postID: 7062; title: The Second Sunday of Christmas
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The Second Sunday of Christmas
O God, who didst wonderfully create, and yet more wonderfully restore, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, thy Son Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Array
(
[date] => 2007-01-07 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 592
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2007-01-07 11:00:00
)
2 post(s) found for dateStr : 2007-01-07postID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7062; date_type: variable; year: 2007
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7062
displayDates for postID: 7062/year: 2007
Array
(
[0] => 2007-01-07
)
postPriority: 3postID: 60391 (The First Sunday After The Epiphany)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 60391; date_type: variable; year: 2007
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 60391
displayDates for postID: 60391/year: 2007
Array
(
[0] => 2007-01-07
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2007-01-07 with ID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
The Second Sunday of Christmas
Array
(
[date] => 2007-01-07 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 592
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2007-01-07 11:00:00
)
2 post(s) found for dateStr : 2007-01-07postID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7062; date_type: variable; year: 2007
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7062
displayDates for postID: 7062/year: 2007
Array
(
[0] => 2007-01-07
)
postPriority: 3postID: 60391 (The First Sunday After The Epiphany)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 60391; date_type: variable; year: 2007
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 60391
displayDates for postID: 60391/year: 2007
Array
(
[0] => 2007-01-07
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2007-01-07 with ID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
The reading_id [73330] is already in the array.
reading found matching title 'Acts 10:34-38' with ID: 73103
The reading_id [73103] is already in the array.
reading found matching title 'Luke 3:15-16, 21-22' with ID: 73525
The reading_id [73525] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): Isaiah 42:1-9; Acts 10:34-38; Luke 3:15-16, 21-22
A Sermon by
Fr. Stafford
on
Isaiah 42:1-9; Acts 10:34-38; Luke 3:15-16, 21-22
✛
A Sermon for the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord
Array
(
[0] => 60725
[1] => 60759
[2] => 60757
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60725
)
] (reading_id: 73330)bbook_id: 60725
The bbook_id [60725] is already in the array.
book: [Array ( [0] => 60759 ) ] (reading_id: 73103)
bbook_id: 60759
The bbook_id [60759] is already in the array.
book: [Array ( [0] => 60757 ) ] (reading_id: 73525)
bbook_id: 60757
The bbook_id [60757] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
“…Heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him…” (Luke 3.21)
Today, we celebrate the beautiful and mystical feast of the Baptism of our Lord. It is an event the Church places on its calendar immediately within this season of Epiphany; Christ’s baptism being foremost in a series of unique manifestations/unveilings revealing him to be the Messiah. This feast day is especially observed and celebrated in the Eastern Church and more quietly commemorated in the West. In either case, the Baptism of our Lord is one of those unique occasions, recorded in Scripture, containing a little bit of everything; a theological smorgasbord, richly laden with themes of death and resurrection, judgment and pardon, surrender and victory. Therefore, today has much in common with the Feast of the Incarnation, to which it is theologically linked. And, as I shall develop with you, to the Feast of the Resurrection, to which it is also theologically linked.
[Now, let me digress a moment to say I must be in the midst of some as of yet unarticulated New Year’s resolution or late career change, either of which is designed to overturn nearly three decades of discipline, but like my last time in this pulpit, there will be today no three points, no summary, and no concluding three actions. This will relieve some of you and will disappoint others. Fair warning; here goes!]
The author of our Gospel account today is Luke, who writes in the early years of the ninth decade of the first century, about sixty years after the death of Christ. Most likely he was a gentile convert to Judaism. He was not an eyewitness to the Baptism he records, so what we read today is not simply literal event or scientific report. Luke, instead, is setting forth a theology, an important one, telling us something about God and our relationship to Him and to one another. In so doing, he mixes both fact and fiction/symbol in the Jewish teaching tradition known as the midrash, whereby a certain suspension of belief is required, as literal truth is super ceded by theological truth hidden in the magical story. Like Luke’s authorship of the nativity narrative of Christmastide, the record of the Baptism of Jesus is steeped in Jewish messianic thought. As Christians of the twenty-first century, we need to remember that our Gospels are essentially Jewish documents, written by Jews, and grounded in ancient, Jewish tradition and theology. Hence, we need to grasp this essential Jewish-ness if we are to understand the truth and point of what is being told and conveyed to readers, such as ourselves, two millennia later.
A Jew of the first century, upon reading/hearing today’s account from Luke, would immediately call to mind words from the Prophet Isaiah; the same words of our first reading this morning (42.1-9), telling of a mysterious and unidentified servant of the Lord upon whom God’s Spirit is given, an anointed one; whose purpose is to bring judgment upon the nations of the earth. He is to suffer for righteousness and truth, and in so doing, he is to renew the covenant of faithfulness established by God with His Chosen People. The Suffering Servant, as he is known, also, is destined to establish and reveal a new time/a renewed creation, the kingdom of heaven; where fear, violence, and death, the ways of ordering and sustaining the kingdom of this world are subsumed/overturned/ended. “Sing unto the Lord, a new Song…” says Isaiah (42.10), to mark the advent of a final age of the victory of God’s righteousness and power, the long awaited reign of the kingdom of heaven; a song and reign Luke echoes in his nativity narrative, the angel multitude, announcing Christ’s birth with “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men” (Lu 2.14); a new song proclaiming God’s kingdom come, an apocalyptic/final age of peace and mercy.
