The Collect for The First Sunday after The Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord - The Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration

Father in heaven,
who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son
and anointed him with the Holy Spirit:
Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made,
and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior;
who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
(BCP 214)

Historical and Theological Introduction

This Collect is new to our current BCP and, according to Marion Hatchett, “reflects the restoration of Epiphany as the celebration of the baptism of our Lord and as a baptismal season.”[1] (See the Note below regarding the movement toward shifting the theme of the season.) Theologically, this Collect “stresses the baptism of Jesus with water and the Holy Spirit” and connects his baptism with our own: our initiation into the Baptismal Covenant is modeled after his baptism. This Collect was drafted by Charles M. Guilbert, who used Collects from the Roman sacramentary for the First Sunday after the Epiphany as his basis.[2]

The Preamble

In the Preamble, “Father in heaven,” we claim the familial relationship with God that God has offered to us (see 1 John 3:1-2). This naming of God as our Father is how we address God in the prayer that Jesus taught us (Matthew 6:9-13) that we pray weekly as part of the Sunday Eucharist (BCP 364) and daily in each of the hours of the Daily Office (BCP 97, 106, 121, 132-3) or as part of the Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families (BCP 136-140). “Heaven” has multiple meanings in biblical texts—while “heaven” can refer to the sky or outer space, it can also refer to where God the Father dwells. With this latter sense of “heaven,” heaven and earth can be understood as overlapping realms of being; wherever we experience God’s presence, we are experiencing heaven.

The Acknowledgement

The Acknowledgement, “who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit,” is a summary of Jesus’ experience of his baptism that we hear in the Gospel reading (in Year A we hear Matthew 3:13-17, in Year B we hear Mark 1:4-11 , and in Year C we hear Luke 3:21-22). The focus is Jesus’ experience of having his relationship with God the Father stated audibly and his relationship with God the Holy Spirit being received as a physical anointing. The baptism of Jesus not only reveals to us who Jesus is, but also reveals the Trinity.

The Petition

The Petition, “Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior,” moves from our Lord Jesus’ baptism to our sacramental imitation of his action. Baptism is something that we receive and that we live into. In our baptism, we not only imitate Jesus’ baptism, but we enter into his life, death, and resurrection (Romans 6:3-6) and, through our baptism, we become children of God who are offered the opportunity to participate in the divine life (see The Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day). To keep the covenant that we have made, which we articulate as our Baptismal Covenant (BCP 304-8), we need God’s grace—we need to be empowered by this divine life that Jesus shares with us through the work of the Holy Spirit. This covenant calls us to live and speak in such a way that others are able to experience the Good News of God in Jesus Christ and to know, through our bold statement about Jesus as our Lord and Savior, that they have experienced this Good News.

The Pleading

In the Pleading, “who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen,” we affirm what we have heard in the Gospel readings for this Sunday—that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one glorious God in three Persons who live and reign as one.

For your consideration:

How have you shared the Good News of God in Jesus Christ since the last time we prayed this Collect? How have we, as a parish and as a denomination, boldly confessed Jesus as Lord and Savior during this past year?

How are you living into the Baptismal Covenant? How are we, as a parish and as a denomination, living into the Baptismal Covenant? How might we change how we live into the Baptismal Covenant so that we can reach those around us with the Good News of God in Jesus Christ?

Note: In 1955, the Roman Catholic Church designated the Sunday after the Epiphany as a feast celebrating the Baptism of our Lord.[3] The current Roman Catholic liturgical calendar does not include a Season after the Epiphany, but designates the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord as the first Sunday of their Ordinary Time. Like the Roman Catholic Church, we celebrate the first Sunday after the Epiphany as the Feast of Our Lord’s Baptism. This Sunday is listed as one of the liturgical days most fitting for celebrating Holy Baptism (BCP 312).

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, however, we continue the practice found in earlier Prayer Books of counting the Sundays between the Epiphany and Ash Wednesday as the Sundays after the Epiphany rather than considering them as Sundays of Ordinary Time (and numbered as Propers). Based upon the naming of these Sundays, our liturgical calendar continues to support a season after the Epiphany that is a distinct liturgical season. To this end, both the Collect appointed for the season after the Epiphany in the Order of Worship in the Evening (see BCP 111) and the Preface for Epiphany for use in our Eucharistic Prayers (see BCP 378) focus on the revealing of God’s glory through the Incarnation rather than the specific event of Christ’s baptism or a more general theological theme for Ordinary Time. Rather, our Eucharistic readings and Collects for this season begin and end with a focus on God’s glory made manifest through the Incarnation.

[1] Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book, (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 171

[2] Hatchett, 171

[3] “Epiphany” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (third edition revised), edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 557.