Baptism of Our Lord

Jan. 10, 2010
The Rev. Susan J. Latimer

By tradition, our Church gives us four Feast Days for Baptisms– Easter - at The Easter Vigil, Pentecost, All Saints’ Sunday, and today – the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, which always comes on the first Sunday after the Epiphany.

If we read widely in the New Testament, we may notice that the early church had a rich vocabulary of images about baptism:

In our baptism, we are reborn.
We die and rise with Christ.
We are Anointed for Ministry
We become a royal priesthood.
We are sealed by the Holy Spirit
We put on Christ as a garment.
We are adopted as God’s children.

Each of the four Feast Days emphasizes one of the major images of baptism.

The Easter Vigil, the first service of Easter, reminds us of the rebirth and renewal of Baptism – dying and rising with Christ. Pentecost, when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, reminds us of the gift of the Holy Spirit in Baptism. All Saints’, where we remember all the faithful who have gone before us, reminds us that we are called to ministry in our baptism. And finally, this day, the Baptism of our Lord, reminds us that in baptism all of us are adopted by God, as God’s beloved children.

Jesus was baptized by John in the river Jordan. And as he was praying, God gave him a great blessing.
Before he was driven out into the desert to be tempted,
Before he began his public ministry,
Before Jesus suffered and died for love of us,
God gave Jesus the thing that he needed most: God’s blessing:
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

We all need to know, in our very bones, that we are beloved.

Henri Nouwen wrote a book entitled, “Life of the Beloved”. In this book, he responded to a friend who asked him to write something about the spiritual life that would make sense to modern people. Nouwen prayed and thought for a whole year about what he wanted to write. He finally chose the word, “Beloved”.

So many things get in the way of our claiming our belovedness.

A central struggle of many who seek spiritual direction is really believing that they are loved by God. Some high achievers feel that they are loved for what they DO, not what they ARE. Those who don’t “succeed” by society’s measurements, may feel that they NEVER quite measure up, no matter what they do. Even the fortunate among us who grew up in loving families often struggle with feeling not-good-enough. And isn’t it often the case that if we receive 10 compliments and 1 negative comment, we let that 1 negative overshadow the 10?

Hopefully we all have some times when we really FEEL loved – when we really feel special – just for being alive. As a child, my birthday was always one of those times. I always got to pick the menu on my birthday, and my mom would cook whatever I wanted. I always dressed up and got to do special things. We always celebrated with my whole family – grandparents and special family friends, around the dining room table. My birthday was a time when I felt beloved, not for anything I did, but just for being, just for having been born.

In the Church we have rituals that remind us of our belovedness: baptism, confirmation, and new youth rites of passage such as the Rite 13 ceremony. In these sacraments and rituals we celebrate our belovedness. Every time we witness a baptism, we may remember God’s words, “You are Beloved”. As Jesus was revealed as the Son of God in his baptism, so we are adopted as daughters and sons of God in our baptism.

Today we celebrate the baptism of Ostin . In a few minutes she will be named by her parents and sponsors, baptized by water and the Spirit, and marked with the sign of the cross as “Christ’s own, forever.”

Baptism gives our community the chance to say to Ostin and her family:
“You are Beloved”. We say this by promising to do everything in our power to help her grow up in the Christian way of life.
That is not a small promise. We are pledging ourselves to a long-term commitment. How can we become a community that reminds this child, and all children, of their belovedness, so they never have a cause to doubt it here? How can we reflect God’s blessings to each other so that all of us may experience belovedness?

Nouwen writes of a change, a transformation, which is available to us all by God’s grace.

We can change, he says,
“from living life as a painful test to proved that you deserve to be loved,
to living it as an unceasing “Yes” to the truth of that Belovedness.
Put simply, life is a God-given opportunity to become who we are,
to affirm our own true spiritual nature, claim our truth, but most of all, to say “Yes” to the One who calls us the Beloved….”

Can we live our lives as an “unceasing Yes” to the truth of our belovedness?

You all know people who live life this way. They are the first ones to praise, the first to greet a lonely person, the first to support us in trouble. They are the first to forgive, and the last to condemn. Because they know that they are loved, they are able to reflect that love back to everyone they meet.

Anthony de Mello, a well-known writer of spiritual meditations and parables, writes of his own spiritual struggle:

“I was neurotic for years. Anxious, depressed, selfish.
And everyone kept telling me to change. And I resented them, and agreed with them, and wanted to change, but simply couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. I felt powerless and trapped.
One day, God said, “Don’t change. I love you as you are”.
These words were music to my ears. I relaxed. I came alive.
And suddenly I changed