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Sermon for The Baptism of Christ

Sunday 12th January 2025


Isaiah 43, 1-7

Psalm 29

Acts 8 14-17

Luke 3, 15-17, 21-22


What do you remember about your own baptism? If like me, you were baptised as a baby it may be that you’ve got no memory of it at all. But Baptism in today’s Gospel is definitely memorable; For the people who come to John to be baptised in the Jordan it is a fiery and challenging experience. First, they have to cope with being called a ‘brood of vipers’ and then they’re told they must change their whole way of life. When we read the gospel on a Sunday, we miss all that comes before and after the day’s reading, and today what Luke tells us about John’s message earlier in chapter 3 seems hugely important. What is baptism for? John tells his audience that its to do with repentance and change-being baptised means they must live in new ways, if they have two coats, they must share one, and whoever has food must do likewise. There’s no ‘should’ share, the word John uses is ‘must’. Tax collectors and soldiers -everyone who comes to John to be baptised is told they must live differently once they have been baptised. So, to John baptism is an outward sign of being changed inwardly, of committing to living a better, kinder, more generous life. If we were baptised as adults then we might have been conscious of making such a commitment, less so if we were babies! But today’s readings present baptism as something fiery and challenging and invite us to think about what it means for us to be baptised. John is uncompromising; baptism means changing your attitude to the world and to those around you; failing to change means that you miss out on sharing in the love that comes from God and which shapes that change in how you think and act in the world.


But John acknowledges that his form of baptism has its limitations, chief of which is that he, being human, can only baptise with water. Jesus, whose coming he is here to proclaim, will baptise , John tells us, ‘With the Holy Spirit and with fire’.


But first Jesus feels the need to be baptised himself. Luke has been chronicling Jesus’s earthly life since its beginning and clearly Jesus, unlike John’s regular followers, has nothing to be forgiven for. But Jesus, just like the soldiers and the tax gatherers, has to commit now to a new way of life; A way of life which is going to take him through times of immense challenge, from being tempted in the wilderness to death on the Cross. That adult ministry begins here, with baptism in the Jordan. For Luke Jesus’s baptism becomes an outward sign of his relationship with God, expressed in the descent of the holy Spirit in the form of a dove and the voice from Heaven . Today we associate the dove with peace; in ancient times the dove was symbolic of divine love, and its appearance here would have told Luke’s hearers that Jesus was loved by God, a message which is reinforced by the voice from heaven, a voice which also identifies Him as God’s Son. Baptism for all who follow Jesus’s example becomes a means of experiencing God’s love and of being able, through the holy Spirit, to share that love with the world.


In everything that Jesus does in today’s Gospel He acts as a guide, first for his disciples and secondly for us. Much of what he experiences in today’s Gospel is open to us to share. There is something very vulnerable and very human about the idea of Jesus being immersed in the cold waters of the Jordan. It’s easy for us to imagine the experience for ourselves, to share in imagining the shock of the cold and the kindly touch of the person baptising us. In Luke Jesus is Baptised, and then he prays. Luke makes it clear to us how important Jesus’ s prayer is; it’s his prayer which opens the way for the coming of the Holy Spirit and it’s the holy Spirit which enables him to take on the challenges of his adult ministry. This is what happens to the disciples in Acts; they pray first and then find themselves filled with the holy Spirit and enabled to go out into the world sharing god’s love with everyone they encounter. And we can choose to follow their example; by praying we too can open up our own lives to God, we too can be open to the presence of the Holy Spirit in our own lives and in the world around us.


At Christmas time we were invited to ask ourselves how we could enable Christ to be born in our own lives; today’s Gospel invites us to think of how we might share in His experience of baptism and prayer. Later this morning, in the words of our post communion prayer, we’ll pray for the power of the Holy spirit to ‘complete the heavenly work of our rebirth through the waters of the new creation.’ Because even though we may not remember our own baptism, reading today’s Gospel invites us to take time to think about what it means for us to be baptised, to pray and then to be open to the mystery which is the power of the Holy Spirit to transform our lives through the knowledge and love of God.


Amen

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