Baptism and Being Transformed

The Baptism of the Lord 2025

Isaiah 40.1-5,9-11 ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’

Titus 2.11-14; 3.4-7 ‘He saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit’

Luke 3.15-16,21-22 ‘When Jesus had been baptised and was praying, the heavens were opened.’

 

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people.

Titus 2.11

 

+

 

The Advent proclamation of John the Baptist, so familiar to many from Handel’s Messiah is ‘comfort ye, comfort ye, my people’ and it is soon followed by verses also in our first reading (and also that appear in Messiah).

 

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

 

Today, on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, in our gospel reading, the glory of God is revealed: ‘the heavens were opened’ (Luke 3.21b); it’s visible to everyone - ‘the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove’ (Luke 3.22a); and the mouth of the LORD speaks - ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3.22b).

 

The Baptism of the Lord is what is known as a theophany, literally meaning a ‘God-showing’.

 

Last Sunday, this Sunday and next Sunday we celebrate three theophanies, showings of God, when the Magi come to the manger, his baptism and his first sign, the miraculous transformation of water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana.

 

All three events reveal God and demand human transformation.

 

Transformed by the divine encounter, the Magi eschew the well-trodden route and take a new road home; the crowds at the baptism glimpse the heavens opened and hear the voice of God; the guests see transformation in abundance at the wedding feast with Christ the Bridegroom.

 

It’s this call to transformation that is picked up in the letter of St Paul to Titus.

 

Titus, a companion of Paul on many journeys had oversight of the church on the island of Crete as their Bishop.

 

The letter to Titus is perhaps not the best known of his epistles, but it contains important guidance and encouragement to its first hearers.

 

And the letter to Titus has contemporary resonance too.

 

And it is a message of transformation that he is giving: Christians aren’t to wallow in the ways we see all around us, but the ways we see in Christ, with our sights fixed on him.

 

After he comes to baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire!

 

Paul urges Titus to remind the Cretan believers that while they live in a sinful culture and have a sinful past, they can be transformed into a new humanity by the same grace that Jesus demonstrated when he died to redeem them.

 

As a new humanity, they are called to live lives consistent with God's generous love.

 

So are we.

 

That’s what the first part of our second reading was describing.

 

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age. (Titus 2.11,12)

 

It is their baptism, and ours, that makes this transformation possible.

 

Baptism is the guarantee that Jesus Christ, who comes to baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire, calls us to a life that mirrors the kingdom of God and reflects the love of God and not the corruption of human society, by drawing us into his Body, the Church, which is a sign and foretaste of the Kingdom.

 

But do we live like that?

 

Elsewhere in writing to Titus, Paul pulls no punches about the way we can go off the rails, as he knows he and Titus, a former pagan, once did:

 

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. (Titus 3.3)

 

It’s not a pretty account!

 

‘But’, he goes on:

 

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. (Titus 3.4-7)

 

In the Creed that we proclaim Sunday by Sunday, we declare that ‘We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.’

 

What we’re saying is that being baptised, being a Christian, flows from the Baptism of the Lord.

 

It’s not down to us, there’s nothing we do to deserve redemption, it is sheer grace, pure mercy, and when we accept it, it is a new birth – regeneration – that makes us a new creation in Christ:

 

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5.17)

 

There’s transformation for you!

 

Baptism brings us into Christ’s life such that we have been transformed, we are in the process of being transformed now, by his mercy, and we will be transformed when the waiting is over and ‘our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (Titus 2.14) is fulfilled.

 

Thanks be to God, for ‘The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people’.