Service for January 11 Baptism of Our Lord Sunday

Sermon for  January 11, 2026                                             Baptism of Our Lord

Hello church! It’s good to be back with you. What a year it has been! Already! We’re only one week into 2026 and it already feels like it’s been months. We live in trying times. There is loss and confusion. There is mourning and division. It can be hard to have hope in this moment in time. Yet here we are. We are called to be God’s people, to walk in faith in this place at this time together. I don’t know where we’re going exactly but I know who we follow and I know we go together! The people of God always go on this journey of life, together!

I hope it isn’t news to you that Pastors don’t have all the answers. We don’t have any more of a roadmap than the ones available to all of us. Everyone, lay people and ordained, we all have: the Bible. We have our relationship with God. We have our trust that the promised Holy Spirit is with us and we have each other, the body of Christ, called to love and support one another; called to hold each other accountable.

In this life, in all its beauty and terror, we have each other. Frederick Buechner wrote, “A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. […] The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.1

Beautiful and terrible things will happen. “Don’t be afraid,” God says in giving us this gift of grace through baptism. Don’t be afraid, I am with you. In baptism we are brought into the church, made a part of the body of Christ so that we are immersed in that grace every time we are together, here in worship, in conversation with each other over coffee or over the phone mid-week, every time we remember our baptism, when we remember whose we are, named and claimed as God’s beloved, we are immersed in grace!

Like I said, Pastors don’t have any extra source of guidance than anyone else, but we are tasked with speaking and specifically we’re tasked with bringing the Good News of Jesus Christ into conversation with the world in which we live. This world. This world where beautiful and terrible things happen. So, I have a few thoughts for today.

Today, I’d like to focus on our identity and on a story. Our primary identity, the one that should orient us in all parts of our lives is the one given to us in our baptism. Just as Jesus was washed in the water of baptism and touched by the Holy spirit, we align ourselves with Jesus as Jesus aligned himself with us when he insisted on being baptized with those repentant sinners being baptized by John in the river Jordan.

So, let’s remember the words spoken at our baptism.

We begin in baptism hearing the responsibilities it entails as the Pastor says, “As you receive the gift of baptism you are entrusted with responsibilities to:

·       Live among God’s faithful people

·       Come to the Word of God and the holy supper.

·       Learn the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the ten commandments,

·       Read the holy scriptures,

·       And nurture your life of faith and prayer.

And then the rite of baptism states that we do all those things for a specific reason! We center our lives in the community of God’s people, we come to worship and the Lord’s Supper, we learn the meaning of our foundational writings, we read scripture and tend to our life of faith and prayer SO THAT:

·       So that we may learn to trust God,

·       Proclaim Christ through word and deed,

·       Care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.

Those things are the purpose of our baptism: “so that…” we may learn to trust God, Proclaim Christ through word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.”

That is our job description given in our baptism. We live the life of disciples, we claim the identity of Jesus follower, “so that…” we can trust God, we can proclaim Christ in all we say and do, we can care for our neighbors and creation properly and we can work for God’s justice, God’s peace in this world!

The next thing that happens in baptism is that we are asked to profess our trust in Christ Jesus, reject sin and confess the faith of the church.

The pastor asks “Do you renounce the devil and do you renounce all the forces that defy God? If so, answer, “I renounce them.” Join me in saying, “I renounce them.”

Next the pastor asks, “Do you renounce the powers of this world that rebel against God? If so, answer, “I renounce them.”

Lastly, the pastor asks, “Do you renounce the ways of sin that draw you from God? If so, answer, “I renounce them.”…

We renounce everything that could separate us from God: the devil, the powers that rebel against God and sin SO THAT “we may learn to trust God, Proclaim Christ through word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.”                                   

We name what we will do and then we name what we reject in following this Jesus born of the virgin Mary, who was crucified and died and on the third day was raised from the dead and now reigns with God. We are baptized for a purpose, to live as followers of the one who taught us how to live, how to act in this world as God’s people.

Now, the story. Many of you have probably heard the story of the events of Christmas Eve, 1914 the first Christmas of WWI, when soldiers from opposing armies celebrated Christmas together. The film Joyeux Noël, French for "merry Christmas" tells the story of that true event. Joyeaux Noel is a movie, not a documentary so it expands upon the few known facts to give us a feeling of what it must have been like. It’s fiction based on fact that can help us in our own struggles to make sense of what it means to follow Jesus in tumultuous times. I don’t use this example to debate the necessity of that war or any war. I use it to help us sort out who God calls us to be and to help us discern when our trust in God is being used for purposes that are not God’s purposes.

On December 24th, 1914, German soldiers began singing Christmas carols in their trenches. The songs echoed out over the quiet battlefield. The sounds of war, artillery explosions and rifle bursts were silent, at least for a time.  

