The Feast of the Baptism of Jesus
January 11, 2026
In case you thought that taking down your Christmas decorations on January 6 meant the holiday season is finally over, I have some news. Today is the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, which extends the notion of celebration for another week. Once upon a time – in the year 300, or so – Christians celebrated both Epiphany and Jesus’ baptism at the same time, on January 6. But in a break from tradition, In the mid-20th-century deliberations around reforming the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church (and eventually all the major Western denominations) liturgical scholars advised separating them in the liturgical calendar so that the Wise Folk from the East could come and go home by another route before we skip over 30 years to the story of Jesus meeting up with his cousin John to be baptized in the Jordan river in solidarity with all the sinners who wanted to turn away from evil and find a fresh start in their relationship with God, with themselves, and with other people.
I realize that “sinners” is not a popular word among us. But sin and evil are real, and there are many sinners and many evils in the world right now. Repentance, turning away from sin and evil, is important not just at the personal, but also at the national and world-wide level all the time. But this morning I am not going to talk about all the horrors that are being done by people in power. It’s not that they are not important, but rather that they tend to drive out attention to other things that we also need to think about. And it seems to me that if we give all our attention to those evils, then those who do evil have won. So today I am going to give some attention to our traditions and how they do or do not serve us.
Let’s begin with how we read scriptuer. As we have just heard, out first reading was from Isaiah 42. Over the years, various Hebrew scriptures readings from Isaiah about the suffering servant have been traditionally paired with Gospel readings about the baptism of Jesus in order to emphasize the assertion that Jesus is the savior foretold by the prophet around five or six hundred years earlier. In that prophecy, early Christian writers found descriptions of a mysterious person that sounded to them remarkably like Jesus. Often called the Suffering Servant, this humble, gentle person was said to have been chosen by God to bring justice to the nations and be a light not only to the Jewish people but also to the Gentiles. Later chapters in Isaiah describe the Servant as a teacher whose obedience to God leads him to suffer because of and in solidarity with the sins of others. Or, as Isaiah 53:3-5 put, it “You were rejected and despised by all; you know suffering intimately, and you are acquainted with sickness. When we saw you, we turned our faces away; we despised you and did not value you. Yet you bore our illnesses and carried our suffering. We thought you were being punished, struck down and brought low. But it was for our offenses that you were pierced, for our sins that you were crushed; upon you lies a chastening that brings us wholeness, and through your wounds we are healed.”
The trouble with such proof-texting is that it makes it difficult to understand the original text in its own context, or as Jewish readers understand it today. This does a disservice to the text, to our Jewish neighbors, and, ultimately, to ourselves. Read in its own context, today’s Isaiah passage and similar ones in later chapters refer not to Jesus and the Jews in a Palestine conquered and oppressed by the Roman Empire, but rather to someone who would save the Jews who were at that moment captive in Babylon, and help them get home. Granted, there is a certain similarity between the longing for freedom from captivity in Babylon and the yearnings of the Jewish people for freedom from Roman occupation a few hundred years later. In both cases, the people wanted to live in a just and equitable system, worshipping according to their own beliefs, and living peacefully in their own homes.
But despite the lovely and pious hymns that we sing at Christmastime proclaiming “it was Isaiah that foretold” the birth of Jesus, and the quotations scattered among the Gospels that insist that the prophet was describing Jesus, when Isaiah described the Suffering Servant, he was almost certainly not thinking about what would happen hundreds of years later. He was thinking about the troubles that his community were in the midst of, and imagining what kind of person could save them from those troubles. Think about it: in our collective anguish over the increasingly dangerous slide into dictatorship we are seeing today, unless you are a science fiction writer, you are probably not imagining what might or might not happen at some moment five hundred or a thousand years in the future or who might save people from some unthinkable danger in some improbable future. Rather, like Isaiah, you are probably concerned about the troubles we are in the middle of right now and who or what might help us change the situation. I just find it very difficult to believe that Isaiah had any foreknowledge of Jesus, despite what Christian apologists have insisted for centuries.
In a larger sense, of course, Isaiah was thinking about and praying for justice and forpeace. And since hopes and prayers for justice and peace are applicable to all times and places, it does make sense that after the death of Jesus, his followers would connect those prophecies in Isaiah to their own experience and understanding of his birth, life, and death.
