The Rev. Dayle Casey
Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
January 7, 2007

1 Epiphany – The Baptism of Our Lord
Isaiah 42:1-9
Acts 10:34-38
Luke 3:15-16, 21-22

On the First Sunday after the Feast of the Epiphany, the Church always celebrates the baptism of Our Lord, that day on which Jesus himself was anointed by the Holy Spirit and received the power to do and be what he had been chosen by God to do and be, so it is fitting that on this day we too baptize those who come to him in faith.

Baptism is so basic to our lives, and yet so misunderstood. Most of us understand that baptism is an anointing, a sacramental sign of our being chosen and set apart like Jesus himself, a time when we publicly acknowledge the favor God has toward us. As George McDonald reminds us, God is a pushover. ”God is easy to please,” says McDonald. “You are my child, my beloved; my favor rests on you. I am well pleased with you,” a voice from heaven declares to Jesus, and to us as well. We like to hear that. Who wouldn’t?

But that is not the end of Jesus’ baptism. In fact, it’s just the beginning of Jesus’ baptism. For as McDonald goes on to add, “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy,” because God expects great things from us. God expects us to learn to love on another in the way his Son was sent to love us.

So God’s pleasure with us is merely the beginning of our own baptisms, just as God’s pleasure with Jesus was only the beginning of his. Because, in addition to being a sacrament of God’s favor for us, baptism is also a call and a promise, a vocation, a call to a new and fuller life, a call to follow Jesus, a call to grow after his likeness, a call for us to let our lives be formed after Jesus’ character of love and selflessness. And baptism also carries a promise, the promise that, through Christ, the Holy Spirit will accomplish the vocation, because, with God’s help, God’s servant will not fail.

So the end and completion of Jesus’ baptism came later. It was, in fact, three years in coming. The end and fulfillment of his baptism came on Good Friday, two days before Jesus showed Thomas his hands.

The fullness and completion of Carla’s baptism was also found in Carla’s hands. Carla had been baptized when she was an infant, and she was only thirteen years old, the oldest of seven children, when her mother, who was dying, called Carla to her bedside in the family’s small tenement apartment, and said, “Carla, I must leave you, and you must be mother now to the children. Be patient with your father. You know he is kind to us when he is not drinking. And keep the children together. God help you.” And with those words, she was gone.

In the months that followed, Carla undertook her new duties bravely. But two years later, she too lay dying of the same disease that took her mother. During her illness, a sister from one of the local street missions visited her, and Carla told her sad story. And she said to the sister, “Now I’m dying as my mother did. I have been patient with father, and I’ve kept the children together. But I’m afraid to die. I haven’t gone to church, because I’ve had no fit clothes. And I’ve been too tired at night to say my prayers. Now what can I say to Jesus when I see him?”

And the sister took Carla’s small hands, which were hardened by years of work for others, and said, “Don’t say anything, Carla, just show him your hands.”

Three years after John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River and two days after the resurrection, when the other disciples told Thomas that they had seen the risen Lord, Thomas said he wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it unless he saw the marks of the nails in Jesus’ hands. And one week later, Jesus appeared to Thomas as well, and Jesus showed him his hands, hands worn and scarred and wounded from the sacrifice he had made for Thomas and for others, and for you and me. And that’s when Thomas said, “My Lord, and my God!”

Just as water was the sign of the promise of Jesus’ baptism when Jesus was lowered into the water and life of this world and immersed in all our difficulties and pain and sin, so Jesus’ hands are the sign of the vocation of his baptism, the sign of that destiny to which Jesus’ baptism into this sinful world had called him, the destiny completed by Jesus at Calvary.

And your hands, and mine, are the signs of the vocation, of the promise and the destiny, of our baptisms as well, for in reality baptism is no mere ritual. Baptism is far more than the religious rite we perform here today. In its fullness, baptism is life itself, and the living of it. Baptism is our vocation, the life to which we, like Jesus, are called by God, which carries with it the promise that, with God’s help, we will not fail life.

Walker Percy reminds us that “it’s possible to get all A’s and still flunk life.” Getting all A’s and the fear of flunking life is what the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes is about. The writer was an older man who was getting on in years, and in his book he considered everything the world held to be important: wealth, power, pleasure, religion.

He had enjoyed it all, but he was beginning to fear that nonetheless his life had been in vain. Wealth: he had accumulated it in abundance. Power: he had held it in his own hands. Pleasure: he had enjoyed the finest wines and the choicest beef. Religion: he practiced it faithfully. And he concluded that it was all meaningless – all vanity, he said. And as his years moved ineluctably toward their end, he was desperate, because he feared that he had flunked life.

