Epiphany 4: The light we need

Luke 4.14-21

I’m a great fan of TV detective shows, like many others here I suspect, but there’s one recurring moment in almost all of them that drives me nuts. It is the moment when someone decides to venture into a pitch black basement or a darkened warehouse, apparently entirely unaware of danger, and when they do so, they never, ever seem to think of turning the lights on as they go in. There can be a perfectly visible switch on the wall by their heads, but no… they won’t even consider it. We all know that the villain is bound to be hiding there. “Switch on the lights…” we shout…, but of course they don’t. Are they trying to save on the electricity? Do they make a habit of wandering around in the darkness normally? If they did switch on the light I suppose there wouldn’t be much of a story, but all the same, it drives me nuts…

The point is that light reveals what is there. Light shows us the things we need to be aware of, whether that is the axe-murderer lurking in the shadows, or simply the everyday obstacles that might trip us up. In real practical terms we need light to see where we are going: it simply isn’t natural for us to stumble around in the darkness if we have a choice not to. Light can be many things – decorative, comforting, exciting like fireworks, dazzling, splendid… But the main reason we need it is to show us what’s there, what’s real, how things actually are.

This season of Epiphany, which ends next week with the feast of Candlemas, is all about light, the light of God, revealed in Jesus, the light that shines in the darkness which the darkness does not overcome, as John’s Gospel puts it.  Epiphany literally means “shining forth”. Here is God, says each of the stories we hear in these weeks after Christmas, at work in Jesus, this unlikeliest of Messiahs who starts life in a manger and ends it on a cross. The stories reveal him, like a spotlight picking him out in the crowds where he might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The light of the star proclaims his birth to the Magi, the voice from heaven at his baptism acclaims him as the Son of God, the miracle of water turned to wine causes those around him to realise that this is no ordinary carpenter.

These signs and wonders say “Look at this man! Here is God.”

But today’s story has no miracles, no heavenly voices or wandering stars. It can seem a bit of an anti-climax after what we’ve heard in previous weeks, but the truth is that the light of the Epiphany season isn’t just there to make us say “Wow – here’s someone amazing!” As I said earlier, light can serve many purposes; for decoration, to impress or dazzle, but its basic function is to reveal things, to show us what is there, what is real and true. The stories of the Epiphany season are not just meant to impress us with the realisation THAT Jesus is the Son of God. They are meant to show us what SORT of God he is the Son of, what the priorities of that God are, what he longs for, delights in and weeps over. We may say that we believe in God, or that we don’t believe in God, but the important question is, “what kind of God do we believe in, or not?” It matters, because our answer shapes the way we live and behave. I don’t believe, for example, in the God of the Incas, whom they thought demanded human sacrifice; if I did I suppose our worship might look rather different… It is the God revealed by Jesus whom I believe in and try to follow, and the stories of the Epiphany season give us clues about what that might mean for our daily lives.  

The light of the star reveals Jesus to be a special child, the Messiah, but the point is that it reveals this first to the Gentile Magi – God is for everyone, everywhere, it says. A heavenly voice announces him as Messiah at his baptism, the beloved Son of God, but the point is that nothing in his background would have made him look like a potential Messiah to the religious establishment of the time, and his eventual death on a cross would have challenged that even more. God’s view of the world might be very different to our, it hints. The wedding at Cana reveals the power of God at work in Jesus’ life, but it is a power used not for his own glory, but to show us that in the midst of trouble, when we feel we are running out of hope, joy or strength, God can fill us with abundant blessings.

So what does today’s Gospel story reveal about God?

Jesus is in his own home town of Nazareth, among people who have watched him grow up, an apparently ordinary child in an ordinary family. As far as we are aware, no one has noticed him much till now. But all of a sudden stories start spreading from neighbouring towns. He’s been teaching and preaching there, and what he says has transfixed people. His own folk want to see what all the fuss is about, so when he comes to his own home synagogue they are all ears. They give him a scroll to read from. It is the prophet Isaiah, one of the most popular, well-known and oft-quoted prophets at the time of Jesus. But it’s a big book. Which portion will he choose? There are all sorts of different messages he could bring out of it. It has words of lament – the people of Israel were in exile in Babylon at the time it was written . It has words of comfort – God promises that he will one day lead them home. It has words of challenge, confronting them with the behaviour and attitudes which contributed to their downfall. It has words that speak of mystical visions too, of glimpses of the glory of heaven. Of course, like all books of the Bible you need to read it as a whole to get its full meaning, and in context too. But there won’t be time for that in the synagogue in Nazareth, any more than there would have been here this morning, so which bit will he choose?

