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Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

Baptism of Our Lord

Year C
January 12, 2025
Melinda Quivik

Isaiah 43:1–7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14–17
Luke 3:15–17, 21–22

 

What does Jesus’ baptism have to do with the relationship we humans have with our home, Earth? How does Jesus’ baptism inform our view of climate chaos? Finally, how does Jesus’ baptism and our own baptisms invite us to embrace our responsibility to God’s creation?

I am assuming that our conventional approach to Jesus being baptized by John focuses on that beginning of Jesus’ ministry and remains unaffiliated with our baptisms. After all, Jesus was different. He got a dove to zoom down when he was baptized. His baptizer, John, was a wild man who rose up out of the wilderness, the place of instability, of danger, of aloneness, and of vision quests to –– as I envision it –– shout at the people that it is time to pay attention and mend their priorities because something really big is about to happen. Our pastors don’t usually come reeling out of the wilds; they live in neighborhoods mostly. They don’t shout much. Yet we give thanks for John because we need him at all times to nudge us, shame us, convert us to what matters. John’s message is: “I am not the Messiah and that isn’t even the point here, folks. I’m here to tell you that the one who is coming will baptize you not just with the Holy Spirit but with fire, too.”

Because fire has multiple effects, this promise of being bathed in both the Holy Spirit and fire is sobering. Fire destroys, purifies, cleanses, renews, alters what it touches in many ways, engenders fear, and brings hope because it can root out what is undesirable to make room for what is needed. The one who is greater than John will bring ultimate change. “Wake up!” says John to the crowds. “Stop looking for what you think you want and prepare the way for what you actually need.” John the Baptist puts front and center in our paths the universal need to set our eyes on what is most critical about life itself.

As we listen to John the Baptist today, we might hear his “Wake up!” about the coming one in a new light. What we need is a life-giving planet. Preparing the way forward is essentially about waking up to what is around us and under and inside us. What could be more critical than the very ground beneath our feet, the air we breathe, and the water we drink and use for baptism.

Jesus’ baptism brings his life and his relationship with water into intimate contact with our lives. We, too, are baptized at the font. . . in small bowls or swift rivers or deep lakes. . . always immersed in the water of life. . . the water of Earth. 

Unless that water is polluted or too scarce to fill a teacup. Then we might suddenly see that the things of this world have sanctity in and of themselves and sacred connections to us. We might stop using the word “resource” when we speak of water, because a resource is something made for us to use and use up. A “resource” is something we own, buy and sell, take apart, waste, and pay not much heed. We might start honoring water, soil, and air with reverence for the fact that these creations of God are in themselves worthy. They are not made worthy because we exist and “use” them.

Isaiah assures us that we do not need to prove ourselves deserving of the Creator’s love because we already “are precious” in God’s sight. The Lord says: “I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.” That is Isaiah’s way of saying what we Christians know in the waters of baptism: we are named “child of God” and promised that we “are created” for God’s glory. We are created to be testaments to God’s glory, to give honor to what God has created.

We are connected not only to God but to each other, made into the body of Christ through baptism which the Acts reading describes as a result of the community of the faithful coming together in prayer. The belonging we are given in baptism does not occur in the course of a run-of-the-mill secular club, fraternal organization, or even family. The creation of the body of Christ is of a different order than those gatherings that include people of like mind or shared hobbies or similar life experiences. The church is not a book club or a knitting or skeet shooting group or people who are in the VFW. The church is not exclusive to people who are kin or even who are acquainted. The church is what God creates through water, the Holy Spirit, and, as John says, fire.

The fire that burns within us as a people who are heirs to God’s reign gives us the insight (as the wisdom of Indigenous peoples urges us) to peer seven generations ahead in time. There, we can see where we are headed. We can make choices based on our commitments to our descendants. We are enabled to care about our children, grandchildren, and the children of strangers all around the world, and plants and big and tiny creatures of Earth, because we know our value as the body of Christ. None of us is alone with the problems we face. None of us has to figure out all by ourselves a reasonable answer on how to care for Earth. We have been given into the hands of all the baptized whose lives are, like ours, founded on the promises of God. From that stable and joyous enclosure, we are enabled to care about our Earth home.

_______________

 

Hymns to consider:

In ELW:

#734 God, Whose Farm is All Creation

#358 Great God, Your Love Has Called Us

In All Creation Sings:

            #991 Go to the World!

            #1099 Kneeling in the Dust to Form Us

Melinda Quivik
Melinda Quivik
Twin Cities, Minnesota

Melinda Quivik, an ELCA pastor (who served churches in Montana, Michigan, and Minnesota) and former professor of worship and preaching, is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal Liturgy, a writer, and a preaching mentor with Backstory Preaching at backstory-preaching.mn.com. Her most recent book, Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays, is a response to Lenny Duncan's Dear Church. She calls all churches to learn why worship ways differ in our various traditions as we seek to be more welcoming.

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