ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass on the First Sunday of Epiphany, 8 January 2012.

Readings: Genesis 1.1-5; Acts 19.1-7; Mark 1.4-11.

The Baptism of Christ. Mark 1.9. Jesus was baptised in the Jordan by John.

The point of us being here, and indeed the point of all human existence, is to join in the divine life, to add the dimension of eternity to our unique personal lives. Divine life will transform us, it changes everything, it sweeps away the idols which clutter our lives. The Gospels are a record of human lives transformed by experience of divine life. Any bit of St Mark's Gospel, like the account of Jesus's Baptism today, reveals a human experience, never mind a divine experience, a human experience of such glory and spiritual depth that it would be folly to ignore it, and not to apply it to ourselves. And yet, we hold back, we always do.

One reason for this hesitation, I think, is that we try to serve God before we've met him. We try to worship God before we've found him. We try to love God without knowing him. And that can be disappointing and dispiriting and it's such hard work, because we're not sure who or where God is. There is a better way and it is right before our eyes today. The stories of Christmas, Epiphany and the Baptism of Christ, are about who God is, how we know him and how he knows us. And every year the same turnaround, the same reappraisal of God, the same surprise. The humility of our God forces us to think again. God is not a disembodied spirit or force, God is not an unpleasant headmaster we must avoid at all costs, God is not a bully who tells us what to do, God is not somebody made up by us or by those who want to use a God to dominate others. God is beyond our imagining. God is a love so pure and so forgiving that the only way we can start to understand it is to look at a newborn child. That's Christmas. God is a love so great that He can hold nothing back from us, is accessible by all of us everywhere, and therefore our response is to hold nothing back from him. There's Epiphany. And God is a love so strong that He will search the world until he finds you, and that's the truth which rises up from the story of the Baptism of Christ which we heard today.

We know the story so well that is doesn't surprise us, but for the early Church, particularly in the East, the Baptism of Christ was rather shocking, because why should Jesus be baptised, ritually cleansed, if he was the Son of God? The sinless one to Jordan came. If we had to guess what it would have been like at the River Jordan, we might imagine a public religious rite, with a lot of noise and a large unruly crowd, no synchronised servers there, a public confession of sins, a penitential act indicating a change of heart within. So the the Messiah's first public act, according to St Mark, is to join in, to be one of many in a communal ritual for the forgiveness of sins. It's a deliberately scandalous beginning to the story of Jesus's life, designed to make us think again about what his life means. The purpose of Jesus's life, they came to realise, was to deal with sin, so we'd better know what sin is. Sin is not a list of things which other people think are wrong. Sin is a self-perpetuating isolation, a deep seated sense of separation from God. Sin is a reality in which we get trapped, it's a name for where we are, not for what we're guilty of doing. Sin is an isolation which we keep going, not because we want to, but because we don't know how to end it. The genius, or the God-given insight in Christianity, is that we do not end this self-imposed isolation, but if we can raise our eyes to the horizon, help is at hand, from beyond us, from that love which will search the world until it finds us. Sin is our isolation. Salvation is the restoring, the making good, of the relationship, the relationship with others, with ourselves, with the created world, and through that engagement, with the God in whom all is united.

The life of Jesus is the story of this salvation. And every time salvation is through Christ's direct action. He comes to meet us. It is an embrace. Love finds us out, and this can happen to us as strongly and in as surprising, and sometimes unwelcome ways, as it did for the disciples and for the writers of the Gospels and their successors. Today we are in at the start of it all. The Baptism of Christ sets a pattern for Jesus's ministry. Jesus joins that sinful crowd by the Jordan, sinful in the sense that what they desire above all is forgiveness, the restoration of their natural relationship with God and with each other. Jesus sets aside his dignity, he knows a total solidarity with all people in their isolation and loneliness, he accepts us all whoever we are, whatever we've done or not done, he submits to John the Baptist, he is entombed within the River Jordan. Do you see how clever the Gospel is, and how this first event described by St Mark, the baptism in the River Jordan, prepares us for the final scene, Jesus's acceptance of his destiny, his crucifixion and his burial?

And coming out of the river Jesus saw the heavens torn apart, and the Spirit like a dove descending, a deliberate echo of the words from the first chapter of Genesis we heard this morning. And a voice came from Heaven, "Thou art my beloved son; with thee I am well pleased."And that's it, there, in the first chapter of St Mark's Gospel is Resurrection. There is love confirmed, the love which will find us all out, there is the love which creates the world and raises us from the dead. At the beginning of the Gospel, at the start of our Christian journey, Jesus is God's much loved Son, and that his ministry begins on the bank of the River Jordan with those who know their apartness, their separation from God. And if that's you, as it is me, then we are at the right place in our lives to welcome Jesus into our story, into our lives, for here is the acceptance, the forgiveness, the mercy, which leads to salvation, to knowing and loving God in all his works.

St Anselm told us about this salvation eight hundred years ago. "Once regenerated in him, delve into his secrets, so that on the banks of the River Jordan you may know the Father in the voice, the Son in the flesh, and the Holy Spirit in the dove; and, the heaven of the Trinity being opened to you, you may be carried up to God."