Baptism of Our Lord, Year C, 2025

Sitting on the desk in my office is a glass bottle of water. There’s a little bit of sediment on the bottom that you can see if you pick it up or just look at it from the right angle, but otherwise, it just looks like a bottle of water. But, as you might guess by virtue of my telling you about this bottle, it isn’t just ordinary water. My friend Mother Angela was on a trip to the Holy Land where she dipped that bottle into the Jordan River and brought it back to me in Colorado. The original intention of that water was to add a bit to baptismal waters every time there’s a baptism, thereby physically linking it to the River Jordan, where today we celebrate the occurrence of Christ’s baptism. Due to the spooky looking sediment in the bottle, I’m a bit hesitant to add it to water that will be poured onto people.

Even without adding some of the Jordan River water to our baptismal water, you can still appreciate the symbolism. Long before people had a word for diffusion, it was a well understood concept - if you put a small amount of something in water it essentially becomes one with the water and very difficult to separate back out again. The early church experienced this with the way in which holy water was made. When a priest blessed water to make holy water, they added, and still today add, a small amount of salt. Priests sometimes traveled to the Vatican and got salt that had been blessed by the pope and then added that small amount to their holy water back in their parishes throughout the world. The special holy water wasn’t a requirement - the priest could still make holy water with salt that wasn’t from the Vatican. But it was a meaningful way in which parishes throughout the world were physically tied together. In the same way as the salt from the Vatican tied churches together, the water from the Jordan can tie us to a real, physical place where all four of our Gospel accounts consider the beginning of the adult Jesus’ active ministry.

At the Episcopal seminary in Virginia, there is a program called Baptized for Life. I like the double meaning of the title. We are baptized for life in the sense that we are baptized once and it does not expire. While we renew our baptismal vows, we aren’t re-baptized, nor can we be un-baptized. It is a common practice of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land to renew their baptisms at the Jordan River. This experience oftentimes includes a water bath, which is atypical of baptismal vow renewals - typically the closest we get is asperges, where holy water is sprinkled onto the congregation in general. So while the vow renewal in the Jordan might look like a re-baptism, intention is important. You can’t get accidentally baptized.

We are also baptized for life in the sense that we are baptized to equip us to live this life as followers of Jesus. There are several days in the church calendar set aside as particularly fitting for baptisms, including Baptism of Our Lord, All Saints Day, and the Easter Vigil. Most churches don’t have baptisms on every one of those days every year - particularly on a day like Baptism of Our Lord, which is so close after Christmas. And while it’s really cool to be at a service with several baptism candidates crowding around the font, a day like today in the life of St. Matthew’s where we aren’t receiving new members into the household of God but are still reaffirming our own baptismal vows, is an important reminder of why we are here and what, in a practical sense, we are called to do. We proclaim what we believe and then answer questions that amount to, “and what are you going to do about it?”

The one part of the baptismal liturgy that we miss out on by not having baptisms are the prayers for the candidates. We typically pray those following the questions but before the thanksgiving over the water. Practically, the candidates for baptism at the time of those prayers are moving from the front of the congregation back to the font. Each of those prayers can be directly tied to one of the promises we make in the baptismal covenant. Here in the service, we  have just promised to do all of those things with God’s help, and then we ask for God’s help by praying for those who are to receive the sacrament of new birth:

Deliver them, O Lord, from the way of sin and death.
        Open their hearts to your grace and truth.
        Fill them with your holy and life-giving Spirit.
        Keep them in the faith and communion of your holy Church.
        Teach them to love others in the power of the spirit.
        Send them into the world in witness to your love.
        Bring them to the fullness of your peace and glory.
        Grant, O Lord, that all who are baptized into the death of Jesus Christ your Son may live  in the power of his resurrection and look for him to come again in glory; who lives and reigns now and for ever. Amen.

The word “baptize” comes from the Greek “baptizo”, which simply means to dip or immerse. The concept is not uniquely Christian and can readily be found in Judaism with the mikveh - a water bath used to achieve ritual purity. The first experience of baptism in the Gospel is the baptism of John, which is different from what Christian baptism would become. John proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins as a way of living out the words of the prophet Isaiah, identifying John with traditional hopes for Israel’s restoration. 

The promise of forgiveness of sins has been so strongly linked to baptism that it became a practice among early Christians to delay baptism until as close to death as possible, so you don’t have to account for any post-baptismal sins. Which is quite the game to play, right? Not only that you manage to hit it just right, almost dead but not too close so that you don’t die before being baptized because then, by your own logic, if you time it wrong you’re really out of luck. On top of that, by following this line of logic we assume we are in charge, that God is following our rules, which is really putting faith in humans and not in God.

But we believe that baptism is much deeper than solely a washing away of sins. Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body, the Church. In that initiation, we receive union with Christ in his death and resurrection, birth into God’s family, the Church, forgiveness of sins, and new life in the Holy Spirit. And in the joy of our membership in this body, we strive to live out in our lives what we saw demonstrated to us by Christ following his own baptism in the Jordan River.

So, what does it mean to you to be baptized? Whether or not you chose to be baptized - I was three months old when I was baptized, so the first time my baptismal promises were made, they were made on my behalf by my parents and godparents. But today I will renew those promises on my own. And I, like you, do so in this community because I believe that this community is working together to discern how to best live out these baptismal promises, both individually and together as a Christian body. And as members of the Body of Christ, because we are all part of the body we don’t each live out our promises in the same way. To borrow the metaphor from Paul, the eye and the hand and the foot are each called to different ministries. Maybe one of the ways you live your promises is by advocating publicly at the Legislature. Maybe you give your employees benefits that go above and beyond. Maybe you are a caretaker of an elderly relative or of children. We can go back to our baptismal promises for guidance on how to follow God’s call on our lives and for a reminder that we do it all with God’s help. Amen.