Tag: Christian

Sermon for the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord: “The Work of God”

Texts: Titus 3:4-8, Matthew 3:13-17

This sermon was originally preached on Sunday, January 12, 2025, at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Sherman, Texas.

Today the Lord of all comes to the banks of the River Jordan to be baptized by the hand of John the Baptist.

Today the Sinless One receives the baptism declared to be necessary for sinners.

Today Our Lord emerges from thirty years of relative obscurity to commence his public ministry— a three-year period that will change the world forever.

The Baptism of Christ is an event so important that all four Gospels record it with great attention. Jesus comes from Galilee in the north to Judea in the south to be baptized by John. Jesus is, seemingly, just another person in the crowd, another person responding to John’s summons to repentance. And the rest of the crowd would not see anything extraordinary in Jesus coming to be baptized. After all, he’s just another man, no one famous.

But John knows who he is. Which is why he tries to prevent him. He knows Christ is sinless and so has no need to receive a baptism to wash away sins— it doesn’t seem right to treat Jesus like any of the other hundreds of peoples he’s baptized. And John also feels unworthy to touch the Lord— if he is not worthy to unloose the strap of his sandals, surely, he’s unworthy to baptize the Lord. As John says, “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you come to me?”

But the Lord insists, because this baptism is necessary for Christ to show his solidarity with sinful humanity… a solidarity that will ultimately lead him to the Cross.

So John consents and baptizes Christ. And the heavens are opened, and the Spirit of God descends like a dove and rests on Jesus; and a voice from heaven thunders, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

The Baptism of Christ is a manifestation of the Holy Trinity. At once, there appears the voice of the Father, the Son who is baptized, and the Spirit, who descends like a dove.

This moment, this Event, is the prototype for all future baptisms. In the Baptism of Christ, we see what happens in every baptism. Whether it takes place at a grand cathedral, in the muddy waters of a lake, or in the humble parish church, at every baptism, the heavens open, the Spirit descends on the baptized, and the voice of the Father declares, “This is my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

The Baptism of Christ announces the will of the Father for every human being. God wills for every person he has made to receive the Holy Spirit, to become a beloved son of God. God desires for the Holy Spirit to descend and rest on each one of you, so that you too might become the beloved children of God. And He begins to accomplish this through Holy Baptism.

Baptism is a work of God. It is God’s gift to us. When we are baptized, we are clothed with Christ, we “put him on.” We are given the right to stand where Jesus stands, to cry out to God with his voice, with his Spirit.

Baptism is God laying hold of us, not because of works we had done in righteousness, but because of his mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. And this is something to especially remember when we bring our children to be baptized.

The great Anglican priest-poet George Herbert expresses this beautifully in his poem on Holy Baptism:

Since, Lord, to thee
A narrow way and little gate
Is all the passage, on mine infancy
Thou didst lay hold, and antedate
My faith in me.

When we are baptized as young children, God lays hold on us and marks us as His own before we articulate our faith. He gives us this grace before we ask for it, for narrow is the way, and we need all the help we can get.

And that’s why baptism can occur before we articulate our faith or after. Within the context of the covenantal community, timing is not so important. Life with God is not primarily about doing things in the right order. It’s not primarily about doing things. Life with God is about God reaching out to us and giving us His life, and calling forth our response, enabling our freedom to respond to God. God freely gives us his grace, so that we might freely respond in love. Freely. For God does not want robots but sons.

And part of being a son of God is the knowledge of His great love for us. One of the great consolations of life in Christ is that throughout your life as a baptized person, you will hear over and over, in infinitely varying ways, the voice of God declaring to you, “You are my son, my beloved. With you I am well pleased.” And this is a consolation that not everyone in this world experiences. So many people go through life without any sense that someone is in their corner. So many go through life isolated, feeling that no one really cares about them, that no one is advocating for them. And this is not true of course, because God loves all people and is looking out for everyone.

But as baptized Christians, we know that there is One who loves us, who cares for us, who is advocating for us, even if no one else is. We know the voice of the Father declaring to us, “You are my beloved.” We know that God is for us. And if God is for us, who can be against us?

Baptism, then, is a source of great comfort for us throughout our lives. It is an enduring sign and pledge of God’s undying love for us. Baptism is not primarily about what we do, not primarily about what we express, it’s about what God does and what God expresses. In Baptism, God expresses His promise to us that He will never abandon us, that He will always love us, that He will always draw to Himself his baptized children.

Yet while it’s true that baptism is a work of God, it is also a work that calls forth a response. Baptism is not magic. It does not infallibly guarantee our salvation. It does not eliminate the need for personal faith or make unnecessary the struggle to live a Christian life.

The Christian life is a journey, a journey into God– further up and further in, as C.S. Lewis would say. And Baptism is only the beginning of the journey, it’s not the end. Baptism purifies us and sanctifies us as we start out on our pilgrimage to God, and it will remain as the constant call to make this faith our own, to engage in our own struggles to be faithful to Christ.

As Lola, Loretta, and Callahan grow up, they will continue their spiritual journey with the help of their families, their church, and the wider Christian community. And they will need to make their own the commitments essential to Christian life. They will need to make their own the renunciation of the world, the flesh, and the Devil. They will need to confess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. They will need to come to a sound understanding of Christian doctrine, as it’s laid out in the Creed. And they will need to integrate into their lives the essential practices of the Christian faith: worship, fellowship, repentance, evangelization, and service to others.

Baptism does not eliminate the need for our response to Christ. It calls forth our response.

So Baptism is not something that is all about what we do, without God’s contribution, nor is it something that only God does without our needing to follow up in any way. Like so many things in the Christian life, it’s not one or the other, it’s both, and to the utmost.

