Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Matthew 3:13-17
An unknown peasant Jew walks up to a rabble-rousing prophet in the desert of Judea and asks to be baptized. John recognizes a messiah and dunks the peasant in the river Jordan. The skies crack open, the voice of God is heard and the Spirit of God is seen descending like a dove and alighting on Jesus. The voice rumbles like thunder, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.” And a movement is born.
Another unknown figure, perhaps representing a wandering people called Israel, is lifted up by an ancient prophet, who hears the voice of God saying, “Behold, my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.” And a people is commissioned for service.
A songwriter writes a psalm of praise to God, and sings of the voice of God thundering over the waters of creation, full of power and majesty, flashing forth in flames and shaking the wilderness. And all the people say, “Glory!”
Our scriptures today tell these stories, and we are invited to listen in, to hear echoes of ancient voices, human voices and a divine voice. These stories have a message for us today, if we have ears to hear. They are stories of glory, of justice, of faithful service, of new creation, and of empowerment by the Holy Spirit. They are stories of God’s love for us and of God’s demands upon us. They are theophanies, disclosures of God, which break open the world as we know it and make our world both unpredictable, and hopeful. These stories are our guide as we remember the baptism of Jesus today, following the liturgical calendar, and as we remember our own baptism in light of his.
Let’s begin with this strange saying, which is counterintuitive for many of us: “remember your baptism.” As you may know, a whole worship service can be constructed around the theme of remembering our baptism; it’s called a renewal of baptism service. We incorporated this ritual of renewing our baptismal vows into an Earth day service we had two years ago, and we also renewed our baptismal vows this fall when Hank baptized a number of older children. Often, renewal of baptism services involve sprinkling the whole congregation with water that’s flung out upon you from pine branches carried down the aisle. I suspect you may be relieved that we’re not doing that today—but don’t get too comfortable, we may do it some other time! I’ve experienced it in Presbyterian churches, and if the so-called frozen chosen who believe in doing everything decently and in order can do it, I don’t see why we Congregationalists can’t give it a try! But what does it really mean to “remember our baptism?” Do you remember yours? Some of you probably do, many of you probably don’t.
I believe in infant baptism…..I believe in the theology behind it that teaches us that God chooses us before we can utter our first word, that God’s grace and forgiveness comes to us before we can choose right or wrong, that we are incorporated into God’s family before we have done anything to distinguish ourselves or make ourselves worthy. But I also cherish my own experience growing up in a Disciples of Christ church, which practiced believers’ baptism. I do remember my baptism, and it marked me profoundly. I remember being eleven years old and anticipating with some trepidation the day when I would don a white robe and walk into the tank at the front of the church and feel the minister’s hand pushing me all the way under the water. I remember the awe I felt in being baptized in front of the whole church, coming up dripping and sputtering, and being led off to a warm towel and a waiting hair dryer, which my mom insisted on bringing! I remember the choice I made to embrace the Christian life through baptism, and I am grateful for the experience. But it’s not necessary to be baptized as an older child or adult to remember our baptism. We remember it when we are confirmed; we remember it when our own children, if we have them, are baptized; we remember it every time we participate as a congregation in the baptism of a child, as we will next week, or whenever we become sponsors to a child who is baptized; and, if we choose, we can make remembering our baptism a part of our daily spirituality, a habit that can infuse our lives with new meaning and remind us who we are.
When I finished my first field education internship while I was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was given a book by the two supervising pastors at my field ed. church. The book was by William Willimon, and it was called, Remember Who You Are: Baptism, A Model for Christian Life. I want to share with you the inscription that my pastor-mentors wrote on the title page. It reads, “To Janet L. Parker upon the completion of her ministry at the Wallingford Presbyterian Church. As you go forward in your service to our Lord, may God give you persons who will graciously help you to remember who you are…and whose you are.” I received that book almost 20 years ago, and I’m pleased to report that I have found many people to help me remember who I am and whose I am, and you are now counted among those people.
