Baptism of the Lord — Andy James

Loving and Troubling Waters

January 10, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3:1-21
preached on January 10, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

You’ve gotta love John the Baptist. He bucks every trend in the book. His parents had so given up on having a child that his father directly questioned the messenger of God who brought this news and ended up mute for nine months. John himself took an old Jewish tradition of ritual washing and put new meaning on it by inviting people to venture out into the wilderness to repent and find forgiveness for their sins. He offered a message compelling enough to draw people out of the villages and cities to come hear him preach in the wilderness. And he managed to amass such a large group of followers that he still had a pretty big group left after calling them all a “brood of vipers” and suggesting that they were trees who would be cut down if they did not bear good fruit.

The people left behind took his words seriously and asked him what this repentance would look like in their lives. First, the told the general crowds that they should share from their abundance with those who are in need. Then, he instructed the tax collectors to be fair in their collections. Finally, when soldiers came, John told them to end extortion, treat people fairly, and be satisfied with their wages. People clearly thought that John was something important—they were “filled with expectation” and “questioning in their hearts concerning John”—but they couldn’t tell what he was really up to. Had he come to offer a new prophecy for their new time and their new challenges as a people under Roman rule? Had he come to lead a political rebellion against these strange overlords? Or had he come to be the Messiah, blending these political and religious roles to guide them out of this terrible morass and save them from all the difficulty that was before them?

According to Luke, John did not see himself as the Messiah. In his view, his baptism and his message were surely important, but there was something more coming up ahead:

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.

John’s message was unmistakable—the old way of doing things that benefited only a few had to be set aside, and a new way of living had to emerge. Some would find hope in this new day, especially those who had little hope in the present, but others would find this new path far more challenging, with their power and privilege drawn into question along the way. This message had immediate and real consequences for John. There were some who were truly threatened by this way of life, and so the puppet king Herod threw John into prison because he had condemned several of Herod’s actions.

But somewhere along the way, it seems that John the Baptist had encountered Jesus. While all four gospels record an encounter between these two figures of renewal, our reading from Luke this morning is very vague about exactly what happened. “When all the people were baptized,” Jesus also “had been baptized.” Somehow Jesus was brought into John’s tradition, following in the footsteps of this one who had come “crying out in the wilderness” preparing the way of the Lord, offering himself to receive this baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and claiming this connection with John and his troubling words at the beginning of his own ministry.

But we don’t usually think of baptism as in any way troubling. The brutal honesty of John the Baptist at the Jordan River in this reading is usually eclipsed at our modern-day baptismal font by a beautiful baby and smiling parents. These are generally not people that we would think of as a brood of vipers! Based on my conversations with them over the years, parents presenting their children for baptism are usually not concerned that their child needs to flee from any wrath ahead. And when approach baptism, we generally do not worry that we must bear good fruit or face the threat of being thrown into the fire. The troubling words of John the Baptist at the Jordan are likely replaced with something more like the gentle and hopeful words of the prophet Isaiah when we gather at the font:

Thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name,
you are mine.

When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;

and through the rivers,
they shall not overwhelm you;

when you walk through fire
you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.

Surprisingly, in this case it is the Old Testament that gives us comfort and the New Testament that strikes fear into our bones!

But this strange mix of loving and troubling words is probably the most faithful thing we can carry when we come to the waters of baptism. There is great love revealed to us in these waters, the love of one who welcomes us no matter who we are, the love of one who stays with us when we feel like we are being overwhelmed, the love of one who gathers us in to show us the pathway to new life. But this great love also shows us that we have responsibility, too—responsibility to set aside the things that might get in the way of us embracing the fullness of this love, responsibility to care for those others who journey with us on this way, even if they do not venture into these waters themselves, even responsibility to examine ourselves to find ways that we can bear greater fruit as we follow the example of Jesus through these waters into new life.

Every time we approach these waters, we must carry all these words with us. Whether we come to the font to be baptized or to reaffirm the promises of the baptismal covenant, we are asked to reject sin, profess our faith in Christ Jesus, and confess the faith of the church, to honor John’s challenging words as we embrace his call to repentance and new life. But then we are even more reminded that these waters are a gift to us, a place that shows us how we are created for God’s glory, an opportunity to experience everything that we need to go forth in justice, love, and peace. These loving and troubling waters remind us of the depth and breadth of God’s care for us and presence with us and the real call and challenge that God gives us as we respond to all that we have received. And these loving and troubling waters express the deep wonder of God’s gifts to us, gifts that remind us that God loves us so much that God is not satisfied with the way things are now, gifts that invite us to respond to God’s love in our lives by joining in the transformation of our troubled world.

