“Why would God need baptism?”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, January 11, 2026
Matthew 3:13-17
I had a friend who was the leader of a blue grass band. They weren’t religious. He wasn’t religious. But he told me of a tradition among musicians in the genre—you finish every jam session with a rendition of Amazing Grace. It’s required by the union or something. My friend called it “drunk gospel.” Because by that time the whole band’s sloshed, and they’re into it. And this little tradition brought him to faith in Jesus Christ. He started to wonder, through the haze, who gives this amazing grace? I feel like a wretch already, could I also feel ... found, and not just lost? The cumulative effect of years of belting out drunk gospel at 4:00 a.m. made him say hmm, I guess I believe in this God.
We might call that an irregular way of coming to faith. Perfectly valid! And cool enough that I started this sermon with it. But probably not one I’d recommend you plan for, it’s a little roundabout, indirect. But I do think God has a soft spot for that sort of story.
A church like ours has all kinds of regular ways to come to faith. We call some of them sacraments. Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, every Sunday worship: they’re designed to draw us deeper into belief, or if necessary, into belief for the first time. The word sacrament just means “mystery.” I call a sacrament “a physical means by which God saves”. The physical part is important: bread, wine, water. The physicality shows God loves creation and is saving not just our souls, but everything he made in the first place.
I thought up a series on the sacraments for our church during a sacrament. We were celebrating the Lord’s Supper, as we’ve done more often lately. In the ancient church we had the Lord’s Supper every time we gathered. Sermons were optional. Sacraments were not optional. Some of you would like that back. The answer is no. Anyway, one of you is here every week, decades-long leader, much trusted and beloved. And you received the bread. And looked at me while I was holding the cup, smiled awkwardly, and walked right on past. I could tell in that nervous moment you weren’t sure what to do! So clearly, I owe you a little more instruction, wouldn’t you say?
In the ancient church, you would have never seen a baptism until the day you were baptized. Most people were baptized as adults. In those days, if the church was to celebrate a proper sacrament, everyone not already baptized was ushered out first. We would baptize new believers at an Easter vigil, and immediately after, serve them communion for the first time. Then we’d spend months teaching the newly baptized what their baptism and what communion mean. We would teach through the sacraments, as we’ll do here the next six weeks of this series. I actually think this matches how human beings learn best. Something life-changing happens and then we learn from it. We don’t usually learn best by downloading information, we’re not computers. Someone wise said ‘we don’t learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.’ So, three weeks on baptism, then three on the Lord’s Supper, all through Epiphany season until Lent. Y’all ready?
In the ancient church we had dozens of sacraments. Signing yourself with the sign of the cross: sacrament. Signing up to be baptized in the future: sacrament (observed with salt apparently). Lighting the candles for worship: sacrament. Lots of physical places where God saves. In the Reformation, we Protestants said no, there are only two, because Christ explicitly commands only two, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Our Roman Catholic frenemies said there are seven—adding confirmation, marriage, ordination, confession, and the anointing of the sick. Both lists are tragically short. I prefer lists of like 27 sacraments, or 36, loose but lots of them. When we asperge folks to remember baptism with an evergreen branch, isn’t that a sacrament? When someone offers to pray for you, takes your hands and does so, isn’t that a sacrament? A physical place where God saves?
As part of this short series on the sacraments we have Jesus’ baptism today. Now I hope you noticed in the story there’s already a problem. John the Baptist says woah, woah, woah, you’re coming to me for baptism? I need to be baptized by you. You go to someone else for something spiritual because they have something you need. What does Jesus lack or need? That John has?
An illustration. When Napoleon conquered all of Europe, he wanted to be crowned emperor in 1804. Fair enough. Only who was worthy to crown Napoleon? Historically the pope would crown emperors, but Napoleon didn’t want to signal the pope had power over him. So, the pope attended but did not crown him. Who was worthy to crown Napoleon? Only Napoleon himself. Humble guy! There’s Jacques Louis-David’s depiction, the pope looking suitably grumpy.