It’s possible, isn’t it? It’s possible to have fat bank accounts and stocks and bonds to the max, and to enjoy all the best pleasures in life, it’s possible to possess power to move armies and mountains, possible to say your prayers and know all there is to know about the Church and to receive communion and read your Bible every day, and still flunk baptism. It’s possible to know and have and do all these things and still flunk life, to fear that it’s all meaningless, all vanity.

But God promises that those with whom he is greatly pleased will not fail and will not be discouraged. God promises that he, the Lord himself, will take his servant by the hand, and will give him and all the peoples life, true life, life in abundance.

But as the old preacher of Ecclesiastes discovered, abundance of life, the meaning and purpose of life, the vocation of living, is not measured by any quantitative measure. None. Not by wealth or power or pleasure, not by press releases or church programs, or even by full parking lots and pews. Like baptism, life itself is ultimately measured by hearts and by hands, because the scars of our hands are the outward and visible sign of the completion of the vocation accepted by our hearts at our baptisms. Our hands tell us what we have done with the choice our hearts have made. Like Jesus’ hands. Like Carla’s.

Like Wesley Autrey’s hands. On Tuesday this past week, in New York, a young man named Cameron Hollopeter had a seizure while waiting for a subway train. He fell to the platform in convulsions, and with the help of Wesley Autrey and two other bystanders the young man managed to get back on his feet. But then he stumbled again, and he fell off the platform and onto the tracks. Autrey’s two daughters were with him, but he left his daughters and leapt off the platform down to the tracks with Hollopeter. A train was approaching the station, and, unable to lift the distressed stranger and himself back to safety on the platform, Autrey used his head and his heart and his hands. Following the lead of his head and his heart, he used his hands to shove the younger man down and to hold both himself and the struggling man in the lowest point between the rails and the wheels, while the train screeched to an emergency stop – but not before several cars passed over them both, smudging Autrey’s cap with grease, but leaving both men unharmed.

Autrey yelled up to people to ask them to tell his daughters that they were all right. He then refused medical treatment, took his daughters home, and went to work his night shift job as if what he had done was all in a day’s work.

Wesley Autrey’s life this week reminds me of the baptismal story some of you have heard me tell before, and which you’re going to hear again right now. Twenty-five years ago, on January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed in the Potomac River shortly after takeoff from National Airport in Washington, D.C. There were six survivors of that crash. Following the crash, Arland D. Williams, one of the survivors, managed to rise to the surface of the water where a rescue helicopter lowered a rope to him. Treading water with one hand, Williams used his other hand to pass the rope to a stranger struggling in the water nearby. Four more times the helicopter returned to Williams, and four more times the same hand gave the rope to someone else who was treading water beside him, and each person, in turn, was rescued. But when the helicopter returned a sixth time, Williams was gone – sunk, immersed, drowned in the icy waters of the Potomac.

Whether that was Arland Williams’ first baptism with water or his second, I do not know. But I do know this. I know that Arland Williams, in dying for his friends, did not flunk baptism. He failed neither life nor God. Even in those dire circumstances, Williams, like Wesley Autrey, accepted the vocation of baptism, the call of God to life in abundance, life lived in love for others. And even though Williams drowned in the Potomac, he lives. He did not fail life.

“I didn’t want my daughters to see a train run over a man,” Autrey said this week. ”I had to make a split-second decision.” But Autrey’s and Williams’ acts of courage and love and life did not happen just at those split-second moments, you know. No one just “gets” courage and love at such moments. Like all virtues, courage and love are the result of a lifetime of practice and faith, the result of a decision made long before at one’s baptism, a decision about the kind of person one wants, with God’s help, to become and to be.

Like the Bible itself, the story of Jesus’ baptism – his baptism with water by John and his baptism with fire at Gethsemane and Calvary – is a love story. Jesus’ baptism, both its beginning in the Jordan River and its completion at Gethsemane and Calvary, is the story of God, the story of One who loved the world so much that he sent his own Son to be baptized into our life in the world, to live and die among us in order to show us how to love in this world, and to save us and prepare us for it. Jesus’ baptism, both its beginning in the Jordan River and its completion at Calvary, is the story of One who laid down his life for his friends, and no one, Jesus reminds us, has greater love than that. No one loves more like God himself than one who lays down his life for his friend, whether it’s on a cross, or in a river, or on a subway track, or in a poor tenement apartment.

Jesus’ hands carry the scars of the vocation he chose at his baptism by John, the scars of the decision he made to go for abundance in life, to live for love, for God. So do the hands of Arland Williams and Wesley Autrey and little Carla.

The hands of those we baptize today – the hands of Nathan and Zane and Jacob and Jonah and Tanner and Aine Lucia – will, as they grow up, also carry the scars of the vocation God calls them to this morning.

And, with God’s help, so will yours and mine.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.