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Baptism of Jesus
12/1/2025

Acts 8:14-17
Psalm 29
Luke 3:15-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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The baptism of Jesus was a job lot. I know that sounds shocking but there it is, at least according to St Luke. Not only that but the celebrant at the baptism of Jesus may or may not have been John the Baptist. It probably was because John was the only known registered Baptist, but who knows, registers being as they were so long ago. John the writer of the gospel according to St John seems to have a clearer idea about the baptizing team. He says that Jesus and his disciples and John (the John we know as the Baptist) were baptizing out in the desert at Aenon near Salim because there was a lot of water there. John’s gospel does not have John baptizing Jesus. John’s gospel makes a clear distinction between water baptism as performed by John and holy spirit baptism as performed by Jesus. Sorry to bring up these anomalies but I find them interesting, so it is fun to inflict them on a captive audience. I promise to try to make sense of this later.

Today’s gospel is from Luke so let’s concentrate on him.

Luke says: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” (Luke 3:21-22)

Add to that the verse that precedes that statement where Jesus’ baptism is simply lumped with all the other baptisms. It looks like John was in prison at the time – “But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.” (Luke 3:19-20) John’s gospel disagrees with this. In that gospel the Baptist is not in prison yet.

With all this confusion the church through the ages has taken its lead from Mark and Matthew on this point. They are clear that John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River. John was reluctant and only baptized him on Jesus’ insistence.

It is not unusual for various accounts of the same event to look different through different eyes and different politics and philosophies and theologies. But it looks to me as if all of them are grappling with an embarrassing issue for the early church. All the gospels agree that Jesus was baptized, although John leaves out the bit about water. The problem is that all agree that for the Baptizer, baptism was about repentance. Now, if the gospel professes that Christ was without sin and therefore had no need to repent, then, what was Jesus’ baptism about? That is a question for systematic theologians. My interest is how these accounts of Jesus’ baptism have had an impact on the church’s practice of baptism through the ages.

The main point of agreement between all the gospel writers regarding baptism is the bits about sin, water and Spirit. To deal with human sin each sinful person needs to do something about it. That is where repentance comes in. The person’s faith community needs to do something about it. That is where the water comes in. For any outcome to be effective, God needs to do something about it. That is where the Holy Spirit comes in.

From earliest accounts of the liturgical life of the church these components have been essential to the celebration of baptism. Ancient testimony tells of catechumens, converts who have undergone instruction in Christian teaching were baptized in a river on Easter Day. They repent then passed from one bank to the other but in the middle a deacon immersed each into the water three times in the name of the Holy Trinity. As they emerged on the other bank the bishop laid hands on their heads praying that they receive the Holy Spirit.

In time, as episcopal regions grew larger so that the bishop could not be on the bank of every river where deacons were performing their part of the ritual, the act of laying on of hands was delayed until the bishop could visit each local church under his charge.

The essentials of this ancient ceremony survive in baptismal liturgies today. Fonts and baptistries have symbolically brought the river into the church. The practice of infant baptism has moved and stretched the components of the ritual. Instead of instruction followed by water then laying on of hands it has been common in western denominations that practice infant baptism for the water followed by instruction then repentance and laying on of hands at confirmation. In episcopal churches the confirmation is still the prerogative of the bishop.

The laying on of hands can look like a bit of an add-on. Indeed, it is and always was. In Acts Luke maintains a strict separation between the water bits and the receiving the Holy Spirit bit. In Acts chapter 8 Peter and John visit a community that have been baptized but still need the Apostles to lay hands on them, so they receive the Holy Spirit. Paul came upon a similar issue in Ephesus in chapter 18. This clunky separation continues in modern church liturgies.

We have so few baptisms celebrated in our congregation we could be excused for being a bit hazy on how our liturgy is ordered. It runs like most western denominations. We do include a scriptural warrant. Our Reformed heritage demands this. Presbyterians didn’t do anything unless it was prescribed in scripture. The story of the wedding at Cana is read before a wedding. The institution of the Lord’s Supper would be read before the Great Thanksgiving, not included in the prayer. There are seven passages to choose from in the Uniting liturgy.

