SPEAKER_00: Reading from Isaiah.
SPEAKER_00: Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights.
SPEAKER_00: I have put my spirit upon him.
SPEAKER_00: He will bring forth justice to the nations.
SPEAKER_00: He will not cry or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street.
SPEAKER_00: A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.
SPEAKER_00: He will faithfully bring forth justice.
SPEAKER_00: He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth, and the coastlands wait for his teachings.
SPEAKER_00: Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it, I am the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: I have called you in righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: I have taken you by the hand and kept you.
SPEAKER_00: I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.
SPEAKER_00: I am the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: That is my name.
SPEAKER_00: My glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols.
SPEAKER_00: See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.
SPEAKER_00: Before they spring forth, I tell you of them.
SPEAKER_00: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: A reading from Acts, Peter began to speak to them.
SPEAKER_01: I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation, anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
SPEAKER_01: You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: He is Lord of all.
SPEAKER_01: That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced.
SPEAKER_01: How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.
SPEAKER_01: We are witnesses to all that he did, both in Judea and in Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
SPEAKER_01: He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.
SPEAKER_01: All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name, the word of the Lord.
unknown: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_02: The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Matthew.
unknown: Glory is to you, Lord Christ.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him.
SPEAKER_02: John would have prevented Jesus, saying, Well, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?
SPEAKER_02: But Jesus answered him, Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.
SPEAKER_02: And then John consented.
SPEAKER_02: And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
SPEAKER_02: And a voice from heaven said, This is my son, the beloved, with whom am I well pleased.
SPEAKER_02: The gospel of the Lord.
unknown: Praise you, Lord Christ.
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to ask as we walk through this season of Epiphany that we not only consider Epiphanes we're invited to, but actually Epiphanes for Jesus Himself in the stories.
SPEAKER_02: And lest I bore you, let me give you an introduction.
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to give you the 2,000-year history of baptism today, and we'll talk about what that might have meant for Jesus and how we ourselves might live into it.
SPEAKER_02: So to begin with, you have to imagine a different mentality than we are used to.
SPEAKER_02: About 150 years before the time of Jesus, there was this very deep conviction that there were spiritual germs in the world, and I think that's the best way to explain it.
SPEAKER_02: Sure, we all know about sin is when we do something wrong that we shouldn't do.
SPEAKER_02: This is not that kind of germ.
SPEAKER_02: This is the kind of impurity like when you touch yucky stuff and it amalgamates in your person and can have really bad effects.
SPEAKER_02: Like, for example, if you acquire enough of these kinds of germs, you might end up with leprosy or blind or bent over.
SPEAKER_02: There was the conviction that if you were sick, you deserved it for one reason or another.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you weren't a sinner, but you had acquired ritual impurity.
SPEAKER_02: Now maybe you're wondering, how do you get that stuff?
SPEAKER_02: There's all kinds of laws, like wearing a garment made out of two different kinds of fabric.
SPEAKER_02: It's not really a sin, but it can affect your spiritual well-being.
SPEAKER_02: Bad news for you all, those cotton polyester blends you're wearing today.
SPEAKER_02: Ritual impurity.
SPEAKER_02: Touching a dead body.
SPEAKER_02: That includes meat.
SPEAKER_02: That's dead.
SPEAKER_02: Ritual impurity.
SPEAKER_02: Being touched by somebody who touched a dead body.
SPEAKER_02: Ritual impurity.
SPEAKER_02: Like these things can be on you without you even knowing.
SPEAKER_02: Unless you think we don't believe in that today, let me tell you, when I was five years old, my mother carefully explained to me that when I went to a public restroom, the thing I needed to do was put paper on the seat.
SPEAKER_02: Now I want to tell you there is zero scientific basis for that.
SPEAKER_02: However, we believed in, frankly, the cooties.
SPEAKER_02: The cooties.
SPEAKER_02: And think in the childhood version.
SPEAKER_02: There were these cooties you could get.
SPEAKER_02: And how do you get rid of them?
SPEAKER_02: The answer, about 150 years ahead of Jesus, were ritual baths.
SPEAKER_02: These are called mikvas, and we find them all over the place archaeologically.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes they're underneath homes.
SPEAKER_02: They're supposed to be filled with living water, which is code speak for water that moves on its own.
SPEAKER_02: That's rain water, that's rivers, streams.
SPEAKER_02: You're not really supposed to go fill them with a cistern.
