The Right Place, the Opened Heavens

“The Right Place, the Opened Heavens” is a homily I prepared for the Baptism of the Lord (2026, Year A) and delivered at the 8:00 AM service at First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor on Sunday, 11 January 2026, at the invitation of the Rev. David Prentice-Hyers. Based on Matthew 3:13–17, the homily reads Jesus’s baptism as an apocalyptic unveiling in which God’s own initiative opens the heavens and thereby interrupts the closed readings of life that organize us around anxiety and self-justification.

The Baptism of Jesus

¹³ Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. ¹⁴ John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” ¹⁵ But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. ¹⁶ And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷ And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Matthew 3:13–17 (NRSVue)

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Please join me in prayer as I read the Collect of the Day from A New Zealand Prayer Book for today’s feast, celebrating the Baptism of the Lord.

Open the heavens, Holy Spirit,
for us to see Jesus intercede for us;
may we be strengthened to share his cup
and ready to serve him for ever.
This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

That prayer asks for sight. It asks for an opened heaven, so that the church can see Jesus as he truly is, and so that we can be strengthened for the life that follows. Matthew’s Gospel answers that prayer by giving us a scene where God makes Godself known in public. The heavens open, the Spirit descends, and the Father speaks.

The Reformed church keeps a simple sentence close at hand; a sentence we never finish learning: “In life and in death we belong to God.”1 That confession anchors us because it tells us that our lives do not finally belong to our accomplishments or to our failures. It also interrupts the stories other people tell about us, and the stories we tell about ourselves. Here is the sharper edge of it: belonging is that which God gives, and it is something God claims—it is not something we manufacture.

John the Baptizer stands in the Jordan with a religious instinct that is quite serious. He wants clear boundaries: God is holy; but we are creatures and sinners. God gives; yet we receive. John knows his role—he baptizes those who come confessing sin. So, when Jesus comes, John understandably resists: “I need to be baptized by you,” he says, “and do you come to me?” John wants to guard the difference between the Holy One and sinners. John is also guarding a truth the church needs to keep hearing: grace is not ours to manage.

And yet, Jesus does not offer John an abstract or theoretical reply. Rather, he locates his own obedience in a particular moment. “Let it be so now;” he says, “for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Notice the word “now.” Jesus names a necessity that has a time and a place. Now, here, at the Jordan. He stands where repentant people stand, where the truth is told without defense and without pretense.

We often hear the word “righteousness” and think first about moral achievement. In Matthew’s Gospel, however, righteousness carries the weight of God’s covenant faithfulness and God’s right-making action taking form in history. “To fulfill all righteousness” therefore names God’s decision to set the world right through concrete obedience in a world that is painfully wrong. God’s faithfulness becomes public and historical.

Jesus enters the water and he binds himself to a people who have no claim over God. He takes responsibility for a world in profound need of mercy. He begins his vocation as the obedient Son who carries that which does not belong to him. And then, John consents. Matthew then tells us: “suddenly the heavens were opened.” In the Bible, when we talk about “apocalyptic,” it is important to realize that it refers to an unveiling or sorts: something once hidden becomes visible.2 The opening comes from God’s initiative.

Most of us know what it feels like to live under a closed heaven. We read ourselves through what we can secure—things like competence, reputation, productivity, and control. We “read” the world and our days through what is loud and immediate, or through whatever anxiety keeps returning to us. These “readings” feel realistic because they are drawn from what we can see.

Then… heaven opens over the Jordan, and God gives a different “reading.” The Spirit descends like a dove and the Father speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”3 Before Jesus teaches, before he heals, before he suffers, before he is resisted, God declares him beloved. Identity and love are given at the outset of a road that will run through faithfulness and death.

The location matters, too. The voice sounds over Jesus in the water, over Jesus standing among those who come seeking cleansing. The holiness of God shows its character here with boldness. God’s holiness moves toward the sinner’s place. That is why we prayed, “Open the heavens, Holy Spirit, for us to see Jesus intercede for us.” Jesus intercedes by taking his place with the guilty, by placing himself where we stand, so that God’s Word can be spoken over him there.

Karl Barth once said that the eternal Son “take[s] His place with the transgressor, dying in his place.” That line clarifies what the Jordan really discloses: God’s glory is displayed in the Son’s free descent into our far country, and in the Father’s public affirmation of that descent. The voice over Jesus becomes the church’s grammar for human life. Baptism means that God’s declaration over Christ stands closer to you than your self-accusations or the world’s verdicts. God has spoken a Word over the Son, and in the Son God addresses you. That Word loosens the compulsion to justify your existence and steadies you for service. It opens space for repentance without panic.

This is why we speak of baptism on this feast.