Jesus has no hesitation. He goes straight to chapter 61 and begins to read. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” he says, and he goes on, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” And there he stops. People are probably a bit surprised at that, because actually that’s halfway through a line – it should finish “and the day of vengeance of our God.” But Jesus doesn’t say that. He just stops. And he rolls up the scroll, which probably takes a little while… And he gives it back to the attendant, which probably takes another little while…And then he sits down, in the centre of the synagogue in the place where you’d expect the preacher to be – Jewish teachers sat down to teach…And everyone watches…And everyone waits…  And finally, after what must have seemed like a suspenseful age, he opens his mouth to speak…

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing…” God’s kingdom is coming to be, here and now, he is saying, right where you are. They are amazed - is he claiming to be the chosen one of God this prophecy talks about? Yes, he clearly is. But he is also telling them that this is what it looks like when God is at work – the poor start hearing good news, the oppressed are liberated, captives are freed, people see anew… It’s not just that God is at work, but that this is the work he is at.

Faith can mean many different things to people. They can come to it, and cling to it, for many different reasons. It can be about having a place to gather and a community to relate to. It can be about having mystical experiences. It can be about finding personal reassurance and comfort. It can be simply a matter of habit, a soothing ritual which helps to mark out the times and seasons. It can also be used for darker purposes, of course; as a tribal marker to divide us, who believe this, from them, who believe that, or to reinforce power structures, or make people conform.

But what Jesus reveals here is that none of this – however good or bad – is really at the heart of what God calls him and his follower to live for and to die for. We can have all the mystical experiences we like, and the best and most beautiful worship. We can get involved in every activity going, and turn up at every service faithfully, but if what we are doing doesn’t end up with the poor hearing good news, captives being released, sight being restored, freedom for those who are oppressed, people knowing that they are loved by God, then we are missing the point. There are many ways of fulfilling that mission – it is as much about the way we treat others in our everyday, personal lives as it is about political campaigns - but God’s primary purpose, says Jesus, the non-negotiable bottom line, will always be about love, love which leads to justice and healing, integrity and wholeness. If what we do doesn’t lead to that, it doesn’t lead to anything worth having.

That’s the Epiphany light that shines from this story. Perhaps we’d rather it didn’t. The gentle starlight of the Magi and the voice from heaven at Christ’s baptism tell us things which are appealing and affirming. The abundance of wine at Cana is something I can always be doing with… But we need this message too, which sets us on the course of costly service and courageous justice-making, otherwise our faith can easily become no more than twinkly window dressing, nice to look at but never really revealing the things which lie in the shadows, and need to be set right.

Amen

Epiphany 4: The light we need

Luke 4.14-21

I’m a great fan of TV detective shows, like many others here I suspect, but there’s one recurring moment in almost all of them that drives me nuts. It is the moment when someone decides to venture into a pitch black basement or a darkened warehouse, apparently entirely unaware of danger, and when they do so, they never, ever seem to think of turning the lights on as they go in. There can be a perfectly visible switch on the wall by their heads, but no… they won’t even consider it. We all know that the villain is bound to be hiding there. “Switch on the lights…” we shout…, but of course they don’t. Are they trying to save on the electricity? Do they make a habit of wandering around in the darkness normally? If they did switch on the light I suppose there wouldn’t be much of a story, but all the same, it drives me nuts…

The point is that light reveals what is there. Light shows us the things we need to be aware of, whether that is the axe-murderer lurking in the shadows, or simply the everyday obstacles that might trip us up. In real practical terms we need light to see where we are going: it simply isn’t natural for us to stumble around in the darkness if we have a choice not to. Light can be many things – decorative, comforting, exciting like fireworks, dazzling, splendid… But the main reason we need it is to show us what’s there, what’s real, how things actually are.