While making these connections, the early followers of Jesus were breaking from the Jewish traditions of their time to found a new community based not on ethnic or family ties, but on faith in a new way of life in Christ. They made those connections in the spirit of tradition-breaking that was already part of their tradition. Indeed, as we just sang in Brian Wren’s hymn “Deep in the Shadows of the Past,” tradition-breaking is embedded in the story of Abraham leaving his ancestral country to find a land that God would show him; in the story of Moses leaving the comfort of Pharoah’s palace to herd sheep in the desert and hear a voice in a burning bush say “I am what I will be”; and in the repeated stories of the prophets, who admonished kings and priests that what God wants from us is not traditional rules and rituals but rather that we “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in the divine light” [Micah 6:8]
Indeed, the entire history of Christianity can be read as one break with tradition after another, as the Western Church split from the East; and numerous reformers have reshaped the Roman Catholic church whenever it became stuck in its ways both before and after the Protestant Reformation gave rise to the many denominations and independent churches that we know today.
And breaking traditions while keeping contact with the past is, I think, what we are doing right now, here at Seekers. In the process that began on our Day of Prayer and Contemplation, we are looking at the past in order to prepare for the future. In our working groups, in our mission groups and ministry teams, in private conversations, and in sermons like this one, we are trying to understand our current situation and discern the path for next steps in our journey. As part of that discernment, we look for guidance and wisdom in the ancient stories written down by people who were trying to make sense about their collective experience of the Divine Mystery, in the prayers and other writings we have inherited from two thousand years of the Christian tradition, and also in the less-ancient but still somewhat old-fashioned stories and modes of expression that we have received from the Church of the Saviour.
This does not mean that we should blindly do what others have done before us. Rather, it means that we should consider what we can learn from their experience, and see how that learning might fit our situation today. For instance, I think that for many people who are newer to Seekers, references to the “tradition of Church of the Saviour” may seem as old-fashioned, rigid, and hard to understand as the Latin Mass. However, in our Group 1 meeting on Friday, someone said that one of the hallmarks of the early Church of the Saviour is tradition-breaking. As I was reminded In the School for Christian Growth class last summer on Elizabeth O’Connor’s book, Call to Commitment, there was a great spirit of experimentation that characterized the early days of Church of the Saviour.
Mission groups, for instance, did not arrive fully-formed. There was struggle and experimentation with different formats for small groups, different combinations of people, until finally they discovered the notion of groups made up of people with a common call. As Gordon Cosby put it in a 1958 sermon,
What is meant by a mission group? … As I discover what aspect of that mission is mine, and as you discover your mission, and they happen to coincide, then we become part of a mission group. It is that simple. …we need one another to work together, we are a combination of persons on mission within a mission group. Who cares what form it takes? Who knows what the details of it will be, when it meets and how it goes about its task? This is not important. The important thing is that this group be guided by the Holy Spirit step by step, and be so attuned, and so flexible that it shall be able to discover what God has in mind. This is all you mean by a mission group: Two or more persons who have been grasped by the same concept of God’s task for them, and who have been grasped by God, which is deeper and more profound than being grasped by a concept. [Elizabeth O’Connor, Call to Commitment: An Attempt to Embody the Essence of the Church, p 58]
Over time, the notion of mission groups became solidified, with rules and descriptions of how to authorize, define, and run a mission group, but in the early days, things were more fluid and experimental. That sense of exciting experiment was part of what I found when I came to Seekers in 1990. But over time, many of our customs have hardened, and some of us have looked for ease and comfort rather than excitement and newness.
Even before the Day of Prayer and Conversation last September, there has been a new sense of that fluid, experimental spirit among us, a need to break open some of our old, entrenched ways of doing things. Some of the places where tradition-breaking is already happening is in conversations around redefining what a mission group is and how it works, looking seriously at how we do or do not make room for new people to take on positions of leadership and power in the community, changing our approach to Sunday worship, rethinking how and why we make ourselves known to the wider community, and how decisions get made about other things that affect Seekers as a whole. Some of this tradition-breaking may feel threatening to those of us who are used to the old ways. Some of it may feel exciting and fresh. It seems to me that as easy and comfortable as it is to keep doing the same old thing, I need to remember this long tradition of tradition-breaking as we find new ways of expressing our deepest values.
I also need to remember, and to remind you, my beloved community and friends, that the past is filled with treasures that we ignore at our peril. There is wisdom and grace in those old stories and customs, if we take the time and effort to find them, to look at them with new eyes, and see what they might add to our living into of what is going on now. When John called the people to repent and let the waters of the Jordan River flow over them, he was using an ancient tradition of ritual bathing to signify a new attitude, a new commitment, a new awareness of the nearness and mystery of God. As we live into the 50th year of Seekers Church and plan a celebration of that milestone on Recommitment Sunday next October, I am certain that we will break some old traditions and create some new ones, even as we continue to treasure the values that underlie them. In that process, let us reflect on John’s call to repentance as an opportunity to renounce our rigid, reflexive, unloving personal and communal habits, as well as the evils that surround us, as we become new creatures in Christ. On this Feast of the Baptism of Christ, let us all hear the voice of the Holy One claiming each of us as radiant, beloved, and whole. Amen.