The Baptism of Christ.

By Marcus Ramshaw

A sermon preached at the Meditative Evening Eucharist on January 9^th 2005.

Many of us were baptized when we were children. We cannot remember the event though for our parents and godparents, for the priest who poured water upon our heads, for those standing round the font it was a powerful and profound moment. Each of them would have wondered what would become of us in life, what we would grow up to be, how the world would treat us and how we would respond in turn……

1. We were baptized in the name of the Father. The hopes and aspirations of others, can all to easily place us under the most extraordinary pressures in life. The pressure to be successful, to achieve, to be accepted by society’s own shallow values.

Our baptism in the name of the father reminds us that who we are cannot be defined by what we look like or what others think of us. Your value is not based on your accomplishments or failures. Your worth as a person can only be understood through God.

When you are baptized in the name of the father, you are baptized into the depths. You are baptized into the mysterious source of light and life, order and beauty. You will leave behind your bondage to surfaces, to shallowness forever. God promises that you will be alive to the mystery and wonder of your existence.

The deep into which you are baptized is what science cannot locate or name... A Chinese proverb calls this the world of the ten thousand things. The deep is the inexplicable relation between those things and their ineffable source. The Deep was the reason that Einstein said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

The Deep made Beethoven unsatisfied with the music of his parent's generation. It inspired the French Impressionist painters to blur surfaces. It is the reason why Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky could not stop writing about God. In the twentieth century the Deep aroused the imagination of particle physicists who struggled to find a language for their paradoxical discoveries. We look for the deep in cathedrals and in art galleries. Mother Theresa found it in the slums of Calcutta. Nelson Mandela found it in captivity.

2. We were baptized in the name of the Son. Although we meet very few people who seem to have an intimacy with the Deep, there is nothing really that revolutionary about it. God, or what I have been calling the Deep exists on its own, independent of our human weakness and frailty. We forget it in our efforts to impress others but we are never really offended by it. The Son offends.

The Son preaches, "Blessed are the poor in spirit… Blessed are those who mourn… Blessed are the meek… Blessed are those who are persecuted"

Jesus offends us because he teaches a truth that is much more difficult to accept. We insist that we cannot remain human and avoid suffering at the same time. Jesus was persecuted and suffered before you did. He made a study of the most desperate corners of our existence.

For Christians brokenness is not a goal that we ought to strive for. When Jesus says "Blessed are the poor in spirit," he is not suggesting that we should strive to be poor in spirit, only that God will not desert the people who are suffering the most. In baptism Jesus promises that we do not have to have a stiff-upper lip orientation to the world. Because of him we do not need to avoid or ignore or by will power transcend the reality of suffering and pain.

3. We were baptized in the name of the Spirit. Now we come to the remarkable thing. This message about the possibility of our intimacy with the deep, this confidence in the power of love to overcome suffering and brokenness will be conveyed to you girls by the most fragile and unreliable means possible - by individual people. People who are weak, sometimes cruel and irresponsible, people with giant egos, people who are sick and suffering will be the ones to tell you about Christ's love.

Look around at the people with you this evening. This is the church, your new Christian family. They are not much to look at and frankly, most of us are not really very good at being Christians. What we share in common is a trust in a few people who came before us and told us about the love of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This Christian message has always been a fragile thing. Two thousand years ago, under pressure from the Roman Empire, its light was almost extinguished, all of the copies of the Bible came close to being destroyed. The message, the hope, the light survived only through the efforts of fragile witnesses.

Through baptism in the Holy Spirit God calls you by name. Through baptism you become part of that imperfect community of saints called the Christian church. In it you will hear God speaking to you and one day you will help others to hear this call also. This evening we come to renew our baptismal vows, to assert our need and our dependence upon God to understand our world and that most mysterious aspect of it, ourselves, to assert that strength may come from our weaknesses and to assert that together we are committed to be part of a Church which is there for each and every one of us, in spite of our imperfections.