This season of Epiphany, which ends next week with the feast of Candlemas, is all about light, the light of God, revealed in Jesus, the light that shines in the darkness which the darkness does not overcome, as John’s Gospel puts it.  Epiphany literally means “shining forth”. Here is God, says each of the stories we hear in these weeks after Christmas, at work in Jesus, this unlikeliest of Messiahs who starts life in a manger and ends it on a cross. The stories reveal him, like a spotlight picking him out in the crowds where he might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The light of the star proclaims his birth to the Magi, the voice from heaven at his baptism acclaims him as the Son of God, the miracle of water turned to wine causes those around him to realise that this is no ordinary carpenter.

These signs and wonders say “Look at this man! Here is God.”

But today’s story has no miracles, no heavenly voices or wandering stars. It can seem a bit of an anti-climax after what we’ve heard in previous weeks, but the truth is that the light of the Epiphany season isn’t just there to make us say “Wow – here’s someone amazing!” As I said earlier, light can serve many purposes; for decoration, to impress or dazzle, but its basic function is to reveal things, to show us what is there, what is real and true. The stories of the Epiphany season are not just meant to impress us with the realisation THAT Jesus is the Son of God. They are meant to show us what SORT of God he is the Son of, what the priorities of that God are, what he longs for, delights in and weeps over. We may say that we believe in God, or that we don’t believe in God, but the important question is, “what kind of God do we believe in, or not?” It matters, because our answer shapes the way we live and behave. I don’t believe, for example, in the God of the Incas, whom they thought demanded human sacrifice; if I did I suppose our worship might look rather different… It is the God revealed by Jesus whom I believe in and try to follow, and the stories of the Epiphany season give us clues about what that might mean for our daily lives.  

The light of the star reveals Jesus to be a special child, the Messiah, but the point is that it reveals this first to the Gentile Magi – God is for everyone, everywhere, it says. A heavenly voice announces him as Messiah at his baptism, the beloved Son of God, but the point is that nothing in his background would have made him look like a potential Messiah to the religious establishment of the time, and his eventual death on a cross would have challenged that even more. God’s view of the world might be very different to our, it hints. The wedding at Cana reveals the power of God at work in Jesus’ life, but it is a power used not for his own glory, but to show us that in the midst of trouble, when we feel we are running out of hope, joy or strength, God can fill us with abundant blessings.

So what does today’s Gospel story reveal about God?

Jesus is in his own home town of Nazareth, among people who have watched him grow up, an apparently ordinary child in an ordinary family. As far as we are aware, no one has noticed him much till now. But all of a sudden stories start spreading from neighbouring towns. He’s been teaching and preaching there, and what he says has transfixed people. His own folk want to see what all the fuss is about, so when he comes to his own home synagogue they are all ears. They give him a scroll to read from. It is the prophet Isaiah, one of the most popular, well-known and oft-quoted prophets at the time of Jesus. But it’s a big book. Which portion will he choose? There are all sorts of different messages he could bring out of it. It has words of lament – the people of Israel were in exile in Babylon at the time it was written . It has words of comfort – God promises that he will one day lead them home. It has words of challenge, confronting them with the behaviour and attitudes which contributed to their downfall. It has words that speak of mystical visions too, of glimpses of the glory of heaven. Of course, like all books of the Bible you need to read it as a whole to get its full meaning, and in context too. But there won’t be time for that in the synagogue in Nazareth, any more than there would have been here this morning, so which bit will he choose?

Jesus has no hesitation. He goes straight to chapter 61 and begins to read. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” he says, and he goes on, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” And there he stops. People are probably a bit surprised at that, because actually that’s halfway through a line – it should finish “and the day of vengeance of our God.” But Jesus doesn’t say that. He just stops. And he rolls up the scroll, which probably takes a little while… And he gives it back to the attendant, which probably takes another little while…And then he sits down, in the centre of the synagogue in the place where you’d expect the preacher to be – Jewish teachers sat down to teach…And everyone watches…And everyone waits…  And finally, after what must have seemed like a suspenseful age, he opens his mouth to speak…

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing…” God’s kingdom is coming to be, here and now, he is saying, right where you are. They are amazed - is he claiming to be the chosen one of God this prophecy talks about? Yes, he clearly is. But he is also telling them that this is what it looks like when God is at work – the poor start hearing good news, the oppressed are liberated, captives are freed, people see anew… It’s not just that God is at work, but that this is the work he is at.

