Matthew 3:13-17
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
Amen
Today’s service is a service that is full of promises. Later in the service, Lisa and Jason will renew their wedding vows – re-state promises that they made before God many years ago, not be because they need to re-say these life-long promises, but because they want to re-affirm them publicly, in front of all those present in the church here today, in order to make it clear to everyone how important this relationship is – how important those promises made many years ago continue to be.
But already we have baptised the rest of the family. Baptism is one of the two most important rituals or sacraments of the Christian church. Baptism is like marriage in that it also involves making promises, and it involves a change of relationship.
In baptism, you are publicly making a promise before God and before the church. You are making a promise to God, and then, in recognition of this promise, you are anointed with oil, and then have water poured over you.
Water is the key element in baptism, and it carries a whole range of different meanings and memories all at the same time.
Christian baptism was started by John the Baptist, who we heard about in our Gospel reading. He called upon all people to come to him to repent and be baptised. To turn away from their old, sinful ways, and to walk in the way of God instead. And to symbolise this change, he baptised them in the river Jordan.
We don’t have a convenient river nearby, especially after the summer we have had, so we use the font instead, but the baptism that you are given is this same baptism that John was giving, almost 2,000 years ago.
You are receiving it here, in this ancient church, where people have been baptized with the same form of words for well over a thousand years. You are entering the family of God, and that is a family with very deep roots in this place, and a family that goes back, unbroken, to those very first baptisms of John.
At one level, we are washing you with water. In the time of John and Jesus, ritual washing was an important part of religious ceremonies, so that people were clean enough to enter God’s presence. In baptism, we are washing you clean of your sins, not just once, but forever. Your baptism washes you clean forever, at a spiritual level at least. I don’t want this to be taken as permission to avoid bath-time…
At another level, in the Old Testament, passing through water symbolises many of the great changes in the relationship of the ancient Israelites with God. When God rescues the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea symbolises them being washed clean of the chains of slavery, and being made clean to enter into the covenant with God at Mount Sinai.
When the Israelites finally reach the promised land, they arrive from the east, and so they have to cross the River Jordan to enter into the promised land – to take delivery of the reward that God has promised them for their faithfulness.
It is no accident that John chose the Jordan to baptise in – by choosing this river he is making it clear that they are crossing from the wilderness of their sin into a new promised land of God’s Kingdom.
Even, as we heard, Jesus comes to John to be baptised, despite being the one person who has no need to have his sins forgiven. But by being baptised, Jesus is showing that this is an essential rite for all Christians to undertake. By being baptised alongside Jesus, in the same baptism that Jesus received, we are all becoming brothers and sisters of Jesus.
In baptism God adopts you, and all of us, as his beloved children. It is through this adoption in baptism that we have the confidence to address God as ‘Our Father’ in the Lord’s prayer.
Baptism is something that only happens once. Once you are baptised, you are forever a part of God’s family. Nothing that happens can take that away from you. Baptism is not a one-off forgiveness of sins. John called people to repent when he baptised them – literally to turn away. That is why we ask you if you are willing to turn away from evil and turn towards the good that is God.
This turning towards God doesn’t make you a perfect person though. None of us are. All of us have made promises that we have failed to keep. But the important thing is that we recognise that we have failed, and that we are sorry that we have failed.
That is why every Sunday in church we confess our sins before God, and are reminded of his love and forgiveness. But in our baptism we have promised that we will try and be better; we will try and lead our lives well; we will try and be good. So long as we keep trying, and so long as we are faced towards God, God will do the rest for us, as his beloved children.
Amen