SERMON FOR A BAPTISMAL SERVICE ON THE 1st SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
(Matthew 3: 1-2, 4-6, 13-17)
This ought to have been a difficult sermon
to write. Our theme for today - the Holy Trinity – is a notoriously challenging
subject to preach on. And this is a baptism service – a time of celebration in
which people don’t expect s lot of dry theory but a lively message with some practical
bearing on their lives. Fortunately, the Bible contains a story tailor-made for
an event like this. It’s the story of Jesus’ own baptism, which was read to us
earlier.
My starter question is this, and I’ll give
you a couple of moments to think about it before I carry on: How many
characters are involved in the story?.....
Let’s go through the possibilities in order
of appearance:
- First, there’s John the Baptist – a hermit who lived out by the river Jordan – someone to whom the confused people of the day were coming in droves to feel the touch of the sacred and to find peace.
- Secondly, there’s Jesus – a carpenter from Nazareth, struggling perhaps with his own destiny, but soon to build up a following of his own.
- Thirdly, there’s something referred to as the Spirit of God – a mysterious presence sensed floating down from Heaven and settling on Jesus almost like a dove.
- Then, finally, there is God as people traditionally imagine him, a disembodied voice from heaven, proudly declaring Jesus to be his Son.
Four main characters. Four players, in a
story that records the first Christian baptism…or so it would appear. But, I
want to put a different interpretation to you. I want to suggest that in
substance there are only really two players in the story: firstly John the
Baptist, and secondly God. That the main point of the story is not the first baptism,
but the first revelation to humanity of God as three distinct Persons: Father,
Son and Holy Spirit.
It would take a much later generation of
Christians to develop the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as we know it today. But
even as the very first generation of Christians wrote the Gospels, they were
understanding God in a new and radical way, in a total break with the past: not
as a distant, solitary, unknowable ruler, but as a complex interplay of
personalities seeking to draw humanity itself into their loving circle of fellowship.
It’s impossible to overstate how novel and
politically dangerous this vision was. According to the Jewish religion in
which Jesus grew up, God is One in every sense of the word: solitary, unique, inaccessible,
and dangerously holy. Again and again in the OT, God is depicted as so holy
that just to glimpse him results in instant death. Such was their fear of this awesome being, they did what you would do if you
found an exposed live wire in your house. They insulated themselves against it,
representing his presence on earth with a tiny, secluded shrine, surrounded
with stone walls and guarded by an all-powerful priesthood.
Then Jesus appeared, and he was like nobody
the people had ever met before. And as they felt his love and power moving in
their lives, they had an extraordinary realization. Meeting Jesus was
indistinguishable from meeting God. The divine presence that had been hidden away
for so long was out in the open, accessible to everybody, welcoming rather than
threatening.
Then when Jesus finally left them, they experienced
the most remarkable thing of all: they felt the Spirit of God come down on all
of them at once – in much the same way as it had descended on Jesus as he stood
in the river for baptism. It was like being set on fire by a supernatural force.
And amazingly, they found that they no longer needed the physical presence of
Jesus any more than they had needed the Temple when he was with them. In the
power of this Holy Spirit, in order to find God, all they had to do was look
into themselves or across at one another.
This discovery was dynamite in the first
century – it turned the world upside down. And it’s dynamite for us today. It
tells us that Jesus is unlike any other mystic or religious leader in history. The
truth we in the Church celebrate and safeguard is this: the God of Eternity has
personally come to dwell with and within the human race. It started with the
person of Jesus, who came to earth and left us with the perfect example of how
to live lives pleasing to God. But as we’ve seen, that was only beginning. When
we turn from our past lives to follow Jesus, when we submit to the waters of
baptism, the same Holy Spirit of God that descended on Jesus comes down to take
up residence in each one of us.
Heaven knows we’re not worthy of him.
Heaven knows the church has been going through tough times. It consists, after
all, of weak, fallible human beings who rarely if ever live up to Jesus’
teaching and example. But here is the crunch: If you want to see God, look
around you. Look one or two of your fellow worshippers in the eye…God’s
presence is as real as if the person sitting next to you was Jesus himself.
[Names of baptismal candidates]: In baptism
you are uniting yourself not just with a lot of beautiful old buildings, not
just with a group of well-meaning but flawed people, not just with a social
cult built on old hymns and rituals. You are uniting yourself with the
historical Jesus of Nazareth, and with the Spirit he left behind when he
returned to heaven. In short, you yourselves in baptism are becoming vessels
for God’s transforming presence on earth. We hope that over time you’ll join
with us in exploring what that means for the way we live our lives, but above
all we hope you’ll enjoy being part of this enlarged Christian family.
Let’s bow our heads in prayer…