So as we reaffirm the promises of the baptismal covenant and remember our baptism today, may we experience God’s grace and mercy in these loving and troubling waters as we are assured of God’s love for us and empowered to join in God’s transformation of our broken and fearful world until Christ comes to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

Over the Face of the Waters

January 11, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 1:1-5 and Mark 1:4-14
preached on January 11, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Beginnings are important moments. How you tell the beginning of a story changes how the rest of it is heard. If I start with “Once upon a time,” it will be really hard for you to hear anything I say as much more than a fairy tale. If I start with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” you’ll expect me to launch into Charles Dickens. And if I start with “So-and-so was born on such-and-such date,” then you’ll be ready for me to give you a full biography.

The beginnings of moments in our lives are important, too. First impressions can make a huge difference in how we interact with one another over the long term. The first time we do something, we set a pattern for how it is done that is often very hard to shake later on. And more and more we are learning how the things we do in the earliest months and years of our lives make a difference throughout all our days.

So today, our texts point us to two beginnings in the Bible—first the beginning of the beginning, the opening words of Genesis that tell of God’s creation of the world, and then the beginning of the story of Jesus, the dramatic shift of a relatively ordinary guy from a relatively ordinary town in the backwaters of the Roman empire to being the one who proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of God and was executed for doing so. More than anything, these beginnings set the stage for how the rest of the story is told and heard, and we do well to let them shape our thinking and understanding of everything that follows.

The beginning of the creation story in Genesis sets the stage for the rest of the Bible. This story seems far less concerned with the exact details or process of creation and far more concerned with making it clear that God is at work in all of it. In this beginning, God creates light where there was none, the first step in the process of transforming the formless void of the earth into something new. And that is the real point of this beginning, to show how God acts to make something out of nothing, how God is in the business of transformation from the very beginning, how the world begins when the voice of God sweeps over the face of the waters.

And so the beginning of the story of Jesus in Mark also sets the stage for everything else that follows in the story of Jesus’ life. This beginning is much like the beginning of Genesis, as both point us to the transformative power of God that becomes so very clear when the voice of God sweeps over the face of the waters.

As he begins his story, Mark skips over so much of the stuff that we usually associate with the beginning of the Jesus story. There’s no mention of angels, shepherds, kings, or even Mary and Joseph. Jesus’ background and upbringing are unimportant and perhaps even distracting to Mark’s version of this story. Instead, in Mark’s telling, Jesus just sort of appears out of nowhere to be baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. John himself had just appeared in the wilderness to proclaim a message of baptism for the forgiveness of sins. People quickly identified him as a prophet, but John knew that his biggest role was to point forward to another who was still to come:

The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

And so when Jesus was baptized by John, God’s transformative power was revealed once again. The heavens were torn apart, and the Spirit descended like a dove upon Jesus. Then a voice moved over the face of the waters, announcing to Jesus,

You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Jesus’ beginning was not quite over yet, either. After a brief interlude of forty days of temptation in the wilderness that we’ll hear more about in a few weeks, Mark continues setting the stage for everything else in his story of Jesus. “After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God,” bringing a message of transformation:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

As the one whom John said was coming after him, Jesus took John’s message of repentance one step further. There was more than an individual change of heart going on here—God’s transformative power was coming into its fullness in Jesus’ presence, and everyone was called to join in. All this became clear for Jesus in the waters of his baptism, in that moment when John held him under waters of the muddy Jordan River to symbolize repentance and new life. It was then, as he came up out of the water, that all the dots of his life connected for the first time. When Jesus experienced the heavens torn apart, the Spirit descending like a dove upon him, and a voice proclaiming his identity once and for all, he understood his mission and call in a new and complete way. This was not a total surprise to him, but as that voice called out over the face of those waters, he entered fully and completely into the work of fulfilling the time and embodying the kingdom of God.

In the waters of our baptism, we see much the same thing emerging around us. There is certainly nothing magical in those waters even as they mark the beginning of our lives of faith, and we are very unlikely to have a vision of heavens torn apart and a dive-bombing Spirit dove, let alone a heavenly voice offering a loud and clear declaration of our beloved status. But when our very human voices move over these waters to affirm the vows of repentance and new life for ourselves and to pray for God’s presence, the heavens are torn apart as God joins us here, the Spirit descends upon us to seal God’s love and grace upon us in a new and different way, and a voice moves over the waters to tell us that we too are beloved children of God. And so we too are called with Jesus to join in fulfilling the time and embodying the kingdom of God.

