Jnaurary 11, 2026

The Baptism of the Lord Cycle A

For the record, I am a good sleeper. My family will tell you that I can sleep through just about anything. In the Navy, slept through the general alarm on my ship when they did a drill one day when I was in my bunk. I can sleep with the best of them. And it is a restful sleep for the most part, but there was one time, only one that I or my parents can remember, where I engaged in sleepwalking. For some reason, I got up one night, balled up the bedspread from my twin-sized bed, carried it downstairs, opened the front door, and put it behind one of the chairs that was on the porch, and then returned to bed. When I woke up and tried to make my bed, I saw that my bedspread was missing. For some reason, I had this foggy notion that it was on the porch. And sure enough, it was. This is the only clue that I had been sleepwalking. To my knowledge, I never did this again.

Well, that is to say, I never again engaged in the medical condition known as sleepwalking. I, like all human beings, can be fairly accused of sleepwalking through life at times, putting it on autopilot, going through the motions without questioning why I am doing what I am doing. And this can apply to many areas of our lives, not the least of which is our religious beliefs. Especially for those of us that were baptized as infants, a faith in God was started without our direct consent, and although we should have made a more conscience decision at our confirmation, let's face it: we were still pretty young and probably just doing what our parents expected us to do. So the question before us today as we celebrate the baptism of Jesus is this: what does the fact that we are baptized Christians really mean to us? Truly mean? Not just something we memorized from the Baltimore Catechism or some platitude such as “I've accepted Jesus as my personal savior.” We will say the creed in just a few minutes, but are they just words or do they have meaning in our lives?

This has some additional importance to us right now since the Diocese of Charleston, in its five-year pastor plan Via Fidelis, is ending the year of evangelization and beginning the year of catechesis, which will formally kick off on Ash Wednesday next month. Now our Church loves big words that are often taken from Latin or, as in this case, from Greek, but the term catechesis simply means the process of understanding the faith. We often substitute the term religious education for this, as it is simpler to understand. But one problem with this is that the idea of education is associated in many people's mind as something for younger people, for students, and not for adults. That is why ongoing training within many career fields is called not education but professional development, and it is required and necessary to stay up on the latest changes within any field of interest. So we ask ourselves: what have we done lately to foster our religious development?

The problem of people not seeking a deeper understanding and therefore a better relationship with their God and with the Christian community around them is unfortunately demonstrated especially in the area that we celebrate today: the sacrament of baptism. Since I do the preparation for baptism within the English-speaking community for Saint James, I see people sleepwalking through the process – not all, by any stretch, but some – and it's not just me but it is a constant lament within all parishes in the diocese. Parents are bringing their children for baptism because it is the thing you do after they are born. They want to have sponsors, which we also call as godparents, to be friends or relatives who no longer participate in any church. Often the motive is to appease the child's grandparents, since the parents themselves no longer go to church themselves but feel compelled to check off this box due to badgering from family members. These problems bring out the fact that the people seeking baptism do not know what they are asking for, what the sacrament means. The idea of godparent devolves to an honorary title and not a role model for a life of faith and service to God.

Baptism is fundamentally a sacrament of initiation, that is to say, it marks the beginning of membership in the Church of Jesus Christ. The last words of Christ before his ascent to heaven, called the Great Commission, were to “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” [Matthew 28:19-20a NABRE]. So there we have it in a nutshell: we make disciples, that is to say members of the Church, by baptizing them. Baptism without ongoing discipleship would be meaningless to this commission of Christ. And notice, after telling his apostles to baptize the nations, in the same sentence, he immediately tells them to teach others the things that he taught them – in other words, catechesis. Christ carefully inserted baptism within a larger framework of active discipleship. Carving baptism as a stand-alone rite out of this and making it an empty ceremony that stands by itself outside of the process of being part of a Church is to make it without any true effect in our lives. True, the graces of sin forgiveness and the presence of the Holy Spirit are given, but, if not acted upon, they remain dormant and ineffective. Baptism is not magic or a rite of passage.

So what does that mean for us here. I must be careful because I am preaching to the people here that do come to church, that do have a sense of an ongoing claim on them to participate in the life of the Church. I think there are two things that I should mention. The first is that, if you have family members that are away from the Church, you should not encourage them to be baptized as much as you should encourage them to find a relationship with Christ, which will bring them to the Church and then baptism will follow logically from there. In my experience, baptism does not lead to discipleship in every case, but true discipleship will always result in baptism. Do not put the cart before the horse. The second thing that I will place before us today is to ask everyone here what they have done recently to develop their own faith. The bishop in his pastoral plan is challenging us to learn more about our faith, or in many cases relearn it, or maybe even unlearn things that we misunderstood or misremembered from the beginning. There will be many opportunities that will be offered here at Saint James in the coming year to more fully develop ourselves as disciples and to truly measure up to the ideal that we professed, or was professed for us, at our baptism. So I challenge everyone: will you participate more fully in a life of faith, or will you continue to sleepwalk your way through life?

As we continue with our Mass with the celebration of the Eucharist, let the graces of this sacrament propel us to fulfill the graces of our baptismal sacrament. Through the intercession of Saint John the Baptist, may we always heed the call to become better and wiser disciples throughout our life. Then maybe we can all wake up and figure out where we misplaced our own baptismal bedspreads.