Then how do we represent the actions of the three players in this sacrament. If we are following the ancient traditions what does the baptismal candidate do, what does the faith community do, what does God do?

The candidate learns about the faith and repents. The congregation confesses the faith of the church reciting the Apostles’ Creed with the candidate and the minister pours water three times in the name of the blessed Trinity. God gives the Holy Spirit which is provided visual symbol by the laying on of hands on the candidate’s head.

All well and good, but how are we to know what these actions mean. The Uniting Church liturgy is particularly obliging in this regard. After the OK has been given by reading appropriate scripture about Jesus commanding the church to make disciples and baptize them, the minister reads a paragraph that is very helpfully called ‘the meaning of baptism’. I want to conclude by reading this statement, but please note that the statement does not duck away from the problem of why Jesus was baptized like I did. Our liturgy brings together all that I have tried to say in succinct and erudite way.

Baptism is Christ’s gift.
It is the sign by which the Spirit of God
joins people to Jesus Christ
and incorporates them into his body, the Church.

In his own baptism in the Jordan by John,
Jesus identified himself with humanity
in its brokenness and sin;
that baptism was completed in his death and resurrection.
By God’s grace,
baptism plunges us into the faith of Jesus Christ,
so that whatever is his may be called ours.
By water and the Spirit we are claimed as God’s own
and set free from the power of sin and death.

Thus, claimed by God
we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit
that we may live as witnesses to Jesus Christ,
share his ministry in the world and grow to maturity,
awaiting with hope the day of our Lord Jesus.

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Epiphany
5/1/2025

Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72
Matthew 2:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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Our order of service includes the poem “The Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot. It is this poem rather than the story of the wise men in Matthew’s gospel that forms the text for this sermon. It is helpful for our reflection as it drags us away from the cosiness that cards and carols convey. Eliot takes us back to reality to reimagining the story of the Magi visiting the infant Jesus in Bethlehem in the context of travel conditions unfamiliar to us and political intrigue that maybe all too familiar. It is worth noting that the poem begins with an adapted quote from a 1622 sermon by English bishop Lancelot Andrewes. Also worth noting is that Eliot had recently converted and joined the Anglican Church.

We have heard Matthew’s version. Let’s hear Eliot’s poem.

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Two lines always trouble me in this account of the story. The speaker arrives at the destination and rather than remembering the encounter with the one who will change his life and alter history for ever with some kind of superlative, he states: Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. SATISFACTORY! Is that the best you can say?

I used to be a religious education teacher and had to write term reports on each student. There was no assessment to comment on. There were so many students under my tutelage I could not possibly assess most of them and judge their participation in those lessons. The best I could do was to be somewhat non-committal and my go to comment was ‘Satisfactory’ – just a little assurance to loving parents that, in my opinion, their son was OK.

The Magi arrive at the house where the infant Jesus is living with his loving parents – a dwelling of ordinary folk who are wearing ordinary clothes amid ordinary décor. There are no coloured light displays. No choirs of angels pre-empting Handel’s Halleluiah Chorus. It was ‘OK’ and then we went home but when we went home it was not OK. Of course, we could try to imagine what Eliot really meant by his understatement. If you say ‘satisfactory’ in a certain way it can sound like a superlative. IT WAS SATISFACTORY!!!! Not convincing?

The other line that puzzles me is the last one – ‘I should be glad of another death.’ The puzzle is that Eliot does not specify what death would make him glad. The commentators have speculated but my speculation is that the poet wanted the reader to grapple with the question rather than get any definitive answer.

The thing Eliot is most clear about is what he says between these two intriguing sentences.

“There was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods.”

One commentator on the poem notes that Eliot was frustrated by the way that people believed his conversion to represent a kind of comfortable settling-down, when he saw himself as [engaged on] a difficult process. (Reference)

The Magi return home to the places where they were insiders, where they felt socially comfortable, where the values of their communities aligned well with their own values. But now, after their journey, after their encounter with a birth that somehow looked like a kind of death, now they were in their own lands again. But they found themselves ‘with an alien people clutching their own gods.’ The Magi were now clutched by a different God.

