I must apologize to the two people who have wondered why I not been posting. To the first: Yes, I am still here. To the second: No, a northern Wisconsin winter has not done me in.
It has simply been a very busy time since the Epiphany and I have just not gotten around to new posts such as they have been for some time.
In short, sorry! Here are the four homilies--in very rough draft form-- which I would have posted had I posted anything.
In Christ,
Father Dean+
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Epiphany 4
It would seem that the people of Nazareth did not like what Jesus had to say. And it is not too surprising. In fact, it would be most surprising if people had not been indignant. Remember Jesus has just told them the words of Isaiah had been fulfilled in their hearing. Last week we heard him read those words from Isaiah,
4.18:"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, 19: to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."
And then Jesus tells the people, the people with whom he grew up, the people he saw everyday for thirty years that God is not talking about them in particular. These are people who ask, "Is not this Joseph's son?" and these are people who think that they know the answer as surely as we think we know what see around everyday. Luke tells us “And all spoke well of him, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth.”
And then the mood shifts. The admiring congregation becomes a murderous mob. The people who wondered at his gracious words; the people who are just bursting with pride at Joseph’s son, at the kid from the carpenter’s family, the guy who was their buddy, who was right there on the same level with them, these go crazy. Luke tells us that “all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.” They become a lynch mob and try to throw Jesus over a cliff in order to stone him, in order to kill him. Why?
They think that they know Jesus--"Is not this Joseph's son?"—and, of course, they do not. We are reading Luke’s Gospel and we all remember that Luke has made it clear over and over that Jesus, born of Mary, is God’s Son and Joseph is his guardian, Joseph is his protector, but Joseph is certainly not his father.
They think that they know God. They are the good and the decent, the people of Israel, God’s chosen. They are not arrogant like the Syrian leper, Naaman, who came from the court of the Syrian king. Naaman was a soldier, who in Jewish lore and legend, had led attack after attack on Israel. Naaman is a foreigner, a enemy and yet, God’s prophet Elisha is sent to heal him, not the many deserving lepers of Israel.
They think that they know God. They are the synagogue community. They are the faithful and the good. They are not like the poverty stricken widow of Sidon, a Phoenician, a pagan, an idolater and yet, God’s prophet, Elijah, is sent to her and save her and her son from the famine which followed the drought which hurt Israel as much as their pagan neighbors.
And now Jesus tells them that the words of Isaiah do not apply to them alone. The words of Isaiah proclaiming release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, liberty for those who are oppressed are not just for them but for the people of the world. Jesus is the light to enlighten the Gentiles, and God’s love is not just for the good folks of Nazareth.
And in their rage and in their fury they drive Jesus out of the synagogue, out of the town and they try to kill him. They are so sure that they have a lock on God’s love, on God’s care, on God, that they drive off the person Luke has told us is the Son of God. They drive away Jesus who was described by Gabriel to Mary:
1.32: He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, 33: and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end."
They drive away Jesus of whom Luke has told us that when he was coming up from the water,
3.21had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, 22: and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, "Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased."
No, it seems that they do not know Jesus. And they do not know God. God is not the God of only the good and the decent. God is not the God of only those who claim Him as their God, but God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the God of all creation and in Jesus, in Christ, God is reaching out, God is coming to, all the people of all times and all places. In Jesus God is making all things new. In Jesus God is reconciling Himself to humankind which has separated itself from Him. In Jesus God is reconciling all humankind, separated and divided by sin, living in fear of death.
The people of the synagogue at Nazareth thought that they knew God, but what they knew was a creation of their own imagination. What they knew was an imagined god which simply was a reflection of themselves. They think they see God when all they see is themselves in a mirror. A God who comes to Naaman the Syrian general, and to the starving widow of Zarephath, does not fit the picture of a god which they had made for themselves from themselves. And so they try to kill God-become-human when Jesus threatens their picture-perfect god.. They try to kill Immanuel, God-with-us as they try to maintain their idolatry which is really the idolatry of themselves, their idolatry of themselves because they are in love with themselves.
