The Baptism of the Lord
January 10, 2016

     When I think of baptism. I think of family.  Baptism is our entry into the family of the Church, after all. And baptisms are usually family celebrations, aren’t they! We all have memories of some of those, I’m sure. Let me share with you a memory of how an Italian family, dear friends of mine, celebrated the baptism of their little girl a few years back. The baptism took place in a 1000-year-old church in a tiny town in Tuscany and it brought together at least 50 family members from all over Italy. It was a picture-perfect day in early October. The Tuscan hills were brilliant in shades of gold and green and the sky was the bluest blue you can imagine. It was a landscape worthy of Van Gogh!

     The baptism itself was great fun, like most baptisms, and this one was especially so because almost none of the family in attendance had ever seen a baptism by immersion.  There were audible sounds of delight as I took little Elizabeth and plunged her three times into the water of the stone baptismal font that was beautifully festooned with white flowers.

     And I have another memory of that celebration that will long remain with me.  The church was about a half-mile distant from the little country inn where we were all staying, and to get to the church, the whole family -- parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and a pack of little cousins dressed in their Sunday best -- formed a kind of procession (a fairly loose procession: this was Italy, not Germany!) that wound its way over the hillside. At one point, we stopped for a family photo in front of a lovely little wayside shrine with a statue of the Madonna and Child.  That baptism was, in every sense of the word, a family affair.

     But every baptism is a family affair!  Ours here at St. James are doubly so: there’s the family, immediate and extended, of the baby being baptized, and there’s the family of the parish.  In the deepest sense of the word, each one of us becomes ‘family’ as we surround each baby with our love, our prayers, and our welcome.  Baptism is all about family: the family that brings their new baby to the church with love and great anticipation, and the family of faith – the Church – that welcomes its newest member with great joy.

     The story of Jesus’ own baptism that we heard from Luke’s gospel today makes it clear that his baptism was a family affair, too.  Luke paints the picture simply and beautifully.  We can see the people lining up at the water’s edge to be baptized by John the Baptist, their hearts filled with expectation.  At the end of the line is Jesus who steps forward to be baptized after everyone else.  Unlike Matthew and Mark, Luke does not describe the actual baptism but concentrates instead on what happened immediately afterwards.  He tells us that after Jesus had been baptized he was praying (Luke loves to talk about Jesus praying), and it was while he was praying that his baptism became a family affair.  The heavens opened up, we are told, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove, and his Father’s voice was heard from heaven, “You are my beloved Son.  With you I am well pleased.”   A family affair it most certainly was for we must remember whose family Jesus belonged to: the family of the Trinity -- Jesus, the Father’s only-begotten Son; Jesus the one in whom the Holy Spirit lived and breathed as in no other.

     My friends, this feast of the Baptism of the Lord is meant not only to remember and celebrate the baptism of Jesus but also to awaken us to our own baptism – not so much to the day it happened (many of us, maybe most of us, have no memory of that whatever).  No, we are to awaken not so much to the day of our baptism as to the reality of our baptism.  For on that day we became part of a great family, the family of faith, the Church. And every day since, God has been breathing into us the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love and joy and peace, the same Spirit that lives in Jesus and gives us a family resemblance to Jesus.  And every day since, the Father has been looking upon us fondly and speaking words like those that he spoke at the baptism of Jesus: You are my beloved son, my beloved daughter, in you I am well pleased! And he says that even when we do things that aren’t so pleasing.  God never stops loving us, never stops calling us beloved sons and daughters.

     Dear friends, two Sundays ago we celebrated the feast of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Today we celebrate the feast of the Baptism.  But I will always think of this as a second feast of the Holy Family -- our holy family, the family that we are, thanks to our baptism: the family of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the family of the Church.  Baptism really is a family affair!

     Father Michael G. Ryan