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What happened when Jesus was baptized? The Scriptures say that John was baptizing for repentance of sin, and that all Jerusalem and Judea were coming to be baptized by John. Thousands of people were coming to wash away their sin in the Jordan River. But then Jesus came to be baptized by John. Jesus, who had no sin, the Scriptures tells us, Jesus who was as clean as the driven snow comes to John, and he is immersed by John in the dirty water which all the multitudes have just used to wash away their sin. It's as if someone who is already clean gets up in the morning to jump in the bathtub full of water that all the rest of the family had already used to take baths in. Jesus is the only one who comes out of the Jordan more soiled than when he entered it. What is happening here? What does this mean? It is helpful to begin with a word about what doesn't happen at baptism. When Jesus was baptized, it didn't make him a better person, any more than our baptisms have necessarily made us better persons. Baptism is not about morality. All religions, not just the Christian religion, have a moral element to them. All religions teach that it is better to be good than bad, better to be moral than immoral. But morality is not what baptism is about. St. Mark tells us that when Jesus came to be baptized by John it was the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about is good news, the good news that God cares for his people. In fact, God cares for his people so much that in order to show us his love in person, he himself becomes one of us, and lives and loves and dies among us. This is what this whole season of the Incarnation is all about. It is about the manifestation of the love of God in the world, a manifestation that began with the Annunciation, with the angel's announcement to Mary that it was going to happen, a manifestation that took human form in the manger on Christmas Day, that was confirmed by Jesus when he went to John for baptism, and that was completed by Jesus when he walked the road to Calvary. The whole of the message of the Incarnation is that God cares about us so much that he becomes one of us, that he identifies with us, that he assumes our troubles, our pain, even our sin and our death, in order to tell us, in unmistakable body language, that we count with him. There was a movie several years ago that helped me understand this. It wasn't a particularly good movie, and I don't even remember the name of the movie, or who played in it. But I do remember what it was about. It was about a young girl who had run away from home to seek her fortune in Hollywood. She hoped, of course, to become a movie star. But she had little talent, and as happens all too often, she found that she was soon earning her living as a prostitute, alone and far from home, separated from those who loved her, wanting to go home but ashamed to, sexually intimate with a number of different people every night, but, at the depths of her being, lonely and afraid. And the movie was also about her father, about how he searched for his runaway child for years, losing his job in the process, mortgaging his home and spending every dime he had in a relentless search in the worst of neighborhoods, and being beat up by the pimps whenever he got close to finding his daughter, because they, of course, were making their living off her. It was about the father's doing this all because and only because he wanted to say to her, "I love you. You count with me." Jesus' baptism is not about morality. It's not about our sins, but about our sin. Baptism is about our separation from the One who loves us, about how God cares about us so much that he comes to spend a life among us in order to find us and show us the way home. St. Paul tells us that "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." And elsewhere he adds, "Where sin abounded, grace did abound all the more." And that's what happened at Jesus' baptism. At Jesus' baptism, grace abounded all the more than sin. "You are my beloved son,"is the way Jesus received the grace. "With you I am well pleased." There are few words more strange to us these days than words like "sin" and "grace." The words "sin" and "grace" are strange to us now, Paul Tillich said a half century ago, because they are so well-known and so carelessly used that they have lost much of their power. But there are no substitutes for the words "sin" and "grace," because, when we understand them in the right way and use them precisely, they speak something to us about the depths of our experience as human beings that no other words can express. "Do we realize that sin does not mean an immoral act," Tillich asks, "and that the word 'sin' should never be used in the plural? Do we realize that not our sins, but our sin, is the great, all-pervading problem of our life? Do we still know," he adds, "that it is arrogant and erroneous to divide men by calling some 'sinners' and others 'righteous'?" For when we divide people into these two groups, "we can usually discover that we ourselves do not quite belong to the 'sinners,' since we have avoided the heavy sins, have made some progress in the control of this or that sin, and have even been humble enough not to call ourselves 'righteous.' Are we still able to realize that this kind of thinking and feeling about sin is far removed from what the great religious tradition, both within and outside the Bible, has meant when it speaks of sin?"