This morning, we find ourselves standing once again on the banks of the Jordan River, listening to a familiar story from the opening chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus comes from Galilee to John, wades into the water, and asks to be baptized. John hesitates. “I need to be baptized by you,” he says, “and do you come to me?” Jesus responds with a line that is easy to glide past but hard to exhaust: “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” And when Jesus emerges from the water, the heavens open, the Spirit descends like a dove, and a voice speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
It is a scene many of us have heard dozens of times. And yet, if we slow down, it raises an immediate and unsettling question. Why is Jesus there at all? John’s baptism is a baptism of repentance. It is for people who are turning away from old lives, old loyalties, old ways of being in the world. It is for people confessing sin. And by Matthew’s own witness, Jesus is not one of those people. So why does he step into that line?
To get at an answer, I want to start somewhere that might sound a little surprising: with the claim that all human beings are religious. Whether we call ourselves Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Mormon, Sikh, agnostic, atheist, secular, humanist, or something else entirely, we are all religious. Not necessarily in the sense of believing in God or participating in a particular system of worship, but in a deeper and more basic sense.
One dictionary definition of religion names it as “a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.” By that definition, religion is unavoidable. Every human life orbits around something. Every one of us, by the choices we make day after day, reveals what we think really matters. We stake our time, our energy, our money, our attention, and our hopes on something. We organize our lives around it.
For some, that “something” is money or financial security. For others, it is career success, reputation, or achievement. For others, it is family, nation, ideology, pleasure, control, beauty, reason, or safety. None of those things are trivial. Many of them are good. But when any one of them becomes the thing to which we ascribe supreme importance, it functions religiously. It becomes the lens through which everything else is seen and judged.
In that sense, we do not choose whether or not we are religious. We choose what our religion will be.
This, I believe, helps us understand why Jesus submits to John’s baptism. Jesus does not enter the Jordan because he needs forgiveness or repentance in the way the rest of us do. He enters the water because he is fully human. And part of what it means to be fully human is to choose what will be ultimate. To choose which story you will live inside. To choose which allegiance will shape all the others.
Standing there in the muddy water, Jesus is not confessing sin. He is declaring loyalty. He is making visible, embodied, public the orientation of his life. He is choosing, as every human being must, what will matter most.
And he does so in a way that is profoundly revealing. He does not separate himself from the crowds. He does not stand above them. He stands with them. He waits his turn. He identifies himself with people who are broken, confused, compromised, and searching. In doing so, he shows us something essential about God. God does not save from a distance. God enters fully into the human condition, including its ambiguity and vulnerability.
Matthew tells us that when Jesus comes up from the water, the heavens are opened. The Spirit descends. And a voice speaks identity before Jesus has preached a sermon, healed a body, or called a disciple. “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Before Jesus does anything, he is named. Before he acts, he is claimed.
That order matters. In the world’s scripts, identity is earned. You are what you achieve. You are what you accumulate. You are what you prove. In God’s story, identity is given. “You are my beloved.” Everything else flows from that.
But baptism is not magic. It does not eliminate choice. In fact, it intensifies it. Immediately after this scene, Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he is tempted to abandon the choice he has just made. Hunger, power, spectacle, control. All the familiar rival religions present themselves. “If you are the Son of God…” Each temptation is an invitation to adopt a different script, a different way of being religious.
Jesus’ baptism is not a one-time decision that settles everything. It is the beginning of a lifelong faithfulness. Every healing, every teaching, every confrontation, every act of mercy, every step toward the cross is a working out of that moment in the Jordan. He lives from the identity he has received.
And that brings us, inevitably, to our own baptisms. In the Episcopal Church, we often speak of baptism as a sacrament of incorporation. We are grafted into Christ, joined to his body, marked as his own forever. That language is beautiful and true. But it can also become abstract if we are not careful. Baptism is not merely something that happened to us, whether as infants or adults. It is something we live from.
Baptism names our religion. It declares, again and again, what we will treat as ultimate. It says that our primary loyalty is not to the market, the nation, the tribe, the ideology, or even the self. It is to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. And that loyalty reshapes everything else.
This is where baptism quietly but firmly challenges many of the scripts we absorb without noticing. The script that says the goal of life is comfort and safety. The script that says happiness comes from consumption. The script that says worth is measured by productivity or success. The script that says we are on our own and must secure ourselves at all costs.
To be baptized is to step into a different story. A story in which love, not fear, has the final word. A story in which power is shown through vulnerability. A story in which the belovedness of each person is not negotiable. A story in which God binds God’s self to us and refuses to let go.
And that binding is not fragile. One of the most important truths about baptism is this: we can reject our baptism, but our baptism cannot reject us. We can forget it, ignore it, even deny it. God does not revoke it. The voice that says “You are my beloved” does not get withdrawn when we fail. We may lose faith in God. God does not lose faith in us.
That does not mean baptism is easy. In fact, it is precisely because baptism is about identity that it is costly. If baptism were merely a naming ceremony or spiritual insurance policy, it would not matter much. But baptism claims our whole lives. It asks us, daily, to decide again what will be ultimate.
That decision is made in ordinary places. In how we speak to one another. In how we use our resources. In how we treat those who have less power than we do. In how we tell the truth. In how we forgive. In how we resist despair. In how we love our neighbors, especially when it is inconvenient or costly.
None of us does this perfectly. Not one. The baptismal life includes repentance not as a one-time event but as a rhythm. We turn, we wander, we return. And each time, God meets us not with rejection but with mercy. The community meets us not with exclusion but with welcome. That, too, is part of the story we have chosen to live inside.
When Jesus is baptized, the Spirit descends and remains. The same Spirit is given to us. Not to make us impressive, but to make us faithful. Not to lift us above others, but to bind us more deeply to them. Not to remove us from the world, but to send us into it as people who know who they are and whose they are.
So today, as we remember the baptism of Jesus, we are not just recalling an event in his life. We are being invited to remember our own. To remember what we have already been given. To remember the identity that precedes our striving. To remember the voice that still speaks over us: “You are my beloved.”
In a world that constantly urges us to earn our worth, secure our future, and prove our value, baptism offers a different religion. A religion of grace. A religion of trust. A religion that frees us to love because we no longer have to justify our existence.
This is not a small thing. It is a purpose worth waking up for. A story worth living inside. A faith worth returning to, again and again, whenever we forget.
And so, like Jesus, we step into the water. Not once, but daily. Choosing again what will be ultimate. Choosing again which voice we will trust. Choosing again to live as the beloved of God.