Faith can mean many different things to people. They can come to it, and cling to it, for many different reasons. It can be about having a place to gather and a community to relate to. It can be about having mystical experiences. It can be about finding personal reassurance and comfort. It can be simply a matter of habit, a soothing ritual which helps to mark out the times and seasons. It can also be used for darker purposes, of course; as a tribal marker to divide us, who believe this, from them, who believe that, or to reinforce power structures, or make people conform.

But what Jesus reveals here is that none of this – however good or bad – is really at the heart of what God calls him and his follower to live for and to die for. We can have all the mystical experiences we like, and the best and most beautiful worship. We can get involved in every activity going, and turn up at every service faithfully, but if what we are doing doesn’t end up with the poor hearing good news, captives being released, sight being restored, freedom for those who are oppressed, people knowing that they are loved by God, then we are missing the point. There are many ways of fulfilling that mission – it is as much about the way we treat others in our everyday, personal lives as it is about political campaigns - but God’s primary purpose, says Jesus, the non-negotiable bottom line, will always be about love, love which leads to justice and healing, integrity and wholeness. If what we do doesn’t lead to that, it doesn’t lead to anything worth having.

That’s the Epiphany light that shines from this story. Perhaps we’d rather it didn’t. The gentle starlight of the Magi and the voice from heaven at Christ’s baptism tell us things which are appealing and affirming. The abundance of wine at Cana is something I can always be doing with… But we need this message too, which sets us on the course of costly service and courageous justice-making, otherwise our faith can easily become no more than twinkly window dressing, nice to look at but never really revealing the things which lie in the shadows, and need to be set right.

Amen

Baptism of Christ: The waters of baptism

Isaiah 43.1-7, Luke 3.15-17, 21-22

Today we celebrate the Baptism of Christ, the moment when Jesus, like us, goes through the waters of baptism. Luke’s account of this moment is actually rather vague. He seems far more interested in God’s acclamation of Jesus as his Son, the Beloved. The baptism itself almost slips past unnoticed – “when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus had been baptised and was praying…” Blink and you’ve missed it. Luke doesn’t tell us how Jesus was baptised, what he understood by it, or why it mattered that it happened.  This vagueness has left all sorts of problems for Christians since. Often baptism has been a bone of contention between different branches of the Church, and a bit of a mystery to people both within and outside it.

After one of the baptisms I did last year, a woman came up to me with her little girl, who was about four years old I would guess. “My daughter just asked me a question” the woman said, “I didn’t know the answer, so we thought we’d ask you. She wanted to know why you poured water on babies at baptism...” And there they stood looking hopefully at me, trusting that I would provide them with a pithy, simple response which a child of four could understand…

I can’t remember what I said, but I can remember knowing that there was no chance I could give them what they were looking for. The fact is that baptism is as hard to pin down as the water we use to do it. What is it about? Who is it for? What does it do? These are questions which people have answered quite differently over the centuries, and often argued bitterly about.

Some branches of the church insist that only adults can be baptised, others baptise babies as well. Adult baptism stresses our personal commitment to God; infant baptism stresses God’s commitment to us which is there from the beginning, before we can speak for ourselves. Some see baptism mainly as the way people join the family of the Church, a collective view, or as the start of a journey of faith, part of a process. For others, though, it is all about the washing away of original sin, a sin they believe is inherited automatically by every human being. If you believe that, which I don’t, it turns baptism into an individual thing, and one which does what it needs to do in one fell swoop. It doesn’t matter whether the person concerns ever sets foot in church again.  Original sin was an idea which really only became widespread in the fourth Century, but it has been very prominent in Christian thinking since then, especially around baptism, leading people to baptise babies as soon as possible after birth, especially if they are in danger of death.

The “official” views of Baptism are many and various, then, but that is just the “official” views. People who come to me to ask for baptism often have their own ways of looking at it, and they can be even more varied.  “It’s about giving my child something to belong to” “It’s about putting my child in God’s care” “It’s about setting them on the right road” “It’s about giving thanks for them, welcoming them into the world”.