Who is worthy to baptize Jesus? Nobody. But Jesus insists. And John goes along.
This already says something. Our God is not just great, mighty, powerful. Our God is humble. Defers to others. He needs Mary to get born. He needs John to get educated, baptized. Other religions see God as mighty, like we do. But a God who bends low, depends on us, gets born—that’s different. A God who is baptized, leading us all into the water. Certain political regimes seem to think power is the ability to bully others, take what you want. Nope. Real power is the ability to serve and love others.
At Jesus’ time, baptism was a Jewish renewal ritual. Jews to this day will take a ritual bath to be purified after becoming ritually unclean—touching a dead body or for other reasons. When I was in Israel recently, I saw archaeologists’ discoveries of dozens of ritual baths. What’s new with John is that he thinks God is coming in person, to judge and save. Better repent and get ready. And then the Lord himself comes to John. As promised. Woah, everything I’ve been saying is actually true. Reminds me of a Mel Gibson movie where he plays a conspiracy theorist, only one of his dozens of conspiracy theories turns out to be right, so the bad guys come after him. Oops. John sees the Lord in person and does what he’s told, baptizes him. Do you see in that Ethiopian icon the fish are jumping out of the water in celebration? All creation is renewed. Even water is different now.
And as Jesus comes up from the water, the sky is opened. In Mark’s telling of the same story, the Greek says the skies are schizo’d, like our word schizophrenia, for a tear in your mind. The skies are schizo’d, torn apart, and the Holy Spirit descends like a dove, and the voice of God the Father says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” In this icon Jesus’ arms are out, like a dove. And he looks like he’s already hanging on his cross. We might call this moment a theophany. If you’ll forgive the ten-cent word: a theophany is manifestation, a showing, of who God is. All three persons of the Trinity are shown here: the voice of the father, the person of the Son, Jesus, and the Spirit as a dove. The Orthodox church prays this way for today, the baptism of the Lord Sunday:
When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, worship of the Trinity wast made manifest; for the voice of the Father bore witness to Thee, calling Thee His beloved Son. And the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the truth of His word. O Christ our God, Who hath appeared and enlightened the world, glory to Thee.
I love the ways different cultures depict the baptism of the Lord. Giotto in the 1200s in Italy depicts the Lord being baptized nude. We Christians usually were. Paul says in baptism we strip off the old self and put on a new self, Jesus Christ. So, our ancestors took off their old clothes to symbolize this, and after baptism put on a new dazzling robe symbolizing Christ’s holiness. This is why we figure women had priestly roles in the earliest church—celibate male priests were not baptizing nude women. Their sisters were. Jesus himself was probably clothed at the Jordan, but artists often show him in a constricted place, a narrow place. These contemporary Ukrainian iconographers make me feel claustrophobic, shut in. One of you said in Bible study that this one even looks like a coffin. That’s fitting, because baptism is a kind of death. This is why some prefer to baptize people by immersion. Paul says baptism is a death by drowning. Coming up from the water is resurrection to new life. A Baptist minister friend of mine says he holds people down just a beat longer than they’re comfortable with. I hope one day we have a way to baptize like that in here. A font for full immersions. Dare to dream. There is a big lake nearby where that would work. When I helped lead at Tenth Church in Vancouver they would baptize in the ocean and would offer new believers the chance to wait till the weather warmed up. They’d inevitably say no thanks, this is new life, I don’t mind if it hurts. Arctic plunge baptisms.