SPEAKER_02: Cisterns are filled with living water.
SPEAKER_02: Does this make sense?
SPEAKER_02: So you fill it up with living water, and then you would immerse yourself in general five times a day to wash off your spiritual cooties.
SPEAKER_02: Now we all know that if you continue to do this, the hygiene of the water goes down with each dunk.
SPEAKER_02: But this is not about real germs, it's about spiritual germs.
SPEAKER_02: John the Baptist was somewhat of an innovator because he came out of the wilderness and said, we're going to do this one time for the rest of your life.
SPEAKER_02: Once.
SPEAKER_02: Circle, circle, dot, dot, you get your cooti shot in the River Jordan.
SPEAKER_02: But it also is a baptism of repentance from sin.
SPEAKER_02: So you get rid of both things.
SPEAKER_02: Now Jesus shows up and he's like 30.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe he's 27.
SPEAKER_02: Somewhere in that range.
SPEAKER_02: And he wants to get baptized.
SPEAKER_02: Now look, our prayer book tells us Jesus is like us in every way, but without without sin.
SPEAKER_02: So why on earth is Jesus showing up to have ritual cooties washed off him and in repentance for sin?
SPEAKER_02: Well, I want to put it to you to consider that even if Jesus didn't commit any moral action, he certainly was shaped by a culture that did.
SPEAKER_02: So I told you last week that around the age of four, my daughter started classifying people not by the color of their garments, but by the color of their skin.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus was born in a culture that told racial jokes.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus was born in a culture that experienced ageism.
SPEAKER_02: By the way, we get it in clergy.
SPEAKER_02: I've been told that in the Diocese of Texas, once you get over 50, your job prospects go down.
SPEAKER_02: Because you're too old to lead young people into the church.
SPEAKER_02: I'm just 40.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you all.
SPEAKER_02: I mean that as a joke, but listen, it's in every career.
SPEAKER_02: It's in every career, especially in tech careers.
SPEAKER_02: Ageism is a real thing.
SPEAKER_02: Doesn't matter whether you participate in it or not, it exists and it affects you.
SPEAKER_02: Women at the time of Jesus were shadows.
SPEAKER_02: They belonged to their fathers.
SPEAKER_02: They were given, sold to their husbands.
SPEAKER_02: I know that's a terrible thing to do, a terrible way to frame it, but their husband paid the bride price, so the father gave her away.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus was steeped in that.
SPEAKER_02: He comes to the river Jordan not only to wash away touching dead bodies and being in the shadow of Gentiles, but to wash that off so that he can start anew.
SPEAKER_02: Now, water in the Bible, everybody gets we needed to grow crops, but water is very, very capricious in Israel.
SPEAKER_02: It's a desert.
SPEAKER_02: If you haven't been, it's a lot like San Diego.
SPEAKER_02: And I don't mean irrigated San Diego.
SPEAKER_02: I mean like go into East County San Diego where there's little scrub brushes.
SPEAKER_02: And that's where people live.
SPEAKER_02: And if it doesn't rain, you die.
SPEAKER_02: So water actually in the Bible is a symbol of chaos.
SPEAKER_02: Borderline evil.
SPEAKER_02: And John takes people and he says, let all that evil chaos wash the evil and chaotic elements of your life away so you can come out and live a new life.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus, don't you see, needs to do that just like we do.
SPEAKER_02: Before Jesus gets baptized, he's a day laborer or a carpenter.
SPEAKER_02: He does that for 27-ish years.
SPEAKER_02: Please notice he is changed when he comes out because he starts teaching.
SPEAKER_02: He takes on disciples.
SPEAKER_02: We don't know what he did exactly before, but we sure do know that afterward he touches women and accepts them as his students.
SPEAKER_02: We know that he eats at the homes of tax collectors and sinners.
SPEAKER_02: We know that he says things like, God did not make human beings for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is for human beings.
SPEAKER_02: We know that baptism changes the way Jesus lives his life.
SPEAKER_02: Now, for the first couple hundred years, baptism was for adults only.
SPEAKER_02: And it's maybe helpful for you to know that the word baptism only exists in the English language because of King James.
SPEAKER_02: Baptism is a Greek word, just like lots of other Greek words you may or may not know.
SPEAKER_02: Like pneuma means spirit, and uh, you know, pharaoh, which means to bear or to bring.
SPEAKER_02: These are all Greek words that your Bible translator has rendered into English for you, but baptism they didn't do that.