From his baptism, as the voice moved over those waters, Jesus was called to live this kind of life of transformation, to declare and embody God’s reign. This was not an entirely new thing. Jesus followed after a long line of those who had prepared the way. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Miriam, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and countless other women and men carried God’s message across the generations. And Jesus followed very much in the footsteps of John the Baptist and even other similar, now-unknown prophets of his own day who were setting the stage for this message and this life. From the beginning, Jesus was called to proclaim and live the fullness of God’s new thing that already had been taking hold for generations, guiding others to the light of this new day so that they too could live in justice, peace, love, hope, and grace each and every day.

And so we also are called by the voice of God over the waters of our baptism to live lives of transformation as we declare and embody God’s reign in our lives and our world. We too follow in a long line of prophets and saints who have gone before us to prepare the way and make it clear that we are not doing this all alone. We too have companions on this journey who set the stage for the message and life of transformation that stand at the center of the coming reign of God. And ultimately, as our story begins at this font, we too are called to proclaim and live the fullness of God’s new thing that had been taking hold for generations, guiding others to the light of this new day so that they too could live in justice, peace, love, hope, and grace each and every day.

So today as we remember Jesus’ baptism and reaffirm the promises made in our own baptisms, may God’s voice move over these waters once again to remind us that we are God’s beloved children and to encourage us to continue proclaiming and living the reign of God until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Gift and Challenge of Baptism

January 12, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 10:34-43 and Matthew 3:13-17
preached on January 12, 2014 (Baptism of the Lord), at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I think Baptism of the Lord Sunday that we celebrate today is simultaneously one of the most important Sundays of the church year—and one of the most difficult to explain and figure out. All four gospels tell a story about Jesus meeting up with John the Baptist—that’s two more than that talk about his birth!—so this event that we celebrate today had to be pretty important to the early church, but what does it mean for us today anyway?

The story itself is challenging enough, really. First of all, as Matthew tells the story of Jesus, his baptism is a bit jarring. We move directly, without interlude, from Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, his exile in Egypt to escape the evil King Herod, and formative years with his parents in Nazareth to this strange scene with a bizarre messenger named John washing people in a muddy stream. There’s no real transition here—no story of the boy or young man Jesus, no tales of his exploits working in his dad’s carpentry shop in Nazareth, not even the familiar tale from Luke’s gospel where a twelve-year-old Jesus stays behind talking to the scholars at the temple while his parents head back home.

We skip nearly thirty years of Jesus’ life—and then move into a story that just doesn’t always make sense. When Jesus shows up at the Jordan River and asks John the Baptist to baptize him, I find myself asking much the same question that we heard John ask in our reading this morning: Why?? Why does Jesus of all people need to be baptized? To even start thinking about this means that we have to think a bit about what this baptism means. The baptism that John offered in those days had a considerably different meaning and understanding than the baptism we celebrate in the church. For us, baptism is a sign and seal of God’s grace, a mark of how much God loves us and how we are welcomed into the community of faith and a reminder of our cleansing from sin that comes in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For John the Baptist, though, baptism was a ritual washing following on long-standing Jewish tradition that was a public and visible mark of a personal commitment to repentance and a different way of life.

Why would Jesus need to do this? We certainly understand him to be without sin, fully human and fully divine, from the beginning of his life following in God’s way, so there seems to be little point for him to make this statement of his commitment to a new and different way. John was the first to ask this perfectly reasonable question—he knew who Jesus was, and he knew that God had great things in store for this one who would follow him to open the pathway of new life. Yet Jesus approached John and asked him for this moment of blessing, telling him that it needed to happen in order “to fulfill all righteousness” and to make space for the new thing ahead for him.

Once John finally agreed to baptize Jesus, the story actually gets even more strange and wonderful. After Jesus’ baptism, God’s presence was made abundantly clear.

When Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

Ultimately this was a big deal, bigger than even Jesus himself had even thought. While he had gone to John knowing that this baptism was the right thing to do, in this moment he found a much deeper encounter with God than he had ever expected. As the heavens opened, the Spirit flew down like a dove, and a voice thundered from the cloud, Jesus found the confirmation that he needed to step out into something new, the affirmation of his ministry that he had been waiting for before beginning his work in public, the great proclamation of God’s love for him and God’s call upon his life that would define the days ahead in his life and ministry. Now it’s not clear from Matthew’s telling here if anyone else even heard or saw any of this—“the heavens were opened to him” and “he saw the Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him”—but it is clear that in this moment something happened for Jesus that he would never be able to forget.

