Epiphany I:
The Baptism of our Lord

January 13, 2008
The Rev. David R. Hackett

Terry Holmes, the late Dean of my seminary at Sewanee, in his book for children entitled Praying With the Family of God, tells this story:

Jimmy raced out of the front door and slammed it behind him. Blam! He ran down the walk toward the park. It was Saturday morning, the sky was blue – no sign of rain. He ran faster. He was off to play baseball, and he couldn’t wait to get started! His parents had given him a new bat for his tenth birthday. Here was his first chance to try it out. Coming to the corner, Jimmy swirled the bat around his head. It was a great day! He could almost feel himself hitting the first ball as he held the bat tightly in his hands. Then suddenly, the bat slipped … and … Crash! The bat had sailed out of his hands, through the air, and right into the plate glass of Harmon’s Drug Store.

Disaster! Jimmy stared at the awful hole in the window. He wished he were somewhere else. Everyone on the block came running. Jimmy couldn’t move. He just stood there staring at the drug store window display with its boxes and thousands of tiny pieces of glass. Lying in the middle of it all was his brand new bat. He knew that people were all around him, but he could not look up. Then he heard one gruff voice above the others. Somebody was standing right next to him. “Hey kid”, the voice said, “who’s going to pay for this?” Jimmy didn’t know what to say, he kept staring at the ground. “Did you hear me, kid?” the voice said more harshly this time, “Who’s going to take care of this? Answer me that!” Jimmy opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Then, just when all the sounds around him were getting jumbled up together, Jimmy heard a voice he knew. “Jimmy is mine.” It was his dad. Jimmy looked up to see his father standing there next to him. “I’ll pay for it,” his dad said, putting his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.

Whenever I think of baptism, I think of this story. Every one of us has thrown a bat through a window, figuratively. Every one of us knows what it is to mess up, to foul up in life. Holmes’ story reminds us of our baptism, of our adoption as children of God. Through baptism our heavenly father is saying you Emma Grace, you Greg, you Barbara…you are mine. I’ll pay for the brokenness.

This is the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord. That’s why we schedule baptisms on this day. Now, if you were to picture the scene of Jesus’ baptism in your imagination, what would it be like? Most of picture it according to stained glass windows we’ve seen or like ancient frescos or like the icon here in the Baptistery: just Jesus and John the Baptist; Jesus standing with his hands folded over his chest and John pouring water over his head. But the reality was that Jesus’ baptism was not a private ceremony. There were hundreds of men and women swarming into the river, and hundreds more on the river bank waiting their turn.

Jesus was with this milling crowd of ordinary, struggling men and women. These masses of mediocre people had come to John for his “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of their sins.” John the Baptist told these crowds of people that their sins would make the coming judgment terrible for them. Their failures, their luke-warmness, their unfaithfulness, caused them to need a fresh start. And that’s what this baptism represented, a new beginning.

So here is the crucial moment. What is Jesus going to do? He could have kept his distance from that crowd. He was innocent of the things of which they were guilty. His was an unbroken faithfulness to God. He could have stood up on the bank of the river and looked down on that struggling mass of humanity and felt sorry for them, felt pity for them. But instead of looking down on them from a distance, secure in his own righteousness, Jesus plunged into the waters with them and lost himself in the crowd. He threw away his innocence and separateness to take on the identity of struggling men and women who were reaching out for the promise of forgiveness.

And then at the moment Jesus identifies with needy, failed, struggling human beings, at that moment “suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” You see, it is when Jesus empties himself in assuming our identity, identifying with our humanness, that God declares his pleasure in him. In the River Jordan Jesus was taking on the role of representing humanity.

Jesus chose to be us. He chooses us: sinners, struggling, imperfect us! He chose the world! He identified himself with every woman, every man, every child. And he calls us to do the same.

In our baptism we discover we are connected to all humanity. All who are baptized in Christ become members of Christ and members of one another. We belong to one another.

Is that true? In a few minutes after I baptize Emma Grace I’m going to take her for a walk to introduce her to you. And I’m going to tell her, “Here are your new sisters and brothers.” I’m going to tell her that God has adopted her as his own child and that all of us who are children of God are brothers and sisters. Is that true? I can say it. Do we live it? Are we being members of Christ, of one another? In a world in which there is increasingly a yearning for a place to be accepted for just being yourself, the Church should be that place. How are we being “members one of another?” We who are the Church are called to be connected to one another not by our successes, but by our failures; not by our strengths, but by our weaknesses. Connected, not because of who we are, or what we have, or what we are, or what we have done, but because of who Jesus is and what he has done.

Isn’t it sad that we fail to be brothers and sisters to each other? Isn’t it terrible that we can’t turn to one another and say, “I’m hurting….I need help.” Perhaps it is because we have yet to give permission to one another here in the church not to “have it all together.” All too often we of the Church are guilty of wearing masks of respectability to disguise our true faces which are often far less than what the world deems acceptable and respectable. Our masks cover up our vulnerability and we present this strong, self-reliant exterior when, in truth, we are fearful and tearful. We haven’t given each other permission to take off our masks that we wear here in church, in our business and professional world, and trust a fellow Christian to see who we really are. Maybe that’s because we talk forgiveness, but haven’t really experienced forgiveness.

In our baptism we are forgiven our sins. Forgiveness of sins is God’s way of spanning the distance between God’s righteousness and our sinfulness. When forgiveness happens a person gains a new perspective and a new orientation in life. When forgiveness happens a person is given the gift of new possibilities. When forgiveness happens a person gets a new motivation for forgiving others.

Forgiveness has happened. Forgiveness is happening. Forgiveness will happen. God does that. When we throw the bat through the window and it comes crashing down, God is there saying, “He’s mine, she’s mine, this is my beloved child.” We are connected to God’s forgiveness in our baptism. When we realize our baptism then we can live like who we truly are; then we can live like forgiven people. And forgive others. And receive forgiveness from our sisters and brothers.

A venerable old sage once asked his disciples, “How can we know when the darkness is leaving and the dawn is coming?” “When we see a tree in the distance and know it is an elm and not a juniper,” said one student. “When we can see an animal and know that it is a fox and not a wolf,” chimed in another. “No,” said the old man, “those things will not help us.” Puzzled, the students demanded, “Then how can we know?” The master teacher drew himself up to his full stature and replied quietly, “We know the darkness is leaving and the dawn is coming when we can see another person and know that it is our brother or sister; otherwise, no matter what time it is, it is still dark.”

We are being the Church, a spiritually healthy Church, when we can say to one another, “No matter who you are or what you have done, we are connected by our baptism. And we are here for one another: to support, to love, to nurture, to care, to forgive.”

It is all because of Jesus’ baptism. It is all because of our baptism in Jesus. It is all about being connected to God and to each other. Amen.