10th January 2021
Parish Church of St James, Louth
Genesis 1.1-5; Psalm 29; Acts 19.1-7; Mark 1.4-11
+May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Water is such a fundamental element. Celebratedly, we fail and die almost immediately without it, whereas we can go months without food. Scientists
have established that the earth did indeed have a time, 1.5 billion years ago, when it was a water world, all one sea-surface just as Genesis describes: with
a wind from God moving over the face of the waters. And we all know water’s pleasures—the whole body glow after a sea-swim, the smell of the
garden after rain, the play of light on a clear Lincolnshire chalk-stream.
I sometimes ask parents whose babies I am about to baptise whether they like their baths, as this is usually a gauge of how they will respond to the
water I pour over their heads. But actually baptism is much less like a baby’s first bath than what comes before it: pregnancy & birth. In the words said
over the waters in the medieval rite of baptism this is made explicit: the prayer speaks of the ‘womb’ of the round-bellied font. We are all, as
baptised Christians, being given a new mother, the life of the Church as Christ’s body. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, says St Paul. We
are replaced into the heart of God’s being, from where all creation comes and belongs, and told that is where we will grow and be formed, as his
children.
One way in which it is like a baby’s first bath is the sheer delight and glory of that moment, when, under the transparent veil of water, we take time to
appreciate tiny limbs and radiant skin, when we make what contribution we can to the health and comfort of this extraordinarily precious new being.
But as with a birth, there is also some hardship, danger . Every coming to be is a risk—less so now than once, but still truly fraught with the fragility
we all carry.
In the prayer with which the waters are blessed, we trace the scriptural history of water, and see in it the river of grace that runs through the whole
history of the cosmos—from the spirit hovering over the waters of creation, through the waters that parted and sustained the pilgrims of the exodus,
through the water miracles of Christ to the water into which he descended, redicting his death, and burst up out of to recognition and sonship. The
God who has been ‘over’ and ‘upon’ the waters in our Old Testament readings is now within and bursting up from the waters. With us, alongside
us, in the matter and fragility he takes with him into, makes a way to, glory.
There is a paradox of eternity and time, whereby in God’s eyes things are richly complete, but for us are not any the less to be rejoicedly realised. This
paradox means that God has made us whole, washed us clean, given us eternal life once and for all in baptism. But in time we will seek this, and
find it, year by year, day by day, even hour by hour. We are holy, we are children of God. But this needs to be freshly called out of us all the time.
And this feast, the Baptism of Christ, is one given to us to remind us of that fresh calling.
It is a time to recall ourselves to our lives in Christ. To recommit ourselves to the whole weight and beauty of our hope and faith. To carry it more
openly, live it out more fully. To live each and every day in the full glow of our baptismal release, and yet also to know that in God’s endless rushing
river of grace there is enough water to wash us clean again and again. There is enough water for the healing of all the nations. And that birth, that new
creation, is ours to realise this and every day.