SPEAKER_02: Baptism means to dunk or submerge.
SPEAKER_02: It really means what you do with fabric when you want to dye it.
SPEAKER_02: You don't sprinkle it, you shove it under the water.
SPEAKER_02: When did we quit doing that?
SPEAKER_02: We quit doing that after St.
SPEAKER_02: Augustine.
SPEAKER_02: St.
SPEAKER_02: Augustine of Hippu, bishop in North Africa, decided that the reason we're baptized is because there's something inherently wrong with us.
SPEAKER_02: We call that original sin with a capital O.
SPEAKER_02: Please hear how that's different from being into a cultural world that has sin in it.
SPEAKER_02: Augustine said we're genetically bad.
SPEAKER_02: And what fixes original sin?
SPEAKER_02: Baptism.
SPEAKER_02: That's how you wash off the sin gene.
SPEAKER_02: Now, it did not take very long for mothers and fathers, especially when infant mortality was like 25%, to demand that their children get baptized.
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, their children would die and go to hell.
SPEAKER_02: So this was a major change.
SPEAKER_02: Now, I don't know if you realize this, but submerging your infant is not a good idea.
SPEAKER_02: If you know someone who does this, please, please, you should be very concerned.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, this is like a CPS investigation, people who submerge their infants.
SPEAKER_02: It's not safe.
SPEAKER_02: So this is when the church started sprinkling.
SPEAKER_02: By the way, we still do that in the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_02: We do.
SPEAKER_02: We sprinkle.
SPEAKER_02: It happened so long, and they got the word baptized that when King James's translation came out, he didn't call him John the Immerser or John the Dunker.
SPEAKER_02: That's how it reads in Greek.
SPEAKER_02: No, to protect the practice that people were already doing and believed in, he's John the Baptist.
SPEAKER_02: Don't you see?
SPEAKER_02: It's a Greek word that just means dunker or immerser.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know about you, but I will tell you myself, I am 100% sure my children were born just fine.
SPEAKER_02: I mean it.
SPEAKER_02: There was nothing inherently wrong with either one of my kids.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, I'll tell you there still is nothing inherently wrong with either one of my kids.
SPEAKER_02: When I'm tired, I may say something different.
SPEAKER_02: But in general, I'm very positive of this.
SPEAKER_02: So why do we baptize now?
SPEAKER_02: It isn't to wash away original sin.
SPEAKER_02: I want to put to you, we're baptized for the same reason Jesus was, to wash off whatever it is that separates us from being with one another and accepting God's presence with us.
SPEAKER_02: The other thing we do is try to receive a baptism of new birth.
SPEAKER_02: So, hey, all of these things that we're born into that are life-taking, God, would you please remove that from us?
SPEAKER_02: Now, I'll tell you, John Wesley, Anglican priest to the day he died.
SPEAKER_02: He never was a Methodist.
SPEAKER_02: That's okay.
SPEAKER_02: Wesley said the reason we baptize infants, and this may sound a little harsh, is because they don't have a choice.
SPEAKER_02: This is why we do it.
SPEAKER_02: Because neither do we have a choice about whether God is present in our lives.
SPEAKER_02: Wesley called this prevenient grace.
SPEAKER_02: God's grace is present whether we want it, whether we accept it, whether we choose to believe it, it's there.
SPEAKER_02: And that's why Wesley said, we baptize infants.
SPEAKER_02: And of course, we know the infants won't remember.
SPEAKER_02: But we will.
SPEAKER_02: And I want to put to you, I think this is why we continue to do the practice today.
SPEAKER_02: It's not just about grace, it's about good practice.
SPEAKER_02: So I want you to consider that we are hardwired as mammals.
SPEAKER_02: This is part of our evolutionary DNA, unless you're a sociopath, to care for the young, for babies and puppies.
SPEAKER_02: If you don't like puppies and babies, there's something different in your DNA because this is how we evolved.
SPEAKER_02: Mammals take care of the young.
SPEAKER_02: And I've got to tell you, it's one thing to say, oh yes, you're all beautiful children of God.
SPEAKER_02: But man, it's so much easier to see it in a baby or a puppy.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, they're so cute, they're so wonderful.
SPEAKER_02: That's I think part of the reason we do it publicly, because you can say, yes, look, there is a beautiful child of God.
SPEAKER_02: And then having practiced that, we can see the beautiful baby child of God and the people that drive us up the wall.
