Baptism of Our Lord, 9 January 2022.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Isaiah 43:1-7. Because you are precious in my sight and I love you.
Acts 8:14-17. They had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Luke 3:15-17 [18-20] 21-22. You are my…beloved; with you I am well pleased.

O God of 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, the first Sunday in the season of Epiphany, churchy season of revelations, of proclamations of justice, and of joining with others to work for the common good. Our first reading from Isaiah, Chapter 43, is a passage about the decisive love of God, who gathers the people from every direction, paying whatever it takes to bring them home, to make sure they know that “Thus says the Holy One.” When they are in over their heads, the Holy One will be with them. When they are in extremely difficult and dangerous situations (aka walking through fire), the Holy One will comfort them, because they are precious, honored, and deeply loved. (Except, Isaiah puts the voice of the Holy One in first person and the people in the second person, in an exquisite and intimate I-Thou pairing.)

I wish I could read big swaths of what is called Second Isaiah to you this morning (chapters 40-55 for those of you who want to do some extra credit reading later on). I wish that doing that would put an end to any residue of the idea that the first testament in the Bible is about an “angry God” and the second testament is about a “loving God,” because that is complete rubbish. The Love of God is in the beginning and at the end, and all through the middle of the sacred narratives of the people of the Book. And by the way, anger is the right response when people mistreat one another.

You know, love songs and stories are written often with a person (real or imagined) in mind, but they become about whoever is singing or reading. And some love songs become so well known, that if someone sings the first part of a phrase, many people can finish the line. For example, if I were to sing “Immortal, invisible,” what would you sing? (God only wise.) If I were to sing “O God our help in ages past,” you would sing (our hope for years to come). If I were to sing “Amazing grace,” you would sing (how sweet the sound). If I were to sing “You are my chosen one, in whom my soul delights,” and you were a part of Luke’s original audience, you would sing, “I have put my spirit upon you to bring forth justice to the peoples.” That’s the rest of the line. Chosen and beloved to bring forth justice to the nations, to the peoples. This is not a sappy, glossy love song, this love song is fierce. And this love song wasn’t only about Isaiah or only about Jesus, it’s about us, because we too are beloved children of the Holy One.

Luke’s telling of what happened when Jesus was baptized includes three verses that aren’t assigned in our lectionary. I’ve added them back in (of course) in brackets. I don’t know why the three verses get left out; it’s not much of a time saver. Maybe they seem like an interruption to the flow of the story; but for Luke, 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. 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 (divine anger that was surely coming):

Share your clothing and your food – in this context that means share what is scarce, what is hard to come by. 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.

According to Luke, Jesus’s teachings pick right up where and when John left off. For Luke it seems not that important to know who baptized Jesus, but it was important to know that Jesus was baptized right along with “all the people.” It’s 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 ritually or morally, or was it just for a show of solidarity? Was he just curious, and then once he got in the water, he got cracked open like the heavens? The Gospels don’t address Jesus’ motive. Second Testament letters 1 Peter, 1 John, and 2 Corinthians contain a phrase that claims that Jesus committed no sin or deceit; in him was no sin, he knew no sin (quoting or alluding to Isaiah 53). That’s an idea that grew and grew in the early church, probably because it was set to music;  but, it doesn’t seem important to the Gospel writers.

And what was this spirit of holiness descending upon Jesus in bodily form like a dove after he was baptized and while he was praying? How long after he was baptized? Was he still in the water, or had he dried off? Did Jesus not have a spirit of holiness prior to this moment? Was a spirit of holiness so powerfully palpable, what he needed to launch 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 reports that Jesus did any baptisms (not with water, or spirit, or fire).

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 what they have always meant. In fact, there has always been 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 own way of understanding baptism, and 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. There’s no direction anywhere to baptize anyone with fire, or to involve a live dove. While we take the water part quite literally, we clearly understand the fire and the dove to be a metaphorical language.

It’s that 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 doesn’t make sense in this reading at all. John promises that the Messiah, or the Anointed One, will immerse or plunge people into a spirit of holiness and fire (not or fire). Luke makes it clear that here, 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 is no longer needed 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. This fire is good news. Luke tells us so. We need this kind of fire.

When we read scripture seriously, rather than literally, or perhaps literarily instead of literally, then fire means zeal, motivation, creativity, determination. [1] 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 receive and 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 and especially those neighbors who are hard to love. It’s good to feel the heat of striving for justice and peace, the heat of protecting the beauty and integrity of all creation, and the muscle burn that comes from respecting the dignity those human beings whose dignity is difficult or impossible to detect. 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. 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 like to say that it’s a spiritual version of diet and exercise that includes stretching. 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
3. keeping the Sabbath.

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.”

Consider this: what if this time of the concurrent catastrophes of yet another COVID-19 surge, of global warming, of White Christian nationalism, of fascism, of the yawning gulf between rich and poor; what if this is the moment we were made for, chosen for, beloved for? How are we rising to the challenges already by collaborating with love? I have been praying this past week with an idea attributed to E.M. Forster: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” The promise of our sacred stories is that with Love, “we can bear the unbearable, relinquish the insoluble, stay alert to the possible even when it seems improbable, and rise to occasions we didn’t think we could” (to borrow words from my colleague Holly Antolini). The promise of our sacred stories is that Love will come to our aid like a bright star, like a deep cleansing breath, like immersion in healing waters, like a refiner’s fire, like a renewed sense that we are already beloved and already called to make the world more just. Let’s not wait another moment to do the next right thing. I feel confident that we’ll all have opportunities today, maybe even before we leave this worship service.

Epiphany is a season not only of, but for, revelations; for proclamations of justice; and for joining with others to work for the common good, which is what justice ultimately means. 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.

[1] Thanks to Mark Davis for reminding me of this word play. www.leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com.