Matthew 3:13-17

Isaiah 42:1-9

One of the things that I have enjoyed doing as a pastor in this church is baptizing older teenagers and adults. For most of my ministry, I only had the opportunity to baptize babies because everyone at the church where I served when I first became a pastor was baptized as a baby. But here at Trinity, I’ve had the great joy of walking with teenagers and young adults as they wanted and accepted baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

I was baptized as an infant. I don’t remember a thing of it besides a few pictures that I’ve seen over the years. What I mostly remember from the pictures are my parents hair (at the time, my dad had a mullet and my mom had the big, poofy perm) and their clothes – everything in 1990 was big, frilly, and poofy. My guess is, many of us who are adults in this congregation have a similar experience – you were baptized as a baby and don’t really remember any of it.

Eliza, on the other hand, was baptized as an adult. She’s been a Christian most of her life. But the church she grew up going to was an anabaptist church (meaning, they didn’t baptize infants, but instead did believers’ baptism). When it came time for her as a teenager to get baptized, the church was going through a pastoral transition and there was some conflict, and they kind of just forgot to do baptism for a whole group of teenagers about her age. It wasn’t until she was an adult and part of a brethren church in State College when she was finally baptized. It was the full experience – she went under the water three times (three being a sign of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit). For her, becoming baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was a choice that she made on her own. 

I sometimes wonder whether because I was baptized as a baby whether I missed out on something? Maybe you have a similar feeling if you were baptized as a baby and wish that you would have been given the choice to be baptized when you were able to make your own decision about it and you would remember it?

I say all this because our gospel reading from the gospel of Matthew is about Jesus’ baptism. The way the gospel writer Matthew tells the good news, after Jesus is born, Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus are forced to flee their home because Herod, the cruel and insecure king of Jesus’ land, ordered all of the young children to be killed. Why? Because Herod was afraid of the news from the Wise Men of the birth of a Messiah. It’s only when Jesus is an older child and Herod has died that God tells Mary, Joseph, and Jesus that it is safe to return to their home. 

We do not know much about Jesus’ childhood and teenage years beyond that. What we do know is that Jesus’ ministry and most of his story begins with his baptism in the River Jordan by a man named John the Baptist. That’s the story that we read this morning. Here is a summary of it:

At that time Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan River and wanted John to baptize him (remember, John was Jesus’ cousin. John was part preacher, part prophet, his job was to get the people and the nation ready for Jesus’ arrival as Messiah). But John tried to stop him, saying, “Why do you come to me to be baptized? I need to be baptized by you! (John knows who Jesus is and is a little stunned that the Lord would ask him to baptize him when it should be the other way around).”

Jesus answered, “Let it be this way for now. We should do all things that are God’s will.” So John agreed to baptize Jesus.

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he came up out of the water. Then heaven opened, and he saw God’s Spirit coming down on him like a dove. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love, and I am very pleased with him.” [NCV]

What struck me this week as I thought about this story is that God is the main actor in it. It probably should be obvious that God is the main person in baptism. But one of the things we humans are prone to is forgetfulness. We can go through our days as Christians, and our worship as a church, and forget about God because we have lots of things to distract us and God is not seen.

But God is fully present in this story. That’s not to say that God is not involved in every thing that happens. It’s just that here in Jesus’ baptism, we see God’s presence very clearly. Remember that we Christians believe that there is only one God, but that God exists in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Here is how we see God’s presence in Jesus’ baptism: Jesus the Son goes into the water just like any of us who are baptized and comes up from the water and hears God’s blessing. The Spirit comes down on Jesus like a dove (which is an ancient biblical symbol for peace and harmony). And the voice of God the Father says how very happy and pleased he is in Jesus.

Two things: the good news and then a question. Here is where I see the good news of Jesus baptism: Jesus goes first. He doesn’t wait for John’s approval, he says he’s doing God’s will. We should probably say that Jesus didn’t have to be baptized.  If he is the Son of God, then he doesn’t need to do anything to make God love him more. And yet, Jesus goes first.

Here’s where I take a lot of comfort in this: Jesus doesn’t wait for us to get our act together before showing up in our lives. Last week, we talked about the Ten Commandments. They are super important for how we are to behave and live as Christians. But we misunderstand the Christian message if we think that we need to first live by the Ten Commandments and then God will love us and bless us. Instead, the Christian story flips that. There is a line in the New Testament letter of 1st John: “We love because God first loved us.” Do you notice the priority, what is first? God loves us, therefore we love. We live by the Ten Commandments, and love God and our neighbor, not to earn God’s approval, because God loved us first. 

That’s the good news of the story of Jesus’ baptism: Jesus goes first. Now, the question: where have you seen God’s presence in your life this week? That might be a hard question to answer on the spot because a lot of us can go through our weeks and forget about God. So another question: what are some signs that God is present in a special way like at the story of Jesus’ baptism?

If we follow our Scriptures this morning, some signs of God’s presence are mercy, love, justice, righteousness, joy, and hope, often when things are bleak and dark.

