January 7, 2001
First Sunday After Epiphany
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: You Are My Beloved Child ~ Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
That jump in this mornings scripture leaves open the question, if John was in prison, who was baptizing Jesus? You have a different view of Jesus' baptism than you might have had if you had read about the event in one of the other gospels. When I was a seminary student, I did an internship in North Dakota at three small Presbyterian churches. Whenever you talk about local organizations and national organizations there's always a suspicion on the local level that the national folks don't have any idea what happens right there in the workplace or down in the trenches or in the local congregation. I'm sure it's like that in the business world. I knew its true in the church. Ministers and members of congregations are forever complaining that those folks in the national office just don't have any idea what's going on and only push their own agenda. My supervisor when I was an intern wrote a small editorial piece for a Presbyterian clergy magazine. He said, "Everybody is convinced that there is a conspiracy at national headquarters against the local churches. I'm of the opinion that's an entirely too optimistic view of things. What I'm afraid of is that nobody at all is in charge!" We grow up with an idea that when we get to be an adult, we'll understand how things are and that things will be consistent. Then we get to be an adult and we find out that nothing is consistent. A lot of things that we think were firm and decided were really gray not black and white.
Now we're in a season that is known in the church year as Epiphany. Epiphany starts with the day of Epiphany, twelve days after Christmas. Yesterday was officially Epiphany and we could have gathered together and had a worship service for that high point of the church year. If you look into any church calendar, you'll find that today is listed as the first Sunday after Epiphany. Epiphany is a word that I rarely heard when I was younger. I had some vague idea about what it was. Something to do with revelation or a new awakening, but it wasn't a word that was part of my regular vocabulary. When I went to seminary I found out that Epiphany was also part of the church year and it had a particular liturgical focus. When I learned about the church year, my view of it was much like a pie chart with the dates from the four Sundays before Christmas being Advent, then Christmas, the twelve days of Christmas, then Epiphany and the season of Epiphany, then Ash Wednesday and Lent and moving all the way through the church year. But again, that's assuming that somebody is in charge of determining how all of these things are going to be. The reality of it is that within the Christian church there have always been differences of opinion. There have always been different directions that people have gone. The Eastern Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church likes to focus their celebration on the baptism of Jesus and the descending of God's spirit on Jesus on that time of baptism. Whereas the western church likes to focus on the nativity, on Jesus' birth. Somewhere along the line, instead of understanding those things to be part of the same incarnational event of God being with us in this human form of Jesus of Nazareth, we divided Christmas and Epiphany. Now there is a move to understand Epiphany as part of the Christmas celebration. A wider view of Jesus recognizes that the baby born is the child baptized, is the man that ministers and is crucified. Those are all of one piece. There have been focuses that have come together from some of those different traditions that now are part of the celebration of the season of Epiphany. The one that we are most familiar with is the visit of the Magi. The scripture passages for the day of Epiphany itself are always scriptures of the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus. The baptism that I've already mentioned is also another focus. It's always on the first Sunday of Epiphany. A third theme we pick up in the preceding weeks is the first miracle that Jesus performs, the miracle of turning the water into wine at the wedding celebration.
These three things are all understood to be epiphanies, that is, to be revelations or manifestations of the divinity of Jesus. They are all happenings that were remembered as people listed their ideas of why Jesus was important. They pointed to these three events-Jesus' birth, Jesus' baptism, the visit of the Magi and Jesus' first miracle. Those epiphanies are important to our life of faith. Epiphanies require change on our part. Sometimes change is something that we would prefer to leave behind, especially if we're comfortable in our lives. Epiphanies are new revelations that challenge. New things that we learn, and it's impossible for us to learn something new and not be changed. If we're not changed by something that happens to us, we haven't learned anything new. So we go through our lives, we have experiences and those experiences change us. I said that there was a tie-in between baptism and the children's sermon with the leaf and the winter song of Longfellow that we just sang together. That tie-in comes from Paul's words. When we are baptized, we are baptized into the life and death of Jesus. That's not an easy thing for us to think about. If we reflect on the way that baptism is sometimes celebrated in the church, we can get a clearer idea. I grew up in the American Baptist Church. I was dedicated when I was a young child. I was baptized by immersion, being "dunked," when I was twelve years old. The baptism by immersion is symbolic of dying to our old selves and being born again with the spirit of God within us. It doesn't mean that none of us had any spirit of God before we were baptized and after we were baptized we were full of God's spirit. It is symbolic of what baptism means to us in our lives, particularly when we are baptized as an adult or when we join the church or when we make a marriage commitment. Those are things that we do intentionally and they call upon us to live our lives in certain ways. To be baptized as a Christian requires us to look at our lives, to see how we are living, to see what's important to us, to see what needs to be changed.
Most of us get uncomfortable when we talk about the idea of original sin. This idea says that somehow human beings are born flawed and a price has to be paid in order for us to really be made whole. It's not possible for us to do that by ourselves. Again, this is assuming that somebody has the final word to say on a theological issue. The fact is, all of our words about God, all of our words about the Christian faith are attempts for us to explain things that are very difficult to explain, attempts to explain things that are very difficult to understand. When we talk about the sinfulness of humans we're talking about something that all of us know very well, deep down inside of us. How many of you can truly say that you know of someone in your life who has no insecurities? Someone who is completely at peace with themselves, satisfied with their life; someone who has no regrets, no desires to change anything. I don't know anyone like that. I know that certainly doesn't describe me. If it is true to say that to be human is to know ourselves, to be less than whole, to be less than perfect, to be searching for something to fulfill us, to bring us to completeness, then we can start to get some idea of what it means to say that humans have original sin. To be human is to somehow be flawed. Even if we don't like that idea of a baby being a sinner, we know that as a human a baby is not complete. There aren't any humans that we know of that are complete.
To be baptized into the Christian church is to make a commitment to live our lives in a different way, with a different orientation. To find completeness for our flawed human lives in God's love. That doesn't erase all of those things that we are insecure about, it just says that those are not most important. God's love is the most important thing. God loves all of us with our flaws, with our insecurities, with our regrets.
Many of the actions of our lives are the result of worry. Many of our judgments about other people are made because we are threatened by the life or being of someone else. Maybe we see what we believe to be the worst of ourselves in someone else. We know it's part of us, and our guilt makes us unforgiving. To believe that we are loved just as we are, gives us the freedom to let go of some of those insecurities and fears. As we let go of our own insecurities and fears it opens us up to accepting other people with their flaws, with their inadequacies, with their insecurities. To live our lives as Christians is to die to our old selves, to die to that fearful and flawed individual, to live again with the assurance of God's love and the desire to do the best that we can with our lives. It's much better to try and live doing the best that you can, than it is to be fearful and protecting all of the time. Jesus said that he came that we might live life and live it abundantly. You can't live an abundant life if you're always trying to ensure for the future, if you're always trying to protect yourself from criticism. So we die to our old selves that we might be born again with God's love filling us and driving through each day.
As humans in our incompleteness, we're also not able to be completely faithful all of the time. The process of living in God's love is an incomplete one. Sometimes we are able to give ourselves to others and sometimes we fall back into protecting ourselves. God understands. Those who love us understand. The Spirit calls on us to each be the best person that we can be. We give thanks for God's Spirit and we commit ourselves once again to living faithfully as God's people. Amen.