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Epiphany 1 Lesson: 1 Samuel 3:1-20
January 18, 2009 Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
The Rev. Kirk Lee Epistle: 1 Corinthians 6:12-20
St. James’ Church, Marietta Holy Gospel: John 1:43-51
In the Name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I am going to start this morning with a brief reflection on Paul’s writings. Many years ago when I was in seminary, I had the pleasure of meeting an absolutely saintly lady. She was in our parish, but she was often ill, unfortunately, and so I would take her communion. Once when I was there, she was very distressed and said, “You know, I was baptized many years ago and I’ve never spoken in tongues, and I wonder if I have the Holy Spirit.” One only needed to know her to know that she was full of the Holy Spirit. So we talked at length about that.
This morning as a parish we have the great privilege of baptizing two new persons into the Body of Christ. I want to assure everyone that while we may not see doves descending, and while they may never speak in tongues, they are duly baptized, both in John’s and in Christ’s baptism, and we wish them a long, happy and saintly life.
In terms of the readings, for the past six weeks we have been preparing for the birth of Christ. We have celebrated the birth of Christ. Over the past week or two, we have started to, on some events on Sundays, to look at the early part of Christ’s life. Today, the event is the baptism of Christ. Of all those readings on Sundays over the past six weeks, other than Jesus, who is the character or person that is most consistent through all of those readings? John the Baptist. You will remember that somebody preached a sermon in which they brought to our attention that in the very early Church, there was a division of those followers who were originally followers of John the Baptist and then there were disciples and followers of Jesus who followed him through his ministry. The early Church had to somehow make sense of all this.
In our readings earlier, there were attempts of Matthew and John to deal with this issue. Even in Paul’s reading today, we see, “You were baptized by John; you need to be baptized in the Name of Christ.” This was a very prominent part of the internal dialogue between communities of faith and the early Church.
We know from these readings that John the Baptist had been in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan.
Who were the people who came out to see John the Baptist at the river Jordan for baptism? I think we can safely presume that it was not the self-righteous. It was not the chief priests. We know the scribes and the Pharisees came out, but not to be baptized. Remember what Jesus said to them? “Get out of here, you brood of vipers!” He was an engaging man, wasn’t he!
The people who came out to the river Jordan to be baptized were the marginalized of Judean society. They were (as we say in the old Book of Common Prayer), all sorts and conditions of people. (It is one of my favorite phrases.) They were tax collectors and sinners. They were prostitutes. They were Jews and gentiles. They were, overall though, a group of people who were seeking love, they were seeking forgiveness, they were seeking hope, and they were seeking acceptance by God. They were looking for a community with like-minded people. Does that not sound like us today?
John also proclaimed, “One more powerful than I is coming after me…I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Then, one day, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Can you imagine the reaction from the people there that day when, at last, the person John had been proclaiming as more powerful than he finally walked up to him to be baptized.
The question the Church struggled with is, why does the initiator of the new baptism – the baptism with water and the Holy Spirit – need to receive the baptism of repentance from John? Why does the Son of God accept a baptism of cleansing from a prophet, whose purpose was to call sinners to repentance for the forgiveness of sins?
Why does Jesus need to receive a baptism which, up until that time, was essentially a rite of initiation for Gentiles, people who were being received into the Jewish faith? This baptism was intended to wash away the defilements of the Gentile world before they joined the people of Israel. This type of baptism was also commonplace as a rite for Jews to wash away ritual uncleanliness before major Holy Days.
It appears that Mark is not interested in dealing with any of these questions, as are in the other Gospels. He is not interested, at least not directly or at this point in his story. He moves on with his Gospel.
The Gospel of Mark is a wonderful short read. Mark gets to the point and he jumps. Jesus did this, and then he did this, and then he did this, and it goes very quickly. But it covers all the main events that we see lavished upon in the other Synoptic Gospels.
Think about it. This is an illustration. The Gospel opens with this simple statement: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ…” Within several verses, including what we heard today, Jesus is baptized. So we go straight into the baptism of Jesus. Notice that there are no genealogies dating him back to King David. There are no birth narratives. There are no stories of Jesus’ childhood in the Gospel of Mark. He gets right to the point.
The beginning of Jesus’ story, the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, was marked by the baptism by John. Unlike the other Synoptic Gospels, Mark does not try to explain away why Jesus must be baptized by John. It simply happens, and he moves on.
The answer to the questions we raised earlier are to be found elsewhere in Mark, and I think by considering the overall message or themes of Mark’s Gospel. It seems to me that the answer to these questions is that Jesus sought and insisted on baptism by John because he sought to identify himself with the spiritual needs of all God’s people, then and now.
God came down to our level to take on our human form. And Jesus, God Incarnate, came down to our level to take on all of our human nature.
One person states it so well I am going to quote him. He describes Jesus’ acceptance of John’s baptism in this way:
“With his baptism at the hands of John, the Son of God publicly confirmed his solidarity with all humanity which He had assumed by His incarnation. With no cloak or eover but His personal sinlessness, Jesus at the Jordan formally accepted and acknowledged His radical involvement in the common guilt, burden, and fate of the whole human race.
It would be hard, I think, to overestimate the impact that Jesus’ baptism had among those who thought that they had no chance at all at receiving the blessing of God’s grace. Here before them was the man John proclaimed as being greater than him, that same person, submitting to the same baptism as all those sinners did. Jesus could not take away their shame, Jesus could not take away their guilt, and their humiliation, unless he full entered into their and our reality today. He could not give them a sense of dignity, nor could he release them or us from sin, unless he fully entered into their and our world, which he did.
We know from all the Gospels that Jesus was never interested in prestige; he was interested only in healing. As the remainder of Mark’s Gospel tells us, that is what his ministry was about.
What is made evident in Mark’s brief account of the baptism of Jesus was that Jesus was now at that point, the beginning of the Good News , Mark was saying that at this point Jesus was fully equipped for his ministry of healing, for his miracles, and for his teaching.
Mark’s account of the baptism of Jesus may tell us something about how his community may have understood the baptism in general. I think this is important since we will be doing so today. Mark’s community believed that baptism acknowledges that by our very humanness we participate, as Jesus did, in the sin of a broken world. There is not a lot that has changed since then.
In baptism, we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, to empower us in our ministry in that broken world.
Finally, baptism marks, today marks for these young people, the beginning of their life, as it marked the beginning of our lives, as a child of God – a radical idea at the beginning of the first century with Jesus.
And finally again, baptism marks us clearly as a disciple of Christ in this world. Amen.
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