l 7th January 2024 Evensong

1st Sunday of Epiphany, The Baptism of Christ

Isaiah 42

Ephesians 2.1-10

Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour

“We are what he has made us, created in Jesus Christ for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life’.

Words from our second lesson from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

Today we keep the feast of the Baptism of Christ, reminding us that before he began his mission Jesus submitted himself to the baptism of John the Baptist, his first recorded public appearance as an adult after the visit of the wise men and his childhood visits to the Jerusalem temple. Baptism, for him, as for us, marks a fresh start. And here we are, just a week into a new year, with its unusually fierce floods and storms along with the wars and conflicts and political crises of the present moment.

‘We are what he has made us, created in Jesus Christ for good works’ – this is how St Paul spells out our Christian vocation. In our Old Testament reading we get a model of how Jesus Christ lived out his vocation before God and humanity. The reading is one of four passages in the book of Isaiah which have come to be known as the Servant Songs, because they introduce a figure who is sent from God to bring justice to the earth, a figure who is filled with God’s Spirit, who is a promise to God’s people and brings light to the nations. These ‘songs’ have been hugely important in the history of the Church from earliest times, and you can see their influence on the New Testament. Think of the way the phrase ‘light to the nations’ ‘the light to the Gentiles’ is taken up by Simeon in the temple in Jerusalem and becomes part of the Nunc Dimittis which we sang a few minutes ago. The Baptism of Christ marks the vocation of Jesus, and opens the way for us to understand our vocation: ‘We are what he has made us, created for good works’.

Our society puts enormous emphasis on the importance of personal choice. I remember in my twenties being obsessed with making the right choice. I was lucky enough to have been born into a family where education was valued and the obligations on me pretty light. And yet even then choice sometimes seemed more a burden than a gift. Supposing I chose wrong? As it turned out some of my choices turned out to be spot on; others were fairly disastrous, though useful as what we might call ‘learning experiences’.

But that is really point isn’t it? We are schooled in our society to expect fulfilment, to mould our lives into what we want them to be. And it is hard for us to recognise how privileged and how unusual that is. How many choices would have if you were a girl born into a strictly religious family in some parts of Africa or Asia ? Or as a boy where you were expected to join the military and risk your life for your country?  Or where it was your obligation to leave home for a country you had never seen, make money and send it back to relieve poverty in your family or village? Or, nearer to home, if you are born with a serious progressive illness which threatens to rob you of your future and your freedom. For all of us, our choices are limited, but many of us have more than average.

And then we come across the figure of Isaiah’s  servant. The one chosen by God to bring justice to the nations. The Baptism of Christ opens to us something of the nature of God and how God works in the world. If you look at any picture or icon or image of Christ’s baptism you may notice that it shows the whole of the Trinity. God the Father, often in a cloud above the scene, God the Holy Spirit, the dove lightening on the just baptised Jesus and then Jesus himself emerging from the water. This is how God is, the image says, Father, Son and Spirit.

But also, this is reality. This is how life is. The immersion of Jesus shows us how we are constantly immersed in what we did not create, the waters which bring both death and life. Death, I would suggest to the aggressive, self-seeking ego, which is always searching out ways to be above and beyond reality, to take control of other people and use them for its own projects and plans and power. And Life when we are able to use that power of choice to line ourselves up with the truth of things, to our interconnections and obligations, to the call to justice and fairness in our relationships with others.

What I love about the figure of the Servant in the reading from Isaiah is his gentleness. Though he stands for justice he does not preach from a megaphone or wow the crowds with empty promises. ‘He will not cry or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street’. And he does not judge. He is kind to the struggling, ‘A bruised reed he will not break and a dimly burning wick he will not quench’.

From a shop window in Commercial Road on Friday I saw a man bring a plate of hot food from one of the street vendors to a homeless woman in a doorway. It was all so quiet, so discreet. And I was struck by how even in our selfish times, the human instinct for solidarity can still spark recognition in us. This is how God’s servant works. This is what Jesus is baptised to do. And this is God’s reality, this is how the world really works, not according to the rules of revenge, not according to our relentless appetite for gratification and power which can only imprison and deform us and everyone around us.

God has something going on which can still save the world from its rage and cruelty and can save us from ourselves. Because baptism is not so much a choice that we make as individuals, more a recognition of what life really is and where true life really lies.

The servant is born into a real time and place, just as Christ was, just as we are. And that time and place has its weather, its climate, its culture. We live in a time that is spiritually arid. There is bleak materialism and sometimes heartless affluence, alongside so much material and spiritual poverty. And yet we are prone to spiritual flash floods, heavy rains of emotionalism and judgmentalism as people call out for attention and make great claims to significance.

And I wonder sometimes if our faith really sustains us, and humbles us, whether it nourishes our souls and makes us deeply glad, deeply grateful to be alive in God’s world?

Can we trust that both within and beyond this world there is a healing and fulfilment that is now unimaginable? Jesus brings justice, but he also brings joy. To be immersed in life, to be immersed in God - that is where real life lies, the vocation for each one of us. In the baptism of Christ we are raised up by grace to glory, to the life for which we were created. And though Baptism may be our choice, what we find is that our choice has chosen us. Thanks be to God.

Angela Tilby

Canon of Honour