Jesus brings us all in
Epiphany 1C  |  Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

A few weeks ago, we gathered for the last Sunday of preparation before the Christmas season: when we greened the church, we cloved oranges, decorated trees, feasted on sumptuous foods, and sang for our figgy pudding. There is lovely tradition embedded in our storied preparations, in our anticipations. And two days later, we gathered to celebrate the incarnation, the newborn king, born like any other mammal, to a mammal, to be nursed and raised and to grow.

And then, at the end of the season, a snowstorm swooped in and stole our final revelry, our last time of song, to pack up the greens and ornaments, and praise the season that was to come.

That same storm stole from us a chance to gather for the Epiphany, a feast older in the church than Christmas—one of the great trinity of feasts in the church: Epiphany, Easter, Pentecost. The coming of the light of Christ, the restoring of the light of Christ, and the bestowing of that light upon the people.

I love the Epiphany because of what it is supposed to be for us—a feast greater than Christmas—and filled with such deep theological wrestling that the church, some 1500 years ago, fought over how to celebrate it. Could we get any more human than that?

The Light is coming

But one of my favorite parts of Epiphany, is that it, like all great feasts of the church, had its origins among the people before the church came and said “You know what that sounds like?” Years ago, I read that there was an ancient festival that was celebrated thirteen days after the winter solstice—the solstice being the original day of Christmas. 

As the solstice neared, the people would see their days shrink as they were swallowed up by the night, which is a frightening thought. What if it kept going and night lasted forever? So the people approached the solstice by praying that the growing nights would cease and the dawn would return. That the light would never be vanquished, but would come back, restored. And they prayed through the solstice, and at day thirteen, it was the first time when the people’s eyes could perceive the growing days again.

And those early Christians said, that is an outstanding image! 

Of course, that image was swallowed up by another debate. Not just about using that image of the light of Christ shining through the darkness, but where to seat that image in the catechetical life of the church. In the Epiphany’s origin in the East, they saw this in the baptism of Jesus. In the West, it became the Wise Men following a star to Bethlehem.

And here we are, in the compromise—the first Sunday after the Epiphany is the Baptism of Our Lord and treated like a sub-Epiphany, or Epiphany-adjacent feast. And all of these years later, the baptism of Jesus has all the juice, you guys. It is the most important story of the season.

On Baptism

We’re brought back to John the Baptist, who we read about just a month ago, appearing in the wilderness, proclaiming the good news through repentance and baptism, who received countless people flocking from the cities for the promise of a better life, a better way of living, of a better world.

And among them is Jesus. The one who is greater. Who he is preparing the way for. The one who will assume the mantle after his arrest, and eventual execution.

How we understand this moment relies on the elegance of belief and the curiosity of our souls.

Because those fights I spoke of, centuries ago, were based on our ability to make elegant, delicate, unknowable truths and beliefs—the very fabric of faith—into something clear, simple, and universal. Something we can teach to our children, memorize, recite, and claim with total certainty that we can know the mind of God and what it is that God is doing here. And not merely in the things we are told—the voice of God calling Jesus “beloved” and loved. Or in the mouth of Jesus to the scribe in Jerusalem that the greatest commandment is to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves—these statements that are supposed to be simple. No, I’m talking about the beautiful images of brightening days in the midst of long winter nights and of Jesus submitting himself to be baptized.

Catholic and Orthodox both sought to generate certainty and simplicity from elegant faith, to the detriment of our belief, understanding, conviction, and community. We so misunderstood the purpose of faith that we fought wars to prove ourselves right—which only served to prove how wrong we all were—are, when we do it again.

Power Under

The West and East both used the baptism of Jesus to explain the problem of a divine toddler to pre-teen Jesus—of a fully human and fully divine Jesus during the time of human development when we learn. So, in the East, they developed the belief that Jesus gained divinity in baptism so that he could be fully human as a kid. And the West thought this was ridiculous but then refused to acknowledge the humanness of Jesus. The baptism became the ritual Jesus had to do to “count” as part of the system; the rules required it.

These attempts to clarify and simplify this moment obscure the power and depth of this moment—of the profound image, story of Jesus, the messiah, kneeling at the foot of his herald.

And if we hold this image lightly, tenderly, we can draw a more splendid image from it. By remembering that baptism is a death. A death to self, to the way we were, to a trajectory we were on. And to symbolize that conviction to change, to turn away from that and turn toward God, we are symbolically drowned in water only to be pulled from the depths resurrected and reborn.

The Messiah begins his mission by letting a human kill him so he can be reborn; to begin as he will end. Giving up the power he has over John and all of these people out there witnessing this moment—throwing that away so that John can baptize Jesus. Like Jesus will do with the disciples when he washes their feet. What he will do with strangers who seek healing, and prostitutes and tax collectors he spends time with. Instead of exercising power over, he demonstrates power under. And he teaches us to do the same thing.

Baptism as story

The baptism is important because it is the starting point of the mission. It doesn’t need to be explained more than that. In fact, let’s not. Because all of the power is in the paradox. In the elegance. Like what happens when we perform a trust fall and the group holds us up. It isn’t a factor of one-to-one, but of common experience, shared, spread, felt, and known by all.

This is the beginning of a new way, of a revolution that starts not in the greatness of an individual, but in service to the many, among the many, and with the many. Jesus doesn’t get dunked to be in the club. Nor do we focus on the people outside the club coming to give kingly gifts to an infant. The problem is that we think this about a club. That we define and wall and track and we put the gate there and only trust Jesus to mind that gate in theory, as long as he doesn’t let in the wrong kind of people.

And we think the club is bounded by our church walls or our denomination’s constitution and canons or perhaps the certainty or correctness of convictions and not in the serving and fellowship of Jesus.

When we think of baptism as an entry rite only, or as means of full communion that allows its members into the full participation of the life of the church, how is that shown in this story? How is this reflected in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ? We all know it isn’t.

So what is baptism then?

It is elegance. It is beauty. We need it to be story. Because our experience of it is story. Our story and common story.

One cannot baptize one’s self!

Even as it was difficult for many to bridge the gap from private baptism, from a sense of not wanting it to be public, of wanting it to be a family affair, it was always communal. It is always relational. We experience your baptism. And we experience what your baptism begins.

And what we hope grows from that is an attunement to that common story. The story we share in baptism, too. Yes, that. And—in Jesus’s baptism. His story is our story. We share in it. We experience what his baptism began.

It began from below, from within, among. Our messiah was a person. We don’t need to know what he ate or what shenanigans he got into with his friends, though we’d love some stories, right? We don’t need them, because we’ve got ours—and each other’s.

This is how the light comes to us in the dark—not from above, but below, among, with us. It doesn’t take military might or wealth or fame to lead. Jesus rejected every bit of that—and continues to reject every bit of that. It comes in sitting with a friend, offering food when they could use it. It comes from living this crazy, beautiful, elegant life. Because we can’t get away from it—we can’t pretend we don’t need each other, that each of us is an island, independent and isolated.

We are all children of God. Loved and blessed and impacting each other’s lives, whether we like it or not. And that, my friends, is where the real power is. That’s the juice. Being with each other.

The sooner we learn to love this elegant way of living, the more vibrant our lives become. And the more connected we become—to one another and to our common story.