Baptism of the Lord Sunday — Psalm 119.9-16
The Bible begins by the LORD creating by means of commands. God does not simply speak words that work. God issues law. God said, “Let there be light.” And the command is obeyed, “And here was light.” “God said “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters.” And the second day is constituted by the fulfillment of the command. At the start of the third day, “God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” Again, obedience follows, “And it was so.”
The existence of the world is the event of obedience. God speaks to bring the world to pass. He utters a command. The command is obeyed. And the obeying act is the existence of the world. But the rhythm of the creation story disrupts on the sixth day. After the Father and the Son create the creatures of the land by the usual pattern of command and obedience, God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” But the scriptures do not next report, “And it was so.” Instead, immediately prior to bringing man into being, the LORD gives humanity its own command, “And let them have dominion…” And then, having made them, male and female in his image, unlike everything else in creation, the Creator does not merely create them by his word, but next he turns to address his word directly to them, “Behold! Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
These “out-of-sequence creatures,” these “odd creatures of the sixth day,” remain creatures, yet they are distinct from all other items of creation in that the LORD directly addresses them with his word of command. God does not merely establish humanity’s dominion but he does so by inviting humanity into a relationship of obedience.
Our specificity in comparison with all the other creatures of the earth is that we are the ones addressed by God’s moral word and so enabled to respond; that is, to pray and to heed. In other words, what it means for us to be made in the Triune image; and thus, what it means for us to be human— as human as Jesus, is that we are addressed by God’s will and bidden to obey.
This is not obviously good news.
For our faithfulness in prayer and our fulfillment of the commandments suggests that we are all less than human.
“How can young people keep their way pure?” the psalmist asks the LORD in the section of the prayer labeled for the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Beth. Not only is it a good question, it is a plea not limited to the young. How can any of us keep our way steadfast?
“With my whole heart I seek you?”
“I keep your word in my heart (and not forget it)?”
“I delight in your law?”
“That I might not sin?”
In his long meditation on Psalm 119, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “God does not like false contentment.” Very well, let us be honest about the unsettling truth. Barring some miracle, not one of us can pray this prayer without crossing our fingers.
“I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways?”
Only Jesus Christ himself can pray this way.
Or, as the Apostle Paul puts it in his Epistle to the Romans, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Commenting on a different psalm, the theologian Robert Jenson stipulates the preacher’s obligation when it comes to such texts:
“The preacher must finally come to speak a direct word of comfort and assurance from God to the congregation’s just-evoked sin, impenitence, and need. The preacher’s theological task is, therefore, to find that direct word: to find the words of unconditional assurance that can be made, because and only because the Crucified lives, to the precise complex of impenitence and beginning penitence and sickness that has been evoked. What is the promise that Jesus’ resurrection lets be made to those with just this past disobedience and just these consequent fears and disabilities? The promise that will replace fear with hope, and impossibilities with possibilities?”
But exactly what is the word of comfort I can proclaim on the basis of these words, “Do not let me stray from your word…I keep your word in my heart?”
Roger, was a sharp, successful small-town lawyer and a parishioner in a former congregation. After one of my first Sundays at the church, he had asked me to baptize him, which I did in his home because eleven o’clock in the morning was far too early for him to have recovered from the night before. Roger’s alcoholism and philandering had destroyed his first two marriages, and by the time I became his pastor his drinking would soon destroy him. I went to visit him in the hospital at the University of Virginia as he died slowly of liver failure. With each visit I paid him, his skin and eyes had assumed a more yellowed hue.
One of the last sentences I heard Roger speak was to his nurse. It was that same verse from Paul, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And then he chuckled, “I suppose that could serve as my life verse.” When the nurse looked surprised by his display of piety, Roger explained, “Knowing the word is no guarantee you won’t wander from it.”
After my final visit to him, when Roger’s breathing had gotten shallow and his words confused, I knew I should stop at his best friend’s house on the way back to the parsonage. I knocked on the screen door of Billy’s back porch. I could hear an Orioles game playing on the television in the family room. Billy and his live-in girlfriend had had me over for dinner many times so I wasn’t surprised when he answered the door wearing a polo shirt that probably fit him during the Carter administration and, below the waist, even tighter bikini briefs.
“Billy, I’ve just come from seeing Roger. It’s time.”
“You sure?”
He squeezed his eyes to fight back the tears and he laid bear paw grip on my shoulder to steady himself. “You never know for sure,” I said, “but I prayed and offered him the absolution. So yeah, it’s time. He’s dying.” And suddenly he gathered himself and ran to get pants that were draped over the kitchen island stool.
“If he’s going to be dead soon, then we’ve got to get to his office quick.”
“His office?” I asked, confused, “Why in the world do we need to go to his office?”
“You’ll see,” he said, “We’ll be back in a jiffy, honey,” he hollered at his girlfriend Mary.