A few years ago, I read a story in a magazine called Mockingbird as part of their family edition. It was about guilt and shame in families. The article is titled “A New Recipe: Grace in Family Life” and is written by the child psychologist, Dorothy Martyn. The story is about a young girl named Susie. Susie, she was maybe five or six, couldn’t sleep through the night and wouldn’t stay in her own bed. Susie’s mother, frustrated and tired, tried all of the tricks of the trade to get her to sleep through the night and stay in her own bed. But, nothing seemed to work. So, she started working with Dorothy Martyn, hoping, for her family’s sake, for a breakthrough. Listen as Dorothy tells the story: 

Susie had other symptoms too. She called her mother terrible names, like “you worm.” It would be easy to assume her behavior perhaps reflected how she was being treated at home, but that wasn’t the case. The language came from somewhere deep inside the little girl and would take us some time to understand. As the story unfolded, we had decided the mother, the little girl, and I would spend some time in the playroom together.

So the mother and I watched the little girl play, which took on some most interesting forms. We had the Barbie dolls there, and the Barbie dolls had a party, and we each had a Barbie doll: one belonged to the mother, one belonged to me, and one belonged to her. The little girl said to one of the dolls, “You can’t come to this party.” It was her mother’s doll. “You’re sick and you have to stay in bed, and I hope you don’t get any better.” From there, it became much more violent – these dolls were in for a rough ride. It came to pass, so to speak, that the mother was told her doll had to be attacked with harpoons and spears – and the other dolls had to do it – indeed unto death, and not just unto death, but as a final kind of insult, bugs were put all over the body of this dead Barbie doll.

An ordinary person looking at this would think, “What on earth is the matter with this child? Does she have some terrible disease?” Well, I want you to know I’ve spent 30 years doing play therapy, and I have seen cannibalism and dismemberment regularly come out of the play of the most ‘normal’ little children. It seems to be a part of the human condition, something in us all. It became very clear that the daughter had a rage at the mother for possessing something that she herself wanted, namely the father…

I had clued the mother in that these were not horrible things, that we were just trying to find out what the underneath stuff was. Which is why I consider this an accurate portrayal of mercy – the mother had mercy for the child. The playroom was an old-fashioned apartment where there were still servant bells, so she found that she could push the servant electric bell, and that would be the discharge of electricity at which point her mother’s doll was supposed to fall dead. Her mother entered into this play, always being the bad guy and getting electrocuted. The girl devised this scene and played it out over and over again.

I tell this story mainly because of the power of mercy at work. It was astounding to both parents that with this kind of allowance to play – and to just have it watched and understood and reflected – the little girl started to sleep better. She just had to get it all out; it had to be externalized. The mother and the father entered in without manipulating the behavior in any way, and the symptoms got better. I don’t mean that this little girl was forever saved according to this world’s standards, but that problem did go away. (Martyn)

I share this long story because it tells us something about God’s character. Like the parents who showed patience and mercy towards their daughter even in her worst excesses and terrible thoughts, God’s character is that of patience and mercy. It is as the Psalmist writes,  “The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

Baptism is one of the signs of this. We say in our baptismal liturgy that baptism ‘is an outward sign of the invisible grace of God’. In God’s mercy and wisdom, he decided that we needed tangible, earthy things like water in baptism, and bread and wine in communion to help us to know his grace.

We’ll close with what baptism is about. Whether we are baptized as an infant and don’t remember any of it, or whether we are baptized as a teenager or adult by our own choice, or whether we’ve not been baptized yet, baptism is about three big things:

First, baptism is a start. It’s a sign and symbol of our becoming a Christian and becoming a part of Christ’s church. In the secular world, it’s like an initiation ceremony into a club or group. We are asked to say what we believe: that Jesus is Lord and that we will do everything in our power to renounce the powers of evil and live with Christ as our living Lord. Here’s the thing, every Christian church, in spite of all of our differences, baptizes people with the same words – “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Baptism is our joining with Christians around the world to be a follower of Christ.

Second, baptism is a sign, a symbol of God’s forgiveness. Think about water – water both gives us life and it also cleans. Baptism is an outward sign of something that goes on inside of us that God forgives us and heals us.

Third, baptism is a beginning, the beginning of our growth into Christian maturity. None of us enters life or being a teenager or adult perfect. We all live with the consequences of the fall and sin. But, that’s not an excuse to stay as we are and to keep on sinning. Baptism is the beginning of our growth into Christian maturity, into producing what the apostle Paul called the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, generosity, faithfulness, and self-control.

Friends, if you can, remember your baptism and the commitments you made. If you don’t remember your baptism, remember that God is merciful and that you are baptized and have a purpose because of it. If you haven’t been baptized, consider whether God is calling you to do that.

Amen.

Works Cited

Martyn, Dorothy. “A New Recipe: Grace in Family Life.” mbird.com, Mockingbird, 16 October 2018, https://mbird.com/psychology/a-new-recipe-grace-in-family-life/. Accessed 10 January 2026.