There is a sense in which that is every Christian’s experience. Certainly, we rejoice that the gospel message comforts the afflicted – “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)

In The Journey of the Magi T.S. Eliot reminds us that the gospel message also afflicts the comfortable. Is it not true that, like Eliot’s Magi, the call of God on our lives through following the way of Christ brings us into conflict with the society in which we live. That even in our country whose religious affiliation is dominated by Christianity we are the outsiders, ‘no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation’.

Enough. It is still technically Christmastide – the eleventh day of Christmas. Let’s find some comfort, this time in the final lines of John Betjeman’s poem, Christmas. He has waxed lyrical about the trappings of a traditional English Yuletide with family and social and church festivities. Then he says:

“And is it true?  And is it true, / This most tremendous tale of all, / Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue, / A Baby in an ox’s stall? / The Maker of the stars and sea / Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true?  For if it is, / No loving fingers tying strings / Around those tissued fripperies, / The sweet and silly Christmas things, / Bath salts and inexpensive scent / And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells, / No carolling in frosty air, / Nor all the steeple-shaking bells / Can with this single Truth compare – / That God was man in Palestine / And lives today in Bread and Wine.”

Now, that is satisfactory.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2024

Colossians 3:1-10
Luke 2:1-7

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On our bookshelf at home there is a book with the rather intimidating title, 1001 Movies You Must Watch Before You Die! I’ve decided to rise to the challenge, although it is quite possible that I’ve left my run a little late!

An advantage of resting in a discipline like that – if movie-watching can be called a discipline! – is that it forces you to watch and think about a lot of things you wouldn’t normally consider if you simply followed your personal tastes. The range of “must watch” flicks begins in 1902, crosses national, cultural and aesthetic boundaries, and covers every genre – at least those types that might have appeared in a local cinema near you at some time or other.

Yet, for all their variation across time, genre and style, most films have a common structure which runs something like this. The first thing which happens in the story is the placement of the central character. It might be young, innocent Maria on a mountaintop marvelling that the hills are alive with the sound of music. It might be the not so young or innocent Indiana Jones, realising the dream of finding a legendary archaeological artefact. Or it might be plucky Sidney Prescott, living a more or less happy, middle-class teenage life.

The narrative flow then moves to the displacement. Maria falls in love with Captain von Trapp and his children, and must contend with a jealous baroness, with her own sense of call to the convent and with the Nazis. Or all the boobytraps fire and send Indiana fleeing from crushing boulders through winding tunnels, and later from more Nazis. Or Sidney takes a phone call and finds herself relentlessly pursued by the murderous Ghostface.

In each case, the story begins with a placement, followed by a displacement, before the struggle of the heroes and heroines to find their way back to their proper equilibrium. And the bulk of the story is that struggle against all odds and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, climbing every mountain, fording every stream, until the dreamed-for peace is found.

This is the comedic arc the vast majority of our stories follow because most of our stories are comedies – not necessarily in the sense of making us laugh but in following that narrative flow of equilibrium, descent and restoration.

I bring all this to mind today because I want to draw your attention to a small detail in our gospel reading this morning over which we pass pretty quickly, usually noticing the noun but not the verb: “and Mary placed him in a manger”. We know about the manger, and the irony often noted here: that the one who is called “king” has such a lowly cot. But if we shift our attention from the manger to what Mary does, we seem to see again the dynamic by which our books and movies work: Mary lays, places, Jesus in a manger. This is his “equilibrium” point, the beginning of his story point from which the displacement will dislodge him. If we follow the story of Jesus from this beginning to its end, we see something like the usual flow of our stories: from his beginning condition, he descends into conflict, which culminates in the crucifixion, which is then followed by the resurrection.

The story of Jesus, then, looks like all our favourite stories: from high to low, to high again. Jesus “comes down from heaven”, slums it a bit for a while, and then “ascends” again.

