The Lectionary: The First Sunday After the Epiphany

What do we even do with baptism?

The Collect

Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Scripture

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

The Message

I’ve been baptized twice in my life. When I was an infant, I was baptized in an United Methodist church by my parents. I imagine whoever the minister was used the words from the United Methodist Book of Discipline:

“The Holy Spirit work within you,
that being born through water and the Spirit,
you may be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Then, as a teenager, I was baptized again, at the Church of Christ where I had found a youth group to be a part of, by my friend and mentor Alex, after a “mountain top” experience at summer camp in Colorado. Despite my theological disputes with that very conservative, very fundamentalist church today, I still look back at that occasion with great affection. It meant something to me to choose to be baptized.

I don’t really have a strong theology of baptism today. I struggled with what exactly to write about this week, as the lectionary is so heavily focused on the sacrament of baptism this week. Jesus’ baptism is the central focus of Epiphany in the Eastern church, as the moment when Jesus’ divinity was revealed to him, and to the world, by the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, and the words of God echoing in the foothills of the Jordan valley. What do we say about this moment?

I think I have such a hard time talking about baptism because of my journey in the Christian faith as an adult, from the Methodist church, into the Disciples of Christ, then into the UU, back to the Episcopal church with a strong interest in Anabaptist thought, and now settling at a UCC church where I am employed. Every single one of these traditions has a different take on baptism, but one thing all these more progressive churches share is a measured skepticism about the sacramental nature of baptism. The idea of baptism as the transformation of one’s body, from sin to eternal life, just doesn’t lend itself very well to a theology of doubt and disenchantment. If you deemphasize the reality of sin, and reduce focus on the need for redemption, and actively take a stance of not forcing people into steady church attendance, what are you left for baptism to mean?

I don’t have any answers to these questions. I present them here as open to progressive churches, for us to think about. What does baptism mean? Do we rework it for a liberal, postmodern theology? Or should we find a strong, non-toxic way to rethink the sin and rebirth side of baptism? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I’m pondering them today.