Epiphany 2:
Baptism of Our Lord 2013
Raise your hand if you remember your baptism.
Now, to be fair, many people were baptized as infants, so
while you were there, you shouldn’t be expected to remember it.
However, how many of you had people—or still have people
(parents, godparents or otherwise) who tell you the story of your baptism?
Probably not too many…
Isn’t it interesting, though, that the thing that is supposed
to be central to our identity as Christians is a thing that we rarely rehearse
or tell the story of. Again, to be
fair—I think this has a lot to do with how we understand baptism. For most
people in our culture, baptism is just what you do with your kid when they’re
born. And while it’s still very important to families, I think we just don’t
really know how it fits into the rest of our life. It’s important, but doesn’t
have a lot of rooting in our day-to-day experience.
Maybe it’s the fault of the clergy or catechists, then, that
we have such difficulty bringing it into a more realistic context. Maybe this
is why baptism seems to take a back seat to so many other milestones in our
lives.
However, what we stand
to lose if we cannot reclaim its importance for ourselves, is the important
meaning that our baptism has as part of a much greater story…
Our Gospel reading for today is not only a story of
baptism—it’s the story of baptism.
Here we read that Jesus, prior to his public ministry receives the baptism of
John. It’s a moment of profound revelation—a true epiphany, as it were.
In this moment, the heavens are literally ripped open, and
the Holy Spirit descends. The voice of God the Father, then identifies Jesus as
the Son.
From this action we take our cue as the Church to participate
in this sign—this story which affirms Jesus as the Son of God.
For us, we enter the story as a people claiming some part in
the death of Jesus, but also being raised to new life with him, and with the
mark of the promise of resurrection. And while we, ourselves, are not affirmed
as the Christ at our baptism, we are all the same called children of God.
Just last week in our adult formation discussion, we talked
about how the three main parts of our sacramental life together can be simply
broken down into Word, Bath and Table. When bath and table are juxtaposed with word—they become baptism and
Eucharist. In other words, the signs and elements (the physical stuff like
water, bread and wine)find their meaning only in the context of God’s Word. So
these signs only take their meaning in so far as they’re connected with the
story of God.
Now, along with this idea of bath and table finding meaning
with word; we have this other concept that comes into play. Specifically, there
is in our tradition this concept of anamnesis.
As you can probably piece together by the word itself, it has to do with memory—and in this case it
literally means to “un-forget.”
How this relates to our tradition is that in our liturgy
there are places where we’re reminded to un-forget. So, for instance, in the
Eucharistic prayers, there are the places where Jesus says to take the Bread
and Wine in remembrance of him. But the term used here is anamnesis—this idea
that we don’t remember these things as some moment in the past. We don’t
play-act some historical moment. Instead we are commanded here to actually
bring to remembrance in a real way. There is this sense that what we do in the
Eucharist somehow actualizes this moment that Jesus shared with is friends.
Again, this story…
But if the action of calling into the present these moments
in the life of Jesus, and all of these other stories of God’s history with the
People of God weren’t enough to keep things interesting, there is still more.
Because what these remembrances—these sacraments offer us is
the ability to connect our own stories with the story of Jesus and the whole
grand story of God.
I know this is something that I’ve preached on before, but I
don’t think it can be undercut. After all the whole rationale and meaning for
our lives as Christians is the continual work of finding our place in the
world; finding meaning for that place that we find ourselves in; and more
importantly that our lives in that particular place mean something… And the way
that we come to realize this is by coming to understand and experience God’s
story. By participating in the sacraments—these vehicles for
anamnesis—un-forgetting the important points in God’s history with us, with
Jesus’ life with us; we see by these signs that God’s story in Christ
intersects ours in so many different ways. This is something that is so
fundamental to who we are as the Church that this Thrive retreat that Rob
Brennan, Bob Meehan and I attended worked at reminding us of it as necessary to
our continuing work to become a more vital church.
As individuals, there are points/parts of our lives that
match-up with those of others and more still which are common to the human
condition, and inevitably in our human story we connect. We do these things—these
sacraments, then—because there is an even broader story—not only a history, but
a story that we work at continually to remember that it is a story where ours
fits in.
We have different experiences, different paths that lead us
to these intersections of God’s story and our own.
Baptism, as an intersection, links us ever more so.
It draws our stories together with one another, to Christ and
to God. So that as the baptized Body of Christ, our stories, like ourselves,
are inter-connected. If we understand them in the context of God’s story, like
bath and table, they take on a sacramental quality.
Anamnesis of these stories then would mean that we understand
not only our own experiences as wholly redeemed in Christ, but ourselves, and
our lives as outward and visible signs of God’s grace in the world.
In this way, then we begin to see that the stories that we
rehearse week to week—the moments that we un-forget are not only select parts
of biblical narrative memorialized for our own edification. Instead these
become the connective tissue of the Body of Christ, because the story of God
and God’s People becomes our own.
And so if we
understand that through our lives and our actions, we’re called to incarnate
God’s story in Christ through our stories—I think we begin to see how very
powerful our stories really are; and we begin to recognize our own baptism as
the epiphany—the unforgotten revelation of God—that it truly is.
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