SPEAKER_02: And maybe you're wondering about shells.
SPEAKER_02: You know, the Jordan River actually is fresh water, so there's not any kind of significant mollusks or um or shellfish there.
SPEAKER_02: The shell came into baptism, and we've got one.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you've seen this before.
SPEAKER_02: A lot of priests use this to baptize.
SPEAKER_02: They scoop water and will pour it.
SPEAKER_02: We have a bigger shell than this.
SPEAKER_02: I like that one.
SPEAKER_02: Um this came into the church in about 600.
SPEAKER_02: 600.
SPEAKER_02: And it didn't come from the River Jordan.
SPEAKER_02: It came because one of the oldest church pilgrimage routes there is, many of you still know it, thanks to the movie The Way, starring Martin Sheen.
SPEAKER_02: It's called Santiago de Compostela.
SPEAKER_02: So it's a pilgrimage that begins somewhere in France and it goes over the Pyrenees, and you end up in Spain on the coast.
SPEAKER_02: And it was thought at that time that Spain was on the edge of the world, like in a flat map.
SPEAKER_02: If you go off Spain, you will sail off the world.
SPEAKER_02: And not in a good way.
SPEAKER_02: So pilgrims made this huge journey.
SPEAKER_02: Depending on how you do it, it's more than 400 miles.
SPEAKER_02: And because they'd come to the edge of the world, they brought back a souvenir, which to this day is a shell.
SPEAKER_02: When you go the way of St.
SPEAKER_02: James, you bring back a shell.
SPEAKER_02: And they brought them back to their priests and said, Look, here's a shell from the edge of the world.
SPEAKER_02: And some clever priest realized you could use that symbolically to say, here you go, off the edge of the world, into God's great horizon.
SPEAKER_02: We did even better than those pilgrims because this shell went into outer space.
SPEAKER_02: So it really is out of this world.
SPEAKER_02: But I want to suggest to you that's why the shell has stuck with us.
SPEAKER_02: The whole point of baptism is that we can live out of this world.
SPEAKER_02: That we can live not in ordinary ways, but in extraordinary ways.
SPEAKER_02: Now, you know there's a couple other thoughts, and these matter.
SPEAKER_02: Anybody ever seen the painting, The Birth of Venus?
SPEAKER_02: Maybe in high school.
SPEAKER_02: Venus is born out of a out of a shell, and you know, when you hold the baby up behind that shell, boy, that's the image, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02: Look what God is giving birth to, a citizen of heaven right there in front of your eyes.
SPEAKER_02: With a shell that big, it's really easy to imagine that our little infants are pearls in God's oyster, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02: That's the image.
SPEAKER_02: Now Jesus gets to hear something that we often struggle with.
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I'm going to tell you, everything I said makes totally sense to me.
SPEAKER_02: It's very priestly and very great.
SPEAKER_02: The challenge for me, though, is to think about what happens after Jesus is baptized.
SPEAKER_02: After he's baptized, by himself, the heavens open up and the Holy Spirit comes down, and he hears a voice say, This is my child, the beloved, with him I'm well pleased.
SPEAKER_02: Alright?
SPEAKER_02: Now, our book that we're studying, Liturgy of the Ordinary, makes this a very, very interesting point, which is up to this point, Jesus has done nothing.
SPEAKER_02: In Matthew, he got born.
SPEAKER_02: The Magi came, he just laid there, his parents took him to Egypt, he didn't pick that.
SPEAKER_02: He has not healed anybody, he hasn't preached anything.
SPEAKER_02: We don't even know what kind of crafts he made.
SPEAKER_02: When the junk that he's born into is washed off of him, he is able to hear, possibly for the first time in his own life, that God is pleased with him before he's done anything.
SPEAKER_02: Now I'm going to tell you, usually I hear God say, This is my son with whom I might be pleased.
SPEAKER_02: God might be pleased if I turn in my pledge card.
SPEAKER_02: God might be pleased if I'm really nice to that annoying person at work.
SPEAKER_02: God might be pleased.
SPEAKER_02: If I say 40 Hail Marys and six our fathers and drink some holy water.
SPEAKER_02: God might be pleased.
SPEAKER_02: No, no.
SPEAKER_02: God says to Jesus, I'm already pleased.
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna tell you one of the biggest lies I buy into in all of my significant relationships is that one day I might really please the other person.
SPEAKER_02: Like the biggest edge I have in my marriage.
