with power

BAPTISM OF OUR LORD
Observed on January 17, 2010
Ss. Peter & Paul, Portland – Fr. Phillip Ayers
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Into the water blessed with power,
There baptized by John his friend,
Goes the Saviour for the sinner,
Having nothing to amend.
This baptizer with his power
Gives baptism real and true.
Then the curtained heaven opened.
Closed before to sinners’ view.
(Peter Abelard)
“Can we actually ‘know’ the universe?” Woody Allen once asked. And then, before anyone could attempt an answer, he said, “It’s hard enough finding your way around Chinatown.” Either looking through a telescope, or reading thee street signs in Chinatown, the question of Epiphany is Woody Allen’s question: “Can we actually ‘know’ the universe?” Or, one step further, can we know the God of the universe—at least in any way that matters to us?
The renowned French scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) underwent what he called a “definitive” conversion experience on November 23, 1654. As a testimony to his change of heart, and the new way he had come to know God, Pascal sewed into the lining of his favorite coat the following words: “Not the God of the philosophers nor the God of science, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
Pascal, in his conversion experience, could easily be the poster child for the season of Epiphany. For the self-disclosure of God, Pascal learned, as testified to by the statement stitched in his jacket, was that the One who converted him was far from the “remote” God of the philosophers. This was not an aloof God—nor a purely cerebral God, either. This was not a God detached from human concern, who lived only in the realm of concepts and theories. A God who could best be apprehended by reason—mathematically or propositionally. One, in fact, gets the feeling that Pascal had had enough of knowing this “Uncaused First Cause,” this “Governor of the Universe,” or this “Unmoved Mover.” He needed more; a God to whom he could give his heart, as well as his head.
Pascal, like most of us, needed a personal, saving God. A God who was more than “pure Actuality.” A God less apprehended by reason than by faith. In other words, Pascal needed a God who not only cared for him, but a God who would go to any length to make that care for humanity
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known—personally. A God whose self-risk and self-expenditure could be discerned in history, not simply contemplated under a microscope, or figured out in a mathematical equation. A God who is with the people of Haiti and struggling every inch of the way with them. A God who puts it into the hearts of God’s people to help with their prayers, money and presence.
Pascal’s conversion led him to a God of faith, a God primarily of relationship. The God who called Abraham and Sarah to leave Haran—with no maps, and without any guarantees. This was the God who struggled with Jacob in the darkness at the Jabbok, so that Jacob might be changed into “Israel.” This was the God who burned in a bush before Moses. The God who fingered this obscure shepherd (not to mention a felon and a lousy speaker), to return to Egypt and undo Pharaoh’s tyrannical system of rule—the strongest in the world.
Pascal’s God was the God who strengthened David, a pretty shepherd boy, to go out and kill the Philistine monster, Goliath. This was the God, surrounded by winged seraphs in the temple calling out “Holy, Holy, Holy,” who made young Isaiah quake with unworthiness. The One who called Jeremiah from before he was formed in his mother’s womb to be a prophet to the nations. Alas, this was not only a “God of the universe,” but a God who could help you find your way through Chinatown, too.
This was the God of Jesus. And this is the God who appears to us—at every celebration of the Baptism of Jesus—not in a formula, or through a high-tech microscope, but in the earthiness of a mystical rendezvous between a wilderness holy man, John, and his questing cousin, Jesus. This is “epiphany” at its biblical best. A God revealed up close and personal—if not “in your face.” This is not a God beyond life—confined to the realm of “spirit”—but an enfleshed God, wholly concerned with healing the world of “matter,” because matter matters.
This is Pascal’s “new God.” A God who from the heavens is definitely disclosed on a river bank; in a cleansing rite of purification that will inaugurate the Divine deliverance of the world by the life and death of this man Jesus. This is definitely not the same revelation of God you would imagine through the Hubbell telescope, or in a strand of DNA under an electron microscope, or the one that the Russian cosmonaut claimed to see while orbiting the earth. This is a God bumped along in the womb as his mother rode a donkey to Bethlehem—who suckled at Mary’s breast, who practiced a carpenter’s trade that he learned from his father Joseph, and who grew up with his brothers and sisters in a little village named Nazareth. A God who suffered and died as a public spectacle, and who rose from the dead. A God who will raise the Haitians from their current death and hell to life and heaven.
This is the God into whose arms we abandon ourselves in baptism. The One to whom we entrust our lives, and the One into whom we die—to live as divine servants of Christ. The One who reaches us and grasps us and drowns us in Divine Love—the ongoing “epiphany” that baptism manifests and celebrates.
John Westerhoff tells a profound story about a baptism that he witnessed some years ago in a small church outside Buenos Aires. This story makes the point about the God who calls not just for contemplation, but for new birth:

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“As I walked in a bit late, I witnessed a congregation on its knees, singing a Good Friday hymn. Down the aisle came a father carrying a handmade child’s coffin. His wife carried a pail of water from the family well. Behind them came the godparents carrying a naked baby in a serape. With tears in his eyes, the father put the coffin on the altar, the mother poured in the water, and the godparents handed the child over to the priest.
“As the priest asked the parents and godparents the required questions, he put the oil used in the Last Rites of the Church on the child’s skin. He took the baby and, holding its nose, immersed the child in the coffin with the words, ‘You are drowned in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.’ As he raised the child out of the water the child cried out as he probably had when he emerged from his mother’s womb at his first birth.
“The priest held up the child and exclaimed, ‘And you are resurrected that you might love and serve the Lord.’ The congregation leaped up and began to sing an Easter hymn. The priest poured perfumed oil over the child and, as he signed the baby with the cross, said, ‘I now brand you, as we do cattle on the range, with the sign of the cross, so that the world will always know and you will never be able to deny to whom you belong.’ The congregation broke into applause and came forward to offer the child the kiss of peace with the words, ‘Welcome, Juan Carlos Cristiano.’ No longer was the child to be known as Juan Carlos Renosa. He had been adopted by and brought into a new family—the family called Christian. That was a baptism I will always remember and need to recount.”
The unclouded there descended
God the Spirit as a dove,
In baptizing re-ascending,
Proving present grace thereof.
Peace to mortals, peace to angels,
Highest glory where they soar.
To the Father, the Redeemer,
To the Spirit evermore.
(Peter Abelard)
Main ideas and quotations from Synthesis (date unknown). First used January 11, 1998, at Trinity Church, Marshall, Michigan. Abelard poem found in Homily Service, January, 2004.