Heavenly Openings

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

Baptism of the Lord Sunday
January 13, 2008

Text: Matthew 3: 13-17

Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River: this is attested by all of the gospels. And the church has always had a lot of explaining to do!

Why did Jesus want to be baptized? Isn’t he already Messiah? What is he doing accepting baptism like another sinner?

Jesus was concerned to do what was “proper?” Was he concerned about fitting into a pre-planned script, to check off one of the requirements of messiahship? We must be careful not to try say what was on Jesus’ mind. It’s hard enough to discern what is on our own minds when we do some things.

But consider this. Jesus has come to be truly “God with us.” Through him, God is the “power of love seeking to carry the day on earth and thus win people’s hearts.” (Edward Schweizer)

Jesus enters the role of Messiah----and transforms it. He will give himself every day for the salvation of the world, through servant love, not through raw force.

Matthew tells us that Jesus saw the Spirit and heard the voice of God in a “surge of certainty and understanding.” (Source lost) “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased.”

Why was God pleased with Jesus or with his baptism? Who knows the mind of God? By analogy, we parents are usually pleased when our children are living the values we hold dear, or when they have come back home to those values after wandering away from them.

It may be that God is pleased because Jesus is exemplifying the same love for the world and for the oppressed, the lost and the least that is in God’s heart---and that Jesus knows that only agape love has the power to change the world. Who knows the heart of God better than his beloved child?

Jesus’ intimate relationship with God is one of the most striking aspects of his life. Our relationship with God tends toward emergency calls when we are up against it. For Jesus, God was in him, a strong relationship, day by day. He was in dialogue with God, and he was dedicated to being and doing life God’s way. Remarkable too is that this position did not go to his head. He humbled himself, as Paul says in Philippians, taking the form of a servant, and emptied himself. This relationship with God was not a thing to be grasped for his own advantage.

Our baptisms have been transformed by Jesus to mean repentance and faith---and more. Our baptisms are also signs of identity----naming who and whose we are in God’s eyes, after the pattern of Jesus’ baptism.

John Westerhoff wrote of a baptism witnesses in Holland. The priest baptized with water, referring to the child dying with Christ in baptism, and then anointed the baby with these words:

“I resurrect you to love and serve the Lord…
I brand you with the sign of the cross so you will always know to whom you belong, and so that the world will know….” (“Baptism,” Thesis Cassettes; quoted in Word and Witness, January 11, 1987, Volume 11, No. 3)

William Willimon has written:

“A Christian is one who by water and the word has begun to live the death and resurrection of Jesus in his or her own life.” (William Willimon, Remember Who You are)

When we are baptized, the heavens may not open up for all to see, but I have sensed that something profoundly beyond our control is happening at baptisms and confirmations. It is not something simply being done by us. God is acting, too. Heaven and earth are meeting. God smiles and says, “This is my beloved child, and I am well-pleased! This one will live as Jesus did.”

As babies or adults, in baptism and in confirmation, we are being named and called. We belong to God. We are empowered by God to spend the remainder of our lives in worship and in service to God’s vision of a world redeemed.

Fred Gaely wrote:

“When we worship the creation instead of the creator, we don’t really have the world: the world has us.” (Source lost) When we worship God, the world is loved as Christ loved the world.

The Spirit given at baptism is not a fleeting experience of divine approval: the Spirit stays with us and in us. We may wander far, but the Spirit persists. And “the wise practice of obeying God’s call on our lives makes our real self more truly dominant, and the usurping, selfish ego is manacled and finally banished. The real self, made in God’s image, is able to act like a child of God.”(Source lost)

Jesus came up out of the water and heard saw God’s pleasure with him. God’s Spirit would go with him into the wilderness and beyond, and he would stand his ground: he would fulfill his calling and live his life and die his death as one obedient to God.

Can you revisit your baptism and confirmation? We are all differently gifted. We all are inhabited by the same Holy Spirit. In God’s mercy and forgiveness and claiming love, will you live out your calling? You, too, are God’s beloved son and daughter. Are you up for the great adventure of life lived in companionship with Jesus and his friends?