Luke, at the baptism of Jesus, is calling upon the reader – us – to see Jesus in Isaiah’s context of the Suffering Servant; the King of Peace, a messianic promise and prophecy fulfilled. Jesus, Luke is telling us, is the Christ, mashiach, the anointed one, the realization of the saving action of God in history. And, as such, this Servant brings and is also God’s new song, a song of awakening set upon the hearts and lips of the faithful now being gathered into God’s kingdom come in a final, apocalyptic age that will ultimately reveal God’s peace and mercy, God’s judgment.
Lest there be any confusion about this good news of the final age and victorious triumph of the Lord God of Israel, Luke employs some dynamic, magical imagery; for example, the voice from heaven and the Holy Spirit. Let us look first at the Holy Spirit; portrayed in today’s Gospel in the form of a bird, an image or icon we all immediately recognize. This is not the first time we have encountered the Holy Spirit in Luke. Remember back, if you will, to the nativity narrative, where the Holy Spirit is central to the events of the Incarnation. To a Jew, the Holy Spirit is the life-giving breath (ruach) of God that blew upon the primordial waters of creation (Gen 1.2). So, where the Spirit is found or deployed in Scripture, we have an indicator that we are also in the realm of a Jewish creation story. This tells us how to read Luke this morning.
The Evangelist is saying that both at his birth and at his baptism, Jesus is part-of or the bringer-of God’s new creation. First conceived at the Incarnation and now anointed at his baptism by the Holy Spirit, mashiach is amongst us as savior and redeemer of God’s People. Luke’s implication to the reader/hearer of his Gospel is that salvation and redemption are now offered to each and all in a new and eternal age (eschaton) coming amongst God’s People!
This good news applies to us. What Jesus does in the waters of the Jordan today, Jesus does, once and for all time, for each and for all. Luke is telling us that God has taken flesh, so that what is temporal may become eternal, transformed when it is brought/raised unto the Father’s presence. In other words, Jesus is not simply a singular individual: he is also the world, you and me, and he is all time – past, present, and future. And, therefore, the baptism of this unique individual, both Son of Man and Son of God, has profound consequences, because Jesus is taking all that ever has been, all that is, and ever will be into the Jordan with him. Hidden in the waters is something extra-ordinary, for such are the ways of God, says Luke, as we recall him stating in the birth narrative, “for with God nothing shall be impossible” (1.37). And, this extraordinary something is the miraculous grace/power of the Father to transform, renew, and recreate. Jesus at his baptism, because he is the Son of Man, the love of God incarnate, is making the moment ours as well as his; is making the temporal eternal; is making of this world something heretofore it is not, as he brings the whole “shooting match” of existence, time, and human identity into his Father’s presence, where like bread and wine at the eucharistic table, what is real becomes something greater than what we see; for now we are in the realm of mystery, where truth in these occasions is revealed not in literal fact or scientific analysis but through the lens of faith, the eyes of one’s heart.
Furthermore, approaching today’s Gospel, a Jew of the first century would be keenly aware of the image and use of water in Scripture. He would read into this account, as is Luke’s intent, something essential and unique to the story of Judaism. And, that would be the Passover/Exodus; God leading the People Israel from death in Egypt through the Red Sea to the Promised Land. Jesus at his Baptism, in Luke’s theology, is the New Passover, the one in whom the Spirit of God rests for the salvation of the renewed People Israel. Like Moses, Jesus, who shares/carries our identity, is leading and taking us, a chosen people, into the cleansing waters of salvation and redemption, with him, as we travel hereon a new exile, his dying and rising in the Jordan water, being also our death to sin and transformation to new/eternal life, a pattern sacramental in our own baptism, making of us children of God and heirs of eternal life. And, isn’t this also the story of the cross of Christ, his death being our captivity to fear, violence, and death and also our pardon and entrance unto eternal life by the blood of Jesus, the perfect Lamb of the Passover? – baptism, death, and resurrection now inexorably linked in what Luke is presenting as a renewed Judaism, founded in the mystery of the love of God by the self-offering/self-giving messianic one, the Christ, who gives himself for the world, at baptism and the Cross, that all might come to believe.
