January 8 - Epiphany 1, Year B (RCL)
One of the gifts
under my Christmas tree this year
was a CD.
On it
was a slideshow of photographs of my grandmother
who died earlier in the year.
It begins
with a toddler
in white coat and bonnet
standing in front of a back yard fence,
and it ends
with my grandmother sitting between my brother and sister-in-law, and my two squirming nephews.
In between you see her holding a koala as a young woman,
and standing beside a car that today would be termed vintage;
another picture shows her holding her firstborn child, and another with all three kids.
There are photos of her at the beach, usually with my grandfather,
and of course many with us grandchildren.
Unfortunately my childhood memory of her
in a dress with large yellow and orange flowers
didn’t make it in,
but the beige socks worn with sandals
and the straw hat covered with oversized orange raffia flowers
are both documented for posterity’s sake.
The photographs tell a story,
and what they show, as well as parts of my grandmother’s life that I perhaps didn’t know so well, is the times and events
that for her children best told the story of her life.
What we do here at church
is in many ways
very similar
to that slideshow.
We tell the story of the life of the people of God
over thousands of years,
from the very time of creation,
and culminating
in the life and death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ, God with us,
and the beginnings of the church
which bears his name and is his body.
In between, there are shepherds and kings and prophets,
children born unexpectedly and adults dying suddenly,
wandering in the desert and settling in green pastures,
and faithful life upon faith.
Sometimes the stories are told in narrative, sometimes in letters, sometimes in poetry and prayer.
And each week
we tell a few of those stories,
something from the Old Testament,
a psalm,
something from the life of Jesus
and from the life of the early church.
And always we tell the story
of Christ's last night with his disciples
when he took bread and blessed it and broke it and shared it,
and of his death and resurrection
and the promise
that the will come again.
Now, if you play with your photos on a computer, you’ll know
that you can sort your photos
into different events or albums.
Each album has a theme, or tells a particular story.
And then you draw from those albums
to create slideshows
that retell the stories
in different ways.
This week, our slideshow is drawn from three different albums.
The first one
is the church’s year.
This is the album
that we cycle through each year.
We begin withAdvent, four Sundays before Christmas. Then there’s Christmas, then Epiphany, then Lent, then Easter, then Pentecost and Trinity, then Sundays after Pentecost
until finally we get to the feast of the Reign of Christ, and then we begin all over again.
The second album
is the baptism album.
It’s the one with all that photos to do with water and baptism, all those stories.
There’s all of creation,
and people crossing rivers and seas,
there are stories of drought
and stories of flood,
there’s John baptizing
and Jesus being baptized
and baptisms in the name of Christ
all throughout the Mediterranean in that first century.
And finally, there’s the third album,
the gospel according to St Mark.
Mark is the shortest gospel, and probably the first one to be written down.
It’s full of action;
Jesus and his disciples
seem to spend most of their time sailing from one side of the sea of Galilee to the other,
and in between, just about every scene is introduced by the words “at once.”
Mark likes details, the ones that make his stories more like pictures. He’s the one who tells us
that the grass the people sat on at the feeding of the five thousand
was green,
he tells us about John the Baptist wearing camel hair
and Jesus taking children into his arms
and falling asleep in a boat with his head on a pillow.
And Mark is the one who begins his album
not with the birth of Jesus,
but with his baptism.
Because that, for Mark, is where the story really begins.
The slideshow
that is our service today
combines parts
of all three of those albums.
We begin
with two pictures from the first album.
First is the story of the Epiphany,
the time the wise men
came to see the baby Jesus.
The traditional day for celebrating this was actually two days ago, on January 6,
and if you received one of our Christmas calendars at the Christmas services,
you will have been reading that story, day by day, verse by verse.
It’s a story that’s particularly important to those of us
who are not Jewish.
Because almost all of Jesus’ life,
he focussed on bringing the good news of the gospel to his own people,
the people of Israel, the people of God as they were known in the Old Testament.
After all, that’s where he lived;
they were the people
he came into contact with
every day.
But the wise men
were, as far as we know the first non-Jews
to see Jesus,
the first to worship him,
and their appearance at the manger
was a sign from the very beginning
that people like us
are invited to become part
of the people
of God.
And that’s pretty amazing.
Second
is the picture of the baptism of Jesus,
and it’s actually found in all three albums.
This first Sunday after the Epiphany is, by tradition, the celebration of the baptism of Jesus.
There was a man called John, not the John of the gospel according to St John, but one who was a relative of Jesus.
He was a kind of prophet;
he travelled around the desert,
preaching, calling on people to repent,
to turn away from their sins, the things they had been doing
that were against the law God had given them,
and when he was down near the river Jordan,
he would baptize them as a sign of that repentance
and of the forgiveness
that God offers.
People travelled from all around to hear him,
and came, and were washed in the Jordan.
But one day
he saw his cousin Jesus arrive.
And Jesus started
to wade into the river,
ready for John
to baptize him.
And John knew
from his mother Elizabeth - remember Elizabeth, who Mary went to visit when she was expecting Jesus - John had an idea
that Jesus
wasn’t quite like
anyone else.
But Jesus went into the water
and John
began to baptize him.
And suddenly - and the way the gospel of John tells it, it wasn’t only Jesus who saw it, but John the Baptist as well,
and maybe everyone else there as well -
suddenly, as Jesus coming up out of the water,
something happened in the sky
and something like a bird came down
and there was a voice that said, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’
And the baptism of Jesus
becomes a pattern for our baptism,
not so much about sins being forgiven, as about us belonging to God
and God’s Spirit making
his home
in us.
And that reminds us of the next album,
the one about baptism.
It doesn’t begin
with the baptism of Jesus,
but way back
in the beginning of creation,
in Genesis
chapter 1.
In the beginning
when God created the world,
there was a huge dark messy chaos,
what Genesis describes
as the face of the waters.
And the Spirit of God
hovers over the waters,
and the voice of God speaks,
and creation emerges.
It’s from those waters
that God brings order
and God brings life.
And that act of watery creation
was echoed
in our our Psalm,
when we heard the voice of the Lord upon the waters,
the God of glory thundering upon the mighty waters.
The Lord enthroned above the flood.
And another picture
from the New Testament,
the story of baptism in the early church.
And the apostle Paul
arriving at a place
where they have heard of Jesus,
but haven’t heard of being baptized in his name.
They’ve only heard
of John’s baptism, the baptism of repentance.
They’ve missed out.
And so Paul baptizes them in the name of Jesus
and God makes them his own
and God’s Spirit comes
to live in them.
And there will be more pictures from the baptism album
when we come to the part of the service,
where we bless the water of baptism.
The people of God
escaping from Egypt into the wilderness across the Red Sea, and then crossing into the promised land
over the Jordan
River.
And Nicodemus, coming to Jesus in the night,
and being told he has to be born again, of water and the spirit.
And Jesus’ own death
and resurrection,
So many pictures,
a slideshow of baptism.
Order out of chaos.
Life out of nothing.
Slavery to freedom.
Repentance and forgiveness,
sin and new life.
New birth, and washing.
Death
and resurrection.
Belonging to God
and God’s Spirit in us.
All caught up in those simple words
that I will say today to Abigail and Patricia
as I pour the water of baptism over their heads,
water poured and words said
over each of us.
I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010