Or so it seems. One problem with this way of reading Jesus’ story is that we are the slum! And, certainly, the “we” in the story – the people Jesus encounters in his circle of friends, disciples and opponents – scarcely make it easy for him. But on the other hand, we don’t get the sense from the story that Jesus is somehow dropped into a hole and needs to dig himself out, as do Maria, Indiana or Sidney; or Skywalker, Rambo or Ripley; or Harry, Hermione and Ron.

In fact, the story of Jesus is kind of the other way around. The equilibrium in the gospel story is a world in which mangers and mothers and fishermen and priests and kings already all have their place, and into this is placed the displacing Jesus. The baby in the manger becomes the threat, the thing which disrupts, the thing to be overcome.

And so, just as the heroine typically tries to fight her way back to the world which made sense, those around Jesus push back, seeking again the balance they had before he dislodged them. And this is why the story leads to the cross.

Jesus’ story, then, is not quite like our other stories. It’s a kind of “reverse” story. In a normal story, the protagonist struggles to get out of the frame, and so to disappear back into normality. But in the gospel, it’s not Jesus who struggles to disappear; it is everyone else. It is Jesus who frames them, casting them in a particular way from which they seek to escape by pushing him away.

We usually tell our stories to remind each other that there is danger out there, and that this is how to overcome it, how to get back on our feet again. But we don’t see this in the story that flows on from the manger. Jesus’ own placement and displacement are the same thing: he is at home in the world which finally rejects him, and it is this at-home-ness which is so threatening to everyone else. Jesus always acts as if he is where he should be, whereas most of us, most of the time, want to be somewhere else.

We want to be done with where we’re at. We want to be done with our studies, with our dead-end job, our dead-end relationship, or with the in-laws. We want to be done with the too-high expectations and the incompetence. We want to be done with the uncertainty, the ill health, the infirmity, the worry. We want to be done with knowing and seeing all that is wrong with us and our lives together.

As we struggle to find a way out of all such things, we seek to prove to ourselves that our lives are comedies, despite all appearances to the contrary: the real me cannot be here and now but is still to come. I just need to climb out of this displacement, whatever it is.

The child placed in the manger knows nothing of this. What does a swaddled baby care about straw or silk? A gentle song at a warm breast is close enough to heaven. And this doesn’t change as the story unfolds. Mary’s embrace of Jesus becomes the embrace of the one he knows and names as the divine Father. As at his birth so in the full stride of life, Jesus is where he is supposed to be, and so God’s will is done on earth, without waiting for some distant or future heaven to arrive.

We should entertain no sentimentality, then, as we hear of Jesus’ birth, and the manger, and everything else we’ve added to the story ever since. It is not that things start well in the stable and go downhill from there, only finally to end well by the power of God. It is rather that whether he is with cradle or cross or crown (TIS 321), Jesus is always in the right place; there is nowhere else he needs to be. He is in the right place, whether in Mary’s arms, with his disciples, disputing with the scribes, or standing before Pilate. Jesus is not always in a comfortable place, but it is always the right place, a place where he can be true.

And so this is the proposal of the baby placed in the manger: that it is better to be in the right place than in a comfortable place. The comfortable fear being uncomfortable again, and those who seek mere comfort will fear its loss if they ever find it. But those who know themselves to be in the right place don’t fear anything.

We tell the story of Christmas because it is the beginning of a possibility which might be our own: being fully alive wherever we are, comfortable or not. As Mary places Jesus in the manger, God places him in the world to the part of the world which is always true, wherever it is. The story of Jesus is not comic like the stories we like or tragic like the ones we don’t; it is simply full, and true. Jesus has much to do, but he has nowhere else to be.

And God places us in this same way in the manger of the world, to live stories which are neither tragic nor comic, but pressed down and flowing over with truth and life.

Let the message of the God who finds a home among us be the beginning of our finding our home in the world in which we’ve been placed. For we too have much to do, but nowhere else to be.