In the movie "O Brother Where Art
Thou," the none-too-bright prison-escapees are gnawing on a gopher-carcass
in the Mississippi piney-woods. Suddenly
they hear soft, ethereal, almost nonexistent, music coming from somewhere . . .
"When I went down to the river to pray" . . . and Delmar, the dimmest
of the three, is strangely drawn by it, almost against his will, and he
stumbles through the trees, and the music gets louder, until finally he finds
it's source. It's coming from a
congregation, white-robed and ghostly in the trees, and there's a preacher
standing waist-deep in a river, baptizing sinners . . . and Delmar can't help
himself, he just splashes on in, bulling his way to the front to be baptized .
. . And as he slogs back out of the water, he says "Well that's it boys, I
been redeemed! The preacher warshed away all my sins and transgressions,
including that Piggly-Wiggly I knocked over down in Yazoo City!" But Everett -- the only slightly more-intelligent
ringleader -- is not impressed, and he tries to explain that baptism washes
away sins in the eyes of God only, but Delmar still doesn't get it:
"there were witnesses," he says, "they saw us
redeemed!" To which Everett
replies: "That's not the issue, Delmar. Even if it did put you square with
the Lord, the State of Mississippi is more hardnosed."
Delmar is -- to put it charitably -- confused
about what exactly baptism means . . . and he's not alone. In fact, he's in pretty good company. Some of the major figures of the church have
had the same trouble. If you read Acts,
you can see that its author Luke believed that you can't be a Christian without
being baptized, and in the Roman Catholic Church to this day, baptism is
considered salvific -- that is, you can't have eternal life without
it. For example, if a baby is born
sickly, you'd better hurry up and baptize it before it dies, lest it go to the
outer darkness where, as we all know, there is wailing and gnashing of
teeth. Martin Luther, the father of all us
Protestants, believed the same thing, but his fellow reformer Zwingli disagreed
-- the way he saw it, baptism was just a bare sign, something that we do
because Jesus told us to "do this in remembrance of me," but
for no other reason . . . According to him, it has no power to save, or do anything
else, in and of itself. And this is the
way modern-day Baptists -- and most evangelicals -- look at it: we do it
because we've been commanded to, and that's reason enough.
But
wouldn't you know it, we Presbyterians take a kind of middle way -- we
wouldn't want to be extreme or anything -- and it was a trail blazed by our founder John
Calvin, who believed that although baptism isn't strictly salvific, it's
not just something we just do, either . . . God has a hand in it as
well. According to him, it's a
"means of grace," a way by which God transmits some of God's grace to
us
And, now that you've fallen asleep - and
is that nodding I see back there? - it begs the question -- if folks like
Augustine and Luther and Calvin can't get it straight, people who spend their
whole lives studying scripture and thinking about such things, what hope
do we have? Even though we're not
dumber than a bag of hammers like Delmar -- we know we're answerable to the law
if we knock over a Fifth Third Bank or something -- but still: how can we --
sitting in the pews, or standing here in this pulpit, for that matter -- figure
out what it all means?
Well, maybe if we go to scripture it'll
help . . . and this is the Sunday to do it - it's Baptism of the Lord, when we
look at Jesus' Baptism, and through that lens, our own. And if we know nothing else, we do know that
he was baptized by John the Baptist, who seems mightily embarrassed to be
baptizing the Messiah: "I
need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" See, John thinks that baptizing someone
indicates some kind of hierarchical relationship, some kind of power
differential, between the baptiz-er and the baptize-ee. And of course, the church has perpetuated
this, hasn't it? One of the fights in
the our own denomination over the past decade or so has been over who gets to
do the sacraments, including baptism . . . we've got a problem in rural areas where
there are a lot of little churches who can't afford a full-time pastor, and our
denomination has historically only allowed fully-ordained,
seminary-educated pastors -- like yours truly -- to baptize somebody. And this has helped stop the historical
spread of Presbyterianism -- it's one reason there's so few of us out West --
and it perpetuates the image that us pastors are somehow more powerful
Christians or something than our congregations.
Sort of like the Catholics believe about their priests, only our
theology is all about the priesthood of all believers.
Well.
Good sense -- and demographics -- won out, and we have commissioned lay
pastors who can baptize folks and serve communion . . . but not before a lot of
grousing by pastors -- most of whom should've known better -- about how they
went to seminary for three years, scraping and sacrificing and walking
uphill through the snow to get to class, and some uneducated . . . person
. . . comes along and can all of a sudden do the sacraments . . . and all this
from a belief -- embedded in the church system -- that those who get to baptize
do so because they're special.
