Borderlands

Propers: The Baptism of Our Lord, AD 2022 C

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.

Baptism is not a magical spell. It isn’t a quaint yet antiquated ritual maintained for the sake of tradition. It isn’t fire insurance for the life to come. And baptism certainly is not our promise made to God, because quite frankly, my friends, our promises ain’t worth spit.

Baptism is something much simpler and infinitely stronger: baptism is the promise of God. It is the promise that He is yours, and you are His, forever. And in this glorious exchange, you are given everything He has, everything He is. And God takes upon Himself everything that we are, everything that we have: our weakness, our brokenness, our cruelties, our sins; takes them upon Himself, takes them into His flesh on the Cross; and there drowns them in the infinite ocean of self-giving love which is the grace of God.

You can’t earn it. You can’t lose it. You can’t break it. Once you are baptized, then as surely as that water is wet, you are loved, you are claimed, you are redeemed by the God who has traveled literally to hell and back just to bring you home in Him. He is yours, and you are His, forever. If you fly up to Heaven, He’s there. If you fall down into hell, He is there. You simply cannot escape from the white-hot fires of God’s mercy, God’s grace, and God’s love.

God help us. Because we cannot stop Him. We threw everything we had at Him, and we could barely slow Him down. The love of God is inexorable, and will continue to be so until the End of the Age, when God at the last shall be All in All.

Now, personally, I know of no religion or spiritual tradition that does not hold water to be sacred. It is simply too important, both to our culture and to our chemistry. The evolution of blood is best described as a sort of seawater that we take with us. We are all born through the waters of the womb. And when we die, we will each eventually melt back into the aquifer. Water represents both life and death, both constancy and chaos, both creation and destruction.

The cradles of every civilization have formed along rivers—save for the Inca in Peru, who didn’t need one because of the constant rainfall down their mountains. Rivers feed us, transport us, cleanse us. They fertilize our fields, carry off our waste. But they also flood, don’t they? The river that moves the boat can also break the bridge. Likewise the ocean: source of food and transportation, but also of terror; bringer of riches, yet mother of monsters. Even the rain becomes the storm.

This ambivalence towards water, which both kills and brings to life, is best exemplified, I think, by the mighty Roman Empire, which so dominated the Mediterranean that they called it Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea.” Yet in the words of the Emperor Augustus: “Impious was he that first spread sail and braved the terrors of the frantic deep.” I do rather love that line.

It should come as no surprise then, that water fairly saturates that most human of endeavors: religion. There’s always water in religion. Think of the Muslims in their daily ablutions. Think of the Hindus and their sacred river, the Ganges. The Celts had the Danube, the Egyptians had the Nile—goddesses, every one of them. And the Jews had the Jordan, a river sacred not because it was in itself a god, but because this was where God met them, the covenant border of the Promised Land.

Moses led God’s people Israel out from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land of their ancestors, through what? Through the Red Sea! And just as the waters of the Red Sea were piled high by the power of the Spirit of God, so did the River Jordan part when Joshua led the Israelites across and onto that far and sacred bank. Water, water everywhere.

In the Judaism of Jesus’ day, baptisms were relatively common religious rituals, though differing sects offered differing interpretations. For the Pharisees—the sort of pious middle-class—baptism represented entry into the Jewish community. You descended into the mikvah bath—preferably a pool of water from a living, active source, such as a river or spring—immersed yourself fully and emerged a new person. You were baptized into the community, into the Jewish people.

Other groups, such as the Essenes—who believed that every person should live as a priest—underwent daily baptisms, daily purifications, ever returning to the waters of forgiveness and new life. And then of course there was John the Baptist, Jesus’ forerunner and cousin, who baptized sinners in the Jordan as a sign of repentance, a sign of their turning toward the promised and coming Kingdom of God.

So then Jesus shows up—Jesus, for whom John has been preparing all these people; Jesus, of whom John said, “I am unfit to untie the thong of His sandal!” and “He shall baptize you with fire!” and “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”—and Jesus requests to be baptized. But this seems odd, doesn’t it? It seems backward. John certainly thinks so, in Matthew’s version of events. “You want to be baptized by me?” he blurts out. “That’s ridiculous. I need to be baptized by You.”

That’s his whole thing, right? John prepares us for Jesus.

Yet Jesus insists, “so as to fulfill all righteousness,” He says. And when He enters those waters, boy, let me tell you, something amazing happens; something so astounding that the witnesses we have all still sound flabbergasted decades later. The sky is torn asunder, the Holy Spirit of God alights upon Jesus as a dove, and the voice of God the Father thunders from the heavens, “This is My Son, the beloved. Listen to Him!”

Here in the Jordan, here at the border of the Promised Land of God, the Lord once again meets His people—indeed, reveals Himself to all people—in the waters, as Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit, present in the flesh for us as Jesus Christ our Lord. It is a full theophany, a full epiphany: the eternal reality of God breaking into our world of space and time, here in the waters, here beneath the twain-torn sky.

Baptism doesn’t change Jesus, you see. Jesus changes Baptism! Here is the sign of His promise, the physical border of water. Here is God meeting us in the waters, in the Font, revealing Himself to us through Christ as Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. In the same way that God is made tangible, God is made visible, in Jesus Christ, so now is His promise made visible, made tangible, for us in our Baptism.

It isn’t just a washing. It isn’t just a cleansing. It is a drowning; we die in those waters! We are baptized into Jesus’ death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again. And we are baptized in His own eternal life, already begun. The old Adam, the old creature, drowns in those waters, and we rise no longer simply ourselves but with the life of Christ within us: His breath in our lungs, His Name on our hearts, and His Spirit burning white-hot life deep within our souls.

And when we rise from the waters in Jesus—made one in His Spirit, one as His Body—then at last is each of us who we were always meant to be. We are each of us then reflections of the one perfect person, the God-Man, the Christ. And each of us reflects His glory in such a way that all the rest can only see that particular aspect of Christ in us. With every new Christian, Christ is more fully revealed. Not in that He held something back, mind you—but in that we can now see Him alive in one another, Christ alive in the needs of our neighbors.

Like the Pharisees, we use baptism to mark the entrance of someone into our community. Like the Essenes, we return to the waters daily, weekly, however often we need, in order to hear again the sure and sacred promise of forgiveness. Like John the Baptist, we turn to Jesus—repentance means to be turned—to the coming of His Kingdom and the foretaste of His feast. And as Jesus, we arise from these waters now the sons and daughters of God.

Christ has come to save this world, every speck of it, every soul. Someday His Kingdom will encompass the cosmos—in eternity it’s already so! We are the vanguards, my brothers and sisters. We are those called out from the nations to witness this Kingdom of God: to declare His forgiveness to all sinners, His liberation to all the oppressed, and His life poured out for all to raise the dead.

Baptism makes us one in Jesus. It is a promise that can never be broken, and a love that has conquered the grave. He is yours, and you are His, forever. And you’re just going to have to deal with that. Ain’t nothing you can do about it. For the grace of God in Jesus Christ will never be denied.

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