One bedrock of Christian faith is that in Christ, God becomes everything we as human beings are to make us everything God is. God shares our humanity to gift us his divinity. So different cultures portray Christ in their own cultural dress, their own skin. The Ethiopic Church I mentioned before is older than European ones—Christianity was Asian and African before it got to Europe. And this contemporary artist, James He Qi, imagines the scene in his Chinese culture. God with skin on is something else unique to Christianity. And it has made us a unique kind of worldwide faith. Judaism is a family, Abraham’s and Sarah’s, and a nation, Israel’s. Christianity expands that to include all gentiles. Islam like us wants to be universal. But it’s still really mostly an Arab faith: to be Muslim correctly you really have to pray in Arabic. For example, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world, but Muslims there don’t worship in Indonesian. Christians in Indonesia do use their native languages. Christianity has always been translated into different cultures and languages as fast as we can. Because God is saving absolutely everybody. And then those new cultures teach the church things we didn’t know before. Did you know in Ojibwe there’s no word for faith? There is a word for trust, and a word for knowledge. But not belief. Real faith isn’t wishing for something. It’s trusting someone you’ve met personally. It's saying, ‘I’ve met this Jesus and I trust him.’ Wouldn’t have known that without Ojibwe Christians. That’s good, isn’t it?
I wonder about you and your baptism. If you don’t know about it ask someone who does. If you’re not baptized, that’s one of the few problems on earth we clergy can actually fix. Most problems we can only pray for, pull for you. This one? Done.
I was baptized twice as an infant. And that’s hard to manage. My hippie parents weren’t likely to baptize me, so my Catholic grandmother took matters into her own hands. In some versions of the story, she took me to the sink herself when she was babysitting. It was an emergency, can’t wait for a priest. In other versions she took me to her parish priest. She never clarified which it was. Then when my parents did wander over to a Methodist church to have me baptized, she was too nervous to confess. Explains a lot about me. What about you? Who carried you in here to be baptized? Someday, we’ll all be carried out of here, to our graves. The one prepares us for the other.
When I was in Israel most recently, part of our group was my age (that is, old, 50+), and part was half my age, evangelical ministers in their 20s. Those kids all put on bathing suits, got in the Jordan, and rebaptized each other. The Orthodox priest beside me quoted the creed in a whisper: “we acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” Unlike our Jewish forebears with the regular ritual bath, the church has said baptism is once for all. Because God never makes mistakes, never gets it wrong. After you’ve been baptized, you’re in the church forever, nothing can change that. Some new atheist groups have tried to devise unbaptism liturgies. They involve hair dryers (get it? Drying the water). It's a sort of compliment to us really—baptism is so powerful we can’t dry it off.
Annie Dillard, one of the great Christian voices of the last 40 years, tells about demanding her name be taken off the roll of her church as a teenager. I’m through, done forever. Didn’t I baptize you? The minster asks. Without my consent! Take my name off. She stomps out. Her minister calls after her, “You’ll be back.” What? How dare you? I’m sorry, this is how baptism works. When God gets hooks into us, they’re hard to remove.
I do respect churches that baptize only adults—Baptists and some other evangelicals. But I prefer baptizing infants. It’s like circumcision among our Jewish forebears. Jewish boys are circumcised on their eighth day of life long before they know their own name. Made Jewish before they can choose. Later they have to decide to be Jewish themselves—become a bar or bat mitzvah, observe the Torah. I didn’t let my kids decide what sports teams to cheer for, what political parties to support, whether to be dog or cat people, and those things are trivial compared to baptism. No, we baptized them to start them out right. Later they’ll decide for themselves, after we’ve stacked the deck. But really, we parents didn’t choose baptism for them. God did. That’s why we baptize infants. To show we’re made Christian. God chooses us first. Later we hopefully will choose God back. That’s the regular process of conversion. Sometimes we come to faith by drunk gospel. More usually we come via the sacraments. However God does it, we all rejoice.
We’re going to remember our baptism together in a moment. We’ll have a confirmation, receive a new member, baptize another, and rejoice. Then I’ll invite you forward to remember your own baptism. This is not another baptism, remember we don’t do that, once you’re baptized, you’re good forever. But this is a way to physically remember that: Christ has claimed me as his own and nothing that happens can ever change that. Amen