Faithful Enough

Good morning, everyone. For those of you I haven’t met yet, I’m James. I’m an authorised lay minister up at Beverley Minster, and I’ve been wanting to come to Tickton for ages, so I’m very grateful to be with you this morning.

About six years ago, just after Covid, I was baptised.

And if you’d asked me beforehand for a neat, tidy explanation of why I wanted to be baptised, I would probably have struggled to give you one - which, if you know me at all, is slightly out of character.

You see, I’m the sort of person who, when I’m buying a dishwasher or even a torch, will download the instruction manual beforehand to make sure it does exactly what I want. If I’m booking a hotel, I’ll go on TripAdvisor and check they’ve got breakfast down to a tee. I like knowing how things are going to work. My partner Joel can painfully testify to that.

And yet my baptism didn’t arrive with a clear five-year plan. It came rather out of the blue - even for my family.

I remember standing in a small church just south of Gloucester, where we were living at the time, with my Muslim mother sitting in the third row, and the rest of my family and friends down in the south-west. I think they were surprised - not just that I was getting baptised at all - but that I couldn’t give them a thorough, well-worked-out explanation for it. And yet, I think they were surprised by how at peace I seemed with it.

I’m still surprised by that.

I hadn’t worked it all out, despite my best efforts. I remember going to Waterstones in Gloucester and buying a GCSE Religious Studies revision guide to try to bolster my arguments - but it didn’t really help, and I didn’t really need it. I just knew it was right. And in that moment, I had enough faith simply to step into the water.

And that’s why I love today’s New Testament reading - because it also begins not with certainty, but with something that doesn’t quite make sense.

Jesus turns up to be baptised at the River Jordan. Not because he needs to be forgiven. Not because he’s correcting a mistake. But because this is where people are being turned - re-oriented - back towards God.

And John sees Jesus and immediately feels that this is odd. This isn’t how baptism is supposed to work. It’s for people stepping into something new. For people who know they don’t have it all worked out. But in the case of Jesus, this doesn’t really fit.

So John says it out loud: “This doesn’t make sense.”

And Jesus doesn’t try to explain it. He doesn’t rationalise it. He doesn’t offer a theory. He simply says, “Let it be so.”

Which is kind of extraordinary. Because sometimes faithfulness isn’t about understanding - it’s about consent.

And John, in that moment, is simply faithful enough to go along with it.

But why does Jesus want it? I think this is the heart of the passage.

Jesus steps into the water in solidarity with us. He chooses to stand where we stand. He doesn’t need repentance - but he steps into the place of repentance. He doesn’t need cleansing - but he steps into the water anyway.

And in doing so, he sets an example we’ve been returning to for over two thousand years. So that nobody can ever say, “God doesn’t understand this part of my life.” He’s in it with us.

Jesus steps into the water. Cold. Muddy. Ordinary. Not unlike what the River Hull might look like today. January. Cold. Wet. Grey. The kind of weather that gets under your skin.

And yet - that’s where heaven opens.

Not in a place of certainty. Not in perfection. But in the mud. The Spirit descends. And a voice speaks.

And notice what the voice does not say. It doesn’t say, “Now prove yourself.” It doesn’t say, “Now begin the real work.” It says,

This is my Son. The Beloved. With whom I am well pleased.

And that’s said before anything even happens. Before miracles. Before preaching. Before success or failure.

Beloved.

And that’s where we can find real relief. Because many of us live as though that voice comes later - after we’ve got our act together. But baptism says the opposite.

Identity comes first. Calling comes second.

Very briefly, in the language of theology, this is the difference between justification and sanctification. We are justified - declared God’s beloved - immediately. Not at the end of the journey, but right at the beginning. Sanctification - the slow work of being changed and shaped - takes a lifetime.

But we often try to reverse the order. We think we must become better first, and loved later. Baptism insists it works the other way round.

And that matters whether you were baptised as a baby or whether you came to the water later in life, like me. Because infant baptism isn’t something we grow out of. It’s something we grow into. It’s God saying, before you can speak, before you can choose: “You are mine.”

I was reminded of that a couple of weeks ago in an unexpected place. One of my resolutions before Christmas was to start going to the gym. I go to one at Kilnwick Percy, just outside Pocklington. At the end of a session, I was following a short meditation on my phone, and it asked me to repeat:

I am enough. I am loved. I am safe.

And then to repeat it again.

I found immediate comfort in those words - and then my brain kicked in, and I felt slightly confused. Because those words were written to be universal. Secular. Accessible to anyone. And yet I realised I knew exactly where they come from. We take for granted what those words mean here. And we know why they’re true. Because in Christ, God has already said them.

I am enough because I belong to God. I am loved because I am called beloved. I am safe because Christ has stepped into the water with me - and I am not alone.

So perhaps the question for us today, here in Tickton, isn’t, “Does this make sense?” But rather, “Where am I being asked to trust?”

Can you think of a time when what you were going through felt cold and muddy, and didn’t make sense at the time - but does now, looking back? Or maybe you’re still in it.

For some of us, staying in the water this week might simply mean beginning Monday knowing that we are enough, loved, and safe - before the emails, the loneliness, the money worries, or the doubts arrive. Especially in this grey, post-Christmas season, when energy is low and everything feels a bit heavier. It might mean carrying concerns and uncertainties without needing to solve them all at once - trusting that God is present with us in it, even before anything changes.

And if so, the invitation today is not to rush for answers, but to stay. To be faithful enough to stay in the water until the voice speaks.

To be faithful enough - even when it doesn’t make sense.

And in the meantime, to remember what I believe God was saying to us at the Jordan:

You are enough. You are loved. You are safe.

Amen.