I recall one mum saying that her auntie had told her that if her baby was baptised he’d never have another day’s illness in his life. That needed a bit of exploring, otherwise she might have sued me under the Trades Description Act when her child next went down with a cold… but I understood where she was coming from. She knew deep down that baptism couldn’t guarantee her child good health, but it gave her the sense that she wasn’t on her own as she tried to steer him through the perils of life.

Sometimes these days, baptism seems to take the place of a wedding in people’s lives. The arrival of a child makes an unmarried couple feel united in a new way. Baptism expresses that new sense of common purpose they’ve found in their child. Often a wedding follows close behind –  sometimes people just need a chance to get used to the idea of a commitment…  

Many Christians, I am sure, would be itching to leap in and set these folk straight. Surely all this is a long way from the “real” meaning of baptism, they want to say. But the longer I go on the less I’ve wanted to do that. If the official theology of baptism is so varied, then who am I to say that these unofficial views are any less valid? Part of the reason why I include so many different symbols in our baptism services here – not just water but also oil, candles, shells and shawls too – is that each of them opens up a new layer of meaning, and it seems to me that somewhere in all this families ought to be able to find something that honours whatever it was that brought them to that point. One thing I am certain of though; if we don’t honour the family’s intention, their initial reason for being there, then the baptism won’t be real for them at all. It won’t help them express what they need to say to God, and it won’t help them hear what God needs to say to them either.

And that brings me back to our Gospel story for today, because although Luke is maddeningly vague about Jesus’ baptism, what he does say actually conveys something I think is absolutely vital about it.  “When all the people were baptised, and when Jesus also had been baptised…” he says. What Luke tells us, almost by accident is that, for whatever reason, Jesus is determined to share the experience of those around him, to do what everyone else has to do, to go where everyone else has to go.

What we need to know to understand this story is that by the time Luke is writing, the baptism of Christ was something which had become rather inconvenient and awkward for the Church. Mark’s Gospel, the earliest one, written around 60 AD, 30 years after Jesus’ death, painted a picture of him as a good man, God’s Messiah, but someone who was very much made of the same stuff as the rest of us.  As time passed though, the emphasis shifted and Christians started to speak of Jesus not just as good but as completely sinless.

They battled over precisely what that meant for centuries, and one of the flies in the ointment was this story of Jesus’ baptism. Why would a sinless Jesus need a baptism of repentance? Mark simply tells us that Jesus was baptised by John – it was no problem for him at the time he was writing. But Matthew, writing a decade or so later has John the Baptist arguing that he shouldn’t baptise Jesus; Jesus should be baptising him. Luke, written around the same time, takes the line that the less he says the better; hence the bafflingly brief mention.  When we get to John’s Gospel, written at the end of the first century, he leaves out the baptism completely. John the Baptist and Jesus simply have a conversation which happens to take place by the river Jordan, but no one actually gets wet at all…

Strangely enough, though, what all this evasiveness does is to strengthen the argument that Jesus really did get baptised. Who would make up something  which was so obviously inconvenient? Biblical scholars question lots of bits of the Bible – did they really happen? – but this isn’t one of them. Jesus was baptised, and that tells us that, whatever we think it means to say he is the Son of God, it doesn’t mean that he keeps his distance from us. He’s fully part of the life of the world with all its dangers and distress, quite literally immersed in it. If his baptism tells us nothing more about the baptisms we go through than this, then that’s enough for me. “When you pass through the waters,” says God in our Old Testament reading, “I will be with you”, and here is Jesus, living out that promise.

Why do we pour water on babies’ heads at baptism? Well, water is a symbol of life, something without which life couldn’t exist. We need it to drink and to wash in. It reminds us too of the dangers of life. Water can overwhelm us and drown us; in the end death comes to us all. But in all these waters, God is with us, giving us life, washing us clean, taking us through death to new life. He is there not just once, when the water of baptism is poured over our heads, but always.

