Sacraments
A Reading from John’s Gospel:
The next day [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.”
And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.”
They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed).
He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
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.
On Sunday we read Luke’s account of the Baptism of Our Lord. Today we heard John’s. And John adds some interesting details. The dove is still there—the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ as a dove is witnessed in all four Gospel accounts. But John immediately links Jesus’ Baptism to Passover. “Behold the Lamb of God,” cries the Baptist, “who takes away the sin of the world!”
For Christians these are the central sacraments, the central mysteries, of our religious and spiritual life together: Baptism and Holy Communion, the latter of which is the Christian Passover Meal. Both of them bind us to Jesus, make us one in Jesus. God meets us in the waters of Baptism—meets us as surely as He once appeared to John the Baptist in that River Jordan—and there promises to us all that He has, all that He is. We drown in the waters of Baptism, in that Flood of holy promise.
We are baptized into Christ’s own death, already died for us, and into Christ’s own eternal life, already begun. We emerge from those waters with the Name of Jesus—“Christian,” after all, means “little Christ”—and what’s more, we emerge with the Holy Spirit alive within us. Now, to be clear, the Holy Spirit is not simply a spirit from God; not an angel or elemental or a ghost as we think of it today. The Holy Spirit of God is God: God’s breath, God’s life, God’s power sent forth to create and sustain all the cosmos.
God is not simply our Creator way back when, in the Big Bang, in the Garden of Eden. God is our Creator in every instant, every heartbeat, every breath. God fills and sustains and permeates and uplifts us all in His power, in His Spirit. That’s why it’s the Holy Spirit, a feminine power of creation, who rests upon the Virgin Mary that she may engender a Son of her own, of her seed, of her flesh.
And obviously this Spirit of God is universal, as nothing and no-one could ever hope to exist even for a moment without deriving their being from the infinite “I am.” Yet the Spirit is revealed in Christ in perfection. Remember that in Genesis God speaks creation into being through Word and through Spirit, the thought and the breath, the mind and the life. Together, the Word of God and the Power of God are the perfect self-expression of who God is.
This is how I want you to imagine the Trinity: not as three separate gods with three separate personalities, but as One God who is simultaneously Existence and Knowledge and Love; Consciousness, Being, and Bliss; the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; in one Name, Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. When in Baptism we are given the Name of Christ—the word of the Word, as it were—and His Holy Spirit fills our lungs, we arise no longer as ourselves but as Jesus.
And it continues in Communion. For as Baptism gives to us the Name and the Spirit of Christ, so does Holy Communion give to us His Body and His Blood. And when we have the Name of Jesus, the breath of Jesus, the Body and the Blood of Jesus—what does that make us? Who does that make us? By the power of the Spirit, we become the Incarnation: Jesus broken open for the world!
It is a mystic union, my brothers and sisters. In Jesus Christ, God became human so that human beings could all become one in God. Jesus is the one perfect person, the one perfect expression of God’s Mind: the Adam whom we were all meant to be. And just as Adam was all of humanity in a single person—before the rib, before division, before there was male and female—and we are all derivatives of Adam, so is Jesus the New Adam: all of humanity saved and perfected in one crucified Man.
Jesus, as the perfect expression of God’s Word, is the platonic ideal of the human being. And all of us—everyone who’s ever lived or ever could—we are all reflections, derivations, copies of Him: He who is Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. But now He has come to us, the Image of God in the flesh, to gather us all home, to gather us all in Him; so that the Church, and one day the whole of Creation, will be both Body and Bride to the Risen Christ our Lord.
And that union, that wedding, of Christ and the Church, of Creator and Creation, of God and Man, is the destiny of us all. It is the Eighth and final Day of Creation, the perfect eternal sabbath rest beyond all space and time. It began for us on Easter Morning, when our Paschal Lamb was raised. It continues, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the mystery of the sacraments, through every one of us, every “little Christ” called forth to meet our God at Font and Altar.
And someday—a day already accomplished in eternity—that Resurrection begun in Jerusalem will spread to encompass the world, to encompass the cosmos. Then shall the Son turn over His Kingdom to the Father, and God at the last shall be All in All. That’s what Baptism means to us. That’s what Communion is.
Jesus Christ has come to save a fallen world in love. He has conquered sin and death and hell not through force of arms or legions of angels but by taking upon Himself all of our brokenness, all of our wickedness, all of our hate, and drowning it all in the infinite ocean of God’s mercy and God’s love. He has filled up hell to bursting so that it forces up the dead! And they are raised unto Heaven upon the cresting of that Flood.
We are the few, the sinful, the chosen, who have been called out to give witnesses to this eternal reality here in fallen time, that hope and faith and love might flourish even in a gutted world. We are foretastes of the feast to come. We are heralds of restoration, God made flesh upon this earth. We are, in a word, sacraments. And the mystery of salvation shall make Jesus of us all.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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