Sermon | Clarke Mortensen, Seminarian | January 11, 2026

Epiphany 1: 1/11/26

Let me tell you about a hypothetical seminarian—could be anyone, really, definitely not anyone you’d know—who sat down to write a sermon for the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, only to realize she had no earthly idea why Jesus even got baptized in the first place. See, the reasons we get baptized don’t make sense for Jesus. We are baptized to cleanse us of original sin, but Jesus didn’t have any sin that might need cleansed. We’re baptized to be received into the family of God and be marked as Christ’s own forever. But Jesus is already God, so that doesn’t seem necessary. We’re also baptized to be united with Christ in his death and resurrection. But why would Jesus need to be united with himself in his own death and resurrection?

Our hypothetical seminarian has run into the same theological problem that John the Baptist did. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” And maybe this is where we can find an answer. The basis of John’s issue is that Jesus is greater than he is: earlier in this chapter, he says, “I am not worthy to carry his sandals.” We’re all familiar with this social logic: people of a higher position deserve to be treater better than other people. We roll out the red carpet for bishops, for politicians, or for anyone we deem to be a person of consequence. Everyone else is just a regular person, at best. If you have the misfortune to be considered less than a regular person, we have all seen what can happen, and how those who are “greater” can get away with it.

So if Jesus is that much greater than John the Baptist, he ought to be treated like the authority in this situation, right? He’s not just a regular person coming for baptism; he’s the Messiah, the best of the best. He ought to be the one doing the baptizing, as John says. But elsewhere in the Bible, it explicitly says that Jesus never baptized anyone himself; it was always the disciples who did it. With our social logic, it’s easy to imagine how some might start to say, “Oh, you were only baptized by Bartholomew? Well, I was baptized by Jesus himself!” And the grace of baptism itself would become secondary to the status of the person doing the baptizing.

But baptism has always been the greatest equalizer of our faith. We have never needed anyone of status to baptize people. Sure, it’s traditional for a priest to do it, but anyone can baptize anyone at any time. Even going back to the medieval church, women—most often midwives—could baptize someone in an emergency when a priest wasn’t available. You can still find instructions for emergency baptism on page 313 of our Book of Common Prayer, so that you can know exactly what to do in the event that someone is on death’s door right in front of you, has not been baptized already, and wishes to be baptized.

All this is to say that baptism breaks the social logic that John the Baptist is working with—and that we struggle to escape from as well. When Jesus enters the scene, it isn’t about who is greater or more righteous. It’s about being as human as we are. The whole portion of the church year from Christmas through to Easter is about the Incarnation. It’s about Jesus’s human life. We talk about it most around Christmas time because that’s when it starts, but Jesus doesn’t stop being God Incarnate as a human after he’s born. The whole of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is about God deciding to experience the things that humans experience. In our flawed human logic, God is too good for these human things, and yet God still chooses them. So no, Jesus doesn’t have to get baptized for any particular reason, but Jesus chooses baptism because it is a uniquely human experience.

In baptism, Jesus shows us what we can have if we follow his example. First, Jesus’ baptism marks the beginning of his public ministry, just as baptism is the beginning of our Christian lives, when we are ordained into the ministry that all Christians are called to. We call this “the priesthood of all believers,” meaning that ministry isn’t reserved for people who wear collars and vestments. If you’re baptized, then you are a minister, called to follow Jesus and serve God’s people. There are different ways of doing this, which is why we have laypeople, deacons, priests, and bishops, but none of us is more of a minister than anyone else, because we are all baptized into the same calling to follow Jesus—the same calling to seek and serve Christ in all persons. This isn’t just a nice idea we recite in the baptismal covenant; it’s our Christian duty. If someone claims to be a “committed Christian” shortly after murdering a defenseless mother in her car, then whatever they are committed to is not our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The grace of baptism comes with obligations, and we will all have to give an account for how we have ministered and how we have represented Christ to the world. When that time comes, will we be able to say that we have spread that grace to others? Or will we have attached Christ’s name to death?

The second example Jesus shows us happens when the voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” God the Father is publicly acknowledging Jesus as God’s own. In the same way, our baptism is a public acknowledgement that we are God’s own. In our baptismal liturgy, there is a point where the priest makes the sign of the cross over the baptized person’s forehead and says, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Forever. It is crystal clear: there is nothing that can erase that mark.

This point about baptism being permanent has been so important for centuries that the Church has taken great pains to prevent re-baptism. Going back at least as far as the earliest English prayer books of the 16th century, we’ve always had rites for “conditional baptism,” which you can still find on the same page as emergency baptism. It’s just like a regular baptism, except you say, “If you are not already baptized, I baptize you, etc.” This might seem like theological or liturgical quibbling, but this is a serious concern, because re-baptism would be saying that the first one wasn’t good enough or didn’t stick.

But the seal of the Holy Spirit is permanent. If you are marked as Christ’s own forever, then nothing you can do can erase that mark—not sinning, not questioning or losing your faith, nothing. This is the grace Jesus calls us to by leading the way with his own baptism. He didn’t need to be baptized by the high priest, or even a respectable rabbi. He was baptized by his weird cousin who lived in the wilderness and dressed in camel hair. Even if you were baptized by a person you don’t particularly like, or in a church that ended up wounding you, you are still a minister called to serve God, and you are marked as Christ’s own forever.