Baptism of our Lord - Epiphany 1 - With us in the valleys

Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany (Baptism of our Lord)

Text: Matthew 3:16-17
As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, 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, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

With us down in the valleys

Today’s Gospel reading is short. It’s familiar. It’s simple. It’s a story you might recall hearing at Sunday School or reading in a children’s Bible story book. It’s a reading we hear in church every year. It’s a scene that has been recreated in paintings and stained-glass windows.

On the surface this is an uncomplicated story about an event in Jesus’ life – John baptises Jesus, there’s a voice from the heavens declaring the Father’s love for his Son, and a dove descends on Jesus.

The Gospel writer glosses over 30 years of Jesus’ life, with the simple word “then”. “Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John” (Matthew 3:13). Matthew is not interested in the 100-200 kms journey from Nazareth to the Jordan. Matthew wastes no words getting on with the story.

John has been calling people to repent of their sins and baptising them as they confessed their sins. Jesus approaches John and says, “Baptise me too”. “Wash me too”.

John is gobsmacked. He doesn’t expect to see Jesus here at all, let alone standing in the muddy Jordan asking, “Baptise me too”.

John baptises Jesus. The Spirit descends on Jesus in the form of a dove and God makes a divine pronouncement, “You are my own dear Son. I am pleased with you.” Here, being baptised, is the very Son of God. This man, with water dripping from his head and face, is God himself.

No sooner had Jesus been baptised, the descending Spirit casts Jesus not upon a throne in a palace, but alone out in the wilderness. There he meets, not the Mayor who gives him the key to the city, but Satan who tests and tempts Jesus with “If you are the Son of God then prove it”.

The next time Jesus hears those words will be when he hangs on a cross and hears the taunts of a howling crowd, “If you are the Son of God then do something to prove it”.

The gospel writers tell it is as it is. They don’t hide the fact that the high points of life can quickly become lows.
Take John the Baptist as an example. What happens to the man who proclaims the good news that God has sent the Messiah? He falls victim to the whim of a murderous king and his head is served up on a plate at a party.

We see this even in the events of the birth of Jesus. We go from the glory of angels telling of a newborn Saviour, the excitement of shepherds and wisemen to the other extreme, the terrible slaughter of the baby boys of Bethlehem and the grief that Herod brings this small community.

Excitement and joy filled experiences are great. Inevitably we come down off the mountaintop highs and resume life down in the valley. All the excitement of Christmas has gone. The Christmas decorations have been packed away. Shepherds, angels, mangers and the baby of Christmas are now a memory.

We are back into the ordinary days of the year and the very ordinary problems that come with life that is very ordinary.

Today we hear about Jesus standing in the very ordinary muddy waters of the Jordan River with John the Baptist pouring over Jesus or lowering Jesus into the river. In that act of baptism, Jesus, God in the flesh, is identifying himself with the ordinariness of this world and ordinary people and their ordinary lives of sin and temptation and trouble and sickness and dying. He is standing shoulder to shoulder with sinners waiting to be baptised.
He is with them,
identifying with them,
knowing the darkness in their hearts,
knowing what a powerful grip sin has on every person’s heart and life.
In the ordinary water of baptism, he stands with those ordinary people weighed down by sin.
He stands with John in calling people to turn away from their sin in preparation for the arrival of the Kingdon of God.
In his baptism in the water of the Jordan, he places himself under God’s judgement for the sins of all people.
Here in the Jordan River, he is beginning the task the angel said he was sent to do even before he was born – to “save his people from their sin”.

Becoming a sinner and bearing the sins of all humanity will not be easy for the sinless one. Being obedient to the Father’s plan will not be easy, so Jesus is given a divine boost. Matthew records,
“As soon as Jesus was baptised … heaven was opened, 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, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:16-17).

In a few short years he will feel the weight of the world’s sin on his shoulders as he hangs on a cross. Even for the Son of God made flesh, life is not all beer and skittles. His baptismal experience was an uplifting one. He will soon be thrown into the dark valleys of life in this world. “You are my Son, my own dear Son. You are marked with my love”. These words will ring in Jesus’ ears through every dark moment.