For us, baptism should be this same sort of of unforgettable moment even though so many of us experience it at a time when we can’t remember anything. Just as Jesus did, in our baptisms we see the depth of God’s love for us combined with the breadth of God’s call upon our lives. In our baptisms, we see a sign and a seal of God’s grace that gives us the strength and the encouragement to walk with Jesus each and every day. In our baptisms, we receive the inspiration we need to not only speak about our strange encounters with God like this one but also to respond with actions that “fulfill all righteousness” in the world as Jesus did. And in our baptisms, we get a little glimpse of the new and different and wonderful world that God offers us, much like what Peter described in our reading from Acts today, where “God shows no partiality,” where all are welcome to the fullness of life made possible in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and where God’s grace is so abundant that “in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to [God].”

The incredible gift of baptism comes not even so much in its initial moment but in the ways in which this sacrament that we can only receive once can renew us and restore us time and time again. It doesn’t make sense, really. A small amount of water applied once in life ought not to make that much difference, right? Even if we participate in the tradition of baptism by immersion, how can a near-drowning change things for us? This is why words are so difficult to find for this story—ultimately baptism (and the Lord’s Supper too, both sacraments) is something that cannot be explained, but it instead must be experienced. The meaning of these things comes not in the theoretical concepts behind them but in the personal and communal encounter with God that come to us in them. When we think and talk about baptism, ultimately words and understanding will escape us, but somehow we know and we trust that God is somehow present in this strange and wonderful moment, transforming us and our world.

But as much as we can’t understand our baptism, we can never forget it, either. It makes us new people by water and the Spirit. It confirms the wondrous grace of God in our lives. And it challenges us to help others make their way to this place so that they can know the grace, mercy, justice, and peace of God and join us in working to make these things more real for all God’s children everywhere. So today, as we reaffirm the promises of our baptism in the past or look ahead to a future encounter with God in these strange and wonderful waters, may we always remember that in these waters we meet Christ himself, we go where he first went, we find the love that he offers us poured out in great and wondrous abundance, and we share that grace and mercy and peace with our world each and every day until he comes again. So remember your baptism, and be thankful, each and every day. Alleluia! Amen.

A New Beginning

January 13, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3:15-17, 21-23 for Baptism of the Lord Sunday
preached on January 13, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Sometimes you just have to go back to the beginning. In the midst of our very complicated and complex world, it is easy to forget where we began. In the face of changing times and places, we can easily end up someplace that isn’t where we intended to be—and that just isn’t faithful to to the original intentions of our journey. So sometimes we need to remember where it all began and do what we can do to reclaim that beginning once again.

For us as Christians, going back to the beginning means going back to baptism. Now baptism may not actually be the beginning of the story for us—just like Jesus, all of us lived some part of our lives before we were baptized, and some of us may have even begun our Christian lives before our baptisms—but baptism is the official, formal mark of new beginning for us as Christians, the time when we see how God claims us and makes us new, the moment when we are given a sign and seal of how we are made one with Christ in his death and resurrection. So when we think of Jesus’ baptism as we do today, we go back to the beginning of our stories and remember our lives of faith as we remember how the beginning of Jesus’ story in his baptism connects to the beginning of our story in our baptism.

Each of the gospels tells this story of Jesus’ baptism, but the version we heard from Luke this morning is a little different. First, unlike any of the other tellings of Jesus’ baptism, Luke puts this story much later in his narrative of Jesus’ life because of the detail he offers about Jesus’ birth and childhood. Like many of us, then, the Jesus of Luke’s gospel has some history of life and even of faith before he is baptized, so this moment in the water is the culmination of many things that come before it even as it suggests an incredible journey ahead.

But even with this extra detail on the front end, Luke brings the story in line with all the other accounts of Jesus’ baptism by dealing with John the Baptist. Based on the amount of attention that John gets at the beginning of the gospel story, John must have been important to early Christians, and most scholars think that John’s followers were around for quite a while after his death. But John’s message is not easily appreciated these days. He didn’t have much positive to say to anyone and demanded repentance from everyone. He attracted a lot of followers, but I’m not quite sure how. John’s first words according to Luke don’t exactly make people welcome. Would you appreciate being called first “You brood of vipers!”?! Even so, many of his first listeners wondered out loud if he was the Messiah, but John made it clear that there was something and someone greater on the way.