The Nicene Creed offers the church a plain sentence: “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” Baptism confesses God’s mercy pledged in a sign Christ appointed for the church. Our Confession of 1967 frames baptism by pointing back to Jesus at the Jordan: “By humble submission to John’s baptism, Christ joined himself to women and men in their need and entered upon his ministry of reconciliation.”4 Baptism represents cleansing from sin and dying and rising with Christ to new life. It commits Christians to die each day to sin and to live for righteousness. In baptism, the church celebrates the renewal of the covenant by which God binds a people to himself. In our own Reformed terms, baptism is a sign and seal that points beyond itself to Christ and seals God’s promise to us.

This is important for us because baptism is sometimes turned into a private psychological test. People start to ask whether they understood enough, or whether they felt enough. The sacrament becomes yet another site for religious anxiety. The Reformed confessions direct us to God’s act in Jesus Christ. The sacraments serve God’s promise: God uses them to make the gospel promise clearer, and to seal that promise. Our vows matter as obedience and gratitude. Crucially, and this is the impost important thing: the sacraments answer mercy; they do not produce it.

Some of you will hear this and remember Barth’s worries about infant baptism. Barth feared a church that treated baptism as an automatic possession detached from confession and discipleship, as if grace were something like a stable religious mechanism. That caution is worth receiving with gratitude. It disciplines the church toward serious teaching and the long practice of Christian life.

At the same time, the Reformed tradition continues to baptize infants for reasons rooted in covenant. In covenant terms, God’s promise and claim come before our capacity and comprehension. Infant baptism confesses grace publicly. It places the church under obligation, alongside parents, to nurture a child into faith, so that a baptized child can grow into public profession and practiced discipleship. The confessions also guard the church here. Grace is not tied to a moment we can control. Baptism does not guarantee regeneration as a predictable outcome. God is free. God’s Spirit gives the grace promised in God’s appointed time. That truth keeps baptism from becoming a badge of superiority or a ground for despair.

So, we return to the Jordan, and we listen again for the voice.

The heavens open over Jesus standing where sinners stand, and the Father names him Beloved. The church lives under that opened heaven. The church prays for that sight, again and again, because we so easily return to closed readings of life. When the Spirit opens the heavens in our hearing, weariness receives a place to rest. Shame receives a word stronger than hiding.

The Collect also asks that we be strengthened “to share his cup and ready to serve him for ever.” Baptism marks the church as a people sent. The Spirit’s descent signals mission. Jesus will move from the Jordan into conflict with temptation, sickness, exclusion, hypocrisy, and oppressive power. The church belongs to the one who entered the water with sinners. Therefore, the church is given a posture toward neighbors shaped by mercy: we go without superiority or pretense, and we pursue truth and justice with sobriety.

This week, baptism must be for us more than a churchly metaphor. In baptism we are joined to Christ’s own descent, to the Son who went down into the waters in the company of the accused and the exposed, and who received God’s verdict there—not after a life of achievement, and not after he had proved his usefulness to anyone. So, when Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was killed in Minneapolis by an ICE officer during a major federal immigration operation, the church cannot treat that death as political noise.5 A human being was taken by lethal force exercised by the state, and whatever legal findings eventually say, the baptized are not permitted to speak as though this is normal, or as though it is morally weightless.

Reporting has described Good as a poet and as a volunteer in a community neighborhood patrol network that monitors and records ICE activity. Her wife described the posture of that night with a sentence that belongs in our lament: “We had whistles. They had guns.” Baptism trains the church in exactly this moment. It tells us where to stand, and it tells us which words are not ours to use. In baptism we renounce the powers of sin and death and every regime of naming that turns neighbors into threats and then calls the threat solved when the body hits the ground. We are marked as belonging to Jesus Christ, which means that our first allegiance is to the Beloved Son’s solidarity with the vulnerable, not to the state’s self-justifying narration of its own violence. The opened heaven over the Jordan is not permission for the church to escape the world. The opened heaven over Jordan is God’s act of truth-telling in the very place where people are treated as disposable. To be baptized, then, is to grieve Renee Good as our neighbor, to refuse the rush to moral certainty that crushes the dead a second time, to demand truthful accounting from those who wield weapons in our streets, and to keep saying, against every closed heaven, that God’s final Word over human life is not “enemy,” but the Word spoken over Jesus in the water: beloved.

Here is one final word that presses slightly on the church’s habits. Reformed theology is honest about judgment and refuses cheap grace. It also resists the habit of assigning final outcomes to particular people.6 The church is not authorized to declare any neighbor beyond Christ’s reach. The Confession of 1967 speaks with remarkable breadth about the saving significance of the risen Christ, and it insists that the judge of all is the same one who is our redeemer. It leaves the end in God’s hands. It shapes the church’s posture in the present. It directs us to stand under an opened heaven and to leave judgment where it belongs. It teaches the church to hope well of all.7

Today, we listen to the unveiling in this text. We let the opened heaven reframe what feels sealed. We let God’s declaration over Jesus interrupt the narratives that hold us captive. “This is my Son, the Beloved.” In the Beloved Son, God has made room for you and claimed the church. In the Beloved Son, God has begun the reordering of the world.

+ Amen.