And that is the great danger that we all face in our spiritual lives. The great danger is that we confuse God with what we see in the mirror. The great danger is that we confuse loving that image, loving that reflection, with loving the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind and with all our strength. And the great warning sign, the great reminder of that false love, that confused love, is when we do not love our neighbors as our selves. Far too often we imagine that are loving our neighbors as ourselves when, in fact, we are simply loving ourselves as we meet ourselves in our neighbors.
The test comes, the challenge comes, when we are confronted with those who do not look or act or speak like us. The test comes when we are confronted with people who do not seem to appreciate us as we appreciate, as we love ourselves, and that is when we may begin to understand how God loves.
God loves the hard cases. God loves the unlovable. God loves those who do not worship Him and who not even know His name. God is the prodigal father lavishing His love all without limit or qualification. God’s love is like the rain and the sunlight which falls and shines on the just and on the unjust, the good and the bad. God is the boss, God is the businessman who pays the same wages to those who have worked all day in the heat and those who have only worked as the sun began to set.
And we know all this because that is how Jesus loves and Jesus is the prefect revelation, the perfect and complete disclosure of whom God is. In the Nicene Creed we say almost every Sunday that “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” As someone has said, the good news is not that Jesus is like God, the good news is that God is exactly like Jesus. And in Christ God loves the world And the epitome of a life lived in love is to be found on the cross, but a life lived in that sort of love could not be bound by death or sin, and so the flowering of a life lived in that sort love is the resurrection.
It is easy to say that we should love like God loves, that we should love our neighbors like ourselves, but it is hard to do. It is hard because God loves those who ignore Him and insult Him and injure His creation, His people over and over. God loves those who not deserve our love. It is hard because our neighbors are almost never like us, and they so often ignore us and insult us and injure us; because so many of them fail to deserve our love.
For us loving as God loves takes an act of the will. It does not come naturally. We can love as God loves when we let God love through us; we can only love without reserve or limitation, when we act as avenues of God’s love in the world. When we find that we are withholding our love, our respect, our forgiveness for insult or injury; when we find that we are gossiping and tearing down those whom God has sent into our lives, when we find that we are building ourselves and our own importance, then we are not loving as God loves.
In a few weeks we will begin another Lent and we will once again be invited “to the observance of a holy Lent, by self‑examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self‑denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” Lent is always a preparation for Easter. The practices of Lent, the fasting and additional prayer and meditation, the examining ourselves for the sinfulness in which we live are simply ways to get ready for Easter, but that does not mean a day in mid-April, rather the Easter that Lent prepares us for is the Easter in we live all our days, the Easter that began on the first day of the week some 2,000 years ago. Lent prepares us to live in the triumph over sin and over death which became available in our baptism and which is renewed each time we celebrate mass. Lent prepares us to live in Easter by giving us time to identify those parts of our lives that separate us from the love of God and the love of those around us. Lent gives us time to distinguish between the still, small voice of God, and the static, the pointless noise, that the world broadcasts.
But we do not need to wait until Ash Wednesday. We do need to begin today to love as God loves, to treat others exactly as God treats us with affection, with understanding, with forgiveness and forbearance, until the image of ourselves in the mirror is the restored image of God in which we were made.+
Homily CEp3
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IOGD
There is a particular intersection on Highway 60 between Hartford and Hustisford in Washington County not too far from the school district where I was a teacher. That intersection was where I learned that I sometimes tell the same story more than once. It was a particularly dangerous intersection and I had heard some story about just how dangerous it was from some fellow teachers and, apparently, every time we drove down the hill from Hartford toward this place I would launch into the same tale. One day I noticed that Barbara’s attention was not quite as rapt as I thought the story deserved, and I asked if I had told that before and she made it very clear that not only had I told it once before but that I had told it every time we were on the stretch of road for five years. (I might add that I am sorry but I have forgotten just what the story was.)
There is a school of thought among preachers that repetition is not such a bad idea and there is even a sermon outline or a sermon formula based on that idea. It basically says that the preacher should tell the congregation what he or she is going to say. He or she should then say it and then conclude by telling the congregation what he or she said. I am not sure if I have ever actually heard such a sermon, but then I probably would have fallen asleep during stage two when I realized I had heard this somewhere before.
