Baptism of Christ

 Richard Ames-Lewis

12th January 2025, Feast of the Baptism of Christ

When I was invited to come onto the preaching rota here 15 years ago, I began numbering my sermons. About five years ago I was discussing this with our late vicar Anna Matthews. I had at that point preached 65 sermons in St Benet’s. I suggested to her that when I had preached 100 sermons, I would be ready to hang up my surplice. I don’t know what impelled me to make such a prophecy. Anyway, you may like to know that this sermon is number 103.

Since this is the Feast of the Baptism of Christ, I would like to suggest that we use this sermon for three things. First to reflect on our own baptism, how it happened, when it happened, where it happened. Then to look at the baptism of Jesus, long ago in the River Jordan, as we read about it in the gospels. And then to see if we can make any connection between the two, our baptism and Jesus’s baptism, and if we can, then what this does for our spiritual lives.

Most of us, I think, will have no recollection of our baptism. Quite possibly we have never paused to reflect how, why or where it happened for us. If we were baptised as infants, we will have relied on our parents, godparents or other carers to tell us what the circumstances were that brought our baptism about. If we were baptised as adults we will have the privilege of memory to recall that event and the special people who supported us. Whatever it was like, for us each to reflect on the event will take us back to a time and a place, and to people who loved us enough to bring us to the font.

They will probably want to kill me for this, but I must tell you that my three children, Eleanor, Caroline and Jonathan, who are all here today, were all baptised as infants in the font of this church. So even though they have no recollection of this, I fancy that being here today on such a day as this is something of a spiritual homecoming.

A generation earlier, my baptism, as described to me by my mother, was an event of the most conventional kind. My family were wartime refugees living temporarily in digs in a west country market town. At the age of just under three months, the traditional age for a Christening, I was brought to the font of a rather posh little village church. It was 80 years ago, on 8th April 1945. I must admit that this event meant nothing to me until thirty years later when I was offering for ordination. I discovered that the Church of England required me to produce evidence that it had happened, a Baptism certificate. Please take note of this, if by chance you are called to ordination! I remember writing a letter to the vicar of the church, as though to a foreign country, asking for such a certificate. He found the entry in the register, copied it and sent it to me, a crisp and formal piece of paper. But of my baptism ceremony I have of course no memory or understanding.   

And I have to admit also that for me the Church of England practice of Confirmation, administered to people when they reach years of discretion, was in my case also conventional. I can remember it with affection but with little understanding.

From this I draw the conclusion, that we are blind to the significance of these ceremonies, and that this blindness is somehow important in the spiritual life. Our eyes are waiting to be opened.

Now let us turn to the Baptism of Christ, about which we heard today in the reading from St Luke’s gospel. We are in a different world, the world of the New Testament, the Holy Land, the wilderness, the River Jordan and the frightening figure of John the Baptist proclaiming a baptism of repentance. Here we are caught up with a sense of urgency. The people are filled with expectation. Was this the messiah come at last? John says “I baptise with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming, who will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Then we read that Jesus took his place at the end of the queue of people to be baptised. Despite the incongruity of the sinless Son of God queuing for a baptism of repentance, we can picture Jesus, held in the arms of John the Baptist, being immersed in the Jordan water, and emerging washed. Then Luke writes, “When Jesus had been baptised and was praying “the heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

I think we can be sure that Jesus knew his destiny. He understood what his baptism meant and why he had to undergo it. For him, this was not a blind, unknowing baptism. This was the conferring of authority for his future ministry of teaching and healing, and I can imagine that for him to hear the voice from heaven “You are my Son, the beloved” must have been immensely reassuring. But the baptismal event meant more than this.

Let me share with you a very special word in the spiritual life. It is the word “proleptic”. This word means “anticipating”, “foreshadowing” or “prefiguring”. And it applies to Jesus’s baptism. This event was proleptic. It anticipated and prefigured his passion, death and resurrection. His immersion in the water of the Jordan was no mere washing. It was a drowning, anticipating his crucifixion, while the breaking of the water’s surface, as he emerged baptised, was a rising, anticipating his resurrection on the third day.

So Jesus was, so to speak, armed with this knowledge, fortified with God’s love and driven out by the Holy Spirit to his work of salvation until what had been foreshadowed came to pass.

So it would seem that between Jesus’s baptism and ours there is a great gulf. Ours, an event of blindness; his, an event of foreknowledge. But I want to tell you an important quality which our baptism shares with that of Jesus. Our baptism also is proleptic.  However long ago, however blind, however conventional, what happened for us anticipates and prefigures what God in Christ will yet do for us. The washing by the water in the font prefigures our incorporation into Christ’s death and risen life. As St Paul wrote to the Colossians “when you were buried with Christ in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God who raised him from the dead.”

I want to finish by returning to this church fifty years ago, because it was here, then, that there happened for me a gradual opening of my eyes to the life of faith. Thanks to the ministry and congregation of this church, I experienced God’s abundant love. You could say that this brought together my own baptism with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. And the experience of him risen and alive here among us.

The consequence for me was the disclosure of my vocation, to ordination, to 30 years of parochial ministry, to retirement and a return to this church and now to a return to the pews.

But I am not alone. God in Christ has a vocation for each and every baptised Christian.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.