Baptism of our Lord | January 11th 2026 | The Rev. McKenzi Roberson

Earlier this week, we began our celebration of Epiphany. In my sermon on Tuesday night, I was explaining how the feast of the Epiphany traditionally encompasses two moments in Jesus’ life: the appearance of the wise men from the East at Jesus’ home and Jesus’ baptism. Anglican tradition, and the Gospels appointed for worship, place the emphasis of the actual feast day, January 6th, on the appearance of the wise men, and the first Sunday after the Epiphany is when we are meant to center Jesus’ baptism and perhaps highlight the Trinity because this is one of the clearest examples of the Trinity in the Gospels.

 But one of the core themes I highlighted Tuesday evening has become even more important to remember as the week continued to unfold: You do not have to be from the right group to know and be known by God. You do not have to be an insider to belong to God. You do not have to be an insider to be worthy of life. The wise men were outsiders who would have been looked upon with suspicion by the Jewish community at best, and at worst dismissed and excluded as idol worshipers.

And yet Matthew has them being the first people to recognize the presence of God born as a human. Not only did they recognize the reality, but they made a great pilgrimage to worship God. These outsiders are given a place of honor in Matthew’s gospel. This is a sign, a foreshadowing, of how human understanding of God’s grace and God’s promises is going to grow through the life and ministry of Jesus: God’s salvation is not just for the insiders, not just for the people of Israel. God’s love and mercy is for all. We do not get to set boundaries around who is worthy of love and life and who is not.

Choosing to spend some time revisiting this theme is not entirely outside of the scope of the assigned readings for this morning. In Acts we are met with Peter just after he had a very important dream. In this dream, Peter was told by God to eat foods that were ritually unclean. Now, Peter, much like Jesus, was a good Jewish boy. He had kept Kosher and only eaten what was allowed by his religion, and here God is telling him in a dream to break those religious laws.

As the dream was ending, the Holy Spirit made clear to Peter that he was to go to the house of Cornelius, a man and household who were also ritually unclean. It was a nearly unthinkable transgression of the insider/outsider boundary. And yet, God was clearly there.

We see in our reading from Acts this morning Peter having his own little epiphany. “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” This moment is when Peter finally embraces the fact that the reality of Jesus, the Messiah, who was born human and killed by the state and resurrected to new life for the salvation of all was not just good news for the people of Israel but good news for the people of the whole world.

So Peter preached to the people in front of him. He shared the good news he had experienced of God’s saving actions, and the Holy Spirit moved. I can’t describe it any better than the text itself, “The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the gentiles…” These outsiders, these people whom they had always considered themselves better than, were filled with the same Holy Spirit as they were. How could this be?

Despite whatever they were feeling – almost certainly shock and disorientation, maybe even disgust – Peter knew there was only one next step: find some water and baptize these people. God had claimed them, so it was time that Peter and his fellow Jesus followers claimed them as well by inviting them into the ritual of baptism. Gentiles have been getting baptized ever since.

Baptism is more than a simple initiation rite, however. We are changed in our baptism. God’s grace was already at work in our lives before we were washed in water and sealed with oil, and God’s grace continues to be at work in our lives following that moment. The laying on of hands in baptism, however, forever shifts something essential in us. The Book of Common Prayer talks about baptism as “full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ's Body the Church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble.”

I trust that God still gives us agency, so we are not enslaved to do God’s will forever even if we choose to reject God, especially if we did not choose baptism for ourselves, but that connection, that change, cannot be undone. To borrow a quote a friend of mine loves, “Things change, and they don’t change back.”

One of the things that changes, but only with our consent and effort coming alongside God’s grace, is our value system. Through our baptism we become members of the Kingdom of God, and that kingdom abides by a certain moral code driven by justice and mercy and love.

We get some examples of what these values are through Jesus’ teachings and how he lived. We get the broad strokes and we get the details of what it looked like to live in the Kingdom of God in the first century, but sometimes we need something that speaks to this era.

This is where the baptismal covenant can be helpful. When somebody is baptized in the usual way of the Anglican Communion, it involves making a covenant. The covenant opens by claiming the faith that has been handed down through the generations, and then there is a series of questions about how we will act.

These questions still leave plenty of wiggle room when it comes to interpreting how we ought to live, but they can help to serve as a guide for how we make our choices. Are we coming to church and allowing ourselves to be formed by interacting with the words of Scripture, the sacraments, and the community of other Christians? Are we loving our neighbors? Are we resisting evil? Are we seeking justice? Are we respecting the dignity of all people?

Do you all know why we have that particular bit included in our baptismal covenant? In whole, the question asks, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” In 1965, Reverend Joe Green became the first Black man to graduate from my seminary, The School of Theology at the University of the South – a university founded in the mid-1800s specifically to educate the wealthy sons of enslavers. You can imagine the time he had.

Later, Father Green ended up on the prayer book revision team for what became our 1979 edition of the BCP, working on baptism, and he wrote this question. Other (presumably white, presumably male) members of the committee pushed back, and tried to argue that we don’t need this bidding, it’s covered in the earlier vow to love our neighbors as ourself.

But Father Green was insistent that we as Christians, and especially we as Episcopalians, need to have this specific language undergirding and guiding the ways we are striving to live into the values of the Kingdom of God. We needed that explicit reminder then, and we need that explicit reminder now.

It can be a little daunting to look at all these promises and start to think how am I going to fulfill all of these? It can seem like more than we can do. Thankfully we are not the only ones to make a promise in our baptism. And I am not even talking about the part of the liturgy where the presider turns to the gathered community, the representatives of the whole Church, and asks if they will support this person in their life in Christ, although that part is one I always find moving.

What I want us all to remember is that when we made our baptismal vows for the first time, we were not the only ones making a vow. When we are baptized we are marked as Christ’s own forever. We become members of the Body of Christ, and children of God and co-heirs with Christ. We belong to a God whose love is unfailing, who did not give up hope of receiving the love of God’s chosen people, despite generations of them turning their back on God. God chooses us even more than we choose God.

God calls us to a high standard of living. God calls us to break down the boundaries of us and them, insiders and outsiders, and to see all people as beloved children of God. It was a radical way to live in the time of Jesus and Peter, it was a radical way to live in the time of Joe Green, and it remains a radical way to live in our time. But we do not live this way alone. We have each other for support, and we have the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit within us offering comfort and guidance.

And thus assured, we go forth into the world, resolutely proclaiming, “I will with God’s help.”