Hi everyone,
Welcome to worship for this Baptism of Our Lord Sunday, landing on January 12, 2025!
The bulletin for this service can be found here. You are welcome to follow along with it or with the words on your screen. The sermon is included in both the bulletin and on this page below the embedded video.
If you would like to enhance your worship experience online, you are invited to have a candle in your space, lit at the beginning of the service and extinguished near the end after the sending hymn, when the altar candles are extinguished. You are also welcome to participate in communion if you are comfortable, by having something small ready to eat and drink prepared. Further instruction will be given at the appropriate time in the service.
May God’s unending love for you and all people fill you with joy and peace, today and always!
Glorious God, may we hear your Word speak truth, your voice speak love, and your Spirit speak welcome, through Jesus Christ. Amen.
So it’s been another one of those weeks. I know, I just got back from holidays so I should be totally rested and on the ball and everything, but honestly I had a lot of trouble staying focussed. Maybe it’s because it was just barely a week of holidays after Christmas, and so it wasn’t really enough for me to completely recover from all that hustle and bustle. Or maybe it’s because winter has never been my favourite season and I always seem to be a lot more tired and less energetic when it’s cold out and the days are so short. Or maybe I’m just in the thick of a mid-life crisis, which actually really wouldn’t make much sense since I’m only in my early 30s, give or take a decade or so.
Whatever the case, I had the darnedest time writing this sermon. You’d think it should’ve been an easy too, with so much stuff going on in our part of the world. What, with our prime minister resigning, those wildfires in California, and this talk about Canada becoming the 51st state. So with so many things happening, with so much to talk about, with all this sermon fodder just waiting for a half competent preacher to run with, you’d think that writing a sermon this week should have been a piece of cake, right? But it just wasn’t. I spent a lot of time this week thinking, writing, rethinking, rewriting, and staring at a computer screen. Even AI wasn’t much help. So either the text is super hard to preach on, or it’s me.
And if I’m honest, it’s hard not to think that it’s just me. I said earlier that any half competent preacher should be able to cobble something together with all this material we have, so what does that say about me that I couldn’t? I know, I know, I’m hard on myself and I’m like among the top 10 pastors that have served here at Grace over our 72+ years of history (top 10 out of 9, that is), but I’m just describing what goes through my mind sometimes, especially when I have weeks like this one. I mean, I kind of thought I wasn’t bad at this preacher thing. That’s why I felt called to such a position and vocation. That is why I’m even here and not out driving for F1, or the World Rally Championships, or Uber or something. But every now and then something happens and it sort of shatters those notions that I have of myself. It makes me question who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing. It makes me wonder if this even is God’s call for me in my life.
Oh, there’s that mid-life crisis thing again.
But you know what I mean, don’t you? Those times when your confidence and esteem take a hit, those times when you can’t help but second-guess yourself, those times when you perhaps regret your choices and wonder what on earth you were thinking? Or those times when we feel like we aren’t living up to our potential, when we deserve the jeers and mockery from others for our failures, when we are looked down upon and dismissed because we just aren’t it.
Again, I don’t always feel that way and I especially don’t get that vibe from anyone here, but I do think this might be something that many of us have gone through at some point. Perhaps our Prime Minister felt this throughout the years and leading to his resignation. Perhaps this is the American people in favour of absorbing this nation to become the 51st state might be projecting on us. And I wonder if this is how John the Baptizer felt in this somewhat unique telling of Jesus’ baptism that we get today out of Luke.
Huh? Why would John feel this way? He did everything right, didn’t he? He called out the sinners, welcomed the faithful, and pointed to the light that the darkness couldn’t overcome, right? He was the one who baptized Jesus, for crying out loud. How can I say that he was questioning his call?
Well, like I said the story we get out of Luke is a bit unique. So much so that part of it is cut out of our lectionary reading. Perhaps because it is too different from our very established paradigms, thanks to the other accounts of this event out of Matthew and Mark. See, our Lectionary selection takes away verses 18-20 of this chapter, which tells us that King Herod had put John in prison. And we might think, yeah ok, we know that John called Herod out for the stuff he pulled with his brother’s wife and was jailed, but so what?
Well, in Luke, it is right after we hear about John being imprisoned that Jesus goes and is baptized. Meaning, according to Luke chronology, Jesus wasn’t baptized by John. John was too busy being in prison in this version of the story. Sure, we might say that the other versions tell us specifically it’s John so we know that it was him, but I just find it interesting that Luke almost specifically says that wasn’t the case.
It’s like he’s saying, come on, John, you had like one job. You were to point to Jesus who points to God, and anoint him through the holy gift of baptism for this work. That title of baptizer is literally in your name. But you had to go and get yourself in trouble and be made unavailable for this momentous occasion.
At least, that’s how I read this through the lens of my own mid-life crisis full of self-questioning and doubt. And it seems like Luke supports it, because honestly he is silent on who does the actual baptizing of Jesus, which is probably intentional. See baptism in those days had somewhat of a different meaning. It wasn’t so much as we see it now, as sort of the initiation rite into this way of faith. Rather, in those days baptism was more of an initiation into the “school” or tutelage of the one who was doing the baptizing. In other words, if Jesus were baptized by John, then according to the culture of the time, that would make Jesus John’s disciple.
I don’t think Luke wanted to portray that. So while still honouring John’s ministry and contribution, he left out who actually baptizes Jesus. Luke left out John’s part in Jesus’ ultimate identity. So that raises the question for me, if John didn’t baptize Jesus, then what was his role in the story?
And after reading it a few times, I’ve come to the conclusion that for John and for all of us, that role is to be a beloved child of God.
See, often we are judged by our actions or inaction, our skills and talents or lack thereof, our successes but mostly failures, by our peers and often by ourselves. It’s like a natural wiring in us to determine the value and worth that we and others have. We often size each other up, list out the good and bad points, and interpret a whole person through that lens. We subconsciously or maybe sometimes very consciously make judgements based on what we see and what we assume to be true.
I think this is true for all of us. I know that I’m definitely guilty of judging myself and others in this way. And I know that I’ve been judged as well. But the good news is that in baptism, God shows us how this doesn’t have to be the way. By the grace of God, we are formed and created in God’s own image. By God’s immense and abundant love for us and all people, before we are able to do anything that can be judged by ourselves or others, we are already declared as God’s beloved.
This is what baptism is for. This is what it means, that God loves us. God loves us regardless of what we’ve done, who we’ve judged, or whatever party we vote for. God loves us when we have a hard time fulfilling our duties, our expectations of ourselves and from others, even in our sermon writing. God loves us, not because we are placed in a certain rank or garnered a certain accolade, but because God is holy and just and blesses us with a grace that surpasses understanding.
So who baptised Jesus according to Luke? The Holy Spirit. And then Jesus in turn welcomes all of us into this community under the Spirit, where the heavens are opened and we are declared as God’s beloved, with whom God is well pleased, even before we could do anything to earn it or disprove it. We are God’s beloved.
And as God’s beloved, our only job is to be loved.
In this season after the Epiphany, may we continue to grow in the knowledge of who Jesus is and thus who we are as God’s beloved in the Spirit. Thanks be to God. Amen.