Water Works

Sermon

My understanding of the meaning and purpose of baptism has changed over my lifetime. What brought that to my attention was Junha Kim’s upcoming examination by the presbytery in preparation for his installation at Westminster. I was reminded of my ordination examination, during which one of my friends questioned my statement on baptism. “Is baptism only a sign and symbol,” he asked, “or does something spiritual happen?” We spent the next four months talking about it over lunch together.

Presbyterian liturgy reflects an understanding that everything of importance that happens to us in church happens in the context of our baptismal covenant. Reference to our baptism shows up when we join a congregation, in wedding vows and ordination promises, and in a formal funeral liturgy. Baptism is a covenant, not a contract between us and God. A contract says, I’ll be baptized, you let me into heaven. But God has never made contracts with God’s people; it is always a covenant. There is no exchange of goods and services, as in a contract. A covenant is based on relationship and will remain in effect even if the parties don’t keep up their end. Whether or not we humans can keep our baptismal promise to try to be like Jesus, God holds fast to us in covenant relationship, naming and claiming us with the same passionate words Jesus heard coming out of his baptismal waters: “YOU are my beloved child, I am pleased with you.” Do you remember your baptism?

I was baptized by full immersion at the age of nine. We were Baptist, so we didn’t think of baptism as a sacrament. To us, it was a sign and symbol, the premise being that full immersion baptism was what got you into heaven, and that could only happen if you made that decision. Babies, therefore, could not be baptized. When I joined a Presbyterian church, my customary pew was the front one, which meant that I was right there for baptisms. Those babies and I were nearly eye-to-eye as they received the waters. It sure looked to me like something more significant than the shock of cold water happened to them. And it wasn’t just the babies who were changed by that act. I made promises on behalf of those babies, some sort of mystical bond happened, and I ended up in seminary, keeping promises those for the babies. The person being baptized receives a sort of invisible “you belong to God” sign. The congregation is changed as well, as it, too, names and claims that person.

This is a pretty high theology of baptism, but here’s my discomfort. Do we exclude unbaptized people by making baptism the defining event of their lives? It is the sacrament of belonging, but is today’s reaffirmation of our baptismal covenant making the assumption that everyone is baptized? In other words, are we “othering” people who haven’t been baptized? If this is your situation, that you are not baptized, let me tell you a story that might help. When I was pastor at Springwater, we reaffirmed our baptismal covenant every year on Baptism of the Lord Sunday. One year, a local teenager was visiting on that day. She had never been baptized, but she affirmed all the promises the congregation reaffirmed, and she was struck by the water when I flung it through the congregation. She claims it as her baptism. And who’s to say it isn’t?

I think the point is not to exquisitely define who’s in and who’s out. And, there is, I believe, something important in claiming the distinction of intentionally following Jesus. That claim is supposed to make a difference in the world. I wish I could remember who said that atheists who act with justice and compassion because “it’s the right thing to do” are better Christians than the good church people who do those things to get into heaven. Catholic theologian Karl Rahner labels this phenomenon “anonymous Christians,” that is, people who, regardless of their beliefs, live lives like that of Jesus. That said, I believe baptism changes a person, that “something happens,” but I no longer think its purpose is to get us to heaven. It’s a sacrament, a spiritual event in concrete reality, and I’m willing to believe it happens in more than one way. Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of attending a conference of about 300 people at which Archbishop Desmond Tutu was presiding. Tutu had charmed everyone there, she said, “first, by showing up in an orange dashiki, baggy shorts, and plastic flip flops; and second, by giggling a lot—this Nobel Peace Prize winner had come through hell on earth in South Africa with his ability to laugh intact.”

She tells of an impromptu baptism that happened because “someone in the audience knew a family who had just welcomed a baby with Down syndrome into the world. They wanted their baby baptized, but they didn’t belong to a church. So [someone] asked Archbishop Tutu if he would do it and he said yes, on the condition that all of us who were there could serve as witnesses. That way, when it came time to ask the question about whether everyone present would support this child in his new life in Christ, the baby and his family would hear more than three hundred people shouting, ‘We will!’

“So that’s how it happened,” she continues. “On Sunday we gathered in the auditorium for the service. There was a makeshift baptismal font set up on the stage, with a pitcher of water on a table beside it. [How the place looked] didn’t matter, since the Archbishop only had eyes for that baby. Before he invited the family to come forward, he poured the water into the font. Then he prayed over it in his native language, Xhosa, which has lots of tongue clicks in it.

“Next, he did something I have never seen anyone else do before or since. He leaned over the water and blew on it—once this way, and once that way. . . He breathed the sign of the cross on the water, and then he invited the family to walk through the sea on dry ground with their baby in their arms. It was the evidence of things not seen,” she writes. “It was a moment full of the peace that passes all understanding.”

And, as Barbara Brown Taylor attests, it was not a solitary act. Everyone was changed by that sacrament. Every baptism changes the whole church, and it changes every witness. What I’m saying for today is, whether you reaffirm baptismal promises you or your parents made at some point in your life, or if this is the first time you are hearing the promises, or you’ve heard them before but felt they had nothing to do with you—I am here to tell you that this covenant in which we will “try to be like Jesus” makes all the difference in this world today. What we do flows from who we are. And who we ARE is children of God, individually and corporately. Elaine Heath, on the CAC daily online meditation this week, writes a letter to the Church about the work before us. “[Dear] Church,” she writes, “do you realize we are on the cusp of a new Great Awakening? God’s new thing is networked, exponential, Spirit-breathed, decentralized, a vast planting of small communities of faith. It is very much the work of laypeople, and it is emerging as a natural progression out of the church that used to be.”

Our work, friends, is here and now. We do not exist for ourselves. Our work is to heal the world. Not because we are perfect or because we’ve succeeded in being like Jesus. But if Henri Nouwen is right, that we are all “wounded healers,” our work of healing the world flows out of our own being-in-the-process-of-healing. It is about being in relationship with people not like us, people with whom we do not necessarily agree. It is about acknowledging the sins of the past and restoring justice where we can. Jesus started his ministry knowing he was loved from the very first, and so do we. We are loved from the very first, and we, like Jesus, delight our God. Dear Church, Elaine Heath writes, we are called to be a changed community. Let us claim that call by standing as witness to the delight and love in which God holds us as we are called to offering healing, just trying to be like Jesus.