Christmas, Epiphany, the Baptism of our Lord. What an extraordinary sequence of events. It’s like eating not one, but three rich desserts, one right after the other.
And just as our taste buds and digestive systems have a little trouble handling so much richness all at once, so our hearts and minds struggle to remain receptive, attentive and comprehending of this series of feasts in the church year.
We’ll be back in what we call “ordinary time” for the next five Sundays. But today, we have the undeniably delicious but daunting task—not only of celebrating the baptism of our Lord—but also sort of tying up loose ends by looking at the relationships among these events.
Christmas we also know as The Incarnation: God’s gracious decision to become human and live among us. We celebrate the baby Jesus in the manger.
Epiphany we might also call “the showing forth.” The wise men have made it to the manger. They who came from afar to worship are stand-ins for all the peoples of the world. God’s showing forth in the person of Jesus is recognized by humankind.
And now, rather suddenly, Jesus the grown man is being baptized. Of course, we love the story of Jesus baptized, because we too are baptized. It’s another thing we share with him and another way we follow him.
Barbara Crafton is an Episcopal priest who writes an online meditation. She connects these three feasts in a particularly valuable emphasis. “This is what the Incarnation means,” she writes. “Even the most secular of our moments is soaked with holiness. Every last moment of our moments. There's no getting away from it -- God is with us.”
What an interesting emphasis! We so often think of God as elusive. We often plead and even beg for God to be with us. But the Incarnation is irrevocable. God is here, plain and simple, in every moment of our moments, regardless of how remote God seems to us at times.
Crafton continues: “And here is what the Epiphany means: Anyone who wishes to see this can see it. Absolutely anyone. God is not hiding from us, nor is God closed to any of us. We can all walk a path that will reveal the divine presence to us. For most of us, this happens gradually throughout a life.”
In other words, God is here for everyone. The three wise kings are truly stand-ins. Their path to the divine presence was to follow a star over some great distance, we know not how far.
Our paths to the divine presence among us are as varied as we are. For each of us, it is the people, the events, the opportunities and obstacles of everyday life. When we walk those paths faithfully, we will come to see God in all of those places, moments and situations of our lives.
We all have moments of great clarity, when we see or comprehend something in a particularly fresh, compelling or unmistakable way. And it is no surprise or mystery that we call such moments “epiphanies.”
But I think Crafton is correct when she says that, by and large, our awareness of and ability to see God in the every day, more typically happens gradually throughout a lifetime. Indeed, I often am able to see God’s presence in my life, and more importantly to discern between things from God and my own willfulness and imagination, only in retrospect.
“And here is what the Baptism of Christ means,” says Barbara Crafton. “[It means] the inmost heart and utter wisdom of God is participant in our process of beginning to learn. The very same stumbling journey we make, a journey in which most of the learning that takes place happens through the challenge of learning from our mistakes, is undertaken by the Son of God...”
In other words, Crafton invites us to think of baptism—both our Lord’s and our own—as the beginning of a process of discovery and learning and living into our identities and ministries as people of God.
One aspect of Luke’s account of the baptism of our Lord merits special consideration but often does not get mentioned. Notice how Luke emphasizes that Jesus was baptized as one of many.
“Now when all the people were baptized,” says Luke, “and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying…” (NRSV: Luke 3:21) then the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove.
When all the people were baptized… and Jesus also, only then is Jesus revealed as the Son, the Beloved.
Two points I would make of this. The first is that Jesus’ baptism is a continuation of the “showing forth,” the revealing of God among us, that began at the manger to the angels and shepherds, and was made available to everyone with the epiphany of the wise men from afar.
And so our baptism is a showing forth, "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" (BCP, p 857*). It proclaims that God is among us and within us. Think of it: your baptism, my baptism, each and every baptism... a mini-Epiphany.
The second point is this: God showing forth among us and within us in the form of baptism is never earned, and it is never ours alone. Baptism is a communal event. It is a communal gift and a communal responsibility.
Now, we can all hear the words “community” and “communal” and be quite comfortable. We might even get warm fuzzes from hearing those words, for “community” like “family” is a good, solid middle class value.
But I venture to suggest that we are comfortable with these terms because we have in mind a pretty small and relatively homogeneous community—a good, solid middle class community a lot like the one in hundreds of Episcopal churches across the country on a given Sunday morning.
But that is not what God has in mind. God claims all. God’s vision as revealed to us through, for example, today's lesson from Isaiah, blows my limited human imagination of the scope and richness of God’s people right out of the water.
Each time I walk mentally through this sequence of events—God become human in the Incarnation, God revealed to absolutely anyone who elects to see in the Epiphany, God entering into human community and the process of human spiritual growth and learning through the baptism of our Lord—every time I walk through these events, then go back to Isaiah and read again the magnificent scope of God’s claim of that human community, I am stunned into silence.
Read it with me again:
"Do not fear, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
I will say to the north, ‘Give them up’,
and to the south, ‘Do not withhold;
bring my sons from far away
and my daughters from the end of the earth—
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.'" (NRSV: Isaiah 43:5-7)
It’s an epiphany. A moment of clarity in which I grasp the utterly vast sweep of God's view of human community. And then it's gone. I can only hold on to it for a moment, then my human brain gets stuck in the details of our human differences and hostilities and simple disagreements. And the struggle to comprehend God's vision and desire for humankind begins again.
So be it. Amen.
Epilogue: Recently I came to the same place this homily ends by a drastically different route. I visited Edward Steichen's "Family of Man" exhibit in Clervaux, Luxembourg. See Who are we in relationship to each other? on my main blog, Coming to Terms.
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