That message came home to me very powerfully one summer when I was on a walking holiday in Cornwall with a friend. We happened on a footpath to what was enigmatically called a “holy well” at a place called Madron, near Penzance. The path was very overgrown, but at the end of it we came to an ancient spring. Beside it stood a cloutie tree – a tree which people had tied strips of cloth to as wishes or prayers, and just beyond that stood a tiny, ruined church. It had no roof. It was little more than a pile of stones in fact, but inside, you could see an altar at one end, and at the other end a stone trough which had obviously been the font. The fact that it was a font was clear because the stream from the spring had been channelled so that it flowed through the wall of the church straight into it. Those who’d worshipped there would have been constantly aware of the running water, and even now, when the church had long since fallen into disuse, that water of baptism was still flowing, all day, every day.  I’ve never forgotten that. We are baptised in a ritual that takes place once, but that moment is a reminder that the stream of God’s love flows forever. It is poured out afresh every moment. It never comes to an end.   

We’ll never be able to pin down the waters of baptism, to explain and understand them - that’s in the nature of water. It takes new shapes all the time, filling the spaces we make for it. But that water of baptism comes with a promise we can hold onto for the whole of our lives. “When you pass through the waters – whatever they are - I will be with you.”

Amen.

Baptism of Christ: The waters of baptism

Isaiah 43.1-7, Luke 3.15-17, 21-22

Today we celebrate the Baptism of Christ, the moment when Jesus, like us, goes through the waters of baptism. Luke’s account of this moment is actually rather vague. He seems far more interested in God’s acclamation of Jesus as his Son, the Beloved. The baptism itself almost slips past unnoticed – “when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus had been baptised and was praying…” Blink and you’ve missed it. Luke doesn’t tell us how Jesus was baptised, what he understood by it, or why it mattered that it happened.  This vagueness has left all sorts of problems for Christians since. Often baptism has been a bone of contention between different branches of the Church, and a bit of a mystery to people both within and outside it.

After one of the baptisms I did last year, a woman came up to me with her little girl, who was about four years old I would guess. “My daughter just asked me a question” the woman said, “I didn’t know the answer, so we thought we’d ask you. She wanted to know why you poured water on babies at baptism...” And there they stood looking hopefully at me, trusting that I would provide them with a pithy, simple response which a child of four could understand…

I can’t remember what I said, but I can remember knowing that there was no chance I could give them what they were looking for. The fact is that baptism is as hard to pin down as the water we use to do it. What is it about? Who is it for? What does it do? These are questions which people have answered quite differently over the centuries, and often argued bitterly about.

Some branches of the church insist that only adults can be baptised, others baptise babies as well. Adult baptism stresses our personal commitment to God; infant baptism stresses God’s commitment to us which is there from the beginning, before we can speak for ourselves. Some see baptism mainly as the way people join the family of the Church, a collective view, or as the start of a journey of faith, part of a process. For others, though, it is all about the washing away of original sin, a sin they believe is inherited automatically by every human being. If you believe that, which I don’t, it turns baptism into an individual thing, and one which does what it needs to do in one fell swoop. It doesn’t matter whether the person concerns ever sets foot in church again.  Original sin was an idea which really only became widespread in the fourth Century, but it has been very prominent in Christian thinking since then, especially around baptism, leading people to baptise babies as soon as possible after birth, especially if they are in danger of death.

The “official” views of Baptism are many and various, then, but that is just the “official” views. People who come to me to ask for baptism often have their own ways of looking at it, and they can be even more varied.  “It’s about giving my child something to belong to” “It’s about putting my child in God’s care” “It’s about setting them on the right road” “It’s about giving thanks for them, welcoming them into the world”.

I recall one mum saying that her auntie had told her that if her baby was baptised he’d never have another day’s illness in his life. That needed a bit of exploring, otherwise she might have sued me under the Trades Description Act when her child next went down with a cold… but I understood where she was coming from. She knew deep down that baptism couldn’t guarantee her child good health, but it gave her the sense that she wasn’t on her own as she tried to steer him through the perils of life.

Sometimes these days, baptism seems to take the place of a wedding in people’s lives. The arrival of a child makes an unmarried couple feel united in a new way. Baptism expresses that new sense of common purpose they’ve found in their child. Often a wedding follows close behind –  sometimes people just need a chance to get used to the idea of a commitment…  

Many Christians, I am sure, would be itching to leap in and set these folk straight. Surely all this is a long way from the “real” meaning of baptism, they want to say. But the longer I go on the less I’ve wanted to do that. If the official theology of baptism is so varied, then who am I to say that these unofficial views are any less valid? Part of the reason why I include so many different symbols in our baptism services here – not just water but also oil, candles, shells and shawls too – is that each of them opens up a new layer of meaning, and it seems to me that somewhere in all this families ought to be able to find something that honours whatever it was that brought them to that point. One thing I am certain of though; if we don’t honour the family’s intention, their initial reason for being there, then the baptism won’t be real for them at all. It won’t help them express what they need to say to God, and it won’t help them hear what God needs to say to them either.