Now, we may not all remember our own baptism consciously, and in fact, some of us in this room may not have been baptized. And so I want to take a moment to say to any of you who might be in that category that when I talk about baptism, I am not implying that it is the exclusive way in which God can send us these messages of grace, of incorporation into the family of God, and of forgiveness. But it is the major way that the Christian church has reminded us, in a ritual way, of this divine reality that is actually available to all people—whether we go through that particular ritual or not. So using today’s scriptures as our guide, let’s think about what the sacrament of baptism teaches us about who we are called to be as Christians, as followers of Jesus.
Isaiah may seem like a strange place to go to learn about the meaning of baptism, but the powers that be have ordained that our lectionary readings for baptism of Christ Sunday include today’s passage from Isaiah. This scripture includes one of the enigmatic servant songs that Second Isaiah is so well-known for. Who is the servant at the center of this poem? Most scholars believe that the servant is not a specific individual, like a king or prophet of Israel, but rather Israel itself, the people as a whole. They base this on other passages such Isaiah 41:8-9, which reads “But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend; you whom I took from the ends of the earth…saying to you, “You are my servant, I have chosen you….” So one answer to the question of the servant’s identity is to say, it is the community as a whole, God’s people. Another answer seems to be given by Matthew, who clearly alludes to our Isaiah text in his story of the baptism of Jesus. In both the Isaiah passage and the Matthew text, the voice of God speaks, the Spirit of God is given, and the servant, or Jesus, as the case may be, is declared to be beloved, chosen, and pleasing to God. In Christian tradition, Jesus is often understood to be the promised servant depicted in Second Isaiah, the gentle leader who “will not cry or lift up his voice,” but who will be a “light to the nations,” the one to “establish justice in the earth.” This is the servant-Messiah, promised to Israel and revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s chosen One. So what can we learn about our own baptism from these passages? I hear three messages coming through these Scriptures that have transformative potential for our lives.
First of all, in baptism, God tells us, “You are chosen.” Now, this idea of chosenness is tricky. It is a notion central to Judaism and to Christianity that has great spiritual power and can also be quite dangerous. We can easily think of ways in which the idea of chosenness has been misused to justify horrible deeds done in the name of religion, even violent deeds. It has also been used to justify exclusion, creating closed communities of insiders and outsiders, of the elect and the damned. So we have to approach this idea with great care. The point is not to cultivate a spiritual elitism. In fact, just the opposite. If you look at the way it is used in our Isaiah text, and if you think of Jesus’ ministry, you come closer to grasping the meaning of being chosen by God. We have to ask, what is the purpose of being chosen, and what is the meaning? The servant in Isaiah is described as one who “will not break a bruised reed, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench,” but on the other hand, he will not faint or grow crushed until he has established justice in the earth.” This justice is very concrete: it involves being a light to the nations, opening the eyes of the blind, and bringing out the prisoners from the dungeon. And so we see that the purpose of being a chosen one, or a chosen community, is not to exploit others or hoard God’s blessings, but to share them freely with the world, to partner with God in world-changing projects that leave no one out of God’s reign of justice and peace. This was of course the purpose of Jesus’ ministry as well.
In fact, I think that to understand oneself as chosen is to say nothing about the standing of others before God, but it is to say everything about how one experiences one’s own standing before God. In baptism, we are chosen for God. We are claimed by God. That means we are personally addressed. We are given a vocation of service. Carl Jung once said that to have a vocation means to be addressed by a voice. This capacity to be addressed by a voice, to be summoned into a calling, is not limited to Christianity of course. The famous classic in Native American literature, Black Elk Speaks, tells the story of Black Elk’s calling. The experience of Black Elk is in some ways startlingly like the experience of Jesus’ baptism as described by Matthew and also has echoes of the psalm we sung this morning. Listen to Black Elk’s description, “Then I looked up at the clouds, and two men were coming there, headfirst like arrows slanting down; and as they came they sang a sacred song and the thunder was like drumming. I will sing it for you. The song and the drumming were like this:
Behold, a sacred voice is calling you;
All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.”