I do suspect that Saint Luke may have been a little bit taken with this idea. Not that he would use the triple redundancy homiletic model, but I do believe that he felt that repeating the key ideas was a good thing, and, as a teacher, I agree. In this morning’s lesson we hear about Jesus preaching in Nazareth, his hometown, and there is no redundancy in Jesus’ sermon, and there is certainly no one dozing off for lack of interest. Luke tells us that “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.”(4:20B) Jesus has used a text from Isaiah. Luke says that Jesus unwound the scroll to the place where that text was found. Imagine the huge scrolls and the difficulty of open it to the right spot quickly. An early theologian and scripture scholar, Origin of Alexandria, who spent his entire life among such scrolls said that it was providence that Jesus found the passage so quickly.
In any event, he did and he read
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (4:18-19)
This immediately has a familiar ring. When Mary went to visit Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, we heard very similar words in the Magnificat, in the Song of Mary:
1:32-34
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
This is not last time we will hear these same sentiments. In Matthew’s Gospel we are all familiar with the eight beatitudes from the sermon on the mount. In Luke’s Gospel we have a sermon on the plain and there are only four beatitudes, and the first two have a familiar ring: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.”(6:20-21)
And just in case, we have not been paying attention, Luke tells us once more time. When John the Baptist sent some of his disciples to ask Jesus if he were indeed the one who was to come, Jesus said to them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.”(7:22)
This is what the Gospel is, this is what the Good News is, in Luke’s account of the Gospel. The poor have Good News preached. The blind see. The hungry eat. The captive and the oppressed are set free. And that is good news to the blind and to the hungry and to the captives.
Frankly, in Luke’s account of the Gospel, the news is not all that great for some other people. In the Song of Mary, we heard her sing, “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things,and sent the rich away empty.”(1:31-33) But Luke returns to this as well.
In the sermon on the plain, there are also four “woes” to round out the four beatitudes: “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.”(6:24-25) The powerful, the proud, the rich and the satisfied find the tables turned in Luke’s Gospel. Scholars have called this feature of the third Gospel the “great reversal.” The great reversal, the great upheaval, the great change.
We have already seen this great reversal. We saw Gabriel appearing to a couple that was disgraced to have no children and so old that they never would. But God reverses the cultural judgment when the birth of John was announced. Next we see Gabriel appearing to a teen-aged girl, a person is not even married, who is almost completely powerless and when Gabriel tells her that her son will be called “will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.”(1:22), she bursts into a triumphant song, God “has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” (1:48-49) A great reversal indeed. That great reversal continues at Bethlehem when the visitors are shepherds, the lowest of the low, and they are invited by the angels from on high. Another great reversal. And what does Simeon say to Mary about her son at the presentation in the Temple? He says, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel.”(2:34) Rising and falling, tables are turned, a great reversal is at hand.
But that is not all. There is much more than talk, because as Jesus says to John’s disciples, “Tell John what you see…” Tell John what is happening. Tell John what is being done. The Word made flesh is making the words of the prophet Isaiah come to life in the lives of people. The incarnate Word of God is fulfilling the promise of God in the words of the prophet and this is a message that is worth repeating because it is a message that is worth learning.
I had a high school Latin teacher who used to tell us, “Repetitio est mater studiorum.” “Repetition is the mother of learning.” He must have repeated it a lot because I learned it. As we listen the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ According to Luke we are going to hear the Good News over and over. We are going to see the Good News become part of the lives of the blind as they see, the hungry as they are fed, the captives as they are set free. We are going to hear it and see it again and again because “Repetitio est mater studiorum.” “Repetition is the mother of learning.” And what are we supposed to be learning? We are supposed to be learning that The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because he has anointed us to bring good news to the poor. He has sent us to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
He has sent us to bring food for the food basket and to build habitats fit for humanity. He has sent us to tell a world held captivated by things, that the spirit will not be held prisoner by things that are passing away, and that God loves us so much and that God loves life so much that he has sent his Son who has sent us to proclaim that God has set us free from even the power of sin and death. That is Good News worth hearing over and over beginning with ourselves. The Good News is that we have been set free. That is Good News worth hearing over and over. The Good News is that we will be fed and that we will see and we too have Good News preached to us by Christ. That is Good News worth hearing over and over until we are able to repeat it over and over and over in word and in deed.
