A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. The theme of John the baptizer's preaching was, one more powerful than I is to come after me. I am not bid to stoop and untie his sandal strap. I have baptized you in water. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit.
During that time, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John. Immediately, on coming out of the water, he saw the sky rent in two and the spirit descending on him like a dove. Then a voice came from the heavens. You are my beloved son. On you, my favor rest.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. This matter of baptizing that is the baptism of John is to me mysterious. We know very little of it from the from the the text that is the especially the synoptics and what else have we to go on. But it's very clear beyond beyond the shadow of a doubt that John, we call him John Saint John the Baptist And now, of course, if you wanna be with it, he he has now become John the Baptizer.
And you all can see the difference between the two. It's it's it's really like the Grand Canyon. But anyway, one one thing is perfectly clear that that John, Baptist, the precursor of our lord, was going through some kind of a ceremony called baptism in the Jordan. Of course, baptism means simply to dip or something of that sort. Now the same theme of baptism is taken up by our lord.
The, he has any number of texts about baptism and about the about being reborn And that bapt and that unless you be reborn of water and the holy spirit, our lord says, you cannot enter into the kingdom of god. Now, what I'm saying is very simple. The the the mission of Jesus Christ begins with John and the board of baptism. Baptism plays an important role in the life of Jesus Christ. And yet today, we're downgrading it.
Our blessed lord has insisted time and again that unless you're baptized, you're not in the kingdom. Now, I'm not standing up and saying that the only possible way for this to operate is that there has to be someone coming in here and and bringing a baby in, and you're you're drowning the baby, poor little thing, with water. I'm not saying that's the only way baptism can come or the effects of baptism can come upon anybody. I'm not saying that at all. I'm only saying what Christ said.
Unless you'll be reborn of water and the spirit, you don't get into the kingdom of god. This goes back to that, you know, extra klesia, no less solace. Outside of the church, there is no salvation. See, that this is being terrifically soft pedal these days because that does not lend itself to the ecumenical spirit. And yet it is still the doctrine of the holy Roman Catholic church.
It is the doctrine of Jesus Christ. And now and what I wanna bring home to you as clearly as I can, you say, well, Christ is just speaking kind of metaphorically. Well, the passage I'm quoting from is is the same with Nicodemus. Now Nicodemus was not an ignoramus. Nicodemus was a member of the sanity.
He was an educated man. He was a man of culture, of experience, of understanding, and he's talking with our blessed lord. And Christ says, look, unless you are baptized with water and the holy spirit, you like you will not enter into the kingdom of god. And Nicodemus said, are you asking me that I'm supposed to go back and get in my mother's womb and be born again? He was taking an absolutely literal interpretation of our lord.
And our blessed lord didn't back off. He didn't, of course, he did not encourage Nicodemus to to to consider the absurdity of a man entering his mother's woman being reborn again. But Christ, in this in this passage, our blessed lord reaffirms, reaffirms the need of baptism. Now, this is this is it's there for anyone who wants to read it, and it goes on for about four or five verses. It isn't just one little verse.
And this isn't the only passage. Now, what I'm really saying is this, I'm not of course, I have me in mind baptism. But the point I'd like to make this morning is that we have gotten so far away from a conception of the supernatural life, the life of grace. That's what I'm saying. We do you will you will hear even people who ought to know better.
They talk about baptism as a right of initiation. I say, you are joining the Masons or the the, the or or the the KFC KFC or the Beniover Rift or something. You see, that is a total misunderstanding of the thing. Our blessed lord talks about a rebirth. Not an initiation rite, not like circumcision for example.
And if you see, the the the consequence of this is that we do not think of our lives as being lived on a supernatural level. If this has echoes of my well truest remarks for Sunday, they you can be sure that it's absolutely right. Because you see, everything about Jesus Christ has to do with the super, supra, above the natural, everything. Everything. Now notice, our blessed lord didn't destroy nature.
He didn't condemn nature. He didn't tell us that nature was sinful. He didn't tell us that nature was corrupt. He did not tell us any of those things. That remained for Martin Luther and Company.
But what our blessed lord did do, he brought us a message of being reborn into a new kind of life. And what puts us into that new kind of life is the right of baptism. It's a transformation. The example I used Sunday is as good as any. It's it's and and it's not enough.
It is not enough. And I'll tell you why in a minute. But we all, you know, in our first year biology classes how we studied the development of the frog through all these different stages, you know. From the tiny little things to the tadpole to the next stage until finally you get a nice great big full grown frog. And we said that was an example in biology of complete metamorphosis.
What do you mean by metamorphosis? It's just a fancy Greek word for change. But you see, the changes that that that go through that little old frog's life from being a tiny little thing to the tadpole stage and so on up. It's it's not just like the little baby becoming the adult. It's a transformation completely.
Something like the butterfly. But when you talk about this kind of a transformation in the life of in the in the sense of the supernatural, in the life of grace, in the life of of that comes with baptism. It's it's a different order because the that full blown bullfrog is still in the physical order with a tadpole. It may be a different kind of creature in the physical order, but he's still a physical creature. Whereas, the the human being is transformed by baptism into another order of being.
A totally different order. In which you have a different goal, you have a different, channel, you have different a different ways of attaining it of your goal. It's it's an entirely new world. And all of this begins with the bat with baptism or the equivalent. And it's that order in which a Christian lives.
And unless you've got it, you're not in it. And if you have it, do you realize it? Do you appreciate it? You know, I some of my early youth was spent on my grandmother's farm. And they had fences, not barbed wire fences, but they had wooden fences, rail fences.
And I can remember as a kid, you know, how we would get stranded up there straddling the fence. Now that's just an expression, which unless you have actually been in the position of straddling a fence, you don't know what it means. But it's very uncomfortable. And that's what what that's what that's what we try to do. I mean all of us.
We have one foot in the supernatural. We have one foot in the natural. And we're trying to be comfortable. Throw in the chips folks. You can't do it.
You cannot do it. You're straddling the fence. You're neither one nor the other. And you're not called to the natural. The theologians can argue all they want about this, but they all agree to that.
That the suit that the supernatural has is something different and totally above and beyond the natural. And that all human beings now are called to the supernatural order. Do we realize? Now what there's a specific part of this. We set ourselves supernatural we don't set them.
Christ gave them to us. He said, and unless you make it, you're lost forever. See, these are the things Christ said, and they're very disturbing. Somebody said instead of calling, you know, gospel means good news. Somebody said instead of saying good news, you ought to say disturbing news.
Disturbing news. Because unless the good news of Jesus Christ is a bit disturbing, we're not getting the message. And now one of these messages is that we are called to the supernatural, and we have to use the means. We are not living in the order of the world. We are living in an other worldly order.
Let's face it. If we're Christians, and if you're trying to do that in the world, you're going to have trouble. It's going to be very disturbing. And so as we today read today about our lord's baptism, remember, we have been baptized. A candle was given to us that we call we are called Lucifer's, bearers of the light.
We are told that the boy we must carry this little garment which is put on the baby. We carry it on solid during life. We don't carry it on solid. It gets solid. But we have a savior.
We carry the light. But sometimes it gets dim and sometimes the thing gets blown out. We light it again. The light comes from Jesus Christ, not from me. And so we try, but let us realize what we're what we who we are, sons of and daughters of God.
And that you see, I'm not exaggerating this at all. We are we are and are called to be sons of God, sharers in his divinity. We'll say it in mass in a few minutes. Take it to heart. This is the kind of person you are called upon and to be sons of god.
In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.