This sermon was preached on Sunday, January 11, 2009 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. The lectionary readings it is based on can be found here.
It might seem as if we’ve skipped over a lot of the story this morning as we celebrate the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. We’ve just celebrated the birth of Jesus. There was the Flight into
Well, we don’t know that much about the time in between; the gospels don’t bother too much with Jesus’ childhood. It is only in one gospel, Luke, that we have just one story of the boy Jesus in the
But it’s not that surprising that near the beginning of the calendar year and not far into the church year, we are called to remember the Baptism of Our Lord. Two of the four Gospels begin with the baptism story. Jesus’ baptism is seen as the beginning of his public ministry. It was after his rather news-making baptism – heaven’s torn apart, as Mark tells us in today’s gospel – it’s after this literally remarkable event that what Jesus did and what he said, as well as how others reacted to him, begins to be fairly extensively recorded in the gospels.
Jesus baptism was a beginning as our baptisms are beginnings for us. Most Christians throughout our 2,000 year history were baptized as newborns at the very beginning of their lives. After the initial wave of evangelism that followed the ascension and the missionary efforts of Paul and so many others, and after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, it became more common for Christians to be born to Christian parents rather than converted from other faiths and practices. The baptism of infants was nearly universal in the church until the Reformation. So at the beginning of the year, we are called to reflect upon a beginning that most of us experienced at the very beginning of our lives.
Many of you may not remember your baptisms, but boy I do! I grew up in one of the more radical faiths to come out of the Reformation and its aftermath. I was brought up a Southern Baptist. Baptists get their name from the fact that they do not, repeat DO NOT, baptize infants. Most Baptists adhere to a theology of ‘believer’s baptism by immersion’ wherein you must be able to confess your belief in Jesus in order to be baptized (which, of course, precludes even the most precocious infant) and that baptism must be by total immersion.
I was baptized at
Though I had forgotten the date, I can remember every detail of my baptism. At the front of our auditorium-like church, very high up, and behind the choir, was a baptismal tank. The tank was probably as big as a hot tub, but much deeper. And it was mounted in the wall like a built-in aquarium behind a picture window. It was usually hidden behind a curtain, but on this evening, the curtain was drawn and the tank was filled with water.
Backstage at the church, I stripped down to my underwear, and put on a white robe and was led up a narrow stairway. From the top of the stairway I could look down another set of steps into the baptismal tank. Brother Owens, our pastor, waited in the tank, and gestured for me to come down into the water. As I stepped into the water, I remembered my pre-baptismal counseling: put your feet under the little bar on the bottom of the tank. This was important, if you didn’t secure your feet under the little bar, then when you were dunked backward, you feet would inevitably pop up to the service of the water and you go floating around the tank untethered! I jammed my feet so hard under the bar that I skinned the tops of them and my shoes hurt for the next week. His right hand placed firmly in the middle of my back, Brother Owens lifted his left hand above my head in a gesture of blessing and intoned the words that are used in every Christian baptism, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Next he lowered his left hand and placed it over my nose and mouth, pinching my nose closed with his fingers. Then he very swiftly dunked me backwards into the water, and just as swiftly yanked me back up. I headed up the steps on opposite side of the tank. There waited my mother with a towel, some dry underwear, and a very proud smile on her face.
There is one thing that is undeniable about baptism by immersion -- you get wet, really wet, from head to toe. As I buried my head in the towel my mother held out to me at Cherokee Baptist Church 40 years ago, I was surrounded by a deepening puddle of water on the floor. My sopping robe clung to my body, my underwear was soaked through. I couldn’t be any wetter than I was at that moment.
The medium of baptism is, of course, water. And water is one of those elements of the sacramental faith -- like wine and bread and oil -- that bind us back to the worship of the earliest Christians and for that matter to the ritual lives of our Jewish forbearers. Water is of course necessary to human life, and it has long been invested with symbolic meaning.
