Sermon for the first Sunday after Epiphany

Sunday 9th January 2005

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

Isn’t very fitting that we should have a Baptism on the very Sunday when we specifically remember the Baptism of Christ? But very different Baptisms they are!
Niamh is nearly eight months old; Jesus was thirty.
Niamh Anna has been ‘Christened’ in the sense that she has been given her Christian names; Jesus already had his name which means ‘Saviour’ and ‘Healer’, it’s a form of the name ‘Joshua’. And when the Church began baptising babies as a matter of form, it got itself into a bit of bother, because the question then rose, when do they actually say for themselves that ‘yes, I believe’. And so we had to invent Confirmation when young adults ‘confirmed’, for themselves, what was promised on their behalf at their Baptism. (Now, there’s a bit of Church history that I didn’t really mean to get in to!) But just to let you know that Adult Baptism is still practised today, even here in Glencraig, and to baptise adults is always a very special event indeed.

What I really wanted to ask this morning is, if Baptism was to cleanse us from sin and make us born again, and initiate us into the Church of God, why on earth was Jesus, who was born without sin, baptised at all?

The news that is on everyone’s lips is the appalling devastation of life in South East Asia. Every second page of every newspaper has articles about it, and every news-broadcast is complete with it. When we have sent off our money to Bishops’ Appeal or whatever society it is, and try to help those on the ground to cope with such dire circumstances, we read continually of the constant human tragedy that this earthquake at sea has brought about, we then start to look around and try to make sense of it. Maybe we’re still in early days, and I’m expecting too much, but I’m not getting a great deal from our Church leaders at the moment. And my dismay was almost highlighted on BBC’s Newsnight when I saw an Archbishop taking on an Oxford Professor who was calling God the worst terrorist ever. I don’t want to make too much of a point of this, but when we look to our great world religious leaders at times of great crisis, we seem to get very little.

The truth is that I’m not sure if there is a way of understanding such trauma on such a scale. Death and trauma happens on a daily basis in Africa. But the Tsunami, in an extraordinary way, has united the world in grief and generosity. There are things to be done immediately, of course, but there are lessons to be learned in a wider context. To ‘postpone’ debt repayment in that part of the world, as Gordon Brown suggests, will save South East Asia something like three billion pounds. (I didn’t take a proper note of it at the time, but it is something in that region.) It raises the question of actually cancelling the debts of the poorest nations of the Third World. Do you remember ‘Jubilee 2000’? Whatever happened to that? Their argument being that most third world countries have already paid off their debts several times over, and they are simply still paying off the interest on their debts. A global, so-called ‘Western’ concerted effort to manage third world poverty, malnutrition and poor health care is being cried out for! The editorial in the Gazette reminds us that world military spending is now running at a staggering 956 billion dollars a year. A clear contrast to the amount needed to rebuild South-east Asia.

Jonathan Sacks suggests that God asks us not to understand but to heal: “We have been moved to sympathy, grief and the desire to help. We have watched and listened, prayed and shed inward tears. We have lived John Donne’s great words: ‘Any man’s death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind’. We have seen the worst of nature and the best of humanity”. All true.

But all I can do is try to personalise God. Where is he at? And when I do that I find him in the face of Christ. We’ve just celebrated the amazing fact that God has become flesh: the incarnation, Emmanuel, God with us. That’s what Christmas and Epiphany is all about. God with us. If the Christ-child has just been born in nakedness among the manure and stench of a stable, if he has had to be baptised in order truly to be one of us, if he has had to endure insufferable pain and agony, and eventually to endure the nakedness of death by crucifixion on a piece of wood, then truly he is ‘God with us’. He is identifying with us at every level, even to the point of death. If that is the kind of God that the Bible talks about, then I want to know him! “Lord, you were rich beyond all splendour”.. ‘You are the voice of the Lord upon the mighty waters’, as our psalmist says today, the ‘Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh’, and this same Lord, in order to show what love is, was born amongst the stench of a stable, “Lord, you were rich beyond all splendour, yet, for love’s sake, became so poor”.

If you can believe in a God who is continually identifying with us and our ‘fallen-ness’, then don’t you want to know this God, don’t you want to know a God who already knows where we are at!?

I would rather believe in a God like that, a God who knows our plight, our disease, our nakedness, our despair, than some kind of terrorist God … wouldn’t you?