Christmas is not over yet. There are still a few hours.  But even when it ends for 2015, the feast will not yet be complete.  It’s kind of like when the Cardinals won the WS in 2011.  Monsignor Ted had a good time making sure to refer to our team as the reigning champions throughout the next year.  The celebration doesn’t end with the parade.  Jesus comes to us at Christmas and the whole world begins to recognize this new king through the wise men at Epiphany, but why do we bother fastforwarding 30 years to His baptism?  C’mon, He’s not as cute anymore….what’s going on?

When it comes to the Baptism of the Lord, it is easy enough to say, “Well, Jesus did this – but He really didn’t have to – because He wasn’t guilty of any sins.”  That is true.  But He also didn’t need to die on the Cross — He had still not done anything wrong – and for that matter, He did not need to come down to earth at all.   He did these actions in His great love for us.  His baptism is no different.  He didn’t need to love us, but on the other hand – we need His love and because of our being lost we need Him to do these things – to be born, to be baptized and to die and rise.  In other words, the Christmas season begins with Jesus being born in a stable and ends with Him being baptized so that through our own baptisms, He could be born into our hearts.

God made us to be a people.  He values the idea of the family and the tribe in a way that we come close to in our own families.  He lives it from within as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  In Adam and Eve all of us have been distanced from God.  Why?  Well, because they had a relationship of love with God that they were never able to pass on to us because they sinned and lost it.  Ever since then humanity has not only forgotten God’s love for us, but has fallen short of its love of God in return.  It has been divided up by wars and terrorism and all of the other “isms” that turn us against each other.

Think back on John the Baptist.  What he does in preparing a way for the Lord is he challenges people to consider their sin.  People reflected on their own misguided lives and he baptized them – symbolically washing their sin into the River Jordan. Don’t be fooled – they are not forgiven, but the Jordan becomes a place full of the sins of this broken people — this sinful and yet chosen people that God had prepared in a special way to represent all of humanity.  The Jordan River becomes a place that is very spiritually unclean.

Jesus is pure and yet in going into the river to be baptized He is able to get into the depths of our sin and take it all upon His shoulders.  He is actually greater than our sin, so much so that not only does He have our sins on Himself while remaining sinless, but He makes water everywhere capable of being made holy.  He later commands us to be baptized and water throughout the earth has been used to wash away our sins in the name of God.  But, it is this baptism that enables us to understand how He is bringing our sins to the Cross.  Our baptism joins our own fallen nature to the water and therefore to the Cross and because of His holiness the water truly unites us to Jesus Himself and all of His Body, the Church.

He doesn’t need to be baptized, but we need it.  Thankfully, He has made it accessible to us.  Water can be found to some extent over all the earth.  He has made this element capable of uniting an untold number of people to Himself.  Every time we come into the Church and make the sign of the Cross over our head and chest and shoulders we recall this unity with Christ through the Cross we joined in baptism.

The other more significant reclamation of this unity with the cross and the resurrection happens through confession.  It is in our admitting of our need for Jesus that our hearts open up to His divine life.  The unity then that is established through these sacraments is one that extends not only through time, but over every land.

Today in a world that can become so divided.  Often it seems that we wait on pins and needles for the next act of terror to carve up and pit us against one another and where these empty souls seek to inspire fear, and with just one action can seem to threaten all.  Christ’s baptism is stronger.  Sin is division.  In this one act of Baptism – in Christ’s taking on our sins, we have no division.  There is nothing that separates us in Him.  We no longer need fear the worst of the stories on the news.  For united to the Cross we have already died and now live His life.

Pray for unity in your heart.  From that unity pray for unity in your family and in this parish.  Pray for unity in this diocese and in our global Church and we will change our city, state, and nation.   When Jesus comes out of the water, He is met with the Holy Spirit and the words of the Father.  He has not only shared the Spirit with us.  But in Him we all live as beloved sons and daughters for whom the heavens have been torn open that we might one day enter them and complete His Feast.