The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

© 2021, Dr. Tamilio

Throughout the Christmas season, we reflect upon the Incarnation: how Jesus is God in the flesh.  He is the one born without sin.  This begs an important question that challenges the Gospel Lesson for today: Why did Jesus have to be baptized?

This assumes something that Catholics know all too well: we are born with the stain of Original Sin; therefore, we need the rejuvenating waters of the sacrament of baptism to cleanse us.  It also assumes that this is what baptism is all about, but we will get back to that in a minute.

The contradiction is obvious: if Jesus was born without sin, why would he need to be baptized?  Daniel Migliore offers a good answer to this question by focusing on the fact that this passage comes right before the start of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  Migliore writes: “Jesus commences his vocation, his obedient response to the call of God, by being baptized by John.  In this act, Jesus enters into solidarity with lost humanity.  He begins the life of costly love and service that eventually leads to his passion, death, and resurrection.”[1]

Ah…so it isn’t that Jesus is born with a sin that needs to be cleansed.  It is more that he joins us in our plight.  In order to save sinful humanity, he has to become like sinful humanity.  He has to identify with us (and enable us to identify with him) fully.

In short, Jesus decided to join us in this mess.  I am not a pessimist.  Those of you who have been around for a while know that.  However, I am not a Pollyanna either.  Life can be tough.  There are times when we are pushed to our limits — or find ourselves in a situation that seems hopeless.  Maybe it is the cancer diagnosis.  Maybe it is the pink slip at work.  Maybe it is the loved one (the soulmate) who died.  Maybe it is the drug or alcohol addiction that seems impossible to kick.  Maybe it is the abusive spouse.  The list goes on, and on, and on…

Years ago, the United Church of Christ published a number of resources as part of their “God is Still Speaking” campaign.  One of them, modelled after those old biblical tracts that street corner preachers used to hand out, was printed in black and red, each page featuring a person explaining why they love Jesus.  The one that really grabbed me depicted a man in a suit holding a briefcase walking away from the camera.  It read, “Because Jesus went to Hell, and I’ve been there, too.”  I loved this “advertisement” because it truly captures who Jesus is and what he did and continues to do for us: he accompanies us not just during the best of times, but, most especially, through the worst of times.

One of the requirements for seminarians is that they need to spend a few days with a therapist.  You have to take every psychological test there is and be analyzed: yes, the whole Freudian “tell me about your mother” stuff.  They want to make sure that you are psychologically fit for ministry.  Cindy often jokes, “How you ever convinced them that you are psychologically sound I’ll never know!”  Anyway, I remember telling the psychologist about my childhood.  It was happy.  I grew up in a loving, middle class, suburban family.  My parents seemed normal to me: they worked hard, loved us, and provided us with everything we needed.  When I was eight, my parents bought a camp on a lake in Maine.  We spent lots of time there swimming, fishing, and roasting marshmallows over fires on the beach.  I am not saying that my upbringing was perfect, but it was pretty good.

The psychologist didn’t buy it.  He looked over his glasses after I said all this and replied, in a rather snarky tone, “OK, Mr. Tamilio.  Now tell me the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth,” I said.  He kept pressing me, so I responded in an equally snarky tone, “I’ll lie to you if you want me to.”

I never understood it.  I did not know why he didn’t believe me and thought I was pretending that my childhood was like Leave It to Beaver.  It wasn’t until later that it dawned on me.  This psychologist was so used to hearing stories of abuse and neglect that he couldn’t believe that someone had what I thought most of us considered a normal childhood.  This made me realize that what I thought was “normal” wasn’t normal at all.  It made me sad that so many people grow up in horrific (or at least far less than desirable) households.  It made me realize how broken, how full of pain the world is.

The baptism of Christ reminds us that Jesus is with those who are in pain.  As I have said many times in the past, if you want to find Jesus, you do not need to go to church.  All you need to do is go to a homeless shelter, or spend some time at Boston Children’s Hospital, or take a seat next to a homeless heroin addict in downtown Boston.  You will find Jesus sitting right beside those people, too.  We come to church to encounter him as well and to learn as much as we can about him.  We do this for our spiritual edification, to be sure, but we also do it so that we can go into the world to embody his ethic and his message of salvation.

I cannot remember the name of the author.  He wrote a book that I read back in 2004.  I searched and searched online to no avail, but the gist of his argument is that worship is like halftime in a sporting event.  You are the players: exhausted from a week of living your faith in the world — at home, the workplace, your neighborhood, you name it.  You come to worship on Sunday just as players head to the locker-room after the sound of the buzzer.  What you hear and do here prepares you for the week to come.  It is the pep talk the coach gives his bushed players.  Invigorated, you face the week ahead ready to minister to the masses again.  In other words, when we come to worship we look at the “game” as the week behind us and the week before us.  Worship, as halftime, gives us an opportunity to be rejuvenated.  It is a time to pause and realize that Christ is with us when we are in the mire of life as well as when we are in times of jubilation.

His baptism prepared both Jesus and us for this.  It was a deliberate act through which God said, “I am here, and, through my Son, I am with you.”  Baptism is the perfect culmination of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons — seasons in which we acknowledge and celebrate that God is truly with us.

Jesus stood in the waters of the Jordan.  The voice of God was heard as the Spirit of God settled on Jesus in the form of a dove.  “This is my Son,” God said, “with whom I am well pleased.”  God could just as easily have said, “This is me.  I have come in the flesh to be with you, to love you, and to never leave you alone.”  Amen.

[1] Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 294.