Luke 3:15-22

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Baptize

The first Baptism I ever was the officiant for I was really worried I was going to drop the baby.  I was in my mid-twenties and I didn’t have much recent baby-holding experiences, much less one that was six months old.  So I was, of course, honored when the family asked me to officiate.  It was a week before the baptism, as I was trying to do my walk though in the sanctuary, trying to practice what would be happening when, when I realized that, of course, I would need at least one hand free in order to get water from the baptismal font onto the baby, which meant I had to hold the baby with one hand.  I started wondering if I should be doing upper body workouts in anticipation.  As I worried, I pictured wiggling, filled with images of my first baptism ending with tragedy as gasps swept through the congregation.  When the day arrived, I met with the family again and realized just what an amazingly chubby baby this was.  She was all you could hope a baby would be:  smooshy and covered with an amazing, fluffy white dress, healthy, thriving and robust.  And so it came time for the ceremony and I was, with trepidation, about to take this baby from her mother, and I lifted her.  It wasn’t hard at all; compared to the weight of my anticipation; it was only lightness to carry her.  And I got to lift the water and to baptize her, “Alexandra Cassandra, in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God, Mother of us all.”  And all of my fear felt so unneeded, because we were talking about grace, and so even if I had forgotten the words, if the outfit had been a mess, if she had been crying her whole way up to the font, if she had found herself with a shockingly imperfect pastor, which she did, with remarkably human parents and a congregation that made promises that just were as earthly as this one, that somehow just as the four friends carried their friend to Jesus on a stretcher, lifting his weight to carry him through the roof, that this heaviness was carried by us all until it became something else: lightness indeed, a  gift, a blessing.  For if we’re talking about grace, how could it be heavy to hear the words, “You are a child of God, beloved.”

In the next few weeks we are looking at Jesus’ beginnings, the places from which his ministry had its start.  And the Scripture tells this story of Jesus’ baptism, as Luke jumps from Jesus the infant to Jesus the twelve-year-old; here Jesus is now thirty years old and for some reason he has come to the water.  I love that in the Gospel of Luke there is this sense that Jesus doesn’t want to make this a big deal.  There is some sort of a question whether John the Baptist was there, or already in jail, and there is this back and forth argument with John where Jesus winks tha