The Rev. Ann R. Lougee

January 8, 2006

Baptism Epiphany

Mark 1:4-11

This past Friday, December 6^th, was the day celebrated as Epiphany. Some people observe it as Little Christmas, a day when presents are to be given, as the Magi gave gifts to the Christ Child.

The focus story for Epiphany is Matthew’s account of the Magi finding the baby Jesus, led by a guiding star, and presenting their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. For the word "epiphany" means an appearance or manifestation of God, and in Matthew’s story the Magi see God manifest in the baby Jesus. White, like the star of their enlightenment, is the color, and light is the symbol, for the season of Epiphany, which lasts until Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent.

The wise men vanish after they’ve played their part in Matthew’s story. Did they become Christians, do you suppose? We have no record that they ever affiliated with the church or professed the faith. They seem to have gone home to continue their lives as scholars and astrologers.

We are told only that they went home by another way, deeply moved by what they had seen. They may not have joined a church or recited a creed, but they had experienced the Christ and "were overwhelmed with joy"and gave their gifts. What response could have been better?

They participated, after all, in the beginning of that great movement of Spirit that we call Christianity. Similarly, our goal, I believe, is not to be Christians, adherents of a particular religion, but rather to be Christian, to try to love God as Jesus did, while exuberantly rejoicing along with those wise men.

By tradition, the first Sunday after Epiphany always celebrates the grown-up Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan. In his baptism, Jesus too experiences an epiphany, a vision of God that shows him that he is beloved by his very human existence, by his very recognition of the source of his life and strength and spirit.

Jesus' baptism, unlike John's, was not just a washing away of sin. It also brought the power of the Holy Spirit, awareness of relationship with God - a relationship available to all regardless of sin or merit, age or status, "Jew" or "Gentile."

Another way to say this is that God's love embraces each of us, "just as I am, without one plea," as the old gospel song puts it. We can accept the recognition and welcome of the universe, of God, just as Jesus knew and experienced it.

Baptism for us is the ritual acknowledgment of this, the outward and visible sign of an already existing inward and invisible grace. The word "baptize" comes from the Greek verb baptein, meaning "to dip, steep, color." We might picture ourselves as Easter eggs being dyed. Just as an ounce of dye colors a gallon of water, so recognition of God's love for us colors, "dyes," our whole lives, imperfect though we remain.

Looking at the world through the eyes of baptism we see that everyone is a "beloved child." Sin is real, but grace and forgiveness are more real. They color our whole life. It is not because we have value that we are loved and accepted but because we are loved and accepted by virtue of our very being that we have value.

Of course, we know that while we might rejoice at receiving the gift of a check for a large sum of money, if we don't cash it it's still a good gift, but useless. If we don’t validate the check by cashing it and using it, we cut ourselves off from the value that in fact we've been given.

The same is true of our baptism. If we fail to validate it by letting its value into our lives, we cut ourselves off from it -- from the knowledge that we are valued sons and daughters of God. It’s not that God is not there for us, but that we’re not here for God.

I remember a story from the old days when all cars had bench seats in the front. A woman whose husband was the driver complained to him that they didn’t snuggle close together in the car anymore as they had done when they were first married. His answer, of course, was that he hadn’t moved – she had.

Similarly, if we are experiencing a distance from God, it isn’t God that’s gone anywhere. God is still the source and ground of our being, but we can go around in such oblivion that we move away from our connection with that source and ground, feeling cut off from God, experiencing only God’s absence. Everybody is spiritual, but a comfortable life makes it easy to forget our deeper nature, easy to ignore the subtle but profound movements of the spirit.

After his baptism, Jesus went off into the wilderness to discern what God’s will for his life was. There he rejected the identity of king or Superman, wonder-working hero or political savior.

When he returned from his desert meditations, he apparently no longer thought of himself as being only Jesus of Nazareth, the mortal personality. His baptism epiphany and his meditation brought him to a realization of his true Self as the Christ who lived within him as his inner experience of God as the ultimate ground of his being.

He taught that we all need to recognize God within ourselves, to identify our deepest Self with God and stop clinging to our merely mortal identities with all their attachments. He asked people to join him in the on-going process of ego abandonment and self-discovery, invited everyone to a beautiful and meaningful life.

Baptism and mission are joined in Jesus, in whom God's self-sharing love is seen to be the redemption of the world. This is the truth of baptism, that recognizing God's embrace of others as well as ourselves inspires mission, sends us into the world so that others too might know the love of God - the love that, as a popular song has it, "lifts us up where we belong."

That is, or should be, the mission of the church. We are here to enable ourselves and others to grasp our membership in a worldwide movement of God's Spirit, a movement begun by Jesus.

We should thus be able to find our unity in baptism and the inclusive welcome of God's love, not necessarily in agreement on all the other issues facing the church. Differences, after all, are not divisive when colored by the baptismal "dye" of God's love!

May the church be open to all who seek to know God and follow the way of love, no matter what language they use to describe it. May it be open to all who seek the kind of relationship with God that Jesus had, no matter how they sort out the myths from the facts of the Bible. May even those who follow a new and different way find a home in the church. Amen.