But Luke’s story does make John seem a little different. Only Luke tells us that John and Jesus were relatives of some sort, most likely distant cousins. But Luke also notes that John was put in prison by Herod before he tells us that Jesus had been baptized by him. This all happened in the two verses that were left out of our lectionary reading this morning, because it doesn’t make for particularly good storytelling and complicates an easy passage from John to Jesus. According to Luke, then, Jesus was baptized along with others in the crowd, but strangely enough Luke doesn’t directly identify John as the one who did it.

Amidst all these interesting twists in Luke’s telling of Jesus’ baptism, what really seems to matter here for us as we consider our own baptisms is not who did the the baptizing or the proper order of the story but what happened after Jesus’ baptism. First, after Jesus was baptized, “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” What a dramatic moment for Jesus, to have this clear appearance of God in his life at the very beginning of his ministry! Now I suspect that our baptisms were considerably less dramatic than this one, but even so, the Holy Spirit was present and active in our baptisms, too. And just as Luke gets John the Baptist out of the picture of Jesus’ baptism, so it should be with us too, for in the end, God is the primary agent in baptism for Jesus and for us. Baptism is not about the pastor or priest who applies the water, the denomination in which the sacrament is celebrated, the amount of water involved, or even the time in life when it happens—baptism is about how God breaks into our world and steps into our lives to mark us and claim us as God’s own even with a little bit of water.

But after this movement of the Holy Spirit, Jesus heard a voice from God: “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Even though he surely knew it beforehand, Jesus’ baptism showed him once again who he was and gave him the strength and hope to face the challenges of the journey ahead. And so it is with our baptisms, too. Just as Jesus began his life of ministry with this assurance of love and grace from God, so we too begin our lives as Christians with the sign and seal of water that shows us that God loves us. Just as God’s claim and call on Jesus’ life was made clear in these words, so we in our baptisms also learn that God claims us and calls us to walk in new life. And just as Jesus found strength and hope in this moment at the beginning of a long and difficult ministry that would eventually lead to nothing less than his death, so we emerge from the waters of our baptisms with the confidence that we are God’s beloved children who are called out of the water and sent into the world to join in what God is already doing to make us and all things new.

In our baptism, just like Jesus, we hear the words of the prophet Isaiah loud and clear, directed at us:

Don’t fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are mine.

When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;

when [you go] through the rivers,
they won’t sweep over you.

When you walk through the fire,
you won’t be scorched
and flame won’t burn you.

I am the Lord your God,
the holy one of Israel, your savior.

Because you are precious in my eyes,
you are honored, and I love you.

I give people in your place,
and nations in exchange for your life.

These are powerful words, worthy of the power of baptism that begins the Christian life. We rarely realize it when we stand at this font at whatever age, but the waters in this bowl are far more powerful than even the strongest waves of Hurricane Sandy. We hesitate to affirm it when we welcome our children into our common life with this sacrament, but even the smallest bit of water on our heads in baptism means that we no longer belong to ourselves, to our families, or even to our church—but to God. And we may not always recognize it or remember it, but God’s claim on us in baptism never leaves us. We can do nothing to wash off this indelible mark. Even when we try our best to deny God’s place in our world or God’s claim on our lives, baptism shows us that “God loves us too deeply and too completely to ever let us go.”

And so as we remember and celebrate the baptism of Jesus today, moving from a season of celebrating his birth into more ordinary days, may the baptism of Jesus remind us of our own baptisms, of our beginnings in this life of faith, where we are claimed as God’s own forever and shown that God will go with us through the waters, the rivers, the fire, and everything else that is before us. And so today may we go forth sustained by this unforgettable sign and seal, remembering our beginnings once again, living out this unconditional love from God as we live with others and make it clear to everyone we meet that they too are claimed and loved by God now and always.

So remember you baptism, your beginning, and be thankful, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Ordinary and Extraordinary

January 8, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 2:1-12 and Mark 1:4-11
preached on January 8, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The magi had seen it all before. They had been on these kinds of journeys to other nations when they had seen other stars that indicated the birth of new rulers, so they knew something of what to expect. When they got to Jerusalem, though, things started to look a little different. Even though they had seen the star of the birth of the king of the Jews, the current king could tell them nothing. He had not had a new son recently, and the people around him became very worried when these wise men suggested that there might be some unknown heir to his throne.

