At All Saints'....

Dear All,

Please find attached this week’s sermon and also be aware that next week is a special occasion as we’re getting our youth group to plan and lead our Closer service at 4pm on the 19th, as we celebrate the new year together! It should be a great opportunity to spend time with the family and also have food together. The service will be run by the kids, for the kids. You are all most welcome. Also, don’t forget our coffee morning, coming up a week on Saturday as a chance for us all to spend time together as we raise money for our school!

May you have a blessed week, please find the Sunday sermon attached.

Fr Jordan

Luke 3:21-22

21 When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened 22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

Right, so today is the day when we remember the baptism of Jesus, but it’s actually a day all about the whole life and death of Jesus, as I’ll get to later. But first, I’m going to start off with a pretty simple question for you to think about which is pretty simple: why did Jesus need to be baptised?

Because when we think about we baptise it actually looks like we do quite a different thing at baptism. If I asked three of you what you thought about baptism I might end up getting about 5 different answers and it’s good to be aware of that in the church, but there’s some things that I think we’d agree happen at baptism:

1. At baptism, people are cleaned or refined on the inside in some way.

2. At baptism somebody has made a decision or statement that you are a Christian.

3. At baptism you are welcomed into the family of the church.

Some people would say that you should only baptise people who are able to make that decision for themselves, whereas others would say that it’s good that we welcome people into the church family regardless of what they believe. Some would say we should follow in the way that Jesus was baptised and get dunked, whilst others would say that actually just a tiny bit of water it enough, because Jesus does the work not us. And it’s an issue that lots of people get pretty heated about, especially because some people seem to treat baptism as a cultural rite of passage rather than a sacrament, a physical sign of a spiritual thing that has really happened.

It’s all pretty controversial really, and I’m of the opinion that what matters is the embracing of your baptism as a part (or the key part) of your identity no matter what way you were baptised. And my reasoning for that is pretty simple.

When you look at Jesus’ baptism, it looks very different to ours. Remember those three things I said we all agree about baptism? That we’re cleaned or refined somehow, that we’re stating or deciding we’re a Christian at baptism, and that we’re welcomed into the family of the Church?

Yeah, well none of those three things really apply to Jesus’ baptism. He didn’t need to be cleaned because he didn’t sin. He didn’t need to decide he was a Christian because he was Christ, and he wasn’t really welcomed into the church because there wasn’t a church yet.

So back to my question: why did Jesus need to be baptised? Well the simple answer is, he didn’t when you look at the reasons that we do need to be baptised. Instead, Jesus’ baptism is something different. Jesus’ baptism is, instead, a physical and spiritual thing he did, that we can take part in when we are baptised. A bit like Jesus’ cross and resurrection, later, and totally tied to that, when we are baptised, we are linking our story to Jesus’ story. Jesus wasn’t baptised to be cleaned from sin, he was showing us how to be cleaned of sin. Jesus wasn’t baptised to become a Christian, he was showing us how to start a life of Christian ministry. He wasn’t welcomed into the Church family, but he shows us that anybody (rich or poor etc) who is baptised in the baptism of Jesus, is now a part of your family.

Jesus’ baptism was a physical and spiritual action that we can take part in, and that’s why it’s one of the two sacraments (physical event with a spiritual result) in the Church of England, the other being the Eucharist.

But actually baptism is more than even all that.

I used to be in a church which didn’t have its own building, many years ago, we’d meet in a primary school and there was this one lady who decided one day that she absolutely had to be baptised and she’d decided that she really, really wanted to do it with full immersion. Although, she was a salt of the earth person and I think her actual phrasing was “I have to get dunked”. And this woman had had a really difficult life and wanted to make some big changes immediately which would probably be big for her health let’s just say, so we started looking around for somewhere to baptise her.

The only clean bit of water big enough was an outside pool because it was on a Sunday and everywhere else was shut, but it was weather a bit like it is today, middle of January, and the pool had a layer of ice on it that we had to smash to get this woman into the water to being baptised. But she insisted so we did it and so it was probably one of the quickest baptisms in history.

"InthenameoftheFatherandoftheSonandoftheHolySpiritamen," dunk.

And I remember wondering why it was so important that she was baptised on that day. I understand being baptised is important but couldn’t it have waited a day or two. But to that woman this wasn’t just a cultural rite of passage, to that woman this baptism was something meaningful on another level, it was her joining herself with Jesus in some deeper way.

And that’s because our baptism doesn’t just link ourselves with Jesus’ baptism, important as that is, but it also links us with the cross and resurrection story. When Jesus was baptised, he was lowered down under the water, and came back out the other side with a new start in his ministry, in a way that is symbolically very similar to what happened on the cross. At the cross, he went down into the depths of the grave, into hell, and was lifted back up to new life. And in the same way when we are baptised we are buried with Jesus and come to new life of being a Christian. That’s sort of why some people use the term ‘born again’ although they may use it in an exclusionary way which isn’t always helpful.

The baptism Jesus had was just water, but it gave us a way to be linked to the whole life, death and resurrection of Jesus, it gave us a baptism of the Spirit, by which we can join our lives to the whole of Jesus’ ministry.

Why did Jesus have to be baptised? He didn’t for himself, he did it for us. So that we could be buried and rise again with him at the cross. That’s the deeper spiritual thing that happens when we’re baptised. And it’s fallen at a really good time this reading because I want to talk to you about an event we’ve got coming up…

This year, on the 25th of May, we’re going to be cancelling our main Sunday morning service here and we’re going to have a big baptism service at All Saints’ school. This means that you all will have a chance to take part in this same sacrament that Jesus took part in, if you haven’t before and it means that you have a big opportunity to invite others in to be baptised if they haven’t been before, or even to reaffirm your vows. There’ll be an option to be baptised by sprinkling or by full immersion and we’re going to make it a really fun celebration. So we now all have a big event we can move towards and plan towards so let’s get baptising people...

I’m going to pause now and just ask you to think of someone you may know who maybe you could ask if they want to be baptised, alongside the new members of our youth group and some of the new adults as well, think now if there’s anyone that you could maybe invite down to join in this act that Jesus undertook to give us access to his grace.

Amen.

And at St Georges.....

Dear friends,

Have you ever wondered what kind of leader Jesus would make?

Fr Mike reflects: https://stgeorgechorley.co.uk/news/news_inner/368

Here is the notice sheet: https://stgeorgechorley.co.uk/brochure/theway.pdf

A song from today’s service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY6k2QhdCn0

God bless,

Fr Mike