Once we got to Roger’s law office, Billy produced a key from the pocket of his pants, which also appeared designed for a fraction of this man. Inside, Billy dragged a heavy leather chair across the office floor. He stood up on it, reached up towards the ceiling, removed a water-stained tile, felt around on all sides until he found it and then pulled down a cardboard banker’s box and handed it to me.
“Look, Billy, I don’t know that we should be doing this.”
“Shut up and take the damn box,” he said, “before I drop it.”
I looked inside the box and I suddenly both understood and yet still didn’t understand what we were doing there. Inside the box, along with a half-dozen liquor bottles, were photographs of Roger with women. The kinds of Polaroids I can’t describe in church. None of the women in them, I noticed, were his present wife.
“Prostitutes mostly,” Billy said, “His wife thought different but Roger— God bless him— he never could stop being a rascal.”
And Bill started to squeeze his eyes again against the tears. And then he grabbed hold of me and cried into my hair. I was still holding the box of dirty pictures and bottles of booze, and after an uncomfortable amount of time I said,
“So, Billy, uh…what’s the plan here? What are we going to do with this?”
“We’re going to get it out of here so his wife never discovers it that’s what we’re going to do. She thinks he’d put all this behind him. He should remembered as the man who was forgiven not the man who kept on carrying on.”
I looked down at the box and its sordid contents.
“I don’t know,” I said with not a little sanctimony in my voice, “I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do. I mean, look at these— this…this is wrong; this is like Bible bad.”
And just like that Billy wasn’t crying anymore.
He narrowed his eyes and raised his head back, angry or disappointed, and he said to me, “Tell me, preacher— did you or did you not baptize Roger?”
“Uh, um…yeah— yes, I did.”
“And was everything you said about his baptism true or wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Every word,” I mumbled.
On the liturgical calendar, the season of Epiphany always begins with the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan River. Jordan, in Hebrew, means “to descend.” And Christ does. But before Jesus jordans into the river, before the Holy Spirit alights upon him like the dove after the flood on a new creation, and before the Father declares (to whom it is not clear), “This is my Beloved Son, in whom I delight,” John the Baptist asks an appropriate and obvious question.
“What are you doing, Jesus? I need to be baptized by you, not vice versa.”
After all, the prophet with the camel hair shirt and lunchbox full of locusts had been crying out in the wilderness with a message that does not apply to Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim, “Repent!” And the masses who came to John from “Jerusalem, Judea and all the region about the Jordan” did so to confess their sins. Just so, John’s discombobulation. Why would a holy man, much less the Maker of Heaven and Earth, desire baptism? Jesus has no reason to repent. Jesus has no sins to confess. He is the righteous God made flesh. So why? Along with all those sinners gathered from near and far, why does jordan down into the Jordan?
As the ancient monk Philemon of Gaza writes in his Meditations on Saint Matthew:
“Jesus he went down into the Jordan, cleansing the waters and sanctifying them, as the one that is pure and holy. He took everything that followed from Adam’s sin, and he cleansed the waters so that they would be ready to receive us in our baptism, that we too might be beneficiaries of his saving work, we too being saved by him. He did this for us, his people, in the profound silence of his humble love. What goodness and what grace!”
Jesus jordans into the waters to cleanse them.
Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water.
Christ is baptized to make water holy.
Jesus is baptized in order to make water capable of making you Christ.
As the church father Gregory of Nazianzus preached in the fourth century:
“Baptism is God’s most beautiful and magnificent gift....We call it gift, grace, anointing, enlightenment, garment of immortality, bath of rebirth, seal, and most precious gift. It is called gift because it is conferred on those who bring nothing of their own; it is called grace since it is given even to the guilty; it is called baptism because sin is buried in the water; it is called anointing for it is priestly and royal as are those who are anointed; it is called enlightenment because it radiates light; it is called clothing since it veils our shame; it is called bath because it washes; and it is called seal as it is our guard and the sign of God’s Lordship.”
It is all those things because Christ made the waters able to confer him.
C.S. Lewis was once asked a common question by an Oxford colleague, “You commend Christianity, yet some of the kindest, most selfless, most virtuous people here at the university are atheists. How do you explain that?”
And Lewis responded, “Well, I think unbelievers have to be good, don’t they? They have no other choice than to be as virtuous and as perfect as possible. They don’t believe in baptism. They’ve got to get it right.”
In his Small Catechism, a catechism meant to be memorized by children, Martin Luther asks the question, “How can water do such wonderful things?”
Water can do such wonderful things because Jesus was baptized by John.
Saint Maximus of Turin proclaimed seventeen hundred years ago:
“The mother holds the child for the Magi to adore; the Father reveals that his Son is to be worshiped by all the nations. That is why the Lord Jesus went to the river for baptism, that is why he wanted his holy body to be washed with Jordan’s water. Someone might ask, “Why would a holy man desire baptism?” Listen to the answer: Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy, and by his cleansing to purify the waters which he touched. For the consecration of Christ involves a more significant consecration of the water. For when the Savior is washed all water for our baptism is made clean, purified at its source for the dispensing of baptismal grace to the people of future ages. Christ is the first to be baptized, then, so that Christians will follow after him with confidence.”