And that's exactly where John is coming
from when Jesus comes to get baptized . . . Israelite priests -- those with
religious authority -- were the only ones who could perform acts of ritual
cleansing, and John couldn't for the life of him see himself in a
dominant position over the Messiah -- you come to me to get
cleansed? It oughta be the other way
around . . . But Jesus knows better, and it's the first clue we get that
baptism may be more than just a ritual dunking: "Let it be so for
now," he says, "For it's proper for us to fulfill all
righteousness." Fulfill all
righteousness . . . this language of fulfillment is important in the New
Testament, it's almost technical talk, and it means for something to come to
fruition, often that God's own self has made it that way, has
brought it to its ripe, tasty state . . . and Jesus is saying that something
foreordained by God is brought to realization by this act.
Pretty heady stuff . . . and John can't
argue with that logic, can he? So
he goes ahead and baptizes Jesus, and then all heaven breaks loose . . . when
Jesus comes up from the water, it busts open and the Spirit of God descends on
him -- it looks just like a dove! -- and it lands right on him,
and a voice from heaven -- and we just assume that it booms, that it's
this big, old, deep male voice, but maybe it's not, maybe it's soft and
feminine, maybe it's lyrical and magical, maybe it's the voice most dear to
each person present -- but whatever it sounds like, what it says is
unmistakable -- "This is my son, the beloved, in whom I am well
pleased!"
And when Delmar comes up out of that
muddy Mississippi river, we don't see a dove or anything, but we do see
his face, and it's transformed, he just knows things are
different now . . . he knows the truth, that something supernatural --
something outside the bounds of our surface, cause-and-effect world -- has
happened to him . . . God's Spirit has come down from heaven and landed on him,
soft as a dove, and he has been called a Child of God, he has been called
"beloved."
And that, brothers and sisters is what
God does for us at baptism. We
are Christian, we are Christ-like, and Christ's model for baptism --
what happened to Christ at that event -- is the model for our own. And the key observation is that John is just
a vessel, almost like a conduit, for the work of God through the Holy
Spirit. It is God who sends the
Spirit, it is God who redeems, it is God who claims the child.
In my younger and more fire-breathing
days, I used to say that because it's God that does the work, God could
just as easily do it through my cat -- who let me tell you is not a
whole lot more intelligent than Delmar -- God could work through
my cat to baptize folks if God so desired, but saying stuff like that gets me
in trouble, so I don't say it much any more . . . but our whole theology of
Baptism flows from this one fact: it ain't the church or the pastor or the
person being baptized that does the deed -- it's God working through the
church and through the pastor and through the person being
baptized. It is God who sends the
Spirit, it is God who redeems, it is God who claims the child.
Many protestant denominations practice
what they call "believer baptism:" they'll only baptize adults who
are past the "age of consent," that is, who know what they're
doing. And one of their major criticisms
of Catholics and mainline Protestants like us is that we practice infant
baptism, and how can a baby know what she or he is doing? But I hope now that you can see that the
practice flows naturally from our belief that it's God who does the choosing,
it's God who does the redeeming . . . and it doesn't require consent or even
consciousness on the part of the one being baptized; it is God who
claims the child.
But there's a practical problem with
infant baptism . . . most folks don't remember it. Oh, you hear from people who claim to
remember as far back as birth, but it's not the rule . . . but that's
why -- or at least one of the reasons why -- baptism takes place in the
community. Every time we witness another's
baptism, we in a sense remember our own.
We remember that we are redeemed, we are chosen, we are
forgiven all our faults and failings and transgression, even if not by
the state of Ohio.
I may have told you this story before,
but I preached for a beautiful little Hispanic congregation in Arizona one
Epiphany Sunday, in their pink-hued stucco church, and after the sermon there
was a baptism, and lined up on one side of the copper font were the child's
god-parents, and on the other were her parents, and the minister held the child
and said the ancient words, and made the ancient movements, and although I have
only a passing acquaintance with Spanish, I understood nevertheless . . . and
although that dark-eyed child won't remember the occasion, her parents will,
and her god-parents . . they'll remember the sights and sounds and the words,
and they'll think to themselves: "that's how it was for me," and
their child's baptism will become their own, and theirs will become hers . . .
And
in a few minutes, we will relive our own baptisms, and I invite you to reflect
upon what it has meant to you over the years, and how you have lived out its
promise and obligations . . . reflect as well upon what God has done in and
through your baptism, and remember that through it, God has bestowed
God’s Spirit, forgiven our sins, and claimed us as his children. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment