From the Pulpit:

 
                                                                                     What's in a name?
  

I’ve paid particular attention to names lately. As most of you know,  our only in-town grandchild was born just over a month ago, and of course the first thing we all asked was what is his name? only to be told by his parents that they weren’t rushing into it. They took several days to get to know him and then decided on a most stately name, Arthur Eliot. And I spent this weekend in Dallas at a baby shower for our youngest son and his wife, and the name of the son they are expecting was the main topic of discussion. They are not telling.

Those of us who have ever looked at our watery-eyed offspring,  minutes old or days old, and pronounced the name they would bear for the rest of their lives understand how daunting it is to presume to know who they are and who they will be when in fact we have only just met them. Still, we take a risk, whether in a moment or a week, and the name we give them is a gift.

This is a true story. I am not imaginative enough to have made it up. Years ago I was at a large, obligatory cocktail party at which I knew virtually no one. I was there by myself and determined to stay only as long as absolutely necessary so as not to offend my hosts. If you know me at all, you know it was torment. So I was standing there at a buffet table trying to look busy when up walked a nice looking couple, older parents I would say, and the father had a gorgeous Rubenesque child of maybe 18-months on his hip.

What a gorgeous little boy, I said. What is his name? The mom answered, We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for him to tell us who he is. I promise I didn’t make it up. As I think of it, even years later, I’m still awash in sadness  for the little boy whose parents hadn’t given him a name.

Naming is important. To give a name to someone we care about links us together in a system of expectations and obligations and commitments.

Today we celebrate the baptism of our Lord, the day that Jesus showed up on the banks of the Jordan and presented himself to John the Baptist, who may or may not have been his cousin, to be baptized, just like all the hoi polloi from Jerusalem and all the dusty little townships in the neighborhood. There is so much going on in this little story.

First of all, at the time of his baptism Jesus was not a baby like Arthur – we are told he is about thirty years old -- and he had been given his name before birth and it was made official at his bris when he was eight days old. If you’ll remember, when the angel Gabriel came to Joseph he told him to name the child Jesus, so Mary and Joseph did not even have to think up a name. God chose it for him. And when we baptize children, they have already been named, but still it is something very significant that happens in the sacrament of baptism,  something extremely defining.

Matthew is the only one of the gospel authors who calls a spade a spade. He points out the fact that John knows, and we do, too, that Jesus doesn’t need to be baptized to be forgiven of sin. It’s as if John says, Whoa. Stop. I know who you are and you know who I am, and you should be baptizing me. But Jesus, who is entirely immune to the sin -- which is why all these people are coming to John -- Jesus is insistent and compelling, and so he leans back in the murky water, and  under John’s hand, he lies heavy and breathless until John lifts him up and he gasps for air just like any one of us would have .

Baptism by John was not what we know as Christian baptism. It was a ritual bathing for repentence, a mikvah, and we know Jesus did not need to repent, so what was going on? Matthew lets us know he was scratching his head, too.

And yet we know something momentous happened because when Jesus felt the cool air on his face he saw the bright shaft of sunlight and out of it something like the flapping wings of a dove and he  heard – and they all heard a voice from heaven –  This is my son, my beloved. In him I am well pleased.

Jesus’ came to be baptized like all the rest of the people. His baptism was just like theirs, and still it was not. I like to think he stood his place in line and waited patiently until, unannounced, it was his turn. Actually, from what I know of Jesus, I’m sure he did. And Jesus’ baptism was not like our baptism, and yet it was. Paradox is at the very heart of Christianity. It is the spark that holds us in eternal wonder.

I can’t give you the definitive answer as to why Jesus had to be baptized any more than the gospel writers do, but I’ve got a couple of thoughts to play with, ideas that don’t quite come into sharp focus but that shine light on the power of baptism for Jesus and for us.

First, it is about the willingness with which God became incarnate in Jesus. I think we get confused when we so commonly talk about Jesus as the son of God, and I know Jesus referred to God as father, but the Gospel of John begins with the straightforward statement: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. When we saw the little baby in the manger, that was God. When we see the man suffering on the cross, that was God. And today we see God doing something God did not have to do in order to show us that he truly became one of us. He subjected himself to baptism for the forgiveness of sins because that’s what human beings do.

We struggle with our sinfulness and we repent again and again and again. We never get it right, but we always get another chance. I really like what Father Richard Rohr says about sin. He says we are not punished for our sins but rather that we are punished by them. Our sins hurt us, and so we seek solace. We seek health. Every one of those people who stood in line for hours in the hot sun was standing there hurting. People hurt. God hurts with us.

I don’t think we can ever fully grasp how absolutely beyond huge it is that God intentionally became one of us in order to show us what God’s love looks like. I imagine Jesus thinking as the muddy water closes in over his face, There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Nothing.

And I think there is something else that happens in Jesus’ baptism, and it happens in our baptism as well. The moment of his baptism is when Jesus receives his vocation. It would all be easier if we had stories of his childhood. Other than the single snapshot Luke gives us when he is twelve and gets lost at the Temple, we don’t know a thing about what happened between the manger and the baptism. We don’t know whether he grew up knowing that he was the son of God or if it was big news to him that day, but one way or another when the voice from heaven pronounced, This is my son, my beloved. In him I am well pleased, his job was defined. His baptism was his ordination into public ministry. Our baptism is our ordination into public ministry.

In place of the Nicene Creed today we will reaffirm our baptismal covenant, and I hope we will pay close attention to the five promises we make. They are huge promises. It wouldn’t do us a bit of harm to copy them and paste them on the bathroom mirror to review every morning as we brush our teeth. To say to ourselves before we face the world,  This is what I’m going to do today. They are nothing less than what Jesus did, and he did them because he was God, fully human and fully divine.

It is enormously difficult to hold in our minds this reality that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, and when we err, it is the fully human part that we usually lose our grip on. And so when we hold onto the picture of his baptism we hold onto the fact of his full divinity and also the fact that Jesus actually fulfilled everything we promise in our baptismal covenant.

It is radical. It is breathtaking. But I’ll say again what I’ve said many times before. God became incarnate in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth in order to show us how desperately he loves us, and in order to show us what he has in store for each and every one of us. As the earliest church fathers said, to be fully human is to be fully divine. We are to embrace our full humanity in the five enormous promises we make again today, and we are to go forth into this broken and beloved world as ordained ministers sent by none other than God to heal the sick, release the prisoners, give hope to the poor, and love every person with the love of God himself.

It’s a tall order, but God has given us what we need to do the job, and his name is Jesus.

Amen.