Most of us in this room have been
baptized, haven’t we? It’s a very simple
operation: the pastor cups a little water in her hand and pours it over the
person’s head—three times: “I baptize
you in the name of the Father (splash) and the Son (splash) and the Holy Spirit
(splash)” and then it’s done, and you can go out to lunch with all the friends
and family who are in town for the occasion.
Not that a lot of us remember our baptisms . . . a lot of the folks in this room were baptized
as infants, I’m
sure . . . And though
I’ve heard a few people claim to remember their infant baptisms, I don’t think
it happens often.
That’s
why it’s
good, from time to time, to remind ourselves that we have been baptized . . . After all, baptism, is one of the
central metaphors of our faith, and no less a figure
than Martin Luther was said to remind himself of his baptism every morning when
he got up; he said “to be baptized in the name of God is to be baptized not by
men, but by God Himself. Therefore although it is performed by human hands, it
is nevertheless truly God's own work.” And
that is a general Reformed, a general Presbyterian belief as well. Baptism is an act of God performed by the
church. And in fact, this is what
defines it as a sacrament,
rather than a remembrance. Many
churches—most notably the Southern Baptist churches some of us grew up in—view
Baptism purely as an ordinance, that is something that we do solely because we
are commanded to do it. Luther didn’t
think much of this view, he felt that it trivialized an action of God. Like the Roman Catholics from whence he came,
he defined it as a sacrament, visible means of an invisible grace, and like
Roman Catholics, he taught that it is salvific as well: “it is most solemnly
and strictly commanded,” he wrote “that we must be baptized or we cannot be
saved.”
Leaders of the Swiss Reformation—from whence
our Reformed theology came—began at the opposite extreme from Luther. Huldrych Zwingli, the first great Swiss
reformer, believed that Baptism (and The Lord’s Supper) were “bare signs”, that
is, just stuff we do. Thus, Baptism, to
Zwingli, is the actions performed—the dunking or the washing of the
forehead—and nothing more. God does
nothing during the rite, we do it all, and we do it because we have been
commanded to do so.
John Calvin—a second-generation reformer—begged
to differ. For him, a sacrament consists
of two parts: the action done by us and the action done by God. The action done by us points to or is a signifier
of what God is doing in the sacrament.
Thus, what we do is a visible sign of an invisible grace. Note that in linguistic terms, the dunking or
sprinkling is the signifier and
the action of God is the signified.
But what is being signified? What is the action of God, what is the grace
that God confers upon us? As I said
before, for Luther it is salvation itself—Baptism is an integral part of the
mechanics of salvation. But Calvin did
not view Baptism that way, as necessary for salvation, but as a way of God’s
sealing God’s promises to us, as a kind of a badge, or a token of those
promises. “Baptism,” he wrote in his Institutes, “does not procure
salvation but it accepts and confirms the promises of God.” For Calvin, it baptism inducts us into the
club, it engrafts us onto the
vine, it incorporates us into the family of God as children of God, brothers
and sisters of Jesus Christ.
Disagreement over the nature of baptism and
what it means dominated a lot of the debate in the early Protestant movement,
and sometimes it got quite heated: the two sides would call each other names
like heretic and false teachers. Even
today, though we tend to be a tad
more decorous, there are sharp divisions between denominations over the nature
and meaning of Baptism. In general
Baptists and other evangelicals believe that it’s just an action on our part,
that we do it because we’re told to and nothing more, that it is in essence
Zwingli’s bare sign. Catholic and mainline protestants, on the other hand,
believe that it is indeed a sacrament, with God bestowing grace upon us at our
baptism.
We believe that like so many other things in
Jesus’ life and mission, that his baptism is a model for our own, that in some way
our baptisms are like his own. And so
reading a scripture passage like the one Frank read can tell us something about
our own. And I think the first thing to
notice is that Mark places it right at the beginning of his Gospel. There is no birth narrative, no little town
of Bethlehem, no wise men or shepherds or flight to Egypt. For Mark, none of that matters, because the
Good News of Jesus Christ begins at his baptism, not at his birth. Look at the very first words of his
Gospel: “The beginning of the Good News
of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And
then he goes right into the baptism story.
The good news of Jesus Christ, which we call the gospel, begins for Mark
with his baptism.
And the good news of our participation in God’s
Kingdom, of our own personal life with God, as well as our own association with
like believers . . . that all begins at our
own baptisms as well. Our part in
the mission of God, as carried out by us personally and in conjunction with the
church, began at our baptism. At our
baptism we were engrafted onto the vine, made members of the body of Christ on
earth.
Not long after I came to this church, we
celebrated our 75th year, and this year, if my counting is correct,
the church will be 80. And one question always comes to my mind: how come we
only commemorate the church every ten years or so? Ours is a congregation in
which many of us have participated for years, others not so long, but all of
us, I think, have been enriched by its presence in our lives. Our church family
has been with us through thick and thin, from top to bottom, and for better or
worse. We’ve forgiven each other our
sins as indeed God has forgiven us as well.
This church has not always been hearts and flowers, a bed of
roses—insert your favorite cliché—but it’s always been here. We are not a perfect
people, but we are a good people, a loving people, a caring people. So as we re-member our baptisms, let us also
re-member and re-new our commitment to this congregation and this church, and
to its continuing as a vital part of our lives and our community.
But there is another way in which we believe
Jesus’ baptism models our own. When he
came up out of the water, the heavens opened up, and the spirit of God
descended on him looking for all the world like a dove, and there was a voice
that affirmed him as God’s Son, the Beloved, in whom God was well pleased. And though we might not have heard it at the
time of our own baptisms, though we may not hear it as we live into it every
day, you can be certain that it is true:
We are God’s children, God’s beloved, in whom he is well pleased. And I say these things in the name of God the
creator, and God the redeemer, and God the sustainer of us all, Amen.
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