This sermon was preached on Sunday 12th January 2025 at St Peter and St Paul Church, Langham.
Bible Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17,21-22
Today, we remember the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. So, as we begin thinking about baptism, I thought I’d start with a quick poll. Who here remembers their baptism? Show of hands. Okay, thanks for that. And to clarify, of those of you who didn’t put your hands up, can you raise your hand if the reason you can’t remember is because you were baptised as a baby? Okay, that’s a fair number of you.
Baptism is a crucial moment in the Christian life, and it was also a vital moment for Jesus. But why is it so important? As we discuss this, let’s start by recapping what baptism is.
So, in the gospel reading, John is baptising people with a baptism of repentance. That is, baptism is in response to an act of repentance. Well, what is repentance? Repentance is when, after turning away, you turn around to face a person, in this case, God. To repent is to take your life from heading away from God and turn around toward God. It’s to do a full 180-degree about turn. So, a baptism of repentance boils down to this question: are we turning our lives to now face God? Are we turning to God and not the other things of the world that are not God, the things and sin that distract and pull us away from him?
So, we see that baptism relates to turning away from sin and turning to God. But what else is going on in baptism? Let’s look at the act of baptism itself. As we said earlier, for many of us in this room, baptism took place as a child. So, the vicar (if you let them) would take you in their arms, hold you over the font, and pour water over your head three times, saying, ‘I baptise you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’ But that is not what John was doing in his baptisms. John stood with people in the Jordan River and baptised them in the river, fully submerging them backwards and bringing them back up afterwards. Today, we call this a full-immersion baptism because the whole body is fully immersed and submerged under the water.
Now, the use of water is important in Jewish culture, especially in its role regarding ritual cleansing and purification, which is mentioned on multiple occasions in the Jewish law found in the first five books of the Old Testament. Water was used for purification before worship, particularly for the priests, and it was used for physical and symbolic cleansing, including acts of repentance. We use water for washing dishes or having a bath because they make the dishes and us clean. The same logic is applied to how water is used for ceremonial cleansing. In the opening prophecy of Isaiah, the Lord says, ‘Wash and make yourselves clean.’[1] Water is so closely tied to being clean with the Jewish audience of the gospels (though, if we are honest, water is tied to being clean in nearly every culture).
So, with repentance and baptism with water, we see that baptism is about turning away from sin, turning to God, and being washed clean of the stain of sin in our lives. We are cleansed and purified so that we may approach the pure and perfect God. It’s also worth noting the physical posture of baptism. With full immersion baptism, a person is lowered backwards into the water and is lifted back upright. In this posture, we see the death of the old life of sin, which then falls to the grave as the person is lowered into the water, and then they rise again in a clean and new life. So, baptism is about being made clean and rising to life as we turn our lives to God away from sin. This is what each of our baptisms is about. We are baptised into new life with Jesus, free from the stain of sin, and choosing to live life with God.
When you think about your baptism, what does it mean to you? Does it reflect your desire to turn away from sin and live a new life with Jesus? Or is it something that maybe you have forgotten about, and it’s stuck in the back of your memory as something that happened but was neither here nor there for you? My question to you is, what do you want your baptism to mean for you? Is it something that you are happy to forget about? Or do you want it to mark and distinguish your life as a follower of Jesus? What do you want your baptism to mean to you?
As I said at the start, today, we are marking the baptism of Jesus, who was also baptised by John the Baptist. Now, you might be thinking, hold on a minute, why is Jesus being baptised? Jesus is the Son of God. He is pure, perfect, and, most crucially, without sin. So why would Jesus be baptised if he had no sin from which to repent and no sin that would be a death to his life? Jesus is living a sinless, pure life with God. But I think that makes Jesus’ baptism all the more extraordinary. Jesus is already living a pure, sinless life with God. But he still chooses to be baptised. I see this as Jesus saying, ‘I am actively choosing to live my life turned to God. Even though I am the Son of God, I am not taking my life with God for granted. It is a life that I am actively choosing.’
Jesus’ active choice to follow God reminds us that, as Christians, we must never take our Christian life for granted and forget to choose to follow God. I’m sure we all know people who are baptised and would describe themselves as Christians but are not actively making that choice to turn to God and follow him. I’m sure there are times when we might have experienced that in our own lives. When we go through the motions of being a Christian as a habit rather than a choice. When churches reopened after Covid, a lot of people stopped coming to church. I wonder if some of these people had lost the habit of being a Christian during the lockdown, and when Covid was over, they didn’t choose to come back – they were now set in a new habit.
I want to stress that it’s okay that we might go through those periods in our faith. It’s a normal and common experience to find ourselves going through the motions of our faith if we are not careful. And sometimes, God takes us through spiritually desert periods for what feels like forty years. It’s okay and normal to go through this. But I think the story of Jesus’ baptism today offers us a reminder and invitation to make an active choice to follow God. What do you want your baptism to be? I want my baptism to be an active choice.
I was baptised when I was fourteen years old. Last night, I was reading over the testimony I shared at my baptism about my faith and my choice to follow God (I can confirm that even at 14, I knew how to go on a bit). I wrote:
‘I was…brought up in a Christian family… so from a young age I was learning about Jesus. I would pray to him, sing songs on a Sunday, go to Sunday school, and if my friends ever asked me I would say I was a Christian. As far as I was concerned, I believed in God, and I was going to heaven. At no point did I doubt there was a God because I could see him in the little everyday miracles.’
Then, to skip on a bit, it was whilst at a Christian summer camp at 10 years old that things started to click for me about making an active choice. I wrote:
‘There is where I started to learn about the idea of a relationship with God. For me at first, I was quite confused. During our time of worship, people had their hands raised to God and were jumping for joy. I found it a bit overwhelming, but I started to understand why they were doing that from the teaching. God loves us so much that he sent his one and only son to endure the human hardship and take all our sins on the cross so that we didn’t have to suffer for them. I also learnt that God wants to be my best friend, like that of the bond of marriage. It became clear that I needed to say to Jesus to come into my life. Looking back on it, I can see it is like saying the ‘I dos’ to the marriage of me and God and, in doing so, becoming one with one another. So, on the 1st August 2006, I did. I could feel that the Holy Spirit was in me.’
For many of us, baptism was this spiritual bath time that we didn’t sign up for, and we had no idea it was going on. But today, what is your baptism going to mean for you? Are you going to let your baptism be a faded memory of years past, or is your baptism going to be your active choice to follow God, to turn away from sin and give your life to him? In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray ‘forgive us our sins’ because though baptism is a one-time act, its repentance is a daily posture lived out again and again as we live out our baptism. Are you going to live out your baptism life with God?
As a final note, I want to touch upon the words from our first reading from Isaiah. God says: ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.’[2] When we pass through the waters of baptism, God promises to be with us. John talks about Jesus’ baptising with the Holy Spirit. When we are baptised with water, God does more than wash us with water; he gives us his Holy Spirit to dwell in us. Our baptism life is about a new life turned around to follow after God, and God responds by coming to be at the centre of our life. The baptised life is a life with God and God fully with us. So, what do you want your baptism to mean? Is your baptism going to be your active choice to follow God? I pray that it is because there is nothing better in this life than choosing life with God.
Amen.
[1] Isaiah 1:16 [NIV].
[2] Isaiah 43:1-2 [NRSV].
Shakeel Nurmahi 