Baptism of Our Lord C
Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:1-3a, 15-17, 21-22
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
January 9, 2022
Epiphany
I went to college in Washington, DC, a city in which there is a war memorial almost every block: Civil War, World Wars One and Two, Korea. Most of those memorials I don’t remember, and you wouldn’t recognize or know about.
But there’s one that you would, and that of course is the Vietnam Memorial. It is a piece of such power, and the power of course comes from the names. I looked it up this week and found an interview with Maya Lin, the designer, and she said, “It’s the names; the names are the memorial. No edifice or structure can bring people to mind as powerfully as their names.”
My daughter-in-law is pregnant again, due in April, and it’s a boy. She and my son have let us all know that he will be named Robert, after me. Right now you’re thinking I’m telling you this because I’m bragging, but the way it feels to me, it’s exactly the opposite that is true: I can hardly remember anything that has filled me with more humility. I feel like even at my age now I have to learn how to be a better Robert. I’ve got to live up to the name, now, if they’re going to do that.
There’s power in a name; you’ve got to live up to a name. In the lesson this morning from the prophet Isaiah the Lord tells us
“I have called you by your name, you are mine.” By this little naming ceremony God has made all the difference. It’s a guarantee to God’s people of so much. It reminds Israel’s people of their divine origin, reminds them that they were created and have been formed by the Lord. It banishes fear and announces redemption. It offers God’s protecting hand in fire, flood and, yes, even in time of plague. God has wooed Israel with a declaration of covenant love, and God here confesses that Israel is “precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.” In scripture, being called by one’s name is a rich gift.
These promises and great privileges, however, come with a claim of ownership. The Lord reminds Israel that the name it bears is God’s own name. The Lord speaks here of bringing back from north, south, east and west “every one who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” You know, it’s a little like carrying both a given name and a family name. The first makes me special because I’m me. The second tells me I’m not only me; it reminds me of a heritage I carry with me. When my brothers and sisters and I were in high school my grandmother would occasionally overhear as we swapped stories about what we did with our friends on a Saturday night. “Just remember when you’re out there,” she would tell us, “you remember who you are, you!” As if the name Klonowski, humble little Polish name that it is, were really something to live up to.
Names tell us we are loved and call us into accountability. What greater accountability can there be than to know that we are called by God’s name, created for God’s glory? You have been named one of God’s own. All right, then: When you’re out there, you just remember who you are, you!”
Luke opens the third chapter of his Gospel with a long list of big, loud names, and then with a quiet irony. After a roll call of the celebrities of his day — Emperor Tiberius; Pontius Pilate; Herod, the king; some guy named Philip, prince of Ituraea and Trachonitis — Luke then mentions quietly and drily that “the word of God came … to John, … out in the wilderness.” John is not a Polish name, but it’s humble and little enough. The Word came not to any of those fat-cat guys with the pompous titles, but to a wanderer in the wilderness. The difference was that the name – John – was God-bestowed, with an angel promise that this John would be great in the eyes of the Lord.
In our world of loud and common “celebrities” whose only claim to fame is their inability to keep their clothes on, or the excesses of boorish crudeness of Shark Tank judges or reality dating participants or celebrity chef-types who scream at their captive staff, it is important to remember that God has another list, chosen not for celebrity rating, but for faithfulness to God’s great enterprise of healing the world.
Now, some of those Bible-day “celebrities” were pretty ticked off that the word of the Lord had taken that funny, ironic little turn in John’s direction. Herod the king was particularly irritated by John’s denunciations of his love life, and he finally imprisoned and killed John. We read that story now though and in it Herod is nothing but a punctuation mark, while the ragged figure of John is the Scripture’s signpost to Jesus, the center of human history.
So that’s how we finally get to where Jesus is this morning, standing in the water with the crowd who press in from the Jordan banks for baptism. It’s been 20 years since he engaged the teachers in the Jerusalem temple. The last we knew, he was growing up in the home of Joseph and Mary. Now he begins his public ministry, and it opens with a humble baptism that identifies him deeply with the people he has come to redeem. What could bind him more closely, than to wade into the muddy Jordan with people weeping for their sins; what could bind him more closely to them than quietly urging the hesitant Baptist to wash him, too?
It is out of this act of utmost humility that Epiphany – the revelation of God – comes. It is always out of an act of humility that Epiphany comes. As Jesus prays, heaven’s glory opens and God’s Spirit-dove descends upon him. Suddenly, all those first inklings of his calling that stirred in childhood, the unshaped consciousness of vocation, the inner yearnings and searchings, are brought into sharp, clear focus. And God names him with the name that only he may bear: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
This affirmation is the defining moment for Jesus; it names him who he is. It is God’s declaration of love to God’s new Israel; it is God’s naming to supreme accountability; it is God’s surprise, visited upon the world of the pompous and powerful.
There is nothing more important for any of us than to hear God call our name. What Jesus received by right that day in the waters of the Jordan, we are invited to receive by grace, every day that we remember our own Baptism, our own naming as one of God’s own.
At Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Naperville, where my nephews and my niece were baptized, you can’t avoid the baptismal font there. It’s at the entrance of the sanctuary, as if to say the only way in to this holy assemblage is by way of your Baptismal naming, child of God. It’s huge, maybe four feet by four feet, and it’s dark, smooth granite. And it’s living water, moving water, gently rising to the brim and then brimming over and continually spilling down the smooth granite sides in shimmering wet sheets. Kids love to stick their hands into the sheets of water, and adults too dip in a finger as they move in and out of worship.
Today we remember that the Baptism of Our Lord was accompanied by a big epiphany, a revelation, with the Holy Spirit and a voice from God and a naming. Today we remember, too, our own Baptism, an epiphany itself with the way that God has named us God’s own, children of God. And remember when you leave this place …
… you just remember who you are, you.