SPEAKER_02: Is that my wife's gonna love me more if I'll just do blank?
SPEAKER_02: As if love was some kind of commodity to be earned.
SPEAKER_02: Actually, that fear is what creates most of the tension in my marriage.
SPEAKER_02: When, on the other hand, I'm able to have some holy water run over me.
SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, my wife might actually love me.
SPEAKER_02: There might be something wrong with her, but she does.
SPEAKER_02: I'm actually much more able to be the person I want to be anyway.
SPEAKER_02: When I'm afraid she won't love me unless I blank, it doesn't usually work.
SPEAKER_02: And in general, what it does is creates a lot of resentment that she doesn't already love me like I am and I'm not good enough.
SPEAKER_02: I want to suggest to you that baptism is this opportunity for us to see in ourselves that God has called us beloved just like we are.
SPEAKER_02: This may take some practice for you.
SPEAKER_02: And I would suggest one way to start is by looking in a mirror and staring yourself down until you can hear God say, especially when you accentuate your crows' feet and your frown wrinkles and your really long eyebrow hairs.
SPEAKER_02: This is my son, this is my daughter, the beloved, and you.
SPEAKER_02: I'm well pleased.
SPEAKER_02: Now listen, you may be in front of that mirror for a while, and mirrors are really a spiritual challenge for me.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes in my life it'd be better not looking at them.
SPEAKER_02: But I want to suggest this as part of Jesus' own epiphany that we get to walk into.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus gets to have this epiphany that God already loves him before he starts.
SPEAKER_02: That in fact, God's not going to love him anymore after he's done.
SPEAKER_02: And God's not going to love him any less if he gets upset.
SPEAKER_02: That's a tough teaching for me.
SPEAKER_02: But I do want to suggest because I think Jesus makes that connection, he's able to touch those dirty people because they're no longer dirty to him.
SPEAKER_02: When he can accept his own limitations, he can accept the limitations of others.
SPEAKER_02: When he can accept the spiritual gifts God's given him, he doesn't have to be jealous when he sees other people have some.
SPEAKER_02: He can be grateful.
SPEAKER_02: And I want to suggest that we can only love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves.
SPEAKER_02: And that this is the beginning epiphany for Jesus' whole life and whole ministry.
SPEAKER_02: And that's why we do baptism in public, and that's why we say the baptismal covenant.
SPEAKER_02: Because what we say when we do that is, hey, I don't even know if I remember that, but here's what I do remember: God loves me like I am.
SPEAKER_02: And hey, I hear you saying that you are really disappointed in your supervisor.
SPEAKER_02: How can you love that person more?
SPEAKER_02: That's what we're supposed to do when we covenant together, is hear one another being downtrodden and burned down and disappointed and say, I've covenanted with you.
SPEAKER_02: We will grow in this together.
SPEAKER_02: Let's do it.
SPEAKER_02: Instead of, boy, I hate that person too.
SPEAKER_02: That's why we do this together, so we can say, look, I know you're not seeing it right now.
SPEAKER_02: You're focusing on the show.
SPEAKER_02: But listen, God's pearl is in that person.
SPEAKER_02: To be honest, I can't see it either.
SPEAKER_02: But sonar says it's in there, so let's hold that out.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is how we do it as a community, as we say, we can do this.
SPEAKER_02: We can do this.
SPEAKER_02: We can.
SPEAKER_02: And my prayer is that as epiphanies of Jesus come and come and come, that we'll be formed by this initial one that we'll spend time.
SPEAKER_02: And listen, if this is the only one we get this year, I think it's really worth getting.
SPEAKER_02: God wants to wash away all the things that remove us from ourselves.
SPEAKER_02: So that God can also wash away all the things that remove us from our parents and our children and our co-workers and the church and our priest and the barista at Starbucks and the RoboCollar.
SPEAKER_02: God wants to remove that stuff.
SPEAKER_02: God wants the waters of chaos to take all that chaotic stuff out of our lives with it.
SPEAKER_02: And that's why, in just a few minutes, I'm going to sprinkle you with some water from the Jordan River.
SPEAKER_02: Now I'm going to warn you, if this is a concern about getting in your eyes, you can cover them.
SPEAKER_02: I won't be flinging a lot, but I invite you as this water touches you to take a moment and be refreshed and hydrated and nourished by it.
SPEAKER_02: And let it roll down and wash away whatever it is that is worrying you enough from being present in your life and in those you love and from receiving God's love in you.