Eternity's Spiral

Propers: The Baptism of Our Lord, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The life of religion, of faith, of spirituality, is not a straight line from point A to point B. It’s not even a jagged slope, winding its way generally up or down. Rather, the life of faith is a spiral: forever going out and coming back; forever returning to things familiar with freshly opened eyes; forever making our way home only to experience it anew, because our journey has changed us along the way.

Baptism is our entry into Christian life. For many of us it happened so early that we cannot recall it at all. We were but children. Our parents brought us forward, making commitments on our behalf, and we were sealed with water and Word, with oil and Spirit, so that the life and breath and fire of God might dwell without our bodies, within our very souls.

In Baptism, our sins are not simply washed away, but drowned. We are buried in those waters as Christ within the Tomb, and we rise again not as the old creature, the old Adam, but as the New Adam, Jesus Christ. For if we are united in a death like His, we shall surely be united in a Resurrection like His. Baptism is nothing less than dying and rising again: dying to self, dying to ego, dying to sin—and rising as reflections of Jesus, as sons and daughters of God Most High, not so that we lose our individuality, but so that we gain it for the very first time.

It is once-and-done, it’s true. We do not rebaptize. No orthodox Christian could, for the simple reason that Baptism is God’s action, not ours; Jesus’ promise, not our own. And precisely because it relies on His promise, His faithfulness, His worthiness rather than ours, we know that we can trust it. We know that we can always return to the waters of our Baptism and be forgiven and drowned and resurrected once more.

We keep returning to Baptism, we keep returning to the promise of grace, until that day when we pay the final debt—when our death is fully subsumed into Jesus’ own—and we rise in Him, one last time, never to die again.

It is often pointed out that religious folk tend to remain in the religion and the denomination into which we are born. This is stated in such a way as to invalidate religious conviction: oh, you were just born that way. Of course, the same could be said of the irreligious: that they’re simply the secular children of a secular era. But the truth is that none of us remain in the faith of our birth. Not really. We grow and we change and we return to things we thought we knew only to find them larger and deeper and truer than we’d imagined when we’d left them—not because they’re different, but because we are.

I can’t help but recall the Chronicles of Narnia, in which Aslan, the Lion-Christ, always appears larger each time the children encounter him in the story. They think it’s because he’s gotten older, but really it’s because they have. “Every year you grow,” he tells them, “you will find me bigger.”

God does not change, for He is eternal. God does not grow, for He is infinite. But our understanding of God, our faith in God—that has no upper limit. No matter how good, how beautiful, how true God seems to you, He is always better, always truer, always more than we can imagine. No matter how deep we dive, there is no bottom to the ocean that is God.

With the world around us in upheaval, we often do not know whither we can turn. Institutions have failed us: political parties, church bodies, institutions of wealth, commerce, law and order, all seem rickety, just on the brink of collapse. And we realize that the things we thought eternal in this world, the bulwarks of our society, were never anything of the sort. All were transitory, all were vulnerable from the start. And this can shake us up pretty badly.

A teenager recently told me that things were simpler when he was a child. But that’s true for all of us. When we’re kids, the foundations of our worldview seem unshakable. The Boy Scouts have always been there. Our school has always been there. My parents will always be there. As we age, we see how much of the world we took for granted simply passes away. But it isn’t the world that’s changed—or perhaps I should say, it never wasn’t changing. What’s different now is how we see it, how we view it with older, wearier eyes.

So where are we to turn when the superhuman institutions of our youth prove all too human, all too fallible after all? Do we retreat to the illusions of childhood, to an idealized society that never really did exist outside of memory? God forbid. Many have tried that primrose path, and you can see the results on the evening news.

No. We must return to what is truly eternal, to the center of our spiral, to the promise of grace forever young, forever new. It is in Baptism that we lay down all our pride, our plans, our impotence, and our rage. It is in Baptism that we relinquish the illusion that anything apart from God could last. In those waters we drown once again to the self, to the ego, to pride, to despair. And we rise again renewed, resurrected, as Jesus Christ our Lord, as Temples of His Spirit, members of His Body, and reflections of His grace.

God meets us in those waters. That’s the revelation of the Scriptures read this morning. God meets us in the waters: meets us as the Son within the Jordan, as the Father’s voice on high, as the Spirit descending upon us with wings of feather and flame. Here the heavens are torn apart. Here is God unleashed! He’s on the loose now, in the wilderness, in the river, in this Galilean Rabbi. The division between human and divine, between Creator and Creation, is forever rent asunder. And the wildness of God, the humbleness of God, the majesty of God is found now on this earth.

Not in the halls of power. Not amongst the rich and the famous, the strong and the great. God is there as He is everywhere, I suppose. But His Incarnation—God in the flesh—is to be found amongst the humble, the repentant, the anonymous, and the poor. He is the God who feeds the hungry, protects the orphan, frees the slave, and fears no tyrant.

We must go and seek Him there, at the edges, beyond polite society. His Spirit drives us out into the wilderness, where His Son is already waiting to welcome us. Only in this Way are we Christians. Only in Him are we healed.

I read recently in an almanac that stargazing—like the Magi—humbles us with the vastness of the cosmos, the eternity of the sky; while living amidst nature—gardening, farming, hiking, hunting—renews our hope and grants us wisdom through cycles of seasons, the life, death, and rebirth of all things under the sun. So we have before us the eternally constant, and the eternally changing.

Thus it is with Baptism. Here the eternal upholds the temporal. Here the divine makes the natural new. We’re back where we began: with a spiral, with a cycle, ever returning to things unchanging, finding them ever deeper and true. God is in the waters, my friends, in the promise of Word and Sacrament, in the Christ who is both truly human and fully divine.

Return to the promise and be forgiven. Return to the promise and rise anew. Return to the promise and know that no matter how the storms of this world may rage, no matter how evil and chaos may seem to hold sway, Christ is with you, Christ is in you, Christ is for you. And He will never abandon you, never forget you, never rest until you and me and everyone on this benighted sphere are all raised up in glory with sins forgiven, death defeated, wounds healed, tears dried, and justice and truth and mercy all united in the white-hot fires of His love.

The shadows are passing. The Light is eternal. Know this and you will know peace, throughout this life and for all that follows hereafter.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.