Sermon preached by The Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord
The day before yesterday I was sitting in a restaurant, having breakfast with a friend. It was a beautiful day. The sky was clear. The sun shone brightly. I was facing a window, outside of which were two palm trees. While they were just regular palm trees, the likes of which we see everywhere, I was struck by the great beauty of those trees.
As I conversed with my friend, simultaneously I basked in the beauty of the moment, which led me to thinking about how blessed I was to be alive, how blessed I was to be able to sit and enjoy a good meal with a friend, how blessed I was to have a wonderful wife and son and daughter, and this wonderful parish. It was one of those quiet, mountaintop experiences, affirming the goodness of life and the presence of God.
When you think about it, there is nothing so life-affirming as our Christian faith. God, who is love, created the world. He loves his creation, every little part of it, and the pinnacle of his creation is humanity—you and I, our families, our friends and neighbors, this parish, even those who don’t love us, for we are the only part of his creation made in his image. We were created to reflect the Maker of all things—in our ability to perceive truth and beauty, to know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, in our ability to be in communion with the Creator himself.
Yet something is very wrong with this picture. Created to live loving lives, we choose instead to be self-serving, self-centered. Knowing the difference between good and evil, we sometimes prefer the evil over the good, wrong over right. We live in a world in which theft and murder are facts of life, in which children are abused, marriage and the family are endangered, and in which an alarming number of people choose to escape through a host of addictions. The picture of the world in which we live is far removed from that of a world fashioned by a God of love.
The story of the people of God that we find in the Bible, from beginning to end, is one of the God of love reaching out to the people he made in order to bring them back to him. The incarnation is the ultimate expression of that love—God taking the flesh of the Virgin Mary, becoming a human being, and dying for our sins. Today, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, is the day when we recall that event of Jesus being baptized by John in the River Jordan. Jesus, who is God himself, who alone lived a life of perfect love, always choosing the right over the wrong, always preferring the good over the evil, never being self-centered, always centering on the Father, presented himself to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins. John the Baptist was puzzled that Jesus would want to be baptized, since he was without sin, and Christians ever since have wondered why he would do that, since he had no need of repentance. His response to John’s question was simply, “Let it be so for now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”
Why would Jesus be baptized, since he was without sin? One answer to that question is that in his baptism he prefigured his death and resurrection. Going down into the water prefigures his death and coming up from the water prefigures his resurrection. Certainly his baptism also shows his identifying with sinful humanity. Since he would take the sins of the whole world upon himself in dying on the cross, he begins that identity at the beginning of his earthly ministry.
One of the interesting twists in our life of faith is that just as Jesus identified with all of us in his baptism, when all of us are baptized we become participants in his death and resurrection. And this is not just symbolism. A change takes place when a person is baptized. Just as the beauty, justice, and truth of God’s creation has been distorted and perverted through human sin, our baptism brings us into a new reality in which we become regenerate through the work of the Holy Spirit and in which we become participants in a renewed humanity ruled by God’s love, this renewed humanity being the Church.
Francis J. Hall, in The Church and the Sacramental System, states that “Regeneration has often been confused by modern writers with conversion, but they are not the same. Conversion is a change of disposition and aim, and is moral; whereas regeneration is a change in level of being and capacity by the involution of s supernatural vital principle, flowing from the Body of Christ….For this reason, it can be, and frequently is, accomplished once for all by the Spirit in unconscious infants, before they are able to make any moral response. This does not mean that infants thus regenerate are exempt from the necessity of moral response, and of making it progressively as increasing age and experience afford opportunity. It means that they come to the task of working out their salvation as having the vital capacity and status of members of Christ’s Body and children of God by adoption and grace. The appointed means through which the Spirit thus regenerates the individual is Baptism, which also incorporates its subject into the Church and makes him a sharer in the Christian covenant.”
Today we will baptize two infants and one toddler, none of them realizing what is happening to them, but make no mistake, something very important, eternally important, is happening to them. They will be changed for ever, made children of God by adoption and grace and members of Christ’s Body.