Today the Lord comes to be baptized in the Jordan. And today these beloved children of God come to the waters to be baptized. Convinced of God’s love for Lola, Loretta, and Callahan, we bring them to the waters so that God may lay hold on them and give them His Spirit and adopt them as His beloved children. And empowered by the grace of this baptism, these children will start out on the great adventure, the great journey of life in Christ. May God receive them, and us, at the last, into His all-loving embrace. Amen.

Sermon for Christmas Eve, 2024

“Something New”

This sermon was originally preached at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church on December 24, 2024.

“Christ is born! Let us glorify him. Christ has come down from heaven– let us go to meet him. Christ is at last on the earth– let us be exalted.”1

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The birth of a child is a time of great excitement and joy, but of course also of anxiety and pain. Childbirth is one of those experiences where the line between life and death is indeed very thin. But when the baby has been born, after it’s been cleaned and placed in the mother’s arms, and eyes meet eyes for the first time… when the family sends out texts letting everyone know “mom and baby are doing well”— when things finally start to quiet down… all can begin to appreciate the miracle that a child has been born.

Something new has come into the world— someone new. This person wasn’t here before and now they are, and the world is different because of this. The birth of any child adds something to the world, something that wasn’t there before, and so the world is a different place. And what a child adds to the world is not just one more number to the global population, not just “one more mouth to feed,” but a whole world of possibilities.

The child that is born will, hopefully, grow up and bring all sorts of things to bear on the world. That child will create, will shape the world around them. Conversations will take place that never would have if this child hadn’t been born. Relationships will come into being. There will be events that will occur that would not have happened if this child hadn’t been born.

And that is the miracle of life, that every day we are creating the world around us through what we say and do. Of course, the older we get, the possibilities of what we can do with our lives become ever smaller. We come to see our limitations– that we can’t do all things and be all things in the short time we have on this earth. But a newborn baby has his whole life ahead of him. He is all possibility. So the birth of a child is a time of great hope, a time when we look forward to what he might become and bring into the world.

And if this is true for every child who is born, how much more is it true of the birth of Christ! To say that Christ is born is to say that the world has changed, forever, and it cannot go back. Before the birth of Christ, God was not incarnate in the world as a human being, and after the birth of Christ, He is. The Word of God has taken our human nature from the most exemplary member of our race, the Virgin Mother, and He has been born into the world like each of us is born into the world. God now has a human face, a human body. He can be present in the world the way we are. He can interact with others face to face. God has become one of us and dwells among us.

This is truly miraculous! It is indeed one of the greatest events in the history of humankind! And it may be easy to pass over the birth of Christ without truly appreciating its wonder. Familiarity with the Christmas story might dull our spiritual senses so that we do not feel the awe we should.

Because this event was awesome, in the true sense of that word, for everyone involved in the Nativity of Our Lord. Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the angels… all are in amazement that the divine Word of God has been conceived in the womb of a Virgin and has now been born on earth. The Angels sing their hymn of praise, the shepherds adore on bended knee, the ox and donkey bow their heads in reverence, and the Blessed Mother, face to face with her son and her God, treasures all these things in their heart.

What hope they must have felt. Here is a child, a newborn baby, a world of possibilities. And not only the normal possibilities that could be true of any newborn babe. Because this Holy Child is God incarnate. What possibilities! What sort of a life could this child lead? What miracles could he bring into the world? If God became a human and lived one life in our world, what sort of things would he do? Of course, the answer to that question is the Life of Christ, in all its fathomless beauty.

What the birth of Christ adds to the world is the proof that God has not abandoned us. That despite our sin, despite all our selfishness and folly, God still wants to be with us and share His life with us.

And the birth of Christ is proof of this, it’s not just words. We can say, “Well, God is good, God loves us, God wants to be with us,” but the Nativity is not just words, it’s the proof. There is the Christ Child, there is the proof of God’s desire to be with us, in flesh and blood and truth. Not just words spoken into the air, but the Word made flesh.

Christmas is the Good News that God is good, that He loves us, that He desires to be with us— and in Jesus, He is with us. He begins to be with us by being born for us. The whole life of this Holy Child unfolds in front of him— a life full of possibilities. And we, beloved, have the privilege of walking with Christ through the Events of his life, week by week in the Church.

And let me be so bold to say: If this is one of the two times a year you come to church—if you come to church on Christmas and on Easter— please join us every Sunday and holy day you can. The Life of Christ is the greatest thing that ever happened, and we get to walk through it, week by week. We start with his birth, then the events of his holy childhood, his baptism, his temptation and ministry, all the way through to his Passion, Death, and Resurrection.

Christmas is not the end of the Christ story; it’s just the beginning! We say, Christ is born, and it’s not like he was born and then nothing happened. A lot of things happened, and they’re all wonderful. So join us, and we will experience the beauty and truth of Christ together, week by week, in Scripture and sacrament and song.

This is the Joy of Christmas— it is a night filled with possibilities, with hope for the future, with the delight of knowing that God has more in store for us than we could ever imagine. Something new has come into the world— “newer than everything new, the only new thing under the sun,”2 God-made-man. This Holy Child– the son of the Virgin Mary, adored by shepherds and hymned by angels– this Child has been born, and the world will never be the same. He has his whole life ahead of him, and with that life he will bring redemption to humankind and lead us all back to the God who made us.

And we who receive Christ become the children of God and know the endless possibilities of life with God. Christ is born, and we will never be the same, for we have known the mystery of the Light that shines in the darkness, that no darkness can overcome— the mystery of the Word made flesh, full of grace and truth. Amen.

Endnotes

1 Sermon on the Nativity of Christ, St. Gregory of Nazianzus.

2 St. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith.