New Beginnings

Texts: Isaiah 43:17; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

This is a wonderful time of the year. It would, of course, be heretical for me as a priest to say that I often feel more excited and energised by New Year than by Christmas, so I’ll overcome that problem by rolling the two into one. The Christmas-New Year Holiday is a wonderful time of the year.

And one of the reasons why I have always enjoyed it is to be found in the word we sometimes use for a holiday – we sometimes call it a break. The Christmas-New Year break, we might say. Probably we mean a break from work, but it can be so much wider than that. It can be – if we’ll let it – a new opportunity to break away from all sorts of negative things that have accumulated during the past year, or perhaps during the past many years.

When I worked in the pressured atmosphere of Parliament things usually built up to a pretty hectic crescendo as we entered December. It became, as they say, a matter of survival. The rush was on for the Government to get all its legislation into Parliament before the summer recess; at the same time, we were under pressure to get the legislation that had been passed, checked and printed in final copy for the public. So we were all pretty stretched and tired and volatile as the year ended. If any minor little thing went wrong within the office, it had the potential to blow up out of all proportion.

Usually it didn’t – we were careful with one another. But if it did there was neither the time nor the energy to fix it. We would tell ourselves that we would deal with it in the New Year, sort it out then. And you know what happened – by the New Year, it had sorted itself out. If we remembered it at all, it all seemed so petty and trivial nobody wanted to re-visit it.

The Christmas-New Year break had broken through the nonsense and set us free. It had given us an opportunity to stand back, to rest and recover, to remember that life went on outside Parliament, and generally to get things back into perspective. Without that break, we may or may not have survived as individuals – I am certain we could not have survived as the close-knit team we were.

So the Christmas-New Year break gives us an opportunity to let go of the negative things that made themselves felt in the year just finished. A religious word for that might be “repentance”. We’ll come back to that shortly. But there is also a much more positive aspect about this wonderful time of the year. It’s an opportunity to think about the future – to make a fresh start – a new beginning. What do we want to do this year that we haven’t done before? It’s a time for new resolutions – new commitments.

Of course, we are likely to be a bit cynical about New Year resolutions. We may have made a few of our own over the years, and not managed to keep them. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the opportunity is there again this year. No matter how many times in the past we have failed, we are given this new chance now. There’s a religious word for that, too – I think it’s grace.

With these things in mind I’m glad that today in our Church Calendar we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord - because here we have a new beginning par excellence. St Luke, the great storyteller, has already set the scene for us with some graphic descriptions of the effect John the Baptist was having.

He had suddenly come upon the scene – herald of a dramatic new beginning. He had heard or sensed the calling of God. It is time for a fresh start. So he had emerged from the desert where he had been living in solitude for years and started to call to the people. And his message was, in a nutshell, exactly what I have been saying about this time of the year. Repent, he said – leave behind the negative stuff that has been bugging you and wearing you down. Let go of it – leave it in the past. It is time to begin a new future.

And his message struck a chord with the people of his time. People flocked to him from all over the region – they, too, sensed there was something new in the air. John didn’t spare their blushes or try to be nice to them. He socked it to them! And they responded – he got through to them – they recognised the truth of what he was saying. And he baptised them in vast numbers. We might not feel the shock of that – we’re used to baptism. But they weren’t – converts to Judaism went through a form of purification equivalent to baptism, but Jews didn’t. Yet here they were in huge numbers wading into the Jordan to be baptised by John.

Then St Luke the storyteller comes up with a classic short line: When all the people were being baptised, Jesus was baptised too. That’s it. No details – no discussion – just action. St Matthew tells us that John was a bit reluctant – he had a theological problem with the idea of Jesus being baptised. If baptising is about the forgiveness of sins, Jesus being sinless did not need to be baptised. Well, as our readings show today, there is more to baptism than that.

St Luke has stripped this story down to the bare essentials. We are not given any of the practical details. I once read a very learned article by a man who had carried out extensive research on the relative depth of the River Jordan at the traditional point of Jesus’ baptism, apparently to prove to his own satisfaction that the water wasn’t deep enough to allow baptism by total immersion! (Presumably, he was trying to make a case for baptism by sprinkling!)

Well, St Luke has no interest in the “how” of Jesus baptism. It is over and done with in one sentence. St Luke is interested in what happened next. Jesus prayed, and two things happened. First, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in bodily form like a dove. There was a visible demonstration of the anointing of Jesus in baptism by the Holy Spirit.

Secondly, there came from heaven a voice saying: You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” There was an audible demonstration of who Jesus is. Could there be any more beautiful words than these? And let’s be clear here: God does not adopt Jesus here: He does not say, from now on you are my son; from now on I will love you… This is a moment when God assures Jesus of their intimate relationship, assures Jesus of his love for him, assures Jesus of the pleasure he finds in him. And with all those assurances, Jesus is ready to set out on the new stage of his life.

One of the sources of these words, according to scholars, is this wonderful passage from Isaiah in this morning’s first lesson. Again, from the context, this is about a new beginning. The disasters of the past – unfaithfulness, defeat, exile – are to be left in the past. God is promising them a new beginning; but first they need to be assured of their identity as the people of God and of his love for them. And so these wonderful words flow out of Isaiah the prophet to God’s people. Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine…I will be with you…you are precious and honoured in my sight…I love you…I am with you…everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.

That’s what baptism is all about – it is an intimate act with God in which God whispers words of love to the person being baptised. And to seal that love – to manifest it – to make it effective in our lives – in baptism God gives us the gift of his own Spirit.

Now we can see the “problem” with the baptism the Samaritans had received. In our reading from the Book of Acts St Luke says, this: the Holy Spirit had not yet come upon any of them; they had simply been baptised into the name of the Lord Jesus. In the words John the Baptist used, they had been baptised for the forgiveness of sins. That’s half the process; now they needed the other half. They had let go off the negative; now they needed to be empowered with the positive.

So this wonderful time of the year, this Christmas-New Year break, can be for us a sort of renewal of our baptism; an opportunity to let go of the negatives from last year, and to be reminded of who we are, by whom we are called, who loves us and who has promised to be with us this New Year and always. Amen.