Okay, I finally have to admit it. Christmas is over. Of course, judging by the number of Christmas trees at the curb on December 26, Christmas has been over for some time for most of our culture. That’s why I like to remind folks that Christmas lasts until Epiphany on January 6. The 12 days of Christmas can give us time to savor the incarnation mystery without all the hoopla around shopping and presents and Santa Claus.
But now we are definitely in the season of Epiphany. In the Eastern Orthodox churches where it originated, Epiphany is a three-fold event celebrating first the coming of the Magi to Bethlehem, thus indicating the revelation of Jesus Christ to all the world, including the Gentiles. But the church also marks in Epiphany Jesus’ baptism, and his first act of ministry in the changing of water to wine at Cana. In some places it is marked by the blessing of water for baptism, of gold, frankincense, and chalk. The chalk is used to mark the initials of the names of the magi over the door CMB, for Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Before we had liturgical calendars, the priest would also announce the date of Easter this year (April 24). But the first Sunday in the season of Epiphany is always about the baptism of Jesus.
Why did Jesus come to John to be baptized? As the son of God, I’m not sure he really needed to be baptized; he was already God’s own forever. John certainly did not think he needed it, in fact he thought he should be baptized by Jesus instead. But baptism was something important to him, and I think he wanted it known that baptism should be important to us as well. His insistence on it showed us a way to touch the spiritual world and to tap into its power. Some scholars have said that it was at his baptism that Jesus’ divinity was conferred, or at least when it was claimed. It seems to have been a prerequisite for beginning his ministry. What is it that makes baptism so important to us Christians? What makes it a sacrament? In fact how do we deal with the reality of any of our sacraments? These are heady questions that have filled volumes of books. But I don’t think it hurts us from time to time look at what the sacraments, especially baptism and Eucharist, means to us, and this first Sunday in Epiphany is a good time to do that. Of course most of us know the prayer book catechism formula for what a sacrament is – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as a sure and certain means of that grace.
If we are going to talk about spiritual graces, perhaps we had best know what we mean by spiritual. For many of us, our spirituality is something very private and intimate, some principle or animating force at the core of who we are that needs to be protected and is ours alone to do with as we wish. There are some who deny the existence of anything spiritual, who deny that anything but reason and sensory evidence have any reality. For them, to talk about spirit is to talk about enthusiasm or passion, part of a person’s personality.
You have heard people tell you that they are very spiritual, but not very religious. I would agree with them that our spirits are very real and exist in relation with the spirits of the entire communion of saints, but that the power of the spirit is only developed through the hard work and discipline and humility of leading a religious life, whatever form that might take. Just as we have to exercise to develop our body, and read and study to train our minds, we also have to work at developing our spirits. To us an essential part of developing the spirit through religious life is participating in the sacraments.
Let’s make one thing clear. We can have all the theories and reasoning we want to talk about sacraments, but we will never be able to fully grasp them with just our minds. They are a mystery that speaks to our hearts, an ancient formula in which Christ promises to be with us. If we are going to feel the power of sacrament, we will first have to admit that we are connected to God and each other through the spirit.
A friend of mine, a lawyer, recently had a death in the family. He was very rational, a skeptic, an agnostic. Normally a sound sleeper, something woke him up at exactly 4:40 in the morning with a feeling that something was wrong. He couldn’t quite tie it down, though. But he soon got a call from his mother to say that his nephew had died on the east coast at 5:40 in the morning, precisely the time he had wakened. When he got together with the rest of the family, he found that several other members of the family had also been awakened at the very same time. He could not account for this coincidence in a rational way, and suddenly he was rethinking his skeptical approach to things supernatural. I told him that I believe that we have a connection to the realm of the spirit, some sort of parallel spiritual existence, which connects us in a loving relationship to God and to others. It is a world that we never see clearly, but which breaks through and gives us intimations of its reality from time to time.
The sacraments connect us to the spirit in a way that we cannot understand with our minds. We believe that connecting to that world and to our God who rules it is healthy for us, that it gives us a spiritual strength that we would not know otherwise. What is the power of the spirit? It’s hard to define, but I think we know it when we see it. People like Mother Theresa, or Desmond Tutu, or your favorite monk if you know any, come to mind. They have a transparency to them, an ability to see who they are, to see God shining through them. I envy that. I think we also sense the lack of the power of spirit when we have divorced ourselves from it. We experience a restlessness, an anger, a distraction that often manifests itself in addictions or rebellion, or hatreds.
In baptism we are given the basic orientation to Christ, and the first measure of spiritual power that will continue to grow if nurtured. I believe that is what Jesus is pointing to when he insists on his baptism by John. And what about our other great sacrament, Eucharist? When we make Eucharist together, we call on God and all the powers of the universe to come and be with us. Akma Adam, one of my professors at Seabury, expressed it something like this: “When I break the bread at the fraction, I am always amazed that I can have survived, because all the powers of the universe come together at that point, and at that time.” Since I heard that, I have thought of it almost every time I have done Eucharist. At the Eucharist we enter into the world of spirit, and it enters into us. And in that connection, which the prayer book calls, “the foretaste of the heavenly banquet which is our nourishment in eternal life,” we are strengthened and given spiritual power.
It may be hard for us to recognize this spiritual power as real power. We have been conditioned to think of power as coercive and manipulative, which usually employs violence or the threat of violence. Power to us is a tool to use to get what we want, and to get it now because we want it now. But the power of the spirit is a patient power, it is the power of love working over a long period of time, like the way the constant flow of water in a stream can wear down the rocks in it. It is a power that must be renewed and refilled in us, because it is a power that does not originate with us, but comes from God. But it is a power that can change nations, and it is a power that can change lives, drawing us away from addictions and obsessive reliance on our selves. It is a power that allows us to become the human beings God has called us to be.
As we prepare for the renewing of our spirits in the Eucharist, let us first remind ourselves of the beginning of our spiritual lives in the church by renewing our baptismal vows as found on page 292 in the BCP.