Homily Cep2
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IOGD
You do not have to be an Episcopalian for too long before you hear some fairly interesting stories about church stuff. There was a story in another parish where I once lived about the time that the holy water fonts, at the front and back doors, were filled with wine instead of water. When I heard this story, it seemed sort of an extravagant and festive thing to do, a little like champagne fountain at a wedding reception, and I wondered for a second if it was the kind of thing one might do on purpose on the Sundays when the Gospel account of the wedding feast at Cana was read. It took about a second to decide that that was not a good idea. And apparently the time it actually happened in that other church the wine was turned back into water when people actually arrived for Sunday services.
It is hard not to see some hint of festivity, some joy at a wedding and at a gathering in this morning’s Gospel lesson. It is a portion of the Gospel that is mentioned each time there is a wedding in the Episcopal Church because the wedding liturgy of the prayer-book contains these lines: “The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.” This suggests a great deal about how Christians understand marriage since it points out God’s institution of marriage in the beginning and the continuation of it in Christ through this lesson from John’ account of the Gospel.
There should be no doubt after this reading this lesson that Jesus was able to enjoy himself. There should be no doubt after all of the accounts of Jesus and his disciples, of Jesus and the people, gathered for meals. Just in case there is, we have Luke and Matthew’s account of Jesus telling a crowd, “Jesus said, “For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children.” (Luke 7: 33-35) (See also Matthew 11:16-19) Someone defined a Puritan as a “person who is afraid that somewhere, someone might some how be having some fun.” That attitude has certainly not been unknown in the Christian church and it apparently was not unknown in the early first century in Palestine. And John tells us that Jesus rejects it.
What we see then is Jesus not only “adorning” marriange as a way of life as the prayer-book says, but we also see Jesus adorning the joy of a party, the joy of friends, and, even, apparently, the joy of a good wine. If that is all that we gleaned from this morning’s lesson, it would be plenty, but there is much more. We get a hint of it from the very first verse, “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana.” “On the third day…” may bring the first chapter of the Book of Genesis to mind: “God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it’ And it was so. …And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.”(Genesis 1:11-13) A close reading of of the first chapters of Saint John’s account of the Gospel has suggested a re-working of creation, a new creation in seven new days as Jesus begins his earthly ministry. This morning lesson certainly does suggest that in Christ God looks at “plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit” and again sees that it is good.
There are other third days however. Again in Genesis we find that “On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.” And that was the place that Abraham took Issac, ready to sacrifice him if that was what God wanted.(Genesis 22:4) In Exodus it is on the third day after Israel arrives at Sinai that things begin to happen. We read, “On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled.”(19:16) It continues, “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God.”(17a) Above all, none of us in the Church can hear the words, “the third day” and not think of the first day, the first day of the week, the third after Jesus died on the cross.
It seems that John, at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, is already pointing us toward that conclusion, toward that consummation of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Again, when we read this morning’s lesson we read, “My hour has not yet come.” (2:4) And again, we read, “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”(11) In John’s Gospel, the hour is always Jesus’s death on the cross. In John’s Gospel, Christ’s Glory is always the glory of the cross. In other words, the author of the fourth Gospel is telling us that right from the beginning, Jesus public ministry leads to the cross—and beyond it. We cannot read about the hour, the cross and the glory and the third day without also recalling our participation in it.
We participate in Jesus’ death and in Jesus’ resurrection through baptism. Each time water is blessed for baptism, we hear the priest or the bishop say, “We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection.” At Cana the water that is transformed into wine begins as water used for purification, for a ritual. At Cana we see a practice transformed. We see what points toward one thing, water, turned into something better, wine. In Baptism we too are transformed. We too are transformed into something more, into Christ.