“Tell me, preacher— did you or did you not baptize Roger?”
“Uh, um…yeah— yes, I did.”
“And was everything you said about his baptism true or wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Every word,” I mumbled.
“Well, good,” he said, “because it seems to me none of this stuff in these boxes really belongs to Roger anymore— that Roger died when you baptized him”
That wasn’t the only evidence we removed from his office that night like custodians in the far country cleaning up after the prodigal who’s gone home.
“That’s a lot of stuff,” I said, looking in Billy’s trunk.
“We’ve all got a lot of stuff,” Billy replied, “We’re all camels headed towards the eye of a needle. But if what mattered about us was what’s in our head or in our heart, God wouldn’t have given us baptism.”
I turned to look at Billy, not understanding him. He laid his hand on my head as though absolving me, but then he tapped on it.
“There’s no way you’re going to get the baptismal font into your head. It sure won’t fit into your heart. What saves you is what you can see.”
When it comes to the Christian life, we use words like growth and progress, maturation and development.
Not only is this odd, it is also outright blasphemy.
In the whole long history of the faith, the only description of the Christian life that the church has proposed is the one that emerges from the waters of baptism. The verb emerge is key to understanding the sacrament, for baptism just is the casting off of the old Adam into the waters and the instantaneous receiving of the New Adam, Jesus Christ. In the entire sacramental tradition, baptism has never been understood as merely the beginning of new life. Baptism is the very bequeathing of that new life. Baptism does not slowly draw out of you a new self. Baptism brings the new self. Baptism is the ending of the old and the raising of the new. The font is a grave but it’s filled with water; such that, it’s also a placenta. Baptism is death and resurrection.
He makes the waters capable of conferring him!
No matter who you are or who you have been. Whatever you have done or left undone. Regardless of the boxes of stuff you have hidden away. The act of baptism makes you indistinguishable from Jesus Christ. “The Christian life and baptism are exactly the same thing.”
As Robert Jenson writes:
“So aware of this was the New Testament church and the ancient church that the very occurrence of any time after baptism was a problem for them: Do we not emerge straight from the water in to the Kingdom of God? Why this sad waste of time in between? The old life ends when I submit myself to the waters, and the new self is a self already in the Kingdom, a self in the Spirit. The only thing that we can say about this space between the bath and the Kingdom is that one lives in the bath. Not from it, not after it, but in it.”
In other words, the notion of “backsliding” is as blasphemous as the notion of progress. There is no backsliding; there is only repentance of sin and return to the fact of your baptism— the fact that the LORD Jesus Christ has clothed you with himself.
This is that direct word I can speak on the basis of this text. This is that word of comfort and assurance I can utter on its behalf. This is that unconditional promise I can hand over because and only because the Crucified lives. The word for you to guard, the word for you store up in your heart, the word for you to delight in and never forget is the visible word of your baptism. At a dateable time, in a precise location, surrounded by eyewitnesses, with touchable, seeable water, the LORD Jesus conferred you to himself.
After Roger died, I stopped by later in the week to check on Billy in search of a free meal. The Orioles game was turned on when I arrived, but the house was quiet and devoid of any dinner smells wafting from the kitchen. Billy answered the screen door in a different polo shirt, but the same black bikini briefs.
“Where’s Mary,” I asked.
He shook his head and he looked ready to cry again.
“She went to stay at her sister’s house.”
“For a visit?”
“For forever— at least that’s what she threatened.”
“Why in the world…?”
“She saw one of Roger’s pictures in my Jeep. Some woman. You know. It must have fallen out of the box in my car. She thought the picture was mine.”
“Didn’t you tell her wasn’t yours? Didn’t you explain to her that the photo was Roger’s?”
“She didn’t give me the chance,” he said. She was gone before I got home, left a long note, and won’t answer my calls. I guess grace comes at a cost.”
Here’s my point.
God is like Billy.
Minus the bikini briefs.
And you, no matter how much like Roger you might be behind closed doors, you are human. Christ has made the waters capable of conferring him, and through those waters, as though a womb, he has made you fully, newly, irrevocably human.
“How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.
With my whole heart I seek you;
let me not wander from your commandments!
I have stored up your word in my heart,
that I might not sin against you.
Blessed are you, O Lord;
teach me your statutes!
With my lips I declare
all the rules of your mouth.
In the way of your testimonies I delight
as much as in all riches.
I will meditate on your precepts
and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes;
I will not forget your word.”
Only Jesus Christ can pray this way.
Hear the good news:
Only Jesus Christ can pray this way and that is why you can pray it. You can pray this prayer not as a burden. You can pray this prayer as one baptized. This is true speech for you. To God, you sound like Jesus!
To God, you sound like Jesus!
Because by water and his Spirit, the heart of Jesus Christ resides within you.
So come for those other visible words, the loaf and the cup. Christ is the host. But he has shrouded you with himself. So come to the table as though it belongs to you. It does.
(Thanks to David Harvey for the sermon title!)
