New Life, Jesus Style - The Baptism of Our Lord 2023
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the First Sunday After Epiphany, Baptism of Our Lord, January 8, 2023 by the Rev. Holly Huff.
There’s slush in the streets, crunchy Christmas trees on the curb await their final resting places, and the fresh green time is still a ways off. As the clouds have parted and converged in and out again this week, though, I remember that exactly within this dreary mud-spattered world spring is already plotting its way out to meet us.
The year turns over, and I feel the impulse to make new year’s resolutions arise like a bad itch. The planners and calendars are on sale at Target and I’m getting targeted ads for new productivity apps for iPhone that promise to turn my life around with nifty life hacks and an extensive checklist regime that, surely, this time, will finally bring my scattered self into order. Tantalizing to think that this time, with this product, this new tool, it just might work, just might finally free me from all the things I don’t like about myself. “New year, new me!” is the slogan for this self-help-happy madness. Or, "Turn over a new leaf!,” we say, as if once a year a plant could decide to grow a new leaf by force of self-improving will, at the designated time, using the tools marketed for that purpose.
My apologies upfront to those of you who’ve made new year’s resolutions—for those not so neurotic as I, they can be a perfectly good practice of living into the eternal freshness of each moment, unconstrained by old and worn-out stories of the self, all the ways we think we’re not enough. It’s true: new year, new me! But do ask yourself, who profits when you start to think you need to change out these stories with a fresh new identity—an identity conveniently pre-packaged and available for purchase? Watch too for the way well-meant resolutions easily become a Trojan horse smuggling in the same old self-loathing violence in the guise of earnest commitment to growth in the spirit. A fresh start twists into a chance to turn on ourselves and start hacking away, forgetting that it is the Lord who is the gardener of our lives, God who tends and waters and digs and will prune when needed, in love and gentleness, always toward true flourishing and fruitfulness.
Baptism is the way to new life that God gives us, the answer to our longing for freshness. On this Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, we read again the divine words spoken over Jesus at his baptism when the heavens part and he hears a voice saying: you are Beloved. In baptism all the world is washed clean, seen fresh, pronounced beloved, and covered by God’s rainbow covenant promise. You too are God’s Beloved. It’s true on the day of your baptism, and it’s true today. For Tyler Jacobsen, it’s doubly true because today is the day of your baptism! You are God’s Beloved, these words are for you, too. And it’s in the echo of this pronouncement of belovedness, spoken over each one of us, that new life can spring up graciously. New life that isn’t being sold to us, a bloom we don’t have to force on ourselves, but vitality springing forth freely from the stream of unconditional love between the Father and the Son in the Spirit.
To go down into the baptismal waters is to say yes to this new life working its way through us—every bit of us. Paul writes that we have been buried with Christ “by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Baptism enacts rebirth, a fresh start, new life not just once today, or once a year, but as a continual way of life, where God’s mercies are new every morning. We are born again, born into a freshness that doesn’t cut us off from the past but unspools itself in the circumstances of our lives as they are. In baptism as on the cross Christ descended below all things in order to fill all things with his loving presence. He knows our sufferings from the inside. In sinking desolation, when we feel most abandoned, Jesus has gone ahead of us and walks with us, and he leads us into newness of life even there. Water breaks forth from the rock in the dusty desert, and we discover a fountain of living water flowing up within our own parched soul, eternal life here and now—how’s that for happy new year!
The words of our baptismal covenant image this newness of life as a practice of turning away from all that draws us from the love of God and a turning toward Jesus as our savior. Turning away and turning toward. That’s a movement that is not one and done but enacted over and over across our lives. A dance step we are learning as we are drawn into the life of God: turning, turning. In the 8th grade my middle school choir had us all sing and memorize the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”, which I found to be very beautiful and also very confusing. They kept calling it a hymn, but it didn’t sound like the other hymns I knew. Where were all the churchy words? Listen to the lyrics, you know the tune. (This is #554 in our hymnal, if you want to follow along)
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.
Such joy and ease in these words, in that melody! I heard Simple Gifts sung during Lent one year and finally understood that repentance could be joyful and easy. Repentance, that long-suffering church word for walking in newness of life—repentance is simply reorientation, turning away from the constricting stories of failure, fear and scarcity that pit us against ourselves and against each other and turning back to root ourselves in the God who created us, who loves us unconditionally, without partiality, and letting that healing mercy stream over us head to toe as a grace. “To turn, turn, will be our delight.” And the place just right, the place we ought to be, is the place where we are, if we can just come down to live in it fully, bowing ourselves to God’s continual gift of Godself to us here now, delighting in turning toward that love over and over. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Newness of life, fresh and green.
Christians are a pilgrim people, so Christian baptism is not an endpoint but the beginning of a journey. As the water is poured over your head with the pilgrim’s shell in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, you are being doused in love and then sent out on a path, Tyler. Be born again in baptism so you know how to be born again every day. Be fed with Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist, and let that meal show you that our daily bread is all around. The pilgrim path is not fixed but ever new, following the person of Jesus, who shows us how to walk in love and in newness of life. We turn toward him. We follow where he goes. As one Body we are called to stand where Jesus stands, washed into solidarity with the unwashed, the poor, the marginalized, and the outcast. On this pilgrim path we’re invited to relate differently to our old hurts, as they too are accepted and held in the strong love of God. Total acceptance washing over us day by day by day becomes the governing story, the governing reality of our life. As we practice turning toward that love, all those partial narratives of partial acceptance and conditional “love” start to lose their hold over us. We let the living God love us, and we come to trust that wondrous love, poured out for us freely. New you, new me, and not just in January. We are transformed by a love we can’t earn and can’t lose. We can only receive it, and gratefully, joyfully, offer it out, proclaiming Belovedness to all we meet so they can taste it, too, the ordinary starch of life suddenly fresh and new.
“Happy are the people whose strength is in you! Whose hearts are set on the pilgrim’s way” (Ps. 84:4).