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Weekly Bible Notes

Epiphany 1

Year C, White

Introduction

Our Service today has the readings for the Covenant and Renewal of Baptism Vows. This is the time of year when we re-affirm our Christian commitment. It is also a time when Jesus demonstrates his commitment to the ministry to which he was called. We are told that it was while Jesus was praying that the wonderful events occurred. The miraculous Baptism was not something out of the blue, but rather something to confirm what Jesus had known all along. We know this form the events last week where Jesus went missing at the age of 12. He knew that he was in the right place when he was found in the temple. Jesus has spent two decades growing in his understanding of theservice which he knew he must offer, and the sacrifice which he knew he must make. Here is the baptism experience to affirm him in his role and prepare him for the journey ahead. As we affirm our baptism vows, we too should expect the energy of God to be present in our lives. Perhaps we too will hear that quiet voice inside which tells us that God is with us and will empower us to walk the path which he has set before us.

Opening Verse of Scripture

When the Lord had been baptized, the heavens opened, and the Spirit came down like a dove to rest on him. Then the voice of the Father thundered: This is my beloved Son, with him I am well pleased. (Mt 3:16-17)


Collect Prayer for the Day—Before we read we pray

Eternal Father, at the baptism of Jesus you revealed him to be your Son, and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Keep all who are born of water and the Spirit faithful to their calling as your people; through Jesus Christ our Lord Amen. (Methodist Worship)

First Bible Reading  Deuteronomy 29:10-15


All of you are standing today in the presence of the LORD your God--your leaders and chief men, your elders and officials, and all the other men of Israel, together with your children and your wives, and the aliens living in your camps who chop your wood and carry your water. You are standing here in order to enter into a covenant with the LORD your God, a covenant the LORD is making with you this day and sealing with an oath, to confirm you this day as his people, that he may be your God as he promised you and as he swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I am making this covenant, with its oath, not only with you who are standing here with us today in the presence of the LORD our God but also with those who are not here today.  (This is the word of the Lord -- Thanks be to God)
 

Second Reading 

Jeremiah 31:31-33

"The time is coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, " declares the LORD. "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. (This is the word of the Lord -Thanks be to God)

Romans 12: 1-2

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Gospel Reading   Luke 3:15-22
 
The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Christ. John answered them all, "I baptize you with water. But one more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." And with many other words John exhorted the people and preached the good news to them. But when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of Herodias, his brother's wife, and all the other evil things he had done, Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison. When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened 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." (This is the word of the Lord -- Thanks be to God)

Post Communion Prayer

Lord God, the bright splendour whom the nations seek: may we who with the wise men have been drawn by your light discern the glory of your presence in your Son, the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Commentary

Today our worship is a service of covenant and renewal of Baptism vows, so what a day to remember the Baptism of Jesus. When Jesus was baptised he posed an interesting question for Christians. The baptism of John was about repentance and the forgiveness of sin, why then would Jesus be baptised?

Various reasons have been given for Jesus' submitting to the ritual washing. Some think Jesus was manifesting a strong consciousness of sin and its effects on humans. Others, that Jesus was showing God's approval of John's ministry to the people. Or, Jesus may have undergone the ritual as a sign of unity with those outside the Law; his future death would free people from sin. Later, Jesus will refer to his passion and death as a "baptism" he will undergo.) There are those who believe Jesus was a disciple of John and in accepting baptism Jesus was taking the first step towards establishing his own ministry. He may have been taking the first steps away from John and on his own.

But, think about Jesus' being in the same water the crowd had just left. He gets wet with water that touched them and what they left there with John's baptism. Think of what they brought down into the Jordan, what was clinging to them. Not just the sins; but the pain of their lives; the struggles against the big evils that surrounded them--- terrorism, crushing taxation by a foreign power and daily fears of unpredictable violence. What burdened their hearts when they went into the water? Did they wonder what God was doing to help them out of the mess of their lives--- their dyings, the crippled children, the feeble elderly, the deaths from painful sickness? What about their feelings of inadequacy for not being able to provide enough food for their families or to protect them from the vagaries of daily life? Did they feel they hadn't done enough for God or taken God seriously enough? We renew our vows and covenant with God today, what do we bring with us? Wouldn't we want Jesus to join us in the places we feel most frail, pained, inadequate and sinful? We bring a lot to our service today. Jesus does not remain aloof from us, judging us from on high. He comes right to where we are gathered with all our burdens and takes them up into himself, as we wait upon the Holy Spirit in prayer.

