The Baptism of Christ
The Baptism of Christ
A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham on Sunday 12 January 2024
Isaiah 55:1-11 and Romans 6:1-11
The start of this new year, 2025, marked the anniversary of the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4, which turned 100 on New Year’s Day. The weather being our national obsession, it’s not surprising that- even though not that many people actually use the Shipping Forecast anymore, compared to when it started being broadcast – on the day of the anniversary, it was widely hailed in the Press as “one of the cultural touchstones of our times” (The Guardian, 4 January). Alan Bennett and John Prescott – and now Nessa from Gavin and Stacey – have read it, and poets Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Carol Ann Duffy have been inspired by it, along with musicians Tears for Fears, Radiohead and Blur.
At never more than 350 words, with its own cadence and mystical lexicon, the Shipping Forecast is largely incomprehensible to non-seafarers – and yet people find it comforting. Listening to its familiar refrains – Dogger, Fisher, German Bight – especially on this New Year’s Day just gone, while wind and rain lashed outside, and parts of the country were experiencing terrible flooding – it was a reminder of the dangers that led to its creation. Yet people find it consoling, and even reverent. Perhaps like certain texts from the Book of Common Prayer, that we may or may not fully understand, it makes us think of a bygone age – in this case, of creaking storm lamps and of foghorns. Listening to it, we feel safe at home and yet intimately connected with the distant drama around our islands going on outside. Or as Duffy’s sonnet puts it, “Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer”.
Apart from raising an interesting question about how far we need to understand something in order to be moved by it, the Shipping Forecast – especially this year, with the floods – brings into focus the different, and sometimes opposing, associations of water. Water can be both wonderful and dangerous – a source of solace and basic necessity for survival, but also terrifying, as the weather grows more unpredictable and modern-day tragedies at sea are more common.
Water, of course, in all its various symbolism, is central to the Christian faith. Today is the Feast of the Baptism of Christ. Epiphany, the season we’re in now, means “manifestation”. In the Eastern Church, the Epiphany is not the story of the wise men, but rather a celebration of the Christ’s baptism at the hands of John, when the heavens were opened and a voice from heaven declared Jesus to be God’s beloved Son. Baptism is the principal rite of admission into the Church. And when we are baptised, we come to share in Christ’s baptism. We too are beloved. The waters of baptism are the waters of life.
And yet, as Paul writes in our second lesson, the letter to the Romans, in being baptised into Christ Jesus, we have also been baptised into his death. Our font here in the Cathedral combines two of the most striking characteristics of water, its calm stillness and constant, generous overflowing. In his book entitled Water: A Spiritual History (2012), theologian and Church of Scotland minister Ian Bradley writes of our font as “a brimming bowl” reflecting the arches and stained glass windows above that make it a mirror of God’s grace. And yet, for me, when the surface is disrupted, its depths also speak of drowning and the waters of death, or chaos as the bible describes the waters at creation, the face of the deep. As we look into its depths and see not just the arches but ourselves reflected in its marred surface, we see also in the less calm version of the waters our human brokenness and need of grace.
In being baptised himself in the river Jordan, Jesus entered into the chaos of humanity. It makes no sense that he, the promised Saviour, the one on whom God’s spirit rests, the Holy One of God, should have been found amongst the teeming mass of humanity, asking for baptism just like the rest of us. Jesus was without sin; he had nothing to repent of. And yet he is baptised, not because he has sinned and needs forgiveness, but because he comes to identify with humanity in all our sin and estrangement, our tragedy and lostness. He is baptised because we have to be: because he loves us too much to leave us in our sin, and the world in its darkness, when he longs for us to know the new life he comes to bring.
In baptism, Jesus puts himself where we are, so that he can bring us to where he is. His baptism, his being plunged into the river Jordan, is the sign – the foretaste – of his death, the crucifixion, while the voice that speaks from heaven, calling Jesus the beloved son, is the sign of the resurrection. For Paul, baptism for us Christians too is therefore about both death and life. In today’s reading, he writes: “We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life”. And so we see that, in Paul’s thinking, the waters of death and the waters of life go together. From the waters of death, we are led into new life.
As well as the shipping forecast, another important anniversary, the twentieth anniversary of the tsunami that killed 150,000 people in South East Asia on Boxing Day 2005, was also marked at the turn of the year. For me, this brought back memories of being a newly ordained priest, twenty years ago, when I took the funeral of one of those who had died. Like other extreme weather events, the flooding on this scale is as hard to imagine now as it was back then, for those of us who were not there; yet the grief of the families affected is something we will never forget. Such events test our faith; yet a Christian response is to say that God is somehow present in the midst of suffering. In the baptism of Christ, we see a God who, through submitting himself to be drowned in the waters of death, enters fully into the chaos and tragedy of the world, in order that ultimately the tragedies of life might somehow be resolved and redeemed, and healing found. Twenty years on, we see signs of that in stories of lives being rebuilt and communities re-established.
“Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters… you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” The prophet Isaiah, in our first lesson, calls the people to repentance, to change. Water, here, is a symbol of God’s abundance and grace. In baptism, the Christian enters the waters of life, is washed from the sinfulness of self-centredness, is submerged into the death of Christ, and rises from the water into that life of eternity to which Christ draws us all.
The start of a New Year brings many challenges, not least in relation to extreme weather events across the globe. Whatever darkness or tragedy or stormy waters may lie in the year ahead, reflecting on the water of life in baptism gives us pause for thought. Epiphany, with its theme of revelation, challenges us to go deeper in our faith, and to reflect on our interconnectedness. Whatever chaos we experience in the year ahead, may we know the comforting rhythms and consolation of prayer, and above all that we are beloved of God in all that threatens to overwhelm us.