And that brings me back to our Gospel story for today, because although Luke is maddeningly vague about Jesus’ baptism, what he does say actually conveys something I think is absolutely vital about it.  “When all the people were baptised, and when Jesus also had been baptised…” he says. What Luke tells us, almost by accident is that, for whatever reason, Jesus is determined to share the experience of those around him, to do what everyone else has to do, to go where everyone else has to go.

What we need to know to understand this story is that by the time Luke is writing, the baptism of Christ was something which had become rather inconvenient and awkward for the Church. Mark’s Gospel, the earliest one, written around 60 AD, 30 years after Jesus’ death, painted a picture of him as a good man, God’s Messiah, but someone who was very much made of the same stuff as the rest of us.  As time passed though, the emphasis shifted and Christians started to speak of Jesus not just as good but as completely sinless.

They battled over precisely what that meant for centuries, and one of the flies in the ointment was this story of Jesus’ baptism. Why would a sinless Jesus need a baptism of repentance? Mark simply tells us that Jesus was baptised by John – it was no problem for him at the time he was writing. But Matthew, writing a decade or so later has John the Baptist arguing that he shouldn’t baptise Jesus; Jesus should be baptising him. Luke, written around the same time, takes the line that the less he says the better; hence the bafflingly brief mention.  When we get to John’s Gospel, written at the end of the first century, he leaves out the baptism completely. John the Baptist and Jesus simply have a conversation which happens to take place by the river Jordan, but no one actually gets wet at all…

Strangely enough, though, what all this evasiveness does is to strengthen the argument that Jesus really did get baptised. Who would make up something  which was so obviously inconvenient? Biblical scholars question lots of bits of the Bible – did they really happen? – but this isn’t one of them. Jesus was baptised, and that tells us that, whatever we think it means to say he is the Son of God, it doesn’t mean that he keeps his distance from us. He’s fully part of the life of the world with all its dangers and distress, quite literally immersed in it. If his baptism tells us nothing more about the baptisms we go through than this, then that’s enough for me. “When you pass through the waters,” says God in our Old Testament reading, “I will be with you”, and here is Jesus, living out that promise.

Why do we pour water on babies’ heads at baptism? Well, water is a symbol of life, something without which life couldn’t exist. We need it to drink and to wash in. It reminds us too of the dangers of life. Water can overwhelm us and drown us; in the end death comes to us all. But in all these waters, God is with us, giving us life, washing us clean, taking us through death to new life. He is there not just once, when the water of baptism is poured over our heads, but always.

That message came home to me very powerfully one summer when I was on a walking holiday in Cornwall with a friend. We happened on a footpath to what was enigmatically called a “holy well” at a place called Madron, near Penzance. The path was very overgrown, but at the end of it we came to an ancient spring. Beside it stood a cloutie tree – a tree which people had tied strips of cloth to as wishes or prayers, and just beyond that stood a tiny, ruined church. It had no roof. It was little more than a pile of stones in fact, but inside, you could see an altar at one end, and at the other end a stone trough which had obviously been the font. The fact that it was a font was clear because the stream from the spring had been channelled so that it flowed through the wall of the church straight into it. Those who’d worshipped there would have been constantly aware of the running water, and even now, when the church had long since fallen into disuse, that water of baptism was still flowing, all day, every day.  I’ve never forgotten that. We are baptised in a ritual that takes place once, but that moment is a reminder that the stream of God’s love flows forever. It is poured out afresh every moment. It never comes to an end.   

We’ll never be able to pin down the waters of baptism, to explain and understand them - that’s in the nature of water. It takes new shapes all the time, filling the spaces we make for it. But that water of baptism comes with a promise we can hold onto for the whole of our lives. “When you pass through the waters – whatever they are - I will be with you.”

Amen.