Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
On the day that I was baptized I woke up on a couch in the
living room of my friend Phil. I let
myself out and rode my bicycle through the empty fog-shrouded streets of the
Mission District in San Francisco. When
I got home I ate some breakfast, showered, put on a white shirt and walked over
to St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church. For a
while that morning it seemed as though the clouds were lifting, so no one
bothered to extend the retractable awning that covers the outdoor space at St.
Gregory’s where the font is located. But
when we were all standing out there, just about the time we had finished
reciting the baptismal covenant, and the priest was beginning the prayer over
the water, it started to drizzle. Not
rain, exactly, but that heavy, falling mist that often comes in coastal
Northern California. Nobody seemed to
mind, and by the time we all processed inside for the Eucharist it had
stopped. But it pleased me then, and it
still does, that at my baptism everyone got wet together.
And that’s how the Gospel according to Luke describes the
baptism of Jesus. Mark and Matthew both
talk about the all the people who went out to the Jordan to be baptized by
John, but when Jesus’ turn comes the focus of their narration zooms in on him. He comes out from Galilee, and if anyone
comes with him, Matthew and Mark don’t say so.
They also don’t say whether anyone but John is there when he’s baptized.
But Luke tells it this way—“when all the people had been baptized, Jesus also
had been baptized, and was praying.”
Jesus’ baptism is in the same frame with all the people. Everyone gets wet together.
The way Luke tells the story it is not a private moment
between Jesus and John—it is a public event. And there’s another way Luke makes this point. Mark and Matthew describe the theophany that
follows the baptism, the heavens opening and the spirit descending, as a
subjective experience. It is something
that Jesus saw, and they leave it ambiguous whether anyone else did. But Luke describes it from point of view of
his omniscient third-person narrator. It
is something that happened. It is, you
might say, a historical fact. Matthew and
Mark both talk about the Spirit that Jesus sees “descending like a dove.” For Luke this is no metaphor—“the Holy Spirit
descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove.”
Again—not a mystical vision, not a subjective experience, but a matter
of the historical record, a public event that everyone could see.
I think Luke tells the story this way because he’s trying get
us to shift our focus, from something that happened a long time ago to
something that happens now. He’s trying
to get us to think of Jesus’ baptism as something that he does with all of us,
something that still happens and that we can see with our own eyes every time
we see one of our friends, one of our children or grandchildren get
baptized. He wants us to think of the
gift that comes to us through baptism, the baptism we share with Jesus. He wants us to know that this gift of a new
life of grace, of belonging to God’s family, of being the child of a proud and
loving God, doesn’t depend on having a mystical experience. The gift of the Holy Spirit that baptism
gives all of us together does not depend on having some particular feeling of
being “born again.” It is an objective fact.
For Luke the proof of this fact is the existence of the
church. The fact that we are here, that
we gather to hear the scriptures and remember Jesus, to break the bread of his
passion and drink the wine of his resurrection—this could not and would not
happen if the Holy Spirit were not here, drawing us together, brooding over us
like a hen sheltering her chicks under her wings. The ordinariness of the church, the
obviousness of it, is precisely the point.
God’s love and good will toward the world is right out there in public,
where anyone can find it, and come and get it for free.
A priest friend of mine likes to tell a story about a time he
attended the Great Vigil of Easter at Grace Cathedral. As you may know, in the ancient church the
Easter Vigil was the primary worship service of the year. It is a baptismal liturgy, and that night at
Grace Cathedral was no exception. There
were several candidates for baptism, both youth and adults, who had spent many
months in prayer and study, preparing for what was no doubt to be a profound
religious experience.
When the big moment arrived they processed through the
darkened cathedral, following the deacon carrying the paschal candle to baptismal
font, amid clouds of incense and clergy in their finest vestments, and the
choir chanting a psalm in the ancient style.
And when the last of the candidates had been baptized and anointed, Alan
Jones, who was the Dean of the Cathedral and the presider at the liturgy, looked
around at the crowd that was assembled and called, “is there anyone else here who
wants to be baptized? Anyone?” For all the great pains that were taken to
invest this sacrament with awe and mystery, for all that was done to ensure
that those who received it found it a potent and life-changing experience, Dean
Jones made it clear that the essence of this sacrament is available to anyone. Even if you just happened to be there, and
hadn’t prepared at all, and didn’t have a sponsor, and got caught up in the
spirit of the moment and decided “what the heck? Why not?
Why not now?”
In Luke’s gospel Jesus learns the truth of his divine nature
via the public address system. He
receives the gift of the Holy Spirit in bodily form that anyone can see. Everything that he does after that will be a
demonstration of how to make that nature visible to others, so they can see
themselves in the same light. The whole
work of the rest of his life will be to share the Holy Spirit in concrete ways. But the full meaning and purpose of Jesus’
baptism will only become evident on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit
descends on his disciples, in plain view of people from many nations, to be the
ongoing, concrete, historical manifestation of God’s love for the world.
Which is where we come in.
There are consequences to receiving this gift. It brings with it questions of
responsibility, and the confession that we don’t always live according to that
truth. It comes with a call to action to
make God’s love for all her children concrete, visible, and real. It urges us to confront the powers that
continue to organize and administer the world as if there was no God, or God does
not love us, or God only loves a few of us, to denounce their hypocrisies and
expose the lies that they tell.
But mostly the Holy Spirit returns us again and again to the
gift we received in our baptism, which is the basic truth of our belonging. Everything we do as individual Christians,
and as the church, flows from this source. God chose us, created us, loves us, is
well-pleased with us, and this is the defining truth of who we are, and a gift
that we are sent to share. We can verify
this truth by our own most profound religious experiences, but those can be few
and far between. In the meantime we
depend on each other to remind us. That
is why we do liturgies, and celebrate sacraments, do public reading of the scriptures
and preaching about them. That is the
purpose of our community fellowship and our works of mercy and justice in the
world—to make a public demonstration of God’s love for this world, which is
always true, whether we know it or not, whether we feel like it or not, whether
we deserve it or not.
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