Isaiah 42: 1-9
Baptism of August Isaiah Newman
Good morning. The Sunday after
the January 6th Feast of the Epiphany and the day of the traditional
observance of the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ, as we’ve heard
in the hymns and the gospel reading. The
event at the Jordan River in all four gospels launches the public ministry of
Jesus along the road that leads eventually to Good Friday and the cross. In the Eastern Orthodox Churches the day is
known as the Theophany, as the divine nature of Jesus is revealed by the Word
of the Father and in the descent of the Holy Spirit.
And here this morning we celebrate the baptism of August Isaiah Newman. The launching of his public life and ministry as a follower of Jesus, a
disciple. “Confess the faith of Christ
crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal
priesthood.” Thank you Tom and Meredith
for coming all the way from your home in Buffalo to share this great day with
all of us. A great way to enter a new
year as a congregation and extended congregational family, with this
reaffirmation of our shared baptismal identity and life in Christ.
August Isaiah’s namesake, the Prophet Isaiah, was living and
prophesying in Jerusalem in the 8th and 7th Centuries
before Christ. The job of the prophet is
to call attention to God’s Word in a fresh and compelling way when the people around
him seem to have forgotten it. And Isaiah’s ministry took place in a
complicated time. The Northern Kingdom
of Israel had been conquered by the Assyrian Empire of what today would be
Eastern Iraq. Its ancient cities and
sacred shrines destroyed, its civilian population decimated and displaced in a
disorganized refugee diaspora throughout the Near East. Its cultural identity and history and faith
traditions wiped clean, its orchards and farmlands distributed as the bounty of
war to the soldiers of the victorious foreign army. Yet just a few miles down south across the
border in Jerusalem, the capital of the southern Kingdom of Judah, there is
this sense of deep, deep denial. “What
happened to our cousins up North, that
could never happen to us!” The country
is protected for the moment by a fragile
network of alliances and vassal state relationships. The Kings are big on ceremony and show, pomp and circumstance--while in reality they
are weak pawns in a game between the great powers, Egypt and Persia and Babylon
and Syria. The aristocracy is humming
along like the courtiers of Louis the XVIth.
Eat, drink, and be merry! The
influences of foreign powers, foreign cultures, foreign religions are
percolating through the nation. Whatever
the latest fad. In all this what it was
that made the sons and daughters of Abraham special, unique, a Chosen People, a
sacrament for the world, a People of the Covenant, was slipping away. The word of the Lord was set aside—the
discipline of a holy and consecrated people ignored, forgotten.
Isaiah could see disaster ahead.
You didn’t need a Masters Degree from the Graduate School of Public and
International Affairs. It was pretty
straightforward to anyone who knew God’s word.
The wages of sin. But then also, what
Isaiah could also see, as the truth written deeply into God’s character and
word, was that God’s faithfulness to Israel was greater than any failure of
faithfulness in Israel. That no valley
was so deep, no mountain so high, no grave so final, that God could not and
would not prove himself true to his promise.
Our reading from the 42nd chapter is sometimes called the
First Servant Song of Isaiah, a part of Isaiah’s prophetic vision of what it
would look like beyond the catastrophe, when that perfect faithfulness of God
would be made known. To look at those words again (there on page 7): He will bring forth justice, righteously but not violently, not by
shouting louder than everybody else, not by steamrolling over the weak, not by
snapping and crushing every bruised reed and extinguishing every weak spark and
flame, but faithfully, carefully, with gentleness, with love. A sign of new and renewed creation, the First
Creator bringing forth a new heaven and a new earth, giving breath and life and
spirit to a healed and restored human family.
Bringing light and sight to a dark world, freeing every prisoner,
sweeping away all those false gods that command our worship and loyalty. “Behold, the former things have come to pass,
and new things I now declare.”
Isaiah’s vision is not an easy
one. Because real death must always come
before there can be real resurrection from the dead. But he sees how an Israel rescued out of and through the calamity that would soon
befall it would be refreshed in God’s word, would trust God’s promises, would
obey his commands, and so would become in reality what God had first described
to Abraham so long ago, a sign of blessing and grace and right relationship
with God, to all people, to every tribe and race and nation. Every nation on earth will be blessed through
you. And from the very earliest days of
Christian memory and witness this has been heard as God’s word to us of the
fulfillment in Christ of his everlasting and perfect Covenant. We hear the echo this morning. The Song of Isaiah 42 begins, “Behold my
servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” And as we heard this morning as Jesus and
John stood side by side in the River Jordan, the word from above, “This is my
beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
Epiphany and Theophany. The
delight of the Father, now with us and for us in a new way.
We pause in this season of Sundays after Epiphany to go deeper into the
meaning and purpose of Christmas: what does it all really mean, that God became
Man? This story, Mary and Joseph and
Child in the Manger, Angels, Shepherds, Wise men from the East—what does it
mean that this child was born for us?
Words of the Prophet first spoken eight
hundred years before the night the angels sang to the shepherds begin to open
that up for us. What
difference does Christmas really make, once the trees come down? I hope we would each one of us ask ourselves
that question a few times in the coming weeks. Thinking back to Christmas—and not, I mean, to
the outward expressions and festivities, but to the heart of the story itself. To the fact of Jesus. Word of the Father, now in flesh
appearing. Of the Father’s love
begotten. Israel’s hope and
consolation. To this promise that as we
would follow him and become a part of his life and attend to and become
obedient to his word, we ourselves may be lifted up in him as he brings about a
new creation, a new heaven, a new earth.
The Christmas holiday comes to an end.
Back to work. Back to
school. The newspaper headlines proclaim
wars and rumors of war, terror and disaster, conflict and strife. The trees are put out for the landfill, the
decorations get boxed up and moved back to the attic for another year. But the one who was born for us at Christmas
remains with us, the Father’s delight, inviting us to remain with him, to find our
own true lives in him. From the
Catechism: “Holy baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his
children and makes us members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and inheritors of
the kingdom of God. The inward and
spiritual grace in Baptism is union with Christ in his death and resurrection,
birth into God’s family the Church, forgiveness of sins, and new life in the
Holy Spirit.” And the word of the Lord
spoken by the Prophet Isaiah this morning to August Isaiah, to the people of
Jerusalem and to the people of St. Andrew’s Highland Park—his promise to: “I am the Lord. I have called you in righteousness, I have
taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the
people, a light to the nations . . . .”
Welcome to the family, August Isaiah.
Blessings and joy and Happy New Year!
Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering
and a sacrifice to God.
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