John the Evangelist’s Gospel is full of references to the Eucharist and surely no one reads this lesson without thinking of the wine which Jesus takes and blesses and gives for the life of the world, his blood, himself. And again every time Christians gather around the table of the Lord things are transformed into something better and into something greater as bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus and through them we participate in Christ’s sacrifice, in His glory. In Eucharistic Prayer B, we pray, “Unite us to your Son in his sacrifice, that we may be acceptable through him, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” The prayer-book clearly links this unity with the Eucharist since it follows these words. “We pray you, gracious God, to send your Holy Spirit upon
these gifts that they may be the Sacrament of the Body of Christ and his Blood of the new covenant.”
The sign at Cana points beyond then to something much better and much richer and which will last far longer that even six large jars of wine. The sign at Cana points toward our transformation into something much richer and much better and it points toward the transformation of all creation. Last week we celebrated the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. In Orthodoxy, in the Church of the East, this feast celebrates the sanctification of the waters of the Jordan River as the sinless Christ enters those waters to be baptized. And from those waters, all creation is again sanctified, made holy and again God looks at creation and says that it is good. This morning’s lesson repeats that I believe. In it water becomes wine and created matter becomes a sacrament of Christ’s ministry just as at the incarnation the Word became flesh, the creator became a creature and Jesus became the fundamental sacrament of God’s love for the world.
At our baptisms we too became sacraments. The stone jars that we can so often be are being transformed into something new, into a new creation. We are being made into the citizens of a new heaven and a new earth and we have been sent to participate with Christ in the retransformation of all creation into something that is holy and something that is good and something that is as full of joy a family and friends gathered to celebrate because that is really what we about. We are really about the celebration of the marriage feast of the Lamb that began in an hour of Glory 2,000 years aga and continues and that altar and lasts deep into eternity.+
Homily
CEp1
IOGD
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There is a novel called Cats’ Cradle by Kurt Vonegut. In this story the world comes to any end after a mad scientist allows a substance called ice-nine to get loose in the eco-system. The problem with ice-nine is that it turns water to ice and so any water that comes in contact with it instantly freezes, rock solid. Since all the waters of the world are connected either through chains of rivers and lakes, or through the aquifers which carry water below the surface of the earth, it only takes one mistake and it is all over.
That is sort of depressing, but it does suggest a much more edifying notion. That is that the waters of the whole earth are holy and blessed and that they have been so since Jesus entered the Jordan river to be baptized. The orthodox churches have a rite, a liturgy that recalls this idea and rather perpetuates it. On the feast of the baptism of our Lord Orthodox congregations gather at lakes and rivers and bless the water, even if they have to chop a hole in the ice to do so. (Which I do not think the Church Insurance Company, the vestry or my wife would want to done here.) It is done all over the world. It was done last winter in Milwaukee on Lake Michigan and it is done at an orthodox monastery near Boscobel Wisconsin in southwest Wisconsin. Each year on the Baptism of our Lord the monks and their friends hike up to the head the valley where the monastery is located and they bless the water of a springs which becomes a creek and then flows into the Wisconsin river. Since I think blessings can go upstream as well as down, it seems to me that Boom Lake and all the waters connected to the Wisconsin River are doubly blessed and doubly holy. Not only are they part of God’s sacred creation, but that holiness is renewed each year as our orthodox brothers and sisters bless the waters of the world again and again.
Of course all the seriousness and all the silliness are just a reflection of the importance of baptism in our lives. Of all the changes in the liturgy in the last generation—some very good and some not so good—the most important has been the restoration of the Eucharist and Baptism to their central place in the sacramental life of the church. Part of that restoration has been moving baptisms to a Sunday morning service in front of the whole congregation. Each baptism has such a great effect on the whole church, on the whole Body of Chris, as a new member is added. Not just another name on a roster or in the parish directory, but a new member whose presence changes all the rest of the body.
There is another reason, however, that this change is so suitable and that is because every time there is a baptism, all the rest of us, renew our baptismal covenant. Each time there is a baptism all the rest of us have a chance to reflect again on the meaning of our own baptism.