The descent of the Spirit upon Jesus is not just about Jesus, just as our baptism is not just about our personal relationship with God. We are baptized into a community. We share together a creed, a history, and a struggle to make that faith real in the world. The Spirit calls us into community and is present in the community.

God does work in spectacular ways; but if we look for spectacle we most often will be frustrated. In this episode Jesus makes an anonymous entrance that the crowd missed, even though they had been "filled with expectation." Even the voice from heaven is not a public broadcast, but a voice directed to Jesus. It will take the Spirit's gift of fire to burn away the veil over our eyes and our false expectations to purify us so that we notice Jesus' daily entrance ---there among the ordinary, especially the downcast, people.

Meditation

Meditation By The Reverend Neil Bramble Chapman
The Covenant and Renewal of Baptism Vows.

In many ways it resembles making New Year resolutions, but as the resolutions are to follow God whatever he has for us to do or wherever he wants us to be, many members of the Church find it difficult to say and mean the words of this service. Nevertheless the traditional words of the covenant prayer said by the whole congregation during the service (reproduced below) are much loved by Methodists. "Put me to doing, put me to suffering" are not meant to ask God to make us suffer, but to ask that he will help us patiently to accept his will for us.

"I am no longer my own, but yours.
Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you or laid aside for you,
exalted for you or brought low for you;
let me be full, let me be empty,
let me have all things, let me have nothing;
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you are mine and I am yours.
So be it.
And the covenant now made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven."

The prayer is one of the most treasured prayers of Christian commitment for the 325,000 members of the Methodist Church in Britain. The Secretary of the Methodist Faith & Order Committee, Dr Clive Marsh, said: "The Covenant Service is often singled out by Christians of other traditions as a valuable and distinctly Methodist practice. Methodists find the Covenant prayer especially significant because of the commitment at its heart. The invitation to make such a covenant in commitment-phobic times offers a major challenge, especially when we are prone to live the illusion that we are wholly in control of our own lives."

In this service today we seek God's strength and encouragement to enable us to fulfil His calling. Our lives as disciples of Christ are not directed or determined so much by what we want or desire, but by what God calls us to do for Him. Many Christians of great renown have discovered this to be a difficult yet rewarding path to tread. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, experienced a great deal of struggling with her faith and soul searching over what she believed God was calling her to do with her life. Yet today she is regarded as a true Saint; an example to be emulated. In this calling by God, there must also be a response from us. If we are to be a truly obedient and faithful disciple, we must respond openly and in faith to God's voice when he calls us to follow and fulfill a particular vocation. It may not be easy, it probably will mean sacrifice of some kind, but the ultimate sense of satisfaction of knowing that in our obedient response we are playing our part in God's Mission, is beyond compare. Let us seek to say the words of the Covenant in Faith, trusting in the strength and Mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Hymns

1. Praise to the Lord, 16;

2. I am a new creation

3. And now O Father 593

4. Be thou my vision 378

Prayers for Sunday and the week ahead

Accept, O Father,
the sacrifice of all our thanksgivings:
of praise, for your great mercies already received;
of prayers, that they may continue and increase;
of penitence, for the sins we have committed;
and the love of our hearts,
being the only gift that you seek or desire;
and this we ask through the merits of your Son our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen
John Donne, 1572-1631

O God, we pray for all those in our world who are suffering from injustice:
For those who are discriminated against because of their race, colour or religion;
For those imprisoned for working for the relief of oppression;
For those who are hounded for speaking the inconvenient truth;
For those tempted to violence as a cry against overwhelming hardship;
For those deprived of reasonable health and education;
For those suffering from hunger and famine;
For those too weak to help themselves
and who have no one else to help them;
For the unemployed who cry out for work but do not find it.
We pray for anyone of our acquaintance who is personally affected by injustice.
Forgive us, Lord, if we unwittingly share in the conditions or in a system that perpetuates injustice.
Show us how we can serve your children and make your love practical by washing their feet.
Mother Theresa of Calcutta
      

Additional Resources

Meditation

About to embark on a dangerous journey, St. Patrick refused the heavy armour offered him by friends and nobility. Instead, he presented his own protection, a song that has come to be known as "St. Patrick's Breastplate. "For all who have found the Messiah, it is a symbol of our best protection:

Christ be beside me; Christ be before me; Christ be behind me; King of my heart. Christ be within me; Christ be below me; Christ be above me; Never to part. Christ on my right hand; Christ on my left hand; Christ all around me, Shield in the strife. Christ in my sleeping; Christ in my sitting; Christ in my rising, Light of my life. Amen

Commentary

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

John the Baptist was a Jewish prophet who preached and practised a baptism of repentance in anticipation of Jesus’ ministry. The Gospels note that ‘all’ came to hear him, such was the appeal of his message and act of baptism.

