THE BAPTISM OF OUR LORD – 09 January 2005

St. Paul Lutheran Church, ABQ NM – The Rev. P. L. Holman

Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:24-43; Matthew 3:13-17

“Listen, you nations of the world…”

Canticle 14 in the LUTHERAN BOOK OF WORSHIP is actually based on the first lesson for last week, from the prophet Jeremiah. 

“Listen, you nations of the world, listen to the Word of the Lord. 

Announce it from coast to coast, declare it to distant islands…”

I couldn’t help thinking about it in the context of the recovery efforts in south Asia, and in the context of today’s lesson from the book of Acts: “I understand,” Peter, disciple of Jesus, says, “that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.”  Wow – in every nation.  That’s a far cry from some of the things I have been reading about “faithful people” pondering the “tsunami’s meaning.”  Last week Pastor Nilsson so graciously invited us to consider how God is God in the world, who God is and how God acts.  While many people might want to interpret this terrible devastation to God’s will and judgment against one people or another, he carefully and faithfully reminded us of Immanuel, God with us, the reason for the season just completed, that God is with us in the depths of any darkness, and that the mystery of God made flesh can never be defined or contained or explicated by any human construct. 

Yet I read just yesterday in the ABQ Journal of one self-described Christian fundamentalist who said, “Eight of the 12 nations hit … are among the top 50 nations who persecute Christians”, which is why so many Muslims died and many Christians “miraculously” were saved.  He cites for justification a verse from Matthew about the end times … a verse followed just a few sentences later with a warning about false prophets… Wow.  As Martin Marty said when interviewed for that same article, “(W)hen people are precise in knowing that this is God’s will, they’re creating great trouble for themselves and others.  You have to say that God is playing favorites.”  [ABQ WEST SIDE JOURNAL, 1/8/05, p.3]

And then a Muslim cleric offers his interpretation, also quoting the Bible: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”  What has happened is another a test of people’s faith, he said with not a little sorrow, something that happens time and again.  But faith in God prevails.

Today we mark the Baptism of Jesus.  Thirty years of relative anonymity have gone by, at least as far as recorded scriptures are concerned, since the birth of Jesus.  Now it is time for Jesus to be baptized, and he approaches his cousin, John the Baptist, to “get it done.”  John’s aware of the power differential, and at first backs away. But Jesus insists, citing the history of the people and the prophecy needing fulfillment, so John relents.  And then something amazing happens: God speaks.  No one hears the voice of God and lives to tell about it, at least not until now.  But here is God, speaking not to the people there but to Jesus then and to us here and now: This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.  Jesus is baptized, publicly affirmed by God and committed to God’s purposes, and his public ministry begins. 

Do you have a public ministry?  Often people think I do because I have a certificate of ordination hanging on my office wall.  Many of us believe that St. Paul member Mark Behenna does because he is finishing his four year Master of Divinity degree at Gettysburg Seminary; Mark has a public ministry because he was just this past week approved for ordination and now will begin the process of being assigned to a Synod to await the external validation of his call to ordained ministry – that is to say, a call to serve a congregation in the ELCA.  But if you have a certificate of baptism on a wall in your home or somewhere in those boxes in the garage, or a baptism date your parents told you about, or even some dim recollection of a story of your baptism when you were just a baby at San Juan by the Arroyo Church of God … if you’ve been baptized, YOU have a call to public ministry.  “Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.”  That seal embraces our living and our dying; that mark shapes our life.  It’s all the credentials we need, really, to do the Lord’s work.  Next week when we install the 2005 Congregation Council, you will see people who are gifted in unique and amazing ways step forward to say yes to serving as your elected leaders for another year.  Yet for all their credentials the one that matters most is their Baptism into Christ.  Today we send out Visitation ministers with various communication and caring skills, to visit the sick and shut-in and bring them the Holy Meal.  But their best qualification for that job is that they are Baptized.  That Baptismal seal embraces our living and our dying; that mark shapes our life.  It’s all the credentials we need, really, to do the Lord’s work.

Luther taught that baptism is a daily grace; that each morning when we rise we should begin with prayer and then, upon washing our face with water, we should remember we are baptized, born again.  Any guilt we carry forward from yesterday is our own fault, not God’s, he said.  “Certainly, if you offended somebody, you must make it right with them.  But for sin or guilt, for sinning against God – in that return to the baptism of repentance, there is no yesterday…God has promised to see me as God’s child.” [Martin Marty, THE WITTENBURG DOOR, January/February 2005, p.21]

In Baptism we are named by God, and claimed by God for public ministry following the way of the Beloved Son of God.  What does it mean to be God’s child?  Who is this God we’re called to serve?

Consider God, the psalmist says, the one whose voice is strong enough to fell cedars the size of giant sequoias, strong enough to quake the waters into a tsunami and make mountains dance like young unicorns.  This God is the one who rules over the floods, reigning over them all in majestic peace.  This is the one who has claimed us and named us.  This is the God who drives us out only to flee to the God who washes us in the waters of forgiveness and welcomes us home.  For, as one contemporary theologian put it, “This God … has himself been swept overboard, immersed and engulfed in the river Jordan” dying for us to rise to life beyond death. 

Some people believe that worshiping God in nature is enough – it’s one way to justify, say, golfing on Sunday morning instead of going to worship.  To “worship God in unmediated nature is to risk ruination.”  Where do you turn then when the tsunamis of illness, defeat and death overwhelm you?  “But to drown in the waters of baptism in which the Lord himself was drowned, to receive the Pentecostal fire of the Spirit which the Lord himself sent – in this way we creatures of nature can worship our God in nature, and live.”  [THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY, December 28, 2004, p.17]

Consider God, the disciple of Jesus says, speaking to a Gentile and his household: how God anointed Jesus and was with him through all sorts of trials, even through death itself.  This God raised Jesus from the dead so that we could testify to the truth that everyone who believes in Christ Jesus receives forgiveness in his name.  Everyone.

Consider God, who in word and deed, in bread and wine, in water and the Sprit welcomes the likes of you and me into partnership for life.  God calls us into partnership not to focus on the source of our beliefs, nor on who’s “in” and who’s “out”, who’s “right” and who’s “wrong”, but in word and deed to share those beliefs taking great care to hold ourselves accountable for the impact of our lives on others.  For the One who “will not grow faint or be crushed,” whose nature is such that “ a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick” - even the most faint glimmer of faith – “a dimly burning wick he will not quench” – this God has first promised, with gentle justice and persistent love, to take great care of us.