If you wanted to tell the story of your life, where would you begin? How would you give an account of who you are? What would be the first words out of your mouth?

If I were telling you my story, perhaps I might begin by saying that I was born in the early 1980s in Falls Church, VA, and raised further south in Charlottesville—and from these facts, you might make certain inferences about me, based on your personal assessment of millennials and southerners.

Rather than starting from the beginning, another way to tell the story would be to start from the present moment and tell you about my immediate nuclear family unit, consisting of a wife, three daughters, a son, and three chickens currently residing in my backyard. That information might offer further insight: that I’m a family man with my “hands full,” in a very active stage of family life.

Or I could even go another route, and tell my story by starting with my vocation as a parish priest—and while doing so might have a friendly reception here, oftentimes, the response is a distinct and awkward silence. One wonders about the psychological state of someone who actually wants to be a parish priest.

There are plenty of other ways I could tell my story, like providing a list of things I like to do in my spare time—the books I enjoy, musical preferences, whether I like ‘long walks on the beach’. Such tidbits, interesting though they may be, won’t really show you the arc of a life story; they will not suffice to disclose an identity to you.

What’s the best way in to telling the story of a life? Where does one begin? How would you begin yours?

In the Bible, Jesus does not tell his own life story; instead, we have four unique stories that other people tell us about Jesus. These four stories—Gospels—are like painted portraits, each with its own distinct character and emphasis, each with its own way of telling us the life story of Jesus. Matthew, the Gospel that the Sunday lectionary will focus on throughout this next year, tells the story from the very beginning, starting with a genealogy. Matthew then provides a fairly short account of Jesus’ birth; and—as we heard last week, the story of the three wise men, and of the Holy Family’s escape to Egypt; but Matthew says nothing about Jesus’ childhood. By the time Jesus really enters center stage in Matthew’s story, he is full-grown, and traveling all the way from Nazareth, his northern hometown to the River Jordan further south, where his wild cousin John has been baptizing. And it is when he meets John that Jesus speaks his first words—his opening lines: “Let it be so.”

Let it be so. A curious way to begin one’s story, and yet they run right to the heart of who Jesus is, and what Jesus’ life was about. John was baptizing and proclaiming that the kingdom of God was near; he told the crowds of someone who was going to come after him, who was more powerful than he—because John was baptizing with water, but the Greater One would baptize with the Holy Spirit, and with fire. That Greater One was Jesus, and John knows it. But then, to John’s utter surprise and confusion, Jesus comes asks to be baptized by him. The Greater humbles himself before the Lesser. John is clearly uncomfortable about this; it’s not the way that things are supposed to work. “I need to be baptized by you,” John says to Jesus, “and do you come to me?” To which Jesus says, “Let it be so.”

By humbling himself, and accepting the baptism of John, Jesus shows us just how vast the difference is between the kingdom of God, and the kingdoms of this world. According to the logic of the world, rulers do not humble themselves before subjects, the powerful do not submit to the powerless—in this world, one who is great does not serve one who is less. But in the kingdom of God, as Jesus says later on in Matthew’s Gospel, “The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” And here we see Jesus, in this first extraordinary act in his life story, humbling himself. “Let it be so,” he says.

John complies, and Jesus is baptized. And at this moment in the Gospel, the perspective shifts: before we had Matthew’s view of the action, but now, we are seeing through Jesus’ eyes. When Jesus emerges from the water, “suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” In this moment, we see what Jesus sees, and we hear what Jesus hears. It’s a moment of Epiphany, of Revelation: Jesus is not merely a good man, an ordinary prophet from Nazareth—he is the Son of God, the Beloved, the One in whom the Spirit of God dwells.

In Jesus Christ, God becomes a human being. In his life story, every single aspect shows us how God will hold nothing back in drawing near to us, to the very depths of human life and experience—from his lowly birth in a manger in Bethlehem all the way to his tortured death on a cross on Calvary. No matter where we are in our lives—in our joy and gladness, in our suffering and pain—Jesus is with us through it all. His submission to John’s baptism shows us this. In his baptism Jesus performs an act of repentance on our behalf, even when we ourselves were unable to repent. Why would he do that? It doesn’t make any sense. Yet the first words out of his mouth are: “Let it be so.”

One of my favorite commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew is by the American theologian, Stanley Hauerwas. In his commentary, Hauerwas says this:

Jesus is unleashed into the world. His mission will not be easy, for the kingdom inaugurated by his life and death is not one that can be recognized on the world’s terms. He is the beloved Son who must undergo the terror produced by our presumption that we are our own creators. He submits to John’s baptism just as he will submit to the crucifixion so that we might know how God would rule the world. His journey begins. Matthew would have us follow.

Jesus submits to Baptism—identifying with us, becoming one with us. But the same is also true in the other direction: as Christians, it is through Baptism that we identify and become one with Christ. It is in Baptism, the moment we were sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own for ever, that the heart of our identity lies. It is the key to our life’s story, whether or not we even remember it, and I suspect that most of us do not. I don’t remember my baptism on August the 8th, 1982; I was only an infant, after all. But here’s the thing: whether I remember it or not is irrelevant. What matters is that Christ remembers me. And it is because of God’s proclamation—that Jesus is “the Son, the Beloved”—that we can know that Christ does remember us, and has marked us as his own—for ever.

There are so many ways that you could tell your life story, and countless ways in which you could begin. I can’t tell you how you ought to tell yours. But if you ever lose faith in those familiar ways you use to make sense of your life—in your birthplace or your generation, in your family bonds or in friendships, in your interests and hobbies—consider starting with something like this: “On a certain day of a certain month of a certain year, I was sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”

Strange as it may seem, that moment forms the center of our identity, and the heart of our life story. It’s where Life in Christ begins.

Let it be so. Amen.

January 12, 2020: Baptism of Our Lord