And what is the voice saying? Each of us will be addressed by God in a unique way. Each of us will be given our own song. But, as Christians, we also share a corporate identity in Christ. In baptism, we are joined with Christ, and so we hear with Christ the words of God by the river Jordan, but now addressed to us, “You are my Child, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased. A lectionary resource that I use acknowledges some of the ways the idea of chosenness has been problematic, and asks the question, “what would it mean if we understood chosenness as belovedness?” Such an understanding “takes the emphasis away from the supposed qualities of those who are loved and emphasizes instead the gracious gift of love itself.” And so the second thing we hear God saying to us in baptism is “you are beloved.” Knowing that we are beloved is part of knowing who we are and whose we are. Zen Buddhism has a wonderful way of expressing this idea. In Buddhism, becoming spiritually awakened leads to a recognition of “your original face before you were born.” In a similar way, Christian baptism reminds us of our original face, the face that God created, the face that God sees and never forgets, and continually calls us back to, a face that is beautiful and beloved by God.
Stephanie Paulsell, a Disciples of Christ minister, tells a moving story of a teenager who needed to be reminded of her original face, of her belovedness to God. This young woman was plagued by terrible acne which caused her great shame. One day, Paulsell writes, “when she felt unable to leave the house because of anguish over her face, her father led her to the bathroom and asked her if he could teach her a new way to wash. He leaned over the sink and splashed water on his face, telling her, “On the first splash, say, ‘In the name of the Father’; on the second, ‘in the name of the Son’; and on the third, ‘in the name of the Holy Spirit.’ Then look up in the mirror and remember that you are a child of God, full of grace and beauty.”
Ultimately, of course, baptism is not only about us. It is not only a rite that reminds us that we are chosen and beloved, but it is also a rite that commissions us to discipleship and service. It tells us not only who we are, but why we are. It invests us with a purpose. The third message, then, that I hear God giving us in baptism is, “you are sent out to serve.” The servant in Isaiah’s song, who actually represents the whole community of Israel, is chosen and then equipped with the Spirit of God to go forth into the world and establish God’s justice. Jesus’s baptism is his commissioning for service, the inauguration of his ministry. Soon, he will invite others to join him, and a community of disciples will form.
The UCC lectionary resource for this week had many good insights into these Scriptures, but there was one that I took some issue with. It said that what we learn from the baptism of Jesus is that God will send One who will “fix the mess we’ve made, transforming it into a time of beauty and grace, healing and justice.” I surely believe that Jesus was sent by God to transform our world, but I’m not sure it’s helpful to think of Jesus as the “fixer” who solved all our problems. Yes, in the cosmic sense, Christians believe that ultimately God’s redemption of humanity through Christ will put all things right. But what about the in between times? What about now, when much hatred and violence mars our world, and crowds out beauty and grace and justice?
In these in between times, in between Jesus’ first and second coming, I think it’s up to us. We are the body of Christ on earth. Through our baptism, we are commissioned to embody Christ to the world; we are equipped by the Spirit to love and serve our neighbor and to join in the work of God to bring out a more peaceful and just world. Through our baptism, we are formed into a community of disciples that knows not only who we are but why we are….that understands our calling to continue Jesus’ ministry of compassionate service and world-changing practices of love and justice. And in this ministry, we are not alone. We have one another—we are part of the family of God. And we are gifted with God’s spirit and with the memory and real presence of Jesus, who makes all things possible. Let us pray.
O Brother Jesus, who in your baptism left us a sign of your love and acceptance,
Grant, we beseech you, so to honor your calling,
That we may ever perceive our own preciousness in your eyes
And be moved to share the pain of those on the margins,
That we may in all of life promote the dignity and freedom of every human being.
In your Holy Name we pray. Amen.