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Epiphany 1

11 January 2004

Isaiah 43:1-7
Acts 8:14-17
Psalm 29
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

JESUS' BAPTISM

I would labour hard to forge the link between Jesus’ baptism, and our own baptism. Raise the questions: 'Where were you baptized? Who was present? Who was the minister who recited the required words of this very potent ritual?' For this community is the baptized community, and each one has been baptized, or is a candidate for baptism.  The moment of baptism is when you are remembered and lodged in the memory of God – graced before you could ask, require, demand, claim, or plead.

Lukes ancient story of 2000 years is retold and re-imagined at every baptism, including your’s.  And Luke entices us into the story by requiring an alert audience to imagine the scenes and colour the pictures as the barest of line drawings go past.  Then the God who initiates the whole drama, moves off the page and into our lives, resurrecting dead words and thus re-imaging the jaded, the dispirited, the defeated people who entertain this story. 

Already, Luke has weaved into the story the elusive unpredictable, inspiration of God’s Spirit.

  • John the Baptist’s parents - barrenness no longer bound them.
  • Mary – how will she gift the Christ to the world? The Holy Spirit seeds the gift.
  • Elizabeth, cousin of Mary – something provokes her joyous cry on pregnant Mary's visit.
  • Old Simeon and Anna recognize a fresh stirring of God in our midst.
  • Fiery John the Baptist uses powerful rhetoric to describe the searing, demanding spirit presence of God.

The Baptism – a thin place where heaven and earth meet, described as gentle, dove-like, accompanied by a word from heaven.  The Baptised Community stands in the shelter of this word.

Luke phases John out of the scene, leaving the narrative and ourselves engaged in serious imagining.  Two sentences, four scenes (vvs 21 & 22) with marvelous, expansive riches for our spirits and God’s Spirit to co-mingle for our nourishment, growth, and challenge.

  1. 'After all the people had been baptised …’Who were they? Same as us? Different from us?  We know they were people dissatisfied with the current religious regime.  And they knew their behaviour mattered; how they conducted themselves in the world mattered; justice mattered.  Clean-started, they went home, presumably not alone, but looking after each other’s welfare (vs.10ff).
  2. '… and Jesus also had been baptised …’– along with the others?  Jesus submits to what we, the baptised, submit to. He is becoming one of us – a demonstration of incarnation.
  3. '… and Jesus was praying …' Luke draws our imagining selves right into the innermost movements of Jesus’ heart.  What was the prayer?  Or was it silent waiting – a hushed communion – a pause time seeking for a filling with the good life of the Creator? How often might we seek that?
  4. '… heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came …’Luke expresses the inexpressible, and language stretches beyond its limits, and our imagination must work at maximum capability.  Yet this intense, dramatic, and lovely communion is way beyond our normal, flat, managed, controlled, explainable, fact-laden interactions.  The speech seeds life within us – a double announcement, to Jesus who was baptised with the crowd, and to us who are the baptised crowd:  ‘You are my daughter, my son, my beloved one; and I am pleased with you’.


PRAYER FOR OURSELVES AND OTHERS

God, as you imagine us,
how do you imagine we could be?

For you see people we know
passing through the depths of despair
and surely that is not how you imagine we could be.

You see people we know, consumed by passions and addictions,
and surely that is not how you imagine we could be.

You see people we know, who have sold themselves to their work;
driven themselves into the service of some ideology,
and surely that is not how you imagine we could be.

And our God, you see families we know who are divided and distanced,
and who treat each other as worthless,
and have no regard for kinship
and no desire to love –
and surely that is not how you imagine we could be.

God, you who created us in your image –
would you re-create us as you imagine we could be?
And of all those whom we know of tarnished image
would you re-imagine them.

So may the depths of despair not drown them,
and may consuming passions not destroy them,
and may the recklessly-driven be saved from fatality.

And may you call the distanced families
from the north and south
from the east and west,
may you call them by name
and give them fresh focus for communing in health-giving wholeness.

May that be so in Iraq.
May that be so in Israel.
- and may that be so in Aotearoa, for so much divides us.

But you talk of restoration.
Restore us, our God, as you imagine we could be,
In Jesus' name,

AMEN.