postID: 60391; title: The First Sunday After The Epiphany
no collect_text found
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
Array
(
[date] => 2016-01-10 16:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1351
[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] => 2016-01-10 16:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2016-01-10postID: 60391 (The First Sunday After The Epiphany)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 60391; date_type: variable; year: 2016
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 60391
displayDates for postID: 60391/year: 2016
Array
(
[0] => 2016-01-10
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2016-01-10 with ID: 60391 (The First Sunday After The Epiphany)
The First Sunday After The Epiphany
Array
(
[date] => 2016-01-10 16:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1351
[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] => 2016-01-10 16:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2016-01-10postID: 60391 (The First Sunday After The Epiphany)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 60391; date_type: variable; year: 2016
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 60391
displayDates for postID: 60391/year: 2016
Array
(
[0] => 2016-01-10
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2016-01-10 with ID: 60391 (The First Sunday After The Epiphany)
The reading_id [169115] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
✛
Trinity and Epiphany
Array
(
[0] => 60757
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60757
)
] (reading_id: 169115)bbook_id: 60757
The bbook_id [60757] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who counts himself lucky this afternoon to be here for this service. The readings and prayers are those customary for this season following Christmas, but the Epiphany music of this service is a unique gift of the parish, the consequence of many decades of careful custodianship of the program. How fortunate we are; what a great gift.
The full season of Epiphany lasts for another month, and during it we will hear in our scripture readings those episodes in the life of Jesus when God’s glory was especially apparent. We hear three of these critical stories this evening. The first begins just after Jesus’ birth: wise men came from the east, following a star and bearing gifts; when they saw the child, they fell down and worshiped him. Our own procession this evening commemorated that event, re-creating it once more. The last reading tells of Jesus’ first miracle, at a wedding in Cana of Galilee, when he turns water into wine.
The middle story that we heard, however, marks the beginning of Jesus’ public life as recorded in the Gospel of Luke. It is Jesus’ baptism, by John, in the Jordan River. It is this episode that the Church recognizes as the primary focus of the first Sunday after the Epiphany: as the Book of Common Prayer terms it, today is the feast of “The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I must admit that it is not altogether obvious to me why Jesus would need to be baptized in the first place, and certainly not by John. John the Baptist was a wild man out in the wilderness, as if in self-exile from civilization, preaching the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. His job was to ready the people for the Messiah who was to come, to prepare the way of the Lord.
As important as John’s ministry was, however, what happens between Jesus and John when they meet in the gospel is rather anti-climactic. Luke says merely, “All the people were baptized, and then Jesus was baptized also.” You would think that the two would have had rather more to say to one another. If they did, Luke doesn’t record it.
However, what happens in that ritual act of baptism was something of epochal importance. As soon as John had baptized Jesus, plunging him down into the river and then bringing him back up again, something incredible happens: the heavens are torn open and the Holy Spirit descends upon him. And, for one of the few times in the New Testament, we get to overhear a bit of divine communication: one person of the Trinity speaking to another. The Father’s voice is heard: “Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.”
With those events happening, it is fair to say that a new age begins. The heavens are torn open; the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus; the voice of the Father is heard. Don’t let the familiarity of the story mitigate its power. In that moment of baptism, for the first time in history, the Trinity was made manifest on earth. The Holy Spirit descends from the open heavens, and the Father speaks, naming Jesus of Nazareth, that he is the Son. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: present in that one moment.
Now, articulating the mystery of the doctrine of the Trinity with any specificity is heavy lifting, business that’s perhaps best left to another day. But at the most basic level, the Christian belief is that the Holy Trinity is three persons, mutually indwelling, and intimate. But the idea is that this all happens in some mysterious way in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes; an eternity that is outside of time; a place that is outside of geography.
But at this moment of baptism, the inaccessible light becomes accessible, because the eternal Trinity enters into history. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: there, present, unified and differentiated both, in the shallow end of the river Jordan. The heavens opened; the Father speaking of his son; the Spirit descending: what these three things have in common is that they show us that with Jesus the line between heaven and earth has been erased. The most fundamental boundary of all—that between creator and creation—has been crossed. Not just by an emissary from God such as a visiting angel or otherworldly messenger. No, the boundary has been crossed by the Trinitarian God himself, not just a “part” of God or a symbol of God. It shows that there is now commerce between heaven and earth; that there will now be interaction, even physical interaction, between the eternal creator and his temporally bounded creation. What is naturally impossible in the everyday course of things has become real.
This breaking-in, in just these terms, had been the cry of the prophet Isaiah, when he pleaded with God that God would “rend the heavens” and “come down.” (Isaiah 64:1) Come down in order to establish justice; come down to set the captives free; come down to reconcile the world to God. Here at the very beginning of the public life of Jesus, the gospel writer wants it to be clear that that is exactly what has happened. Isaiah’s deepest wish has been fulfilled. At Jesus’ baptism, the heavens are rent open and God has come down, into time, in robust Trinitarian fullness.
That is the baptism that we celebrate on this first Sunday after the Epiphany. But I said at the beginning that it was not self-evident to me why Jesus had to be baptized in the first place, and this observation that in the baptism the Holy Trinity is made manifest does not change that. When followers of Jesus Christ are baptized, we are baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus. But Jesus wasn’t, of course. He was baptized by John.
I think it is significant that at the same time that the gospel is affirming the full Trinitarian divinity of Jesus, it is also showing the extent to which he has embraced his humility. Note that this baptism at the hands of John is not a moment of strength; it is no exercise of divine power. Rather than Jesus commencing his public life with a might act of his own, it begins instead with Jesus passive, not active, having something done to him rather than doing something himself. John the Baptist lowers him into the water and brings him back out again, and for a moment there Jesus is totally vulnerable, at the mercy of the wild man clothed with camel’s hair. Whatever else Jesus’ baptism is about, it must be about this: it is one instance of Jesus’ willingness to enter into the lives of everyday human beings, undergoing their experiences, even when they are not of necessity his own, in order to most completely be the Word made flesh who dwelt among them, living among them, living as one of them.
We get both of those things at the same time in this gospel: the power of the eternal Trinity and the vulnerability of the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth; the weakness and the strength; the temporal and the eternal. All of it is entered into by the Messiah for whom Isaiah cried out, the Christ whom the Magi adored, the one conceived by the Spirit and born of the young woman Mary. He is the beloved Son, who brings us into that holy community: the Trinitarian family of love.
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
