The theme for the first Sunday after Epiphany is clear: baptism.
But what we’re dancing with is that tension so represented by the moment. We’re celebrating Jesus’s baptism. And remembering our own.
That play is more fruitful than we take it for, I think.
We aren’t merely doing something because Jesus did it. Though that is a part of it.
Jesus’s baptism was the start of his ministry. Not of his life, but, as we say, his new life.
Our own focus, often on baptism as entrance point into the church, feels miscast next to this grand moment. Because Jesus isn’t entering a church, or creating a church. There is no membership or election in sight.
What we see is God in the flesh: manifest.
History
Tradition offers a few options for what is really happening here and why. But what it certainly offers is a picture of the true starting place. Not in Jesus being born, but in his being reborn.
This is the thrust we offer to our own vision of baptism. Our own true starting place.
But we get stuck in the whys and hows. Practice and procedure takes center stage rather than transformation: being made new. Having God be manifest in us.
Here’s a take
I’m familiar with a variety of approaches to baptism; and open to most of them. But the one thing that speaks to me is when we approach it with eyes of generosity and consistency.
Generosity first. Ease. That this isn’t about policy or expectation, but new life and transformation.
Then consistency. Not consistency with other people, but with other sacraments. How is God’s love most manifested in our world? By high expectations or by generous heart?
It seems we’re often so keen to protect the sacraments that they neither vibrate with God’s generosity nor seem to reveal the generous character of God.
Many are willing to with baptism. But also communion? Ordination? Reconciliation of the Penitent? Do we sense that outward and visible sign of God’s grace? Or is it only after we’ve jumped through the right hoops?
Humility
We do recognize the tremendous humility in Jesus’s accepting baptism by John. But it remains a humility of transformation. Of being changed.
The most similar sacramental rite is reconciliation; in which we make our confession and seek absolution and remission of our sin.
At its heart, it is a pursuit of transformation by grace. And done with the certainty that God’s grace is generous and total. That God may purify what we deem irreconcilably foul.
But the character of grace is the same. Generous, transformative, and total.
We are made new.
And because we are new, we are called to a new life—to live a new life.
Each time, I feel the need to spell this out because we don’t fully embody this idea. But that new life is different because we are different. And it is supposed to be lived. By us. It isn’t just a change in our hearts. Or even our lifestyle. It is a part of all things.
So we might need to eat differently—not because their are rules, but living differently compels us to notice the old patterns as wrong for us or for our neighbors. Or think differently, behave differently.
Because that change we experience makes us into better neighbors to our neighbors.