In the Book of Common Prayer the importance of Baptism is highlighted by the strong suggestion that baptisms be done on certain days. They are not limited to those days, but some feasts have a particularly strong baptismal character. All Saints, Pentecost, Easter Eve, today, and when the bishop visits, are those days. The prayer-book takes this a step further and also suggests that when there are not baptisms on those days that the congregation renew its baptismal covenant and that is just what we will do in place of the Creed this morning.
This morning’s collect, this morning’s prayer for the day, highlights that when it prays, “Grant that all who are baptized into [Jesus’]Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior.” To keep the baptismal covenant then is to live as if Jesus is our Lord and as if he is our Savior. To keep the baptismal covenant is to live as if Jesus is the standard and the model for our lives—that is what it means to say Jesus is Lord. It means to live our life in imitation of Jesus’ life. To be a follower of Jesus does not mean that we are in line with Jesus up front. To be a follower of Jesus means to live like Jesus lived. To confess Jesus as savior is to live as if Jesus, and our relationship with Jesus, provides the meaning of our life. It is to live as if they world was full of the sacredness of God’s creation which sin had destroyed and which Jesus’ life, death and resurrection had restored. It is to live as if we too have been restored by Jesus to unity with God, a unity we entered into at baptism and which is nurtured and deepened whenever we receive communion.
In this morning’s Gospel we have an icon, we have an image, of what it means to live in unity with God, to live in a relationship with Jesus as Lord and Savior, to live filled with the Holy Spirit. In this morning’s Gospel we have an icon of the Trinity. We see Jesus praying after he has been baptized and then the heaven was opened. When Luke tells us the heaven was opened, he is saying that it was as if the sky was torn open. Luke uses that picture to say that the gulf between time and space where we live and eternity was suddenly bridged. God the Father who is always present made his presence clear and tangible in the words Luke relates to us when he says, “a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” as “the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” What we see in this picture of the Trinity is a picture of the unity of the Trinity. It is a picture of the love of God which united Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is a picture of Jesus whole earthly ministry which is all about his obedience to the will of the Father and which is given shape and form and substance by the unity of the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.
This morning’s Gospel is phenomenally important in understanding who Jesus is. It is one of the very few events that is referred to in all four Gospels and it is very clearly the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Those two reasons would make Jesus’ baptism important, but I think that its importance goes further and deeper in understanding the Christian life. Jesus’ Baptism was not like ours. Jesus did not have sin washed away in the waters of baptism because Jesus was sinless. Jesus did not have to die to sin and rise to new life because Jesus is the victory over death and over sin. Jesus did not cross from slavery to freedom, from death to life, to become an adopted child of God because Jesus’ life, death and resurrection leads us to freedom, to life, to unity with the Father, unity that only a Son could have. In other words, the picture that Saint Luke gives us of the Trinity in this morning’s Gospel is a picture of what we are brought into as we are baptized and the Holy Spirit fills us with new life in the risen Christ. The baptism of John was an event which pointed toward the sacrament of baptism. John said that he baptized with water but that Jesus would baptize with fire. That suggests the Holy Spirit which acts in our lives at baptism to bring us into that same relationship with God that we see in the Trinity. We are called to enter into that same relationship which is characterized by love. Each time there has been a baptism in this building, the Holy Spirit has hovered over this congregation and each time there has been a baptism in this church God the Father has looked down on His beloved as the risen life of Christ again restores unity in love through the action of the Holy Spirit.
In a minute or two we are going to bless water and we will renew the promises made at our baptisms. Those promises, that covenant, is not a contract and it is not a set of rules, but it is a way life. It is an attempt in words to convey what it means to live in unity with God and so it is in fact a set of goals; it is a set of markers which point the way and it is a gauge and guide on that way.
To continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers, to persevere in resisting evil, and to repent and return to the Lord, to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving my neighbor as myself, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being are all behaviors. They are all actions that we can observe and thus they are, in a very real sense, sacraments because they are outward signs of an inward grace. That inward grace is the very love of God with which the life of Jesus fills us in the power of the Spirit and that, in turn, makes us sacraments in the world where we live—outward signs of the grace of God for all the people we meet.