And it’s not hard to imagine why. All of life began in water, and whether you’re a Creationist or a Darwinist, you’ll agree that water came first -- followed by animal life, then human life. The chronology is the same, and the primacy of water is identical. We know it’s time to head to the hospital when the water breaks. So, water is foundational to the origins of life, to the beginning of life.
And water is necessary for the continuance of life, for the sustenance of life. We can survive without food and shelter for much longer than we can survive without water. It cleans and restores us; it revives us when we are tired and parched. It can remove the dirt and toil of our labors and restore us to our original unsullied state.
But water can be dangerous as well. Too much water can flood our rivers and drown our land and even ourselves. Water encompasses both good and bad effects. It can save life, it can renew life, and it can end life.
And the apostle Paul understood this. His writings are some of the first Christian writings we have, and in his epistles it is clear that baptism is central to the life of this new approach to the faith that would become Christianity. And it is clear in Paul that baptism was a ritual of death to sin and new life in Christ. As Paul explains to the Romans, “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life… For in baptism, we die with Christ so that we may also rise with Christ. (Romans 6:4, 8).
Aidan Kavanaugh, one of the 20th century’s most important liturgical scholars, and Mother Liles’ liturgy professor, when teaching his students how to conduct baptisms was famous for saying that, in terms of the amount of water needed for the ritual, that there should be enough water to drown in.
So, again we find one of those paradoxes, one of those seeming contradictions that lie at the heart of Christian truth. The element from which we are born, that which sustains our life, and can end our life, becomes the medium in which we are reborn into new life.
Baptism is the initiatory right into the life of the church, into the Christian community. We don’t teach however that it is required for salvation strictly speaking. There are those whose faith is known to God alone, faith that may not be attested to at a baptismal font, or in the shallow shoals of a river. So, if it’s not required in a legalistic sense, why do we do it? We do it because we are called to. Our God seeks to be in relationship with us. Relationships require response. God offers us unconditional love, redemption, salvation and mercy. We respond by being baptized, by signaling our acceptance of God’s love and mercy.
Like all sacraments, baptism is an outward sign of an inward grace, a ritual manifestation of the eternal truth of our identity as God’s beloved. We participate in the ritual and thereby we respond to the love and grace that God offers.
It’s as simple as the words we exchange so often with those we love. “I love you,” we say. “I love you too,” we respond. We say these words over and over in our human relationships -- to our spouses, to our children, to our parents, to our friends -- because it is important to re-acknowledge our love from time to time. We all need the reassurance of love, of acceptance, of devotion. The “I love you” spoken in difficult times, as a token of forgiveness, or in the face of challenges, is more important to the survival of our relationships than the first starry-eyed “I love you” spoken at the dawn of a new life or a new love.
In our Prayer Book tradition our baptismal vows are made on our behalf at our baptism by parents and grandparents and sponsors. And then we renew these vows throughout our lives, whenever we attend a baptism, we renew our baptismal vows at Easter, at Pentecost, and on All Saints Day, and we will do so again today on this feast day.
It is renewal that is at the core of the meaning of baptism. Ours is a faith that is always being renewed. Ours is a faith that makes redemption possible at every turn. Forgiveness and salvation are on offer at all times. We don’t expect to be perfect. We know that we can ever repent and return to the life we have pledged to lead in our baptismal vows, and in like wise, we can always seek to forgive those who fail us.
A cool glass of water at the end of a long, hot trek, that first plunge into the ocean at the beginning of a much needed vacation, a warm bath before bedtime after a day of playground exertion, the waters of baptism are ever flowing to provide us with the renewal and restoration our souls cry out for.
Pay close attention to the words of the baptismal vows we will renew this morning in place of the creed. Make no mistake, they constitute a tall order. But we have an eternity of chances to live up to and live into them. It may take a lifetime and more to fulfill them. Just as it takes an eternity to experience all the love that our God bears for us.
Welcome back once again to the new life in Christ that is yours now and forever.
+Amen
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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