A sermon given in St. John’s Episcopal Church, Williamstown, MA
January 7, 2007
The Rev. Peter Elvin
The twelve days of Christmas do feel short when the calendar gives us just one Sunday between the nativity and the epiphany. Then, once January 6 comes and goes, the Book of Common Prayer shifts our attention from the star and the arrival of the magi to—ta da—the baptism of Jesus as a grown man. That’s fast-forwarding the story, isn’t it? You’ll notice we’ve dug our heels in and kept the crèche and wreaths up for their last hurrah…
Making this sense of woosh more dramatic this time around was a truncated Advent, that fourth Sunday buried in the avalance we call Christmas Eve.
This is almost enough to persuade me that our Eastern Orthodox friends do it right, saying that it isn’t fully Christmas until the twelve days end and the magi arrive and the story is full.
But, then again, the story isn’t full and complete until the fat angel sings on Easter Day… even then, the Gospels go on to tell of stunning appearances of our risen Jesus, then his ascension into heaven. And Luke is so full of story that he needs a second volume to tell it, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, to tell the coming of the Holy Spirit upon all the believers (quite like she came down today on Jesus at his baptism), the birth of the Church, her early exploits and startling growth, the adventures of the action hero St. Paul and his sidekicks Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, and other stars of faith like Sapphira, Stephen, Tabitha, Peter, Lydia, Mark… In other words, Jesus’s story isn’t complete until it gets down to including you and me, and all his people today. St. John our patron ends his Gospel by saying, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
So I should stop kvetching about the whizzing-by of time, about feeling just a bit disoriented by this rollicking procession of stories that takes us from Bethlehem to the Jordan, from our Lord’s infancy to his adult public ministry, in just thirteen short days. Like whirlwind tours of Europe, if it’s day 13 this year we’re standing in the muddy Jordan. We are where we are. In the grip of winter. Williams students are completing their first week of April study, shorts and tee shirts greet 70-degree conditions, and those white balls on your neighbors lawn are… golf balls. We are not disoriented. Just adaptable.
So is our Lord Jesus. Today, we see him stripped of clothing, standing knee-deep in the murky waters of the Jordan River, being baptized by John the Baptist. To appreciate what you’re seeing, remember last Sunday’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
From that resplendent font of being, from those realms of heaven’s glory, the Word has been made flesh in Jesus, the Christ of God present at the Big Bang is yoked to Jesus born of Mary. George Herbert turns this story to verse:
Hast thou not heard, that my Lord JESUS died?
Then let me tell thee a strange story.
The God of power, as he did ride
In his majestic robes of glory,
Resolv’d to light; and so one day
He did descend, undressing all the way.
Isn’t that wonderful? The full poem appears at the end of this sermon, for your pleasure.
Undressed he is, to be baptized today. Right, that isn’t baptism as we know it today, not Christian baptism, not yet. John’s baptism was a Jewish rite of moral-spiritual recommitment to God’s reign of justice and peace, and to this revival John called all people, poor and rich, urban and rural, educated and illiterate—and that’s the point. Jesus hasn’t undressed just to stand in simplest flesh and blood: he has done this to stand with you and me, available to us, identified with us, committed to us, us all, all sorts and conditions.
Let me read you the next stanza in Herbert’s poem:
The stars his tiara of light and rings obtain’d,
The cloud his bow, the lightning his spear,
The sky his azure mantle gain’d.
And when they ask’d, what he would wear;
He smil’d and said as he did go,
He had new clothes amaking here below.
In the first-century Church that wrote and kept Luke’s story of our Lord’s baptism, adult baptism was the norm because Christianity was a revival movement (at first within Judaism) that called adults, called them to commit their lives to God known in the Jewish ways of Creator and Spirit, and also in the new way of Jesus the Christ, the Word made flesh. And people indeed fully undressed to be baptized, and were fully submerged three times in a lake or river, each time in the name of one of those three ways God is known and loved, and then would be brought to shore and clothed in a plain white linen tunic, the same kind of garment for every person united to Christ, his new clothes amaking, and would be given milk and honey to drink, sign of entering the promised land, the kingdom of God. In those days, the Church’s semi-sacramental refreshment wasn’t coffee, but milk and honey.
