Episcopal Church of the
Incarnation
The First Sunday of the Epiphany (A)
Isaiah
42.1-9 Psalm 29 Acts 10.34-43
Matthew 3.13-17
May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that
I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Word. Amen.
Imagine with me that you are a
visitor from a different land, or even the proverbial “visitor from Mars”. You don’t know a person here. You don’t know a thing about this society;
who does what or how it is done, let alone why it is done. Imagine you don’t have a manual or guidebook
which instructs you in what the people are like. You are, however, intelligent and so you
start trying to figure things out on the basis of what you can observe, things
like: What do different people do, what
is their role and function? What do
people call themselves, either using a name or a title? What do people call each other? From this observation you can learn a little
about the people and about how they relate to each other. From interacting with them you can develop
your own relationship with them.
When we read the Bible we are not a
visitor from Mars, but it sometimes helps to put ourselves in such a position
in order to better appreciate how God reveals Himself to us. We each have our own ideas and observations
about what God is like and what He is not like, but none of this makes any
sense except to the extent that we realize that the only knowledge we can have
of God is what He chooses to reveal to us, and He reveals Himself to us first
and foremost in Scripture. He reveals
Himself in our Gospel lesson today.
The Jews who were present at the
baptism of Jesus already had a lot of information about God. They already had a relationship with Him, and
even understood the boundaries of that relationship as defined in the covenant
between the Lord and
At the Jordan God revealed that He
is one God in three Persons. Jesus is
baptized by John, and when he comes up out of the Jordan “... suddenly the
heavens [are] opened to him and he [sees] the Spirit of God descending like a
dove and alighting on him.” We see the
Son. The Spirit is seen. A voice from is heard heaven, saying “This is
my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” What has God revealed here? That there is a Son and a Spirit, and if
there is a Son then the voice from heaven which identifies Him is the
Father. These Names are ratified
elsewhere in Scripture by Jesus, when He tells us to call God “Abba, Father,”
and when He tells us that we will receive the Spirit, indeed, that we are to
baptize all people “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit.”
So part of the revelation of God is
who He is, but look closer and you’ll find more information. The Son, although Himself divine and thus
sinless, undergoes baptism at the hand of John the Baptizer; a baptism which
John is giving for the forgiveness of sins.
John certainly picks up on this anomaly, and protests, to which Jesus
replies, “Let it be so for now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill
all righteousness.” Ah! Now we get more information. We see that the Son fulfills the
righteousness of God. And how does He do
this? How does He do this throughout the
Gospel; how, indeed, can anyone be described as “righteous” in Scripture? He is righteous because He is obedient to the
will of His Father. And so like the
visitor from Mars who starts to develop a relationship with the people he meets
by observing how they relate to each other, we learn–God reveals–that a key
ingredient in our relationship with God is that we obey Him; a key ingredient
is that we believe and act to fulfill righteousness.
God tells us more. He tells us who He is; for He also tells us
His Name, and His Name has power. In the
Collect for today we pray that we who are baptized into Jesus’ holy Name may
keep the covenant we have made with God.
We pray that we may live into our vows made in baptism, that in St.
Peter’s words from Acts, “... [all] who believe[] in [Jesus may] receive[]
forgiveness of sins through his name.”
Is this language just symbolic, a literary device designed to evoke in
us a pious reverence for our Lord, or should we pay close attention to what it
means to speak God’s Name?
Let’s
look at the Name. In Exodus, when
God calls Moses to go to Egypt, Moses asks what he shall say to those who ask
about God, “What is his name?” God
replies, “I AM WHO I AM. ... Say this to
the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” This Name, I AM, is made up of four
consonants in Hebrew, and is in the form of a verb of continuous action unbounded
by time. It’s like saying, “I was, I am,
I will be.” God’s Name is a verb; it
effects being because He is Being. It
effects action, and when we get to the New Testament that action is made even
clearer, for the name Jesus is itself a verb which means “God saves”. The Messiah who has been foretold by the
prophets as Emmanuel, “God with us,” is revealed as God become flesh,
Jesus. The transcendent action of the
all-powerful, everlasting God is revealed to be that “God saves,” and it is by
this Name that St. Peter teaches that we receive forgiveness of sins. I AM has revealed Himself to us as the One in
our midst, as the One who saves us, and it is into this holy Name, “God saves,”
that we are baptized.
In our baptism we become a member of
Christ’s Body, the Church. We are
initiated by water and the Holy Spirit into new life in “God saves,” and the
bond which God establishes with us in baptism is indissoluble. As recited by St. Paul at Romans 8.39,
“... neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord.” So while today’s
psalm refers to I AM in saying “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his Name,” we know that in Jesus God has
revealed His full glory, and this glory is “Jesus,” that “God saves”.
God has revealed Himself to us in
His Son, and His Son has said, “Follow me.”
We obey when we follow Jesus. We
know we can’t do it on our own–that we’ll fall–but that God will send His
Spirit to us to help in how we work to obey and follow, in how we seek to
fulfill righteousness.
God has revealed Himself to us in
His holy Word, and we obey God when we obey His Word. This does not mean that we have to take the
Bible literally, but it does mean that God speaks to us in the Bible. We can’t just ignore those parts of the Bible
that trouble us or are inconvenient to us.
We have to take Scripture seriously in order to better understand the
content of the covenant we have made in our baptism.
There’s that word again,
“covenant”. When we pray that we may
keep our covenant with God, we’re praying that we can keep a right relationship
with God; that damage to this relationship can be prevented. God calls us into a relationship with Him,
and this relationship is defined in righteousness, in obedience. Time and time again we find that we are not
obedient, that we do not follow. Time
and time again we find that we damage our relationship–our covenant–with God
because rather than following we want to walk off is some other direction of
our own. So we find that we are not
righteous, and that our relationship with God is defective. And what does God do? He reveals His nature to us in His Name, “God
saves”. He reveals that as we are
baptized into His Name we receive forgiveness through His Name. He sends His Spirit to us that by the Spirit
we may cry to Him, “Abba! Father!” and
by the Spirit we may say “Jesus is Lord.”
We have a relationship with God,
sealed in our own baptism. This
relationship is what matters most, and so let’s take this Sunday in which we
hear about the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Ghost to each examine,
“What is my relationship with God?
I, who have been baptized into the Name which tells me that ‘God saves,’
how do I respond? Do I seek to
strengthen this relationship? Do I, in
the words of the Collect, ‘... boldly confess [Jesus] as lord and Savior,” and
do I do this in what I do and not just in what I say? Do I obey God?”
What God reveals to us about Himself
reveals a lot to us about our own person, and so as we pray that we keep our
covenant with God, as we live in the sure hope that is given us by our Lord as
the one who saves, let us each strive always to follow and obey, that in
knowing God we may love Him and serve Him; that when we arrive in heaven we
won’t feel like a visitor from Mars, but that we are truly and finally home.
In the Name of
the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy
Ghost. Amen.