The Water Is Wide
Matthew 3:13-17
January 11, 2015
It was 1978 when Hubert Humphrey died, the former vice president and senator from
Minnesota. As politicians go he was a popular one, and when he died hundreds of people came
from all over the world to Washington, D.C., to pay their respects.
In all the hubbub, one of those who came was shunned – ignored by pretty much
everyone else. Nobody would even look at him, much less speak to him. Because it was only a
few years after the Watergate affair had blown up and he had resigned in disgrace. Richard
Nixon was back in Washington for the first time since his resignation. And there he was, over
against the wall, all by himself.
Then an interesting thing happened. Jimmy Carter was president at the time, and he
arrived to pay his respects to Hubert Humphrey. He saw Nixon standing all alone, and he walked
over to him. He smiled that famous smile, stuck out his hand, and they ended up in a man-hug.
“Welcome home, Mr. President,” Jimmy Carter said to Richard Nixon. “Welcome home.”
That’s a story, a true story, about acceptance – about the human need to feel accepted by
the people around us, and how one president reached out to another in that spirit. Walk with me
and we’ll build a bridge to today’s scripture about the baptism of Jesus.
They’re kind of a mystery, the biblical accounts of Jesus’ baptism. There’s a Hollywood
aspect to this scene, with the voice of God speaking from the sky, and that theatrical dove –
actually the Holy Spirit looking dovey – coming down to rest on Jesus’ wet shoulder.
It’s something of a mystery, too, why Jesus felt compelled to seek baptism from his
cousin John. This was a commonplace occurrence; John had dunked hundreds of people under
the chilly waters of the Jordan River. They were drawn to him as a charismatic holy man, drawn
seeking an immediate and real experience of God. But surely Jesus didn’t need that kind of jump
start to have a deep experience of God’s Presence. That’s what his life was all about, wasn’t it? –
demonstrating that it’s possible to live in full and deep connection with God all the time.
And Jesus himself, when John resists the idea of this baptism, is cryptic about why he
insists. “It is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness,” he says here in Matthew.
Another version, the Message translation, has Jesus saying it this way: “God’s work, putting
things right all these centuries, is coming together right now in this baptism.” Neither way makes
it very clear what’s going on with Jesus spiritually when he comes to be baptized.
For you and me as Christians, baptism is a sign of inclusion, a sign of acceptance. When
we baptize a baby, for example, we are proclaiming publicly that this is God’s child just like we
are all God’s children, and we are saying out loud that we are joining with her parents and
godparents and extended family in recognizing that baby as a fellow seeker of God. Baptism is a
way of publicly affirming – for that child, and for ourselves – that we are bound together as the
body of Christ, and that we belong to God.
Partly that’s why the sign of the cross is involved – the water of baptism gets applied in
the form of the cross. It’s a recognition, of course, that this child is symbolically becoming dead
to sin and rising to new life in Christ, just as Jesus died and experienced Resurrection. The cross
signifies that we are joined to him in that radical promise of life after life.
But also that watery cross shows in physical form the double promise of baptism. In its
horizontal dimension, it shows our sacred connection with each other. In the vertical, it shows
our connection with our Creator. Those are equally important.
Now, Jesus was baptized by immersion; John probably didn’t make the sign of the cross
as part of this sacrament. But those same dimensions, the vertical and the horizontal, were at
work in this scene on the Jordan River. In baptism, Jesus was proclaiming publicly – remember,
this was not a quiet little corner, this was a noisy, busy river – Jesus was proclaiming his deep
and intimate connection with God. And God responds with words of approval and with the Holy
Spirit made manifest in a dove. But at the same time Jesus was proclaiming the horizontal
dimension – his deep kinship with his fellow human beings. He was allowing himself to be
accepted into the family of humankind. In his baptism, Jesus was demonstrating that he was fully
one of us, even as God made a big show of pointing out that he was God’s Son.
If you’ve been baptized, you’re good for life – it’s an unrepeatable event. But maybe we
continue to wrestle with some of the elements of that sacrament. It’s one of the central questions
of faith: we are spiritual and we are human, but in what proportions?
And so I want to suggest that in this account of Jesus’ baptism, and in thinking about our
own sacramental relationship with God, our growing edges might be different depending on who
we are.
For some of us, that idea that we belong to God, that we’re part of God, that’s our
growing edge, the place where we still have some work to do. The challenge may be that vertical
dimension, our acceptance deep down that God loves us – even us, with all our flaws and
failings! – and cares about us and that really there’s no separation between us and God.
For some of us, though, it’s the horizontal dimension that is the hard part. Lots and lots of
people have a hard time feeling like they really belong to the human family. People who feel
outside the mainstream, marginalized by who they are or what they believe. Artists and writers
who just see the world differently, who march, as Thoreau said, to the beat of a different
drummer. Introverts who find it difficult to be around a lot of people.
For those folks, it may be easier to feel a one-on-one connection to God than it is to feel
connected to the people around them. And yet it’s the human family that is the body of Christ.
The saints and the sinners, the jerks and the angels, all of them are the presence of God made real
in the world. For some folks, the challenge is to feel fully a part of that reality.
So in Jesus’ baptism, as in so many other aspects of his life and ministry, we have a
model. We see Jesus come out of the waters of the Jordan and embody that vertical dimension,
that deep closeness with God. And we see him in that horizontal dimension, in the company of
human beings – John being the first among equals – people for whom he would feel only love
and compassion.
There he stands, dripping wet, a living cross at the outset of his ministry. And the glory of
the Lord shines around him.
May it be so for us! Amen.