Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday December 9, 2022 – Baptism of Jesus
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3:21-22
Welcome to 2022! I’m not going to wish you Happy New Year, since if you remember back to the end of November, the church year begins with Advent and so I wished you happy new year back then! But because I was off last Sunday, this is my first time worshipping with you in 2022, and so we begin a new calendar year together.
The season of Advent was a time of preparing and waiting for and anticipating Christmas, and then we celebrated 12 days of Christmas, right through to January 6. Thursday January 6 was the feast of Epiphany like we were talking about in our Story for All Ages, when the Magi followed a star that led them to Jesus and his parents as they brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
In the church year, it may seem like we are now in an in-between season. Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany are over, and the season of Lent that leads us to Holy Week and Easter doesn’t begin until the beginning of March.
As I was planning out the next couple of months though, the thing that caught my attention was that Christmas isn’t the end – it is also the beginning. Christmas comes at the end of our Advent waiting – Christmas is the fulfillment of all of the things that we were waiting for and preparing for in the weeks leading up to it. But Christmas is also the beginning. Jesus was born at Christmas, but his whole life and ministry was still ahead of him, yet to unfold.
As I read though the readings assigned to the next couple of months, that is the theme that jumped out at me. Not only does Jesus’s ministry unfold in the time that follows his birth at Christmas, but so does our ministry as the church. Jesus lived and died 2000 years ago, but the Body of Christ is alive and working in the world today, because we, the church – we who are part of the universal church of all times and all places – the church is the Body of Christ.
And so that is the theme that we are going to be diving into over the next couple of months – not only will we see Jesus’s ministry unfolding in these weeks following his birth at Christmas, but we are also going to see how our own ministry unfolds.
And Jesus’s ministry began with his baptism by John the Baptist in the Jordan River.
Baptism is one of two sacraments that we recognize and practice in the United Church of Canada, along with the sacrament of communion. My favourite definition of a sacrament comes from St. Augustine, 1600 years ago. He wrote that a sacrament is a visible sign of God’s invisible grace. A visible sign of God’s invisible grace. God’s grace, God’s love is always with us always. God is love, and therefore wherever God is, love is; and because I believe that God is everywhere, then love must also be everywhere.
But love is invisible. We can’t see it or touch it or smell it or taste it or hear it. We are tied to our bodies, we are embodied creatures. But since Christmas is all about God becoming human flesh and blood, that means that God understands what it is to have a body. God not only creates bodies, but God chose to become a body.
And God gives us these sacraments – baptism and communion – as ways that we can sense God’s love. We can’t see or smell or taste or touch or hear God’s love; but we can see and hear and touch the waters of baptism; we can see and smell and touch and taste the bread and the wine of communion. And through these two sacraments, God tells us that we are beloved.
We can celebrate the sacrament of communion as often as we want across our lifetime, but baptism is a once and forever sacrament. God loves us before we are baptized just the same as God loves us after we are baptized. But baptism reminds us that we are beloved. Baptism is a covenant, and I wonder if marriage as a covenant might be a good analogy. When a couple decides to get married, they love each other before they get married and they love each other after they get married, but at the wedding, they enter into a covenant with each other – they make promises to one another that are witnessed by the community that is gathered and by God. I think that it is a bit the same at our baptism. We make promises that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we are going to participate in the life and work of the Body of Christ; and in return, God reminds us that their love isn’t going anywhere. These promises are witnessed by the community that is gathered, and often the gathered community promises to support the person being baptized and their family. God’s love for us hasn’t changed, but a covenant has been made.
Baptism is a special time, a holy time. God’s love that is always around us has become visible and tangible in the waters. And one of my favourite parts about baptism is that we baptize as a community and we are baptized into a community. This isn’t a private Me-and-Jesus moment – this is a community celebration. We are welcoming a new member of our church family.
One phrase that we sometimes hear around the church is “remember your baptism.” But, you might be thinking, I was a baby when I was baptized, so I can’t remember my baptism. But that is the beautiful thing about being baptized into a community – you don’t have to remember your baptism because you have a whole community to remember for you. This isn’t an individual, singular you remember your individual baptism. Instead it is a communal remember your baptism.
If you were baptized as a baby, think of all of the people in your life and in the church who were there that day, and who remember that moment when the water was poured over you. And even if those people are no longer on this side of death, the community of the church still remembers your baptism. And at the same time, think of all of the people you have seen baptized – even if they don’t remember their own baptism, you are part of the collective community memory that remembers their baptism for them.
We, as a community – we remember that we are baptized, and we remember our baptism. We remember that God’s love is always and forever and for all people; and we remember those times when God’s love is made tangible in the waters.
Thanks be to God for this overwhelming gift of love made known. Amen.
(A Church Picnic from a previous year –
a good time and place to celebrate and remember baptism!)
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