. While we light the paschal candle for baptisms, and give a gift of a lighted candle to the baptizand (or a responsible adult), I’ve never for a minute considered baptizing anyone with fire. I’m a priest who uses strictly water and prays for a spirit of holiness to enter the one becoming a part of the Body of Christ and I pray that nobody gets hurt!

It’s the language of that spirit of holiness and fire that I want to dwell on for another moment. Although many churchgoers are conditioned to hear fire as an expression of the wrath of God, that just doesn’t make sense in this reading at all. John’s promise that the Messiah, or the Christ, or the Anointed One, will immerse in or plunge people into a spirit of holiness and fire (not OR fire). This makes it clear that fire is a purifying rather than punishing element, the burning is a restorative rather than retributive act. Separating the edible from the inedible parts of grain is a good thing. Getting rid of what cannot be digested and gathering what is valuable is good news, especially if you’re not sure where your next meal is coming from. It occurs to me that the chaff that is getting burned in the unquenchable fire is not just disposing of the by-product of growing grains of wheat, it’s producing heat for warmth, light for seeing or signaling.

When we read and engage scripture seriously, rather than literally, or perhaps literarily instead of literally, then fire means zeal, motivation, creativity, determination. So when is it good to burn with unquenchable fire? It’s good to blaze when our hearts are longing to be a part of a beloved community longing to both receive and to give support and affirmation. It’s good to feverishly resist evil and repent and return to the Lord whenever we fall short. It’s good to have a fire in our bellies that leads us to courageously testify with our lives about the redeeming love of God. It’s good to be on fire when we are lit up with energy for seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors – yes, even those neighbors. It’s good to feel the heat of striving for justice and peace, and the muscle burn that comes from respecting the dignity of those human beings whose dignity is difficult or impossible to discern. In each of these circumstances (which are paraphrases of our baptismal covenant questions, by the way), burning up is good and burning out is not so good. Burning with an unquenchable fire is better than having the fire quenched. When the fire is good, we want it to be unquenchable.

So how do we burn up without burning out? As your spiritual doctor, I have some thoughts about that, as well as some considerable experience (both positive and negative). It’s a spiritual version of healthy diet and exercise that includes stretching and resting. I think some of the essential ingredients are (1) meaningful activity or inspiring work, whether or not it’s for wages; (2) relationship in communities that are founded by and for love, where care and appreciation and beauty are freely given and freely received; and (3) regular rest. Prayer and refraining from productivity go together like – well like Sabbath! Observing sabbath is not just a good idea, it’s the law. And, as Alfred Lord Tennyson famously wrote, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”

As I said last week, Epiphany is the season to celebrate manifestations, realizations, indications and expressions of the Holy One in our midst. Let’s burn in a way that our lives may be for others a manifestation, a realization, an indication, and an expression of the Holy One in our midst: a light to the world, in the name of Jesus the baptized one, the anointed one, the beloved child of God.