But eventually, some of the court advisors sent them on their way to Bethlehem, where some ancient texts suggested a king might be born. There was no palace to be their guiding landmark in this small town, but the star that had begun their journey continued to guide them to the home of a newborn boy in Bethlehem. When they arrived, their familiar routine kicked right in. They kneeled down before the child to pay him homage and offered him their royal gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It was all very ordinary, but something about it was truly extraordinary – somehow these magi from another land knew that this little child whose birth had been missed by almost everyone would be far more important than anyone could ever imagine.

John the Baptist had seen it all before, too. People had been lining up to listen to his call to repentance for quite some time. Throughout his ministry in the wilderness, people were wondering and asking if he was the one that people had been waiting for, and repeatedly he responded that someone else was coming with greater power to do even greater things. John’s days were surely quite repetitive, with crowds gathering by the Jordan River, ready to listen to his message and be baptized in repentance for their sins.

But one day amidst the crowds, Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee made his way into the water to be baptized. John baptized him like everyone else, but then something strange happened. The heavens were torn apart, and the Spirit descended like a dove onto Jesus. Then, a voice followed: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” In the midst of an ordinary day, something extraordinary happened – a faithful, penitent man who had traveled many miles to hear and respond to John’s proclamation received a word far beyond his wildest dreams as he moved into the next phase of his life.

We’ve seen it all before, too. We know about the strange men who came from far away to visit Jesus when he was young, and we know that Jesus began his public ministry in an encounter with John the Baptist. We’re probably more used to the other story of Jesus’ birth in a manger and the visit of the shepherds, and we’re probably more comfortable with other manifestations of divine power that came later in his ministry. So all too often, we set these stories aside, assuming that there is little for us to learn here or that we already have everything we will need from them.

We’re people who have seen it all before. Someone in our culture gets a great idea – then everyone else copies it and exploits it so that we’re all sick and tired of it. Think about American Idol or Survivor or most any successful television show of the past few years! “We’ve seen it all before,” we mutter. The life of faith seems to be on endless repeat, with little need to engage things in a new and different way and no time and space to connect to the community that shapes and remakes us. “I already know everything I need to know – there’s nothing new still out there,” we say. “I can do the rest on my own.” The world seems to be on endless repeat, with nothing new coming into being and nothing true worth exploring. How many times do we drive past the same places day after day, never noticing the new things around us? How often do we see only the people we have always seen before when we look around our neighborhood? How long will it take for us to notice that things are different, that the world is not what it once was?

The Epiphany and the Baptism of Jesus that we celebrate today remind us that we must be open to seeing things anew. We cannot simply expect to make it today with only what we have seen and experienced before. We need the wisdom of this time and this moment to flourish, the vision of a new time and place to help us see the fullness of things here and now. Amazingly, these stories tell us that we don’t really have to look that hard to find what is new. The new things here lie not in the revolutionary moments but in the ordinary ones. The extraordinary is seen here in the ordinary.

In our life together in this congregation, there is much new that lies ahead for us in the coming year. We are finally putting the uncertainty of litigation behind us, and in the coming months we will complete the sale of the manse, the purchase of an apartment, and the construction of an office here at the church. But even this is not everything that lies ahead for us. These short-term changes are only a glimpse of the bigger things that can shift in our life together in the coming years. As our world and our city and our neighborhood changes, we must keep our eyes open to discover and participate in the bigger vision that God is opening before us in these days. We can start to glimpse a new and different way of life together that embraces the best of who we are and remains sustainable for the resources we have in these days. And we can hone our eyes and ears and all our senses to watch for the ordinary to suddenly become extraordinary – not by anything that we do but by the wonder and power of God at work in our midst.

This way of life is not easy. We don’t naturally see the extraordinary in the ordinary of our world, but today even as we worship we have a chance to practice this way of seeing and being. Today we remember how the common, ordinary waters of baptism touch our heads and become the sign and seal of God’s presence in our midst. And today we gather at this table where a small portion of bread and grape juice mysteriously become the full presence of God in our lives and our world. As we share these incredible moments of God’s presence in our midst, we can practice seeing things differently even as we trust that God can do incredible things and be truly present in the midst of the most routine, mundane things of our lives.

So even when we’ve seen it all before, may the ordinary become extraordinary for us, in our daily lives but especially in this place, for in those moments we might just see God in our midst and have a chance to follow where God is leading us and all the world as all things are made new. Amen.