Our experience is no different. We would prefer life to be smooth sailing. We would like our Christian faith to be just mountaintop highs and the glory and the ecstasy of being lifted up to places beyond the ordinary; to be in our happy place every day.

However, we know our Christianity isn’t about always singing happy songs or always being filled with so much faith that nothing can trouble us or get in our way. Our Christian faith is also for the valleys.

We live down in the valley, where life can difficult. Troubles, anxiety, sickness and death are all around us.
And here’s the good news: that’s where our God meets us.

In our baptism, Jesus meets us in our very ordinary world.
He comes to us.
He embraces us.
He encounters us in the very frequent ordinary matters of every day –
the struggle to love someone;
the questioning about God’s intentions;
the pain in our bodies that won’t go away;
the grief that cuts so deeply;
the torments of anxiety, uncertainty, and frustration;
the doubting that God really cares what is happening in my life;
the sorrow we have over words and actions we have said and done that have cut others so deeply;
and the temptations that suck us in again and again;

At precisely these points he meets us. Down here in the valleys where we wouldn’t expect to find him – that’s where he is ready to embrace us and remind us that he is our loving brother and saviour.

The heavenly Father meets Jesus in the undignified muddy waters of the Jordan saying, “You are my own dear Son. I am pleased with you”.
He meets us in our baptism and says, “You are my own child. My own dear child. You are marked with my love. I am so overjoyed”.

Baptism is God at work in us. The New Testament talks about being baptised “in Christ” – we are joined intimately with his life, his death, his resurrection. We are uniquely joined with Christ in a special way so that whatever Christ has done also becomes ours. He has accomplished everything to open the way to our heavenly Father and to heaven for us – “to fulfill all righteousness” to use Jesus’ words.

Being “in Christ” means that Christ is always with us in the darkest valleys where fear and worry overcome us. “In Christ” we are God’s own dear children. He loves us, saves us, restores our friendship with him, rescues us from Satan’s power to kill us, renews us and gives us eternal life.

The beauty of the Christian faith is that, yes it does give us some high times of spiritual fellowship; of divine experience – what I call, mountaintop experiences, and these mountaintop experiences are different for each person.

But more importantly I believe, our Christian faith gives us strength and comfort in those rather inglorious moments when we struggle and are on the brink of defeat. In the dark valleys our God says to us, “You are my own dear child”, “in Christ you so closely connected to me”.
I am with you;
I will not give up on you;
I will hold you up when you are sinking;
I will carry you when you are too weak;
I will light your way when your eyes can’t see ahead;
I will walk beside you when shadows of death surround you into eternal life.

There are those times when we can feel God’s presence.
We sense God’s powerful impact on our lives.
We know that he is directing us in a certain way.
Maybe we can’t explain these things in a logical way but to us they are real. We are excited about this. After all a relationship with someone is an emotional experience.

But these emotional experiences so quickly evaporate in the dark valleys of life. God’s presence in our lives is not limited to the times we are consciously aware that God is with us. He is with us whether we are aware of him or not. Remember, being “in Christ” means he is never separate from us.

Bishop Oscar Romero said in a time when thousands of people were unjustly imprisoned, beaten, tortured and murdered in El Salvador in the 1970s,
God is not failing us when we don’t feel his presence. God exists, and he exists even more, the farther you feel from him. When you feel the anguished desire for God to come near because you don’t feel him present, then God is very close to your anguish. God is always our Father and never forsakes us, and we are closer to him than we think (The Violence of Love). Similarly, Martin Luther insisted that God is present in our suffering, weakness and even when we think he is completely absent from our lives. He is in places and times when we least expect it.

As at Jesus’ baptism our heavenly Father declares his never-ending love for us and fills us with his Spirit to walk his ways and face life with courage and boldness. Down in the valleys, where the struggles are the hardest, that’s where our loving God says to us again, as he said at our baptism, “You are my child, my dearly loved child”.
“I will be with you always”.
“I am closer than you think”.

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