Sermon for Sunday, January 7, 2024 || Epiphany 1B || Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11
Every year on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we read the story of Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan. Jesus comes up out of the water after John dunks him in the river, and Jesus feels the presence of the Holy Spirit alighting on him like a dove. Our other two readings today speak of the Spirit as well. In the reading from Genesis, a “wind from God” sweeps over the face of the waters at the beginning of creation. In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul baptizes a dozen folks, and they discover the Holy Spirit’s power granting them spiritual gifts. In the Gospel, John the Baptist speaks of the difference between his baptizing with water and the one coming after him baptizing with the Holy Spirit.
That’s the line that caught me this week: Jesus baptizing with the Holy Spirit. The word “baptize” is the Greek word that means “to wash.” It makes total sense to be washed with water. But what does it mean to be washed with the Holy Spirit?
Most days I take quick, businesslike showers: shampoo, soap, beard wash, rinse, done. But every once in a while, I linger in the shower. The bathroom gets all steamy. The mirror fogs up. I let the water run down my head and over my face. I take deep breaths. And the warmth and the steam and the breath unknots me, loosens my muscles, helps me expand my insides. Those showers aren’t just for washing off sweat and grime; they are a balm for the soul. That’s the kind of shower I imagine when I think about being washed with the Holy Spirit.
And as my knots untie and my insides expand, I find all this interior room that God is filling, all this space where the Holy Spirit is breathing within me. And a prayer, a particular very beautiful prayer comes into my heart – the prayer we pray right after a baptism. We don’t have a baptism today, so Jesus’ is the only one we are celebrating. But I’m going to use the wonderful wisdom of this prayer to guide the rest of this sermon because its five petitions help us to live out being washed with the Holy Spirit.
Here’s the prayer: Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of grace. Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen.
We’ll start in the middle of the prayer with the first petition: “Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit.” As the Holy Spirit washes over us each day, we find sustenance for our souls. The Spirit’s creativity wards off complacency and apathy and helps us stay active and aware. The “wind from God” that swept over the face of the waters at the moment of creation, sweeps through our lives, sustaining us just as a sustained wind propels a sailboat to its destination. Our lives of faith are all about trimming our sails to catch the Spirit’s wind that guides us home.
We catch that wind by way of the second petition: “Give them an inquiring and discerning heart.” There’s no such thing as “blind faith.” Faith is forged in the crucible of questioning, of inquiry. When our hearts cry out to God about everything that makes no sense in our world, we aren’t demonstrating faithlessness. We’re demonstrating faithfulness, trusting God with all our questions just like we would trust a close friend with the turbulent thoughts that roil our hearts. As we bring our questions to God in prayer, we rely on the wisdom of scripture, the wisdom of the community, and the wisdom the Spirit breathes into our own bodies. Taken all together, we cultivate discerning hearts.
But sometimes the death-dealing ways of the world beat us down, and so we pray the third petition. We pray for “the courage to will and to persevere.” The Holy Spirit sustains us as we do hard things, as we stand against oppression, as we endure all the changes and chances of life. I’m reminded of the prayer we pray when we bless a prayer shawl. We pray that the shawl wraps and enfolds the person as a tangible reminder of God’s presence wrapping and enfolding them as well. That presence brings courage and perseverance.
Experiencing the Holy Spirit’s sustaining power brings us to the fourth petition. We pray for “a spirit to know and love [God].” These two verbs, to know and to love are important to link together. We tend to know those we love in a deeper way than we know others. I know a lot about, say, Taylor Swift. I’ve been listening to her music for nearly twenty years. But I don’t know her, her actual person. My spouse Leah, on the other hand – I can read her mood with a glance at her face. We can only finish crosswords when we do them together. I love every little bit of who she is. God grants us a spirit to know and love God at a deep, soul level. When we know and love God, we learn so much more about who we are and why we’re here. And we more readily open ourselves to knowing and loving others at that same spiritual depth.
This spiritual deepening brings us to the fifth and final petition. We pray for “the gift of joy and wonder in all [God’s] works. The gift of joy transcends our current mood or emotional state. While sadness can replace happiness, it can’t dislodge joy, which forms the bedrock of God’s relationship with us. And we experience joy through the gift of wonder, that childlike openness to the myriad glories of creation. The breath of the Holy Spirit aids our awareness of wonder. When you gasp at a lovely cardinal landing on your porch or breath in a deep, cleansing breath of ocean air, you’re accessing the gift of wonder. And that gift, like inquiry and discernment, keeps us searching, active, aware.
When we wash with the Holy Spirit, we absorb the sustaining power of God; we seek our place in the midst of eternal questions; we find our bravery in the face of hard things; we fall in love with God and with all that God loves; and we keep our wondering eyes open, always on the lookout for God’s presence. The next time you take a shower, I invite you to prayerfully imagine your way into a different kind of washing. As the hot water unknots you and loosens your muscles and expands your insides, feel yourself washed also with the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Photo by Laura Marques on Unsplash.
Season 6, Episode 8
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The Podcast for Nerdy Christians, where faith meets fandom. In the 8th and penultimate episode of Season 6, the second of a two-parter, we’re talking about how fantasy helps us imagine a better real world.
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