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BAPTISM OF OUR LORD

Baptism in the Spirit

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Today is the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord.  For me, it has always been a problematic Sunday for preaching.  Our practice of baptism and the baptism of Jesus seem to be two very different things.  For us, baptism is about forgiveness.  It is about being washed clean.  It is about our being joined to the death and resurrection of Jesus. 

If that’s what baptism does, then the question we ask on this Sunday is, “Why did Jesus have to be baptized?”  It is, in fact, the most common question in study materials.  It is the most common question that I have asked as I have studied and preached on these texts.  It is the question that may be foremost in your mind today.

I have decided, however, that I am going to set this question aside.  I may come back to it next year.  I think Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism is more concerned with this.  But Luke’s account is not.  I don’t think Luke is interested in the question, “Why did Jesus have to be baptized?”  And it’s important in trying to understand Bible passages not to ask questions of them that they themselves are not asking.

The question I think that this text is interested in is, “Who is Jesus and why should we pay attention to him?”

I think most of us, most of the time, think of Jesus as God dressed in human clothes.  What God can do, Jesus can do.  What God knows, Jesus knows.  He’s really God – he just looks human.  That’s a picture of God that is in line with what the Gospel of John tells us – the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth. And it’s a picture that is carried on through John’s gospel.

But this is Luke’s gospel.  And I believe we get a different angle on Jesus.  In John’s gospel, we see Jesus from above, as theologians would say.  In Luke, I think the picture of Jesus from below, a picture that looks something more like this: Jesus is a human being who is so filled with the Spirit of God, who lives so completely in response to the Spirit of God, that he can only be called the Son of God. 

Now I know this particular picture of Jesus raises its own questions – about the meaning of the virgin birth and about the nature of the Trinity.  But for now let me expand on this picture: Jesus is a human being who is so filled and so lead by the Holy Spirit that he can only be called Son of God.

The Holy Spirit has a prominent place in the Gospel of Luke.  Luke mentions the Holy Spirit sixteen times in his gospel.  In the other gospels, Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit.  In Luke, Jesus has an active relationship with the Holy Spirit.

When the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will conceive and bear a son and she asks Gabriel how this will happen, Gabriel says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you.”

After his baptism, Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness.  After his time in the wilderness, he is also led by the Spirit into Galilee to begin his public ministry.  There, in his home town of Nazareth , he goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath.  He stands to read the scripture from Isaiah and proclaims, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…”  That reading inaugurates Jesus’ ministry of preaching good news to the poor, of healing the blind and freeing the oppressed, of proclaiming the year of God’s favor.

And this Spirit comes upon him at his baptism.  Jesus is baptized and, while he is praying, the Holy Spirit descends upon him in the form of a dove.  And a voice is heard saying, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

That is why I would say that, according to Luke, we can’t fully understand Jesus without the Holy Spirit.  And that is why I would say that, in Luke, Jesus is a human being who is so full of the Spirit of God and so attuned to the Spirit of God, that he can only be called Son of God.

How is it that Jesus remains so attuned to the Holy Spirit?  It would be easy to say that Jesus stays in contact with the Spirit of God because he is the Son of God, after all.   But I think a better answer is through prayer. Luke is the only gospel account of Jesus’ baptism that mentions prayer in this scene.  He reports that, after Jesus had been baptized and was praying, the Holy Spirit came upon him.

Luke doesn’t tell us what kind of prayer Jesus was engaged in.  He could have been praying traditional Jewish prayers.  He could have been praying psalms.  He could have been extemporizing his own prayer of praise and petition.  But if he was using words, he wasn’t so focused on his words that he wasn’t listening for God.  He wasn’t so focused on his prayer that he would have missed what God was doing right then and there.

So, I imagine that, whatever words Jesus might or might not have been using, his prayer included his own undivided attention on God, his own openness to God’s presence and his own availability to what God might be saying or doing in that very moment.  He may not have been using very few words.  He not have been using words at all.  But I believe he was paying attention with his whole heart and his mind and his soul to God.

We often define prayer as talking with God or even conversation with God.  But what about conversation is important?  Is it the words or is it the undivided attention we give? 

When we are talking with a good friend, and we are sharing something important and they are focused on us in a way that we sense we are the most important thing in the world to them right now – that’s the kind of undivided attention I mean.  Just as it can in conversation, that attention can work both ways.  That is the kind of attention God gives you.  So, if you are giving your undivided attention to God, and you trust that, at the same time, God is giving you his undivided attention, then that is prayer.

In Confirmation on Wednesday night, we started a series called, “I AM – Getting to Know God.”  As a part of that study, we read Psalm 139.  That psalm is a hymn of praise to the closeness and care of God.  It begins:

Yahweh, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand.

I’m an open book to you; even from a distance you know what I’m thinking.

You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight.

You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence.

I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too – your reassuring presence, coming and going.

This is too much, too wonderful – I can’t take it all in!  (The Message)

God’s attention is wonderful!  It is amazing!  It is almost overwhelming! God’s undivided attention helps us to feel as if, in that moment, we are the only person in the world that matters to God.  That means that undivided attention is also an expression of love.

So, when we give God our undivided attention and we trust that God is giving his undivided attention to us, then that is the beginning of prayer.  It is opening to life in the Spirit.  It is the life of following Jesus into which we have been baptized.