British, and French soldiers across the battlefield began singing in response to the Germans. Thousands of soldiers across kilometers of trenches who had been fighting found themselves living a truce with enemy soldiers. While heads of state and generals continued plotting invasions, the foot soldiers lived for a short time a cease fire in honor of Christmas.

In the movie, each side is flooded with propaganda about the inhumanity of their enemies. Each side imagines the other as barbarians, and each side believes that that God will give them victory in the conflict. But in the film the men discover their shared humanity as they brave the distance across “no man’s land,” the wasteland between their respective front lines.

Soldiers meet in that in-between space, sharing photos of spouses and children. Wine or whiskey and cigarettes are exchanged. A game of football is played, and maybe most surprising, they gather together to say the Latin mass with one voice. Soldiers look to their left and right and see that the uniforms they’re wearing say that they are enemies, but the words of the Christmas Eve service reveal that they are brothers seeking the Prince of Peace.

They were told to hate each other, but they discovered that, in another life, they could be friends with those they were fighting. They reject the demand of the commanders to kill people they have no desire to kill.

The story ends with the description of how these bold actions were received by the senior military leadership.  The soldiers on all sides were severely and publicly punished and condemned for fraternization with the enemy. The high commands didn’t care that these soldiers saw each other as brothers because of their shared Christmas, or what that might imply for the possibilities of peace.

One of the main characters in the story is the priest who presides over the midnight mass. When he returns to the rear, his bishop denounces him and strips him of his parish. The bishop is appalled at what he called a “cowardly” act.  But the priest confesses with a tone of awe, “I think I offered what was the most important mass of my life.”

In Joyeux Noël, after the bishop finishes denouncing his priest, he goes into a makeshift chapel and delivers a sermon intended to inspire new recruits before they head to the front line. During his sermon, he confidently instructs them, “This war is indeed a crusade! A holy war to save the freedom of the world. In truth I tell you: the Germans do not act like us, neither do they think like us, for they are not, like us, children of God.”

He commands the soldiers to kill, because it’s okay to kill people who are evil, who are not, “like us,” those who have been chosen by God. "It is sweet and right to die for your country," he says.

Nations often justify their imperial ambitions as the will of God and religious leaders can become complicit with those ambitions. Those soldiers who crossed battle lines on that Christmas Eve to celebrate the Prince of Peace as if there was no war came far closer to seeing the true will of God. They understood their baptismal promises!

We follow Jesus, who was humble to the point of death, refusing to retaliate, forgiving everyone everything. We follow the one whose solidarity with humanity was and is complete. Jesus’ love, forgiveness and mercy is for every, single human being. But what that solidarity means is only understood in the context of the particularity of Jesus’ life. Understanding how he showed that solidarity is essential to understanding what it means for us today. Jesus lined up for baptism in the river Jordan along with all the sinners. He was sinless but humbly identified with us completely even to the point of death on a cross; forgiving those who tortured and killed him, forgiving us all.

We have seen many things done in the name of Jesus that have nothing in common with who Jesus was, what he said or what he did. People have been misled by the powerful in military, government or church leadership, like those military leaders in WWI who reprimanded the soldiers for seeing their counterparts as human beings created in God’s image.

Their church has failed them. Their governmental leaders have failed them. Their community failed them. They thought they were faithfully following Jesus, but Jesus is not a nationalist. Jesus is not a racist. He is not violent or hateful.

The church of Jesus Christ must name evil for what it is or we are complicit in the evil. Racism denies that those who do not look like us are created in God’s image. Nationalism denies that God can be found in every country. Violence destroys the humanity of the victim and the perpetrator.

But lest we think we are above reproach, we remember the truth that “every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of that line."2 Jesus is always standing with the outsider.

Jesus loves us and Jesus loves those who thought they were faithfully following him but so badly misunderstood his humility and his love for all people. Jesus loves us and Jesus loves every elected official and every police officer and every ICE agent and every protestor. Jesus loves us while weeping at the ways we have misunderstood his message and have been misled.

We are all created in God’s image and we are all beloved children of God. We are not all acting like it. None of us acts like it 100% of the time. But some of us have gone far astray and need to be reminded of our belovedness by the community.

Like I said, I don’t know where we’re going but I know the one we follow and I know we go together. We follow the one who said we would find him in the hungry and thirsty, in the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned. We follow Jesus together as the body of Christ formed in baptism by God’s grace, trusting that together we will discern the path of faithfulness and if we begin to go astray we will help each other to reject any lies that claim our allegiance.

When you come forward for communion today, pause to dip your fingers into the baptismal font and make the sign of the cross on yourself. For now, turn to your neighbor, make the sign of the cross on their forehead or on the back of their hand, or even on your own forehead and repeat these words: You are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. You belong to Christ in whom you have been baptized. Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Amen.

1 Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

2 Nadia Bolz-Weber