Luke’s gospel associates John the Baptist—who was miraculously born to Zechariah, an elderly priest, and Elizabeth, his wife—closely with Jesus as his cousin. It is thought that prior to his ministry John may have had connections with the community at Qumran in the Judean Desert. In common with community members John had priestly connections, believed in imminent divine judgement, opposed Jerusalem and the Temple, and used water in a special ritual way.

John’s work anticipated and overlapped with that of Jesus. His public ministry began c28AD and was a passionate call to baptism, to people to repent before the wrath to come overwhelmed them. Once he had received his prophetic calling from God in the desert area along the Jordan Valley, John dressed in the clothes of a prophet, camel hair, with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey.

The location of the ministry of John is significant. The wilderness was a place of new beginnings away from Jerusalem and the Temple. John’s teaching forgiveness through baptism rather than making sacrifices only increased the distance between John and organised religion. John saw himself as a precursor to Jesus, and his baptism as an anticipation of the baptism of Christ with the Holy Spirit.

John called for repentance based on the broad principles of the Jewish Law, rather than narrow concerns. He was unimpressed by racial or national identity.

Among those drawn to John was Jesus, whom John baptised in the River Jordan. Only in Luke’s Gospel do they work together for a while as members of the same renewal movement in which Jesus meets his first followers. John’s initial expectations of Jesus were disappointed. John wanted to see great judgement rather than teachings about salvation and forgiveness. After his imprisonment by Herod, John even went so far as to send disciples to Jesus to ask him directly whether he was the Messiah.

Jesus had no doubt as to the importance of John, his ministry marked a transition between the old age and the new. For Jesus, John the Baptist was the greatest prophet—perhaps even Elijah whose return would herald the Lord’s coming.

John later taught in the region of Galilee where he was arrested by Herod Antipas and the executed for publicly criticizing Herod’s marriage to his sister-in-law. John prepared the way for Jesus by paying the ultimate price for speaking against the authorities. Paul was later to meet disciples of John the Baptist in Ephesus.

Today's final verses use the moment of Jesus' own baptism to depict his unique, unmistakable identity. Note that the miraculous moment of identification does not occur when Jesus comes out of the water. It occurs after the fact, when Jesus is "praying." In Luke's gospel, the most revealing and empowering moments in Jesus' ministry occur during times of prayer (Luke 6:12; 9:18, 28; 22:41-42). During this moment of prayer, Jesus receives the Holy Spirit, the gift that marks the beginning of his messianic, Spirit-filled public ministry.

The uniqueness of this moment is further underlined by the image this Spirit takes; it is not tongues of fire that descend upon the newly baptized Jesus, but a bodily form "like a dove." This is typical of Luke wanting to show the reality of the spiritual experience. Charles Royden

Prayers for Sunday

Father in heaven, at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan, you proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit. Grant that all who are baptized into his name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Saviour, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, One God, in glory everlasting. Amen. --After The Book of Common Prayer

A Prayer of the Ancient Church: Come, O Holy Spirit, come! Come like Holy Fire and burn with us. Come like Holy Wind and cleanse us. Come like Holy Light and lead us. Come as Holy Truth and teach us. Come as Holy Love and enfold us. Come as Holy Power and enable us. Come as Abundant Life and Fill us, Convert us, Consecrate us, Until we are wholly thine. Come, Holy Spirit, Come!

May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, grant you a spirit of wisdom and insight to know him clearly. May God enlighten your innermost vision that you may know the great hope to which he has called you, the wealth of his glorious heritage to be distributed among the members of the church, and the immeasurable scope of his power in us who believe. Ephesians 1:17-19a

Hymns for Sunday

All hail the power 13, Be still 50, All earth was dark 8, Breathe on me breath of God 67, Spirit of God unseen as the wind, (On notices, 98 in Glory to God)

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