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…
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All the gospels have some important turning points in them, some moments where the story begins an important new direction, when new things start to happen. And today, when we celebrate Jesus’s baptism is definitely one of those days, it is a day filled with a sense of something coming to life. Like so many of those gospel turning points, it begins with a journey, and the place Jesus journeys to means something. Jesus made a trip of several days’ duration to the River Jordan, to the place where the people of Israel first got a glimpse of the promised land, that place where they believed all of God’s promises…
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So what really happens when someone is baptized? Today is the feast of Jesus’s own baptism, and sometimes people hear the gospel readings about Jesus himself being baptized and they’re puzzled. Just for example, I’ve been asked this question several times over the years: If baptism is all about protecting us from original sin, and washing us clean from it, which is what many of us came to understand, then why was baptism even necessary for Jesus, since sin was not part of his life? And that’s a good question, but maybe what it shows is that we all underestimate what is really happening with baptism. Because there was more…