* In the religious tradition, including the Bible, sin is about separation, about estrangement. "To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation. Separation of a person from other persons, separation of a person from his own true self, and separation of a person from God. "This three-fold separation constitutes the state of everything that exists," Tillich adds. "It is a universal fact. It is the state of every life. And it is our human fate in a very special sense, for we know that we are separated. We not only suffer with all other creatures because of the self-destructive consequences of our separation, but also know why we suffer. We know that we are estranged from something to which we really belong, and with which we should be united. Before sin is an act, it is a state of being." Sin, in other words, is the state of our existence. It is the condition we find ourselves in - that reality of being estranged from each other, estranged from our true selves, and estranged from God. And such estrangement abounds, as St. Paul says. But we no longer know how to talk about it, because we have become estranged even from the words and the meaning of our Biblical tradition. Our condition, however, remains what it is. Sin abounds. "But where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more!" But the word "grace" is as hard to understand as the word "sin," because it, too, no longer speaks to us with the spiritual power it once had. Grace, as Tillich explains, is not merely "the willingness of a divine king and father to forgive over and over again the foolishness and weakness of his children. Grace is that which overcomes estrangement. "Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with self. Grace transforms fate into meaningful destiny. Grace changes guilt into confidence and courage." "The words themselves are not important. It is the response of the deepest levels of our being that is important." So Tillich, following St. Paul, would ask us to think about the condition of our lives, about the state we are in, about our separation, our estrangement from each other and from God. "Who," he asks, "has not, at some time, been lonely in the midst of a [crowd]? The feeling of our separation from the rest of life is most acute when we are surrounded by it in noise and talk. We realize then, much more than in moments of solitude, how strange we are to one another, how estranged life is from life. Each one of us draws back into himself, [for] we cannot penetrate the hidden center of another individual," nor can that individual penetrate the shields that we use to hide our own selves. "Even the greatest love cannot penetrate another person, another self, completely. And our estrangement, our sin, is so complete that we are willing even to use each other for our own sakes. This," Tillich insists, "is a fact about every one of us. There is something in the misfortune of our best friends, which does not displease us. Who among us is dishonest enough to deny that this is true also of him?" he asks. "Are we not always ready [to take advantage of the weakness or misfortunes of others], although often in a very refined way, for the pleasure of self-elevation, for an occasion of boasting, for a moment of lust?" To be honest with ourselves about that fact is "to know the meaning of the separation of life from life, the meaning of 'sin abounding.'" We know, deep inside ourselves, that we really belong to God and to each other, and yet we do not live that way. And this fact, says Tillich, "brings us to the ultimate depth of sin. Separated and yet bound, estranged and yet belonging, we are brought, finally, to despair. No escape, no hope. But though sin abounds, St. Paul insists, grace abounds all the more. Where despair abounds, hope abounds all the more. Where estrangement abounds, reconciliation abounds all the more. And that brings us back to Jesus' baptism, and to the reason Jesus went to John to have it done, and to what it means for us. Jesus' baptism is the beginning of the good news about the abounding of grace. We do not understand grace, Tillich says. "Grace strikes us. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual because we have violated another life, a life we loved, or from whom we are estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being - [our disgust for] our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure - has become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage." And then, at some point, just at that moment of our deepest despair, "a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, 'You are accepted.'" - "You are accepted" is the way Tillich expressed it. "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased" is the way Jesus received it. - "You are accepted by that which is greater than you are, and the name of which you do not know. You are accepted by God who is greater than you are, and whose name you do not know and cannot know." "Do not ask for the name now," advises Tillich. "Perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now. Perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything. Do not perform anything. Do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" That's what Jesus' baptism means to us. Baptism is about grace. It's about good news. It's about a father searching for his lost daughter in the worst of neighborhoods, a search short on clues but long on love. And when he finds her he says, "I don't care where you are or what you have done. You and I belong together, and I want you to know that." At the River Jordan, the One whose name we do not know and cannot know, the One in whom our own very existence is grounded but from whom we are estranged, this One is baptized into this world in the person of Jesus in order to close the gap of our estrangement. He has come to be washed in our sin, even to take on our mortality, our death, so that we can hear God say to us, "We are in this thing called life together, and I love you." That's Jesus' baptism - God's search for us that is short on clues, but long on love. That's grace. The report of Jesus' baptism, like the news of his birth and the news of his death and resurrection, is part of a long love story that begins with Creation and ends at the empty tomb. It's a story about being lost and being found. It's a story about losing your way in the wilderness and being shown your way home. It's the story of sin abounding, and of grace abounding all the more. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. _______________________ * Quotations are from Paul Tillich' sermon , "You are Accepted," in The Twentieth Century Pulpit, vol. 2, ed. by James W. Cox (1981) |