“Put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” St. Paul urges us in his Letter to the Romans. Jesus’s last words to his disciples, in Luke’s Gospel, are “Stay where you are until you have been clothed with power from on high.” The early Church knew that his new clothes are for us. They are a symbol of unqualified love, love without conditions, the embrace that Jesus heard and felt at his baptism and which he gives to us: “You are my son, my daughter, beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
The Christian Way calls people through baptism to enter a community committed to the calling of the Law and the Prophets, which we know Jesus has fulfilled in his life. By union with
his life through baptism, believers have his spiritual moral power to love, to do justice, to make peace: we seek to do it his way, let him do it through us, with us. This is baptism beyond John’s; John called people to do good, to be good. There is still about this too much of the old belief that we must earn the approval of God by good works of our own. Christian baptism calls people to let the good embrace them, fill them, own them, direct them—and unite them in a body, his body, of which he is head and heart and mind and soul and strength.
As we walk in a new year, there’s much to disorient us. “Disorient” is a great word to understand: Dis-, to cut apart from. Orient, east. To be cut apart from a sense of where east is—in the thought of ancient cultures, to be cut off from God. “Disaster” is a related word: to cut apart from “-aster”, star, to be cut off from the orderly movement of the stars, to be ill-starred. Ancient thoughts preceding Christianity, before Judaism.
These times are out of joint, and we are full of questions. Is our balmy winter the result of an innocent El Nino or a foretaste of disaster to befall our planet?
In the war we are fighting against terror, are we convinced that we’re fighting the right enemy, the one that threatens us most? War is disaster, a failure of diplomacy, a failure of imagination, a failure to try alternatives. How do we regain direction, set course by the right star, turn around this disastrous war? We’ll hear about that this week. Whether we believe what we hear is another matter.
George Herbert describes the epiphany in a poet’s few words rivaling volumes of theology:
The God of power, as he did ride
In his majestic robes of glory,
Resolv’d to light; and so one day
He did descend, undressing all the way.
Power resolving to light, shedding its prerogatives to complete its mission. How might this country’s power resolve to light? Could it be by embracing the science it now fears and silences, keeping knowledge from guiding our governance and leadership in the world? Imagine the power of this nation focused on subduing global warming and helping the world prepare for what cannot be prevented. Imagine the resources of our country invested in global attack on poverty.
Epiphany: the revealing of how the God of power resolves to light, a season when God teaches this skill to kings—let’s hope, also, to presidents, and governors. A time for all to be open to reorienting grace, for all of us to pay attention, wherever and however grace chooses to appear.
George Herbert’s poem “The Bag”
Away despair; my gracious Lord doth hear.
Though winds and waves assault my keel,
He doth preserve it: he doth steer,
Ev'n when the boat seems most to reel.
Storms are the triumph of his art:
Well may he close his eyes, but not his heart.
Hast thou not heard, that my Lord JESUS died?
Then let me tell thee a strange story.
The God of power, as he did ride
In his majestic robes of glory,
Resolv’d to light; and so one day
He did descend, undressing all the way.
The stars his tiara of light and rings obtain’d,
The cloud his bow, lightning his spear,
The sky his azure mantle gain’d.
And when they ask’d, what he would wear;
He smil’d and said as he did go,
He had new clothes amaking here below.
When he was come, as travelers are wont,
He did repair unto an inn.
Both then, and after, many a brunt
He did endure to cancel sin:
And having giv’n the rest before,
Here he gave up his life to pay our score.
But as he was returning, there came one
That ran upon him with a spear.
He, who came hither all alone,
Bringing nor man, nor arms, nor fear,
Receiv’d the blow upon the side,
And straight he turn’d, and to his brethren cried,
If ye have anything to send or write,
(I have no bag, but here is room)
Unto my father’s hands and sight
(Believe me) it shall safely come.
That I shall mind, what you impart;
Look, you may put it very near my heart.
Or, if hereafter any of my friends
Will use me in this kind, the door
Shall still be open; what he sends
I will present, and somewhat more,
Not to his hurt. Sighs will convey
Anything to me. Hark despair, away.
