Energise your life!
Dean Anthony Cane, Baptism of Christ, 11.00am Eucharist
Walking past a church on my post-Christmas break, I was impressed by the lengthy banner attached to the hedge outside. ‘Energise your life’ it began, ‘join us now and let us help you change your life’. I was impressed by the evangelical boldness of this, until I realized it was in fact an advertisement for the local leisure centre. Join in January for only £20, it went on; cheap at the price, I thought, for having your life energized and changed.
The start of a new year prompts many into thinking about new beginnings; a new exercise regime, or pattern of study, or way of relating to others. Nothing wrong with that, and I presume that leisure centre advert is correct in assuming a lot of people out there who want something more, something different, who are dissatisfied with their life or elements of it. But as everyone knows, most of these good intentions are likely to peter out. Regular gym members may be a little irritated by the January influx of new people clogging up the changing rooms, but they will also suspect that by February or March everything will be back to normal.
The Christian symbol of a changed life is baptism, through which the believer is born again into new life in Christ. Way back in January 1983, I’d been baptized and confirmed for a whole fortnight. At the tender age of 22, I was beginning the new year in a new way. It wasn’t that I’d been a drunken hellraiser before, nor have I been a model Christian thereafter. A dramatic before and after makes a good story, but the reality is usually more complex. But nonetheless, baptism was a sea-change in my life – before it, I’d had plans and ideals – but they were just that, my plans and ideals. Now I knew there was something more – what God might have in mind for me; and that working for the God’s kingdom made my previous plans look rather feeble.
This might have all petered out, of course, as youthful enthusiasm sometimes does. The reason it didn’t, I think, was that baptism and confirmation connected me with what are sometimes called the ‘means of grace’ – the ways in which God works invisibly in those seeking to follow Christ; quickening, strengthening and enabling. Amongst the means of grace are private and public prayer, bible reading, the sacraments, and membership of a Christian community. These are the things that have sustained me, and continue to do so.
Over the years the Christian life has constantly challenged my preconceptions, and enlarged my vision. Much of this is down to remarkable people I’ve met along the way (including, just six years after my baptism, a certain Desmond Tutu) but ultimately, of course, it is down to the extraordinary and multi-faceted figure of Jesus. The Jesus who had no need of baptism, but nonetheless consented to it, in solidarity with the human race he’d come to serve. ‘Didn’t need to, but did’ – that sums up a lot of the Christian faith for me, from God’s gift of himself at Christmas,
to Jesus’ extraordinary self-giving compassion. He didn’t need to reach out to the marginalized and despised, but he did, He didn’t need to forgive those who hammered in the nails, but he did.
So on this day in which renew our own baptismal vows, and our commitment to follow Christ, let us remind ourselves of three key dimensions to the one whom we follow:
First – Jesus as Messiah. That is, Jesus as the one John the Baptist announces as ‘more powerful than I’, God’s anointed one, who can heal, and do good, and show that God was with him in many different ways, from feeding a crowd to calming a storm. But these powers, this fulfillment of Old Testament passages such as today’s from Isaiah 43 about being redeemed by one who has called us and named us, are but signs of his deeper power to free people from spiritual bondage and political oppression. As Messiah, Jesus takes on and defeats the evil powers, and dazzles everyone from his disciples to the demons to rulers like Herod and Pilate.
The second dimension is – Jesus as the one who suffers. Jesus as the one who was ‘put to death by hanging him on a tree’, who regularly experienced conflict – with the Jerusalem authorities, with the Romans, and with death. The surprise is that the Messiah isn’t going to crush his adversaries – on the contrary, it seems they’re going to crush him. The Messiah is going to be despised, rejected, and acquainted with grief.
In our second reading, the apostles send Peter and John to Samaria. It is not so long since these two, and the rest of the twelve, had really struggled with the notion of a suffering Messiah. They had so much to learn. Part of discipleship is precisely working out how to reconcile these two dimensions, the story of the conquering Messiah and the story of the suffering servant. And now Peter and John, a step further on in their journeys of faith, are now baptizing others into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What has made the difference, what has enabled the penny to drop, is a third dimension to Jesus – the cosmic dimension. Jesus as the one, initially celebrated and later brutally crushed, who is ‘raised from the dead’ and returns in glory as ‘judge of the living and the dead’, vindicating and establishing the reign of God. Jesus as the one who is able to unlock the door between life and death, between heaven and earth, between humans and God. The one able to restore Israel to God’s company and open out God’s offer of friendship to all peoples and nations.
Some Christians seem to think their lives should be all about dimension one – success and achievement. For them the ‘something more’ of the Christian life is learning that God is known in suffering and failure at least as much as anywhere else. For others, who know much suffering, this is truly good news, but there is something more for them too – that God has concerns that go way beyond their
problems, to take in every nation and people, and that God will not rest until God has, in the words of Isaiah, ‘established justice in the earth’.
For the last 38 years it’s gradually been dawning on me how these three dimensions, of the Messiah who conquers, of the suffering servant, and of cosmic glory and justice, are all woven together not only in the life of Jesus, but run through all our lives too, as we seek to follow in Jesus’ steps. Our lives, too, are a mixture of what has gone well, leavened with sadness and failure, and just sometimes enriched by the unexpectedly marvelous, the surprise of new life and hope where we’d thought there was none.
To be a disciple, to walk the path of baptism and faith, means not choosing the dimension we like the best, but to discover that God is made known in Jesus through works of power and healing, through painful rejection and servant suffering, and through glorious transformation and the in-breaking Kingdom of God. It’s about meeting God in all three dimensions, not just one.
Perhaps, early in this new year, you are feeling you’d like to ‘energise your life’. The most effective way to do this is not to join a leisure centre or gym, whatever that poster on the church hedge may say. I suggest that church puts up its own version, adapting the words as an invitation from our Lord: ‘join me now and let me help you change your life’. Joining him means access to those means of grace of which I spoke earlier: and energising our lives through a deepening relationship with Christ.
The baptism of Jesus is the perfect occasion to recall our own baptism, and ask ourselves how we are seeking to live the Christian life; how we are praying, learning more about our faith, engaging with Scripture, treating other people, working for justice and peace. That when our time comes, God’s may address us saying, ‘You are my child, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ AMEN