Sunday, January 12, 2025
The Baptism of Our Lord
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Water and Spirit
Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am pleased.
Watching the College Football Playoff games, I thought how the crowd watching Jesus’ baptism wasn’t large. Those folks out to hear John the Baptist’s fiery preaching and invitation to water baptism – that would have been it.
I remember my baptism on Easter in 1979 by Al Morehead at Mt. Pulaski Christian Church, finishing off the moment when I was two weeks old and my parents handed me to Arthur Neitzel at Zion Lutheran Church, who sprinkled my head. Both pastors repeated the beautiful words: I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus in bodily form like a dove.
Jesus’ baptizer John surely was at a loss for words the day Jesus, his own cousin, appeared and asked to be baptized. A dove descended, seen by some at least, and words echoed across the water, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.” John must have fallen on his knees, and he asked Jesus to be the one baptizing him. Jesus smiled, resumed his place, and John baptized him with water, marking the beginning of God’s bodily return to earth.
I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming, and he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit, and with fire.
We are so grateful that our kids have been baptized – Chris at our church in Waynesville, Marc in the pool at Little Galilee and Andi at the same pool a few years later. I remember those moments thinking and feeling joy, happiness, excitement, and peace.
I wonder if Jesus’ mother Mary watched his baptism by John, memories of the two boys still in the womb as they began discovering who knows what about God and about themselves. Then, and for years afterward, until at last this moment at the Jordan River, when John dunked his cousin and they waited for the world to catch up with them together.
John’s head was brought in on a platter. His disciples came and took his bodied and buried it. Then they went and told Jesus. And Jesus withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.
I imagine his weeping – memories pouring through his mind, knowing how much he loved him. How much they loved each other. Although he knew it already, Jesus understood how moving toward the “bottom” was the way God intended him, and all of us, to live.
Nature has this brutality in it. The fittest survive so as to make for ever stronger seed and progeny. But moral evolution, as both the Jewish and Christian scriptures assure us, works exactly the opposite. We evolve morally not by the survival of the fittest but through the survival of the weakest. This is what makes for an evolved moral offspring. The biblical gauge for morality within any culture is always how its weakest members fare. – Ron Rolheiser
John the Baptist taught this and lived this. Jesus, of course, did too.
(Isaiah 40 and 42, Psalms 29 and 104, Acts 10, Titus 2, Mark 9, Luke 3)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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