Last week, we found ourselves in Bethlehem visiting the Christ Child with the Wise Men or Magi. We have journeyed some 28 years or so this week and find ourselves at the Baptism of our Lord in the Jordan River. Jesus is about thirty years old at this point and this baptism will mark the beginning of His three year public ministry.

What do you picture in your mind’s eye when you think of Jesus’ baptism? Perhaps you picture a revival meeting like the one on the movie Brother, Where Art Thou? where people are coming one by one to be baptized by the preacher in the river. I suppose this is the way I pictured the baptism of Jesus, Jesus waiting his turn to be dunked by John in the Jordan.

But that may not have been how baptisms were done at all. My teacher in Israel said that most likely the people went out into the water and immersed themselves, very much like they did in the ceremonial cleansing rituals of Judaism. At least one of the filmmakers pictured it more like this. In the Pasolini film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The fleeting images of Jesus’ baptism shows Jesus surrounded by masses of people who are in the water with him, being baptized by John.

It gives us a sense of what Jesus was doing there, standing in solidarity with his struggling needy fellow human beings. He would identify with them again three years later as He was nailed to a tree.

Jesus’ baptism is a Trinitarian tableau, for there we see God the Son in the water, the Holy Spirit descending like dove upon Him and the Father speaking the words, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The Godhead, the three in One, the One in three, all present and accounted for, and yet we are still children as we gaze at it and don’t fully comprehend it. One God in three persons.

Billy Strayhorn, Pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Grosbeck, Texas, tells the story of a Sunday School teacher who taught her class to recite the Apostles’ Creed by giving each child one phrase to learn.

At the Sunday school presentations, the class was asked to give their recitation. They began beautifully.

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” said the first child.

“I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord,” said the next.

And do it went perfectly until they came to the child who said, “He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty: from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

At that point an embarrassed silence fell, until a little girl spoke up and said, “Uh, the little boy who believes in the Holy Spirit is absent today.” The following is a story about the difference that believing in the Holy Spirit can make in my life and in your life.

There is a beautiful oriental rug covering the floor of an enormous baronial hall. In the middle of the rug a caterpillar is laboriously working his belly-wise way towards some destination of which he seems not too sure. Progress is slow and confused because this particular species is strangely susceptible to the influence of color. He is crawling through the midst of a seemingly endless and intricate design of many colors. His travel is, of necessity, so close to the design that he cannot possibly see its contour, point or purpose. Confusion colors his perspective.

Life to him is a series of surprises, many of which are unpleasant. First he finds himself in the midst of a cobalt blue, and he responds with a spell of feeling blue; next he is in the yellow which makes him feel bright and well again; crawling on, he finds himself in a patch of brown, in which he feels achy and tired all over; now he turns to red in the design and he fairly burns up with emotional uncontrol which so overstimulates his emotional glands that his confusion soon turns to biliousness.(He is downright cranky!) He wanders into a stretch of green, and so life continues—a meaningless combination of confusions. In the midst of life he is in pleasure, pain, sadness, joy, sickness, and finally in despair. …

Life goes on for our friend out in the middle of the vast rug; he proceeds with heavy heart, an irritable disposition, a hyperacid stomach, and complete disillusionment. After long nights of insomnia, he finally drops off into a deep sleep---for how long he does not know. When he awakens he is suddenly aware of a change in his life; something has happened. What is it? He sits up and takes a good look at himself, and wonder of wonders, he has become a butterfly. A beautiful yellow colleague swoops down over him and calls, “Come on up here and have a look.”

Our friend slowly spreads his wings. What power he feels! He takes off, uncertain at first, and then with mighty pulls he feels himself being propelled up and up. As he peers down upon the rug, he sees that all those painful colors which he kept getting into, without knowing why, are part of a great design. Now he realizes that when he had been in the midst of the rug he could do nothing but blunder from one event to another without reason or understanding. No wonder life on the rug was hell. In a flash life becomes clear to him and his problems are reduced to a new understanding. From above he can see where he has been; the past is full of meaning; he can see where he was just a second ago and where he is now. But what is even greater, he can see into the future. From where he is, the past, present and future are all one great whole.

What a wonderful way to live, to be able to see where you are heading and know why. So back he goes to the rug. Now he moves with confidence and joy. He knows he has wings and can rise above his problems. So can everyone who is born of the Spirit.

----Austin Pardue in He Lives (New York: Morehouse-Gorman Co., 1946).

Jesus said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” Acts 1:8.

Certainly, the presence of God’s Spirit in our lives allows us to see more of the rug than just color after color. As we are led by this Holy Spirit, we begin to see God all around us in the so-called coincidences. For example, this week one of our parishioners had surgery. Both Becky, our Administrator, and I thought the surgery was to be on Friday. But on Thursday, this person just came strongly to Becky’s mind. She made a few calls and found out that the person’s surgery had been that morning and I was able to look in on her the following morning. Coincidence?

Becky didn’t think so, nor did I.

Or, the same day I was trying to help an elderly man rent an apartment. He thought that his appointment was at 2:00 pm. When we got there, it was at 3:00 pm. That gave me time to leave him there, take someone communion at the hospital and get back at the exact time that they were ready to see him, which turned out to be 3:20 pm. Coincidence? It depends on how you look at it.

The day after Christmas, we went an hour away from here to my sister’s house for our family Christmas gathering. As I drove up in front of her house, the idler pulley broke and the serpentine belt came off of our car. Now, it could have happened anywhere on that hour trip or anywhere on the hour trip back. Was that a coincidence that it conveniently broke right in front of my sister’s house where we could drop it off at a garage and have my mother’s car to drive back to Asheville?

Beloved, if we are mindful of what is going on around us, we begin to see God everywhere.

When John the Baptist spoke of Jesus, he said, “I am not worthy to untie his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Beloved, it is this baptism or immersion in the Holy Spirit that allows us to see more of the rug. It is this baptism in the Holy Spirit by Jesus that connects us with Jesus so that we not only know about Him…we actually know Him.

John goes on to say that Jesus will be the one who will separate the wheat from the chaff, and one writer that I read this week said something about this that I really found interesting. He said when John talked about the wheat and the chaff, the wheat were those who would repent and the chaff were those who would not repent. So, the wheat weren’t the good people by nature and the chaff the wicked people by nature. Rather, the wheat were the ones who were willing to repent, to turn from their sinful ways to walk God’s way, and the chaff were those who continued on their own way and said no to God’s way.

Continuing on the sinful way, we’re told in Scripture leads to death, death of the human spirit. When the human spirit dies, the person is simply lost in the wilderness, lost in the colors of the rug, to use our previous example. Our job, as God’s people is go out and find those lost in the wilderness and tell them there is a better way, a Spirit-empowered way that leads to life. We are told that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who did not need to repent.

As the people repented there on the banks of the Jordan, they found life, a life worth living. And so they came and washed themselves as a sign of the cleansing of the spirit that they were experiencing. When we fall into sin, we can feel ourselves veering off into the wilderness. But when we turn around from the wilderness, we fall into the loving embrace of Jesus and are home again.

The premise of one of Thomas Wolfe’s books (I believe it was Look Homeward Angel) was that you can never return to what you knew as home. That may well be true in his novel, but it is not true where God is concerned. For where God is concerned, when anyone turns around to God in repentance, he or she IS home.