A lot has happened since our gospel of the Epiphany last Sunday. What we sometimes call the hidden years of Jesus’s childhood and youth have passed without our seeing them, and today we see an adult Jesus who is ready to take an enormous step forward.
Today is the feast of Jesus’s own baptism, and baptism for Jesus is really the beginning of his public life, this is when it starts to become clear to the people around him, and maybe to him as well, who he is, and what his life will mean. He comes from his hometown out to the River Jordan, just to emphasize that he has now left behind his beginnings. It’s also when he in a tangible way experiences the power of God to live that life, and everyone around him sees and senses this sign too, that this is all from God. And then, right after his baptism he heads to the desert, to the real beginning of trying to live out God’s desire, he will face temptations and make decisions about how God’s values will be his values, and then he reappears and begins his life’s work dedicated to courage and love and suffering and being present with and healing the poor and the forgotten. But it started here, when he received this moment of recognition in the water of baptism, and the blessing of God came down upon him. This is the sacrament of beginning.
But this isn’t just what baptism does for Jesus. This is also very much what our church believes baptism does for us. If you go look up baptism in our catechism, it is something of a shocker, really, there is language that when you read it you will probably think is wildly overstated. It says baptism is, quote, the basis of the whole Christian life, it says that through it we become members of Christ, it says baptism incorporates us into the Church and makes us sharers in its mission, it says that through baptism we enter into communion with Christ’s death, we are buried with him, and we rise with him. These are strong words for all of us who have been baptized, to think what power has been given to us. Baptism means a lot is asked of us too, but baptism makes people like all of us capable of living the life that Jesus did.
So clearly the idea that baptism is kind of a starter sacrament and you then get on to the more serious ones, isn’t quite right. The fact is, people who are baptized are part of something overwhelming. Every time we touch that baptismal water back there, or in the back of any church, it’s a reminder that that water has washed over us, too. It means we signed up to be available when the call of Christ comes to us.
Baptism is not an insurance policy offering us protection, we get baptized for something. It puts our lives in play in the service of the kingdom. What that might actually look like is different for each one of us. It might be hard, but it will be beautiful and valuable, and it will be oriented around other priorities besides those of the rich and the powerful, something that will involve placing the dignity and value of other people ahead of our own. We do this not to earn God’s love, we already have that and always have. It’s so that we can experience the abundant life God wants to reward us with.
When we think about baptism this way it all sounds very intimidating and not what we are equipped to do, imperfect and tired out as we all see ourselves to be. We are only who we are, after all, we all have every kind of limitation and distraction and other work to do. And yet God seems to love working with imperfect people who are all tied up in knots, knowing that with God’s help we can untie them and move. That is the good news about our baptism, we are not called to do the impossible, just to some attempt to do something that without God would not make any sense. With God, we pray for insight into where our own baptism is calling us next, and if we listen, we see the path that God has imagined for us.
In a famous building in Rome where our ancestors in the faith have been baptized for centuries, there is an inscription on the wall around the baptismal font. They may be the words of another Pope Leo, Leo the Great, fifteen or sixteen centuries ago. The inscription ends with these words: The ones who are born here in this river are holy. We’re not used to thinking about ourselves as holy, but that’s us he is talking about. We are people God is pleased with, and we are always being called to something completely new.