Lest there be any confusion as to the identity of Jesus as both human and divine, and his messianic role and purpose in creation history, Luke, lifting a line from the Evangelist Mark, who writes in the year sixty, tells us that at the baptism, the heavens opened, and a voice proclaimed, “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased’” (Lu3.21-22), dramatic words a devout Jew would recognize as something appropriated from the Psalmist (2.7) and deployed to provide confirmation of the status of divine favor and identity now resting on Jesus, the Christ, the anointed one of God.
Yet, there is something more in this pivotal declaration, something that applies to us. Both Luke and Mark intend us to see the delight of the Father in His Son. The words are a revelation of something more than a feeling. God is not a feeling, not an emotion. The words, I think, reveal God’s essence; the joy that is ultimately our beginning and our destination, our home with God; the divine expression of love and acceptance, God’s yes and touch that are beyond definition; a graciousness/hospitality extending to us by the Incarnation and the Baptism and the Cross of Jesus. Yes is the Holy Spirit! Yes is God’s word and promise to us! And, to Jesus – Messiah/Christ – Yes Incarnate, Luke invites us to surrender, that we too come to experience and know the delight/touch of God; that we also might live lives that witness to the power of the Holy Spirit; lives of love/hope/joy in a world dependent on fear, violence, and death, a world now ending.
Furthermore, as with the nativity narrative, Luke calls forth the difference between John and Jesus, Jesus again being established as being the greater, for the baptism of Jesus will bring the Holy Ghost and fire, an image Luke intends as both the refining fire of judgment and the flame of God’s transforming power, a theme which he will later develop in the renewing fire of Pentecost in his Acts of the Apostles (chapter 2). Yet, in spite of our Lord’s greatness, it is to John that Jesus submits for his own baptism; the greatness of Our Lord being revealed in surrender/humility, both to John and to his Heavenly Father; this later surrender being what the Church teaches as part of the perfect oblation or giving of the Son to the Father’s will. In a word, this is sacrificial love. And, from the example of today’s Gospel, we see that Jesus has carried us, believer and non-believer alike, and this world to the Father’s love; to the final judgment that is now the hope and joy of all, the Gospel Good News!
Luke in the Baptism of Our Lord is collapsing the world of Hellenistic mythology, a Promethean, willful world. He gives us a new story by which to live, a story whereby we turn from our idolatrous relationship to fear, violence, and death as a way of life and turn in surrender (what the Church terms faith/repentance) to the mercy and goodness of God, a world in which we find not only our true identity but our true joy and freedom, a life in which we need one another. In other words, at the Baptism of Jesus the old world has ended, just as Scripture has foretold, and a renewed creation has emerged and continues, as it does in our own day, to come into being – again, shades of the cross and resurrection and God’s final judgment of His kingdom come, the fire of Baptism, Cross, and Pentecost.
As the People of God, as the Church, or the baptized, the terms are synonymous, our task as surrendered believers, that is to say men and women who daily and repeatedly are under the invitation/imperative to give our will and life to the care of God, our task is to make the grace or love of Christ tangible and believable to this world we inhabit. It is an activity that we carry out on two levels; within and without; in our own lives and for the lives of others, just as God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit has done for us. Every Christian is by nature of his/her own baptism sealed and anointed, as was our Lord and God, in this priestly task of loving a world with its diverse peoples, many of whom walk in the darkness of fear, violence, and death, as we ourselves do from time to time, before we are turned again to the light of the God who is the great mystery of love. Love as we all know is both beautiful and difficult; it’s joy and difficulty being that it is sacrificial; which is to say, love asks something of us, sometimes more than we thought or expected, more than we can give.
A Church or a parish without the mission to love, both within and without, is a Church or parish without the vision or mission of true sacrifice, a people captive to the bankruptcy of fear, violence, and death. The difficult task of making love tangible and believable is the work of the Church or parish. Justice, compassion, and outreach are central to our baptismal covenant and witness. This is because love is always a walk into waters where something in us must die, yet where something new and eternal arises. Water of this sort is living water; be that water baptism or the cross. Love is the miraculous water of the Lord who offers grace to all those who thirst after righteousness and the pardon/mercy of God; the Lord who bids us do for one and all what he has done and shall always do for us; to pardon and to forgive, to put away all fear, violence, and dependence on death that we may live with him in the freedom of joy and hope, the mystery and fullness of Love. In these wondrous waters, in which the Spirit of God is breath and life, what is untrue (what is un-love) is swallowed up. Fear, violence, and death are conquered. And, all is now hid and being made new with God in Christ.
[It is nearly impossible, at this point, for me to resist summarizing and concluding what I have said. And, having said much, I hope I have told you something of the Good News that is today’s Gospel. But, before I end, let us turn once again to Isaiah].
“Sing unto the Lord” says the Prophet, “…for he hath done excellent things…Cry out and shout…for great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee” (12.5-6). In this new year, amidst all the uncertainty of people, places, things, and events let God’s goodness cry out. Put away that which is untrue, and let love and peace, good will toward men, be your joy, hope and triumph song! Great is the Holy One in our midst!
