Epiphany I

In the Eastern Church the focus is not on the birth of Christ but on his manifestation to us as the incarnate God. The great festival among Orthodox Christians is not Christmas but Epiphany. On the feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, Orthodox Christians celebrate two manifestations: Christ’s baptism and his birth, included because they assume Christ was baptised on his thirtieth birthday. The moment at which Jesus is endowed with the Holy Spirit and acknowledged publicly as God’s beloved is the true manifestation of Christ.

Mark’s gospel operates under the same principle. It plunges us right into that moment in time when John baptised Christ. The baptism serves almost as an inauguration ceremony, after which Jesus is launched into the desert and then returns to walk among the people for three years. The gospel even presages Good Friday with its mention of the heavens being torn open at the moment of the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus like a dove. The whole story is there in a few verses with no preamble.

Perhaps because Mark’s gospel was the first of the four gospels to be written, its author felt that no time should be wasted and that the real story of Jesus’ ministry should start up right away. Mark’s gospel is characterised by a sense of urgency. The adverb, ‘immediately,’ appears 27 times in the gospel. Its use is not limited to Jesus; the disciples, spirits and relatives of suffering people react with the same alacrity. For whatever reason, there are no infancy stories or stories of Jesus’ youth in Mark’s gospel. Instead, the gospel starts off with a bang: the encounter of Jesus with John the baptiser at the river Jordan.

The writer of the gospel portrays John with a lot of detail. We know where John appeared, what clothes he wore, what he ate, and what he did. It is hard to know whether what he wore was common or rare — we’ve always assumed that John was somewhat of an odd character, but perhaps the camel’s hair was normal for a nomadic sort of person. The gospel informs us that John preaches repentance for the forgiveness of sins, not judgement. And the story relates that John knows someone greater than he will baptise not with water but with the Holy Spirit.

Unlike John’s portrayal, Jesus is barely described. For such an important figure in the history of humankind, Mark’s gospel simply says: ‘In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John.’ A listener to the gospel a generation or two after Jesus’ life might have been able to fill in the details of the story of his life that writers didn’t think important to set down but for someone unfamiliar with him and without the aid of the other gospels, Jesus could have been anyone.

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And perhaps that is the writer’s point. Jesus, the Son of Mortals, God-enfleshed, nonetheless is baptised with water and the Holy Spirit in the very same way you and I have been and countless generations have, are and will be. When doctrinal differences have been cast aside, what unites one Christian to another is that he or she has been baptised.

Through baptism, you and I have been called to a rich ministry of proclaiming Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and his continued presence in the Church, the body of Christ in the world, here and now. This proclamation is the ministry of the Church, and all the people of God share in this ministry through baptism. Ordered ministries, like those of deacons, priests and bishops, are specialised ministries set apart by God and the people to help them — the people, the primary ministers of the church — to be equipped with everything they need to be Christ’s sacramental presence in this world. The ministers of the church are not primarily the bishops, priests and deacons, but the faithful, the people of God, all of those set apart by God through baptism to bear witness by word and action that the realm of God is active and present in this world.

The Episcopal Church is only thirty years into realising this new, yet ancient, vision of what it means to be the church. It is learning how to retain those aspects of the church that make it uniquely Anglican and catholic (i.e., universal), such as its sacramental theology of holy orders, while expanding the presence, importance and contributions of the baptised.

When I speak of the ministry of the baptised, I am not thinking of solely what we do here inside this building. Reading the lessons, serving chalice, acolyting, swinging the thurible, singing in the choir, preparing the altar, setting up the flowers, cleaning the church, ushering, bringing forth the bread, wine and alms at the offertory, and all those other good ministries we do inside these four walls are but a piece of what our total ministry is.

As I have come to understand better the ministry of the baptised, I have arrived at the realisation that this ministry is what we do outside these four walls in our daily life and work. Speaking from the perspective of one who taught for many years, I used to ask myself: How do I, as a teacher, make Christ present in my class, even if I cannot mention Christ’s name? How does my faith inform my values? How do I spread God’s good news of redemption, grace, mercy, pardon and love in my daily interactions? Perhaps you have asked these same questions in your daily work.

I heard once of a man who wrestles with the same questions. He is a long-distance truck driver for an organic food company. For the longest amount of time he couldn’t make the connection between driving all hours of the night across the country with his faith in Christ and the baptismal covenant. One day he realised that by driving this truck, he was providing people with good food so that they could have healthier lives. Through his work, he was able to provide for the common good and perhaps touch the lives of others he would never meet. His daily log book of miles driven has become an icon of this human connection.

The task of making the connection between daily work and life with our faith is a challenging one, largely because so much of our culture teaches us that our worth is determined by our monetary value. When we think of ‘vocation’ we tend to get it mixed up with ‘profession.’ Many people go to work because they have to, not because the job they do excites them. Figuring out what our calling is has to do very deeply with one’s self, one’s understanding of self, of asking, ‘Who am I?’ and not living being who others want me to be. In learning to find one’s call by God in this world, we have to do a lot of interior listening. And that is hard.

Novelist Frederick Buechner once said that Christian vocation is discovered in the connection of where we find our deepest joy and where we encounter the world’s deepest need. These connections differ from person to person. What is your joy? And where does it meet the needs of the world? How are you called to minister in that special place with the gifts God has given you?

Finding one’s vocation, one’s unique call by God, is a life long journey. But the hints that we are close to it are found in where we fall in love, where our deep imagination is seized, in what gets us out of bed in the morning, what breaks our heart, in what amazes us at times with deep and surprising gratitude. Knowing and saying Yes to God’s call to us is indeed something like falling in love again. When we know what our call is, it will decide everything for us. [based on a prayer by Pedro Arupe, S.J.]


Photo: Nourse Hall, where we will be worshipping at the 10.00 until Palm Sunday.

Post Script: You can call this sermon my baptismal manifesto, not to be confused with manifestation... but it is how I understand baptismal ministry after a lot of wrestling.