SERMON. My Baptism Is Better Than Yours Making It Clear At The Outset. January 10, Rev. George Anastos

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1 SERMON My Baptism Is Better Than Yours Making It Clear At The Outset January 10, 2016 Rev. George Anastos

2 SERMON PART I My Baptism Is Better Than Yours Before I was ever baptized myself, I performed a baptism. The broad Christian tradition says that for a baptism to be valid, the person doing the baptism must be a baptized Christian. If the baptizer is not first baptized, then the baptism doesn t take I guess. In the case of my first baptism, I assumed God was going to have to figure it out. I was the chaplain on call at Yale New Haven Hospital one night when I was summoned to Maternity. A baby had been born some hours earlier. Mom and dad were over the moon happy. As mom went to sleep that evening the father went out to celebrate by drinking. At around 2:00 A.M. the baby simply stopped breathing. The staff knew they could not save the baby but they put it on a respirator to keep him alive long enough so the family could have him baptized if they so chose. So I, an unbaptized-sort-of-believing-unitarian arrived to find a sobbing mother, a half-drunk father, a compassionate nursing staff and a nearly dead infant. I baptized the child and we turned off the respirator. When I told this story to colleagues years later I caught hell. I was told the baptism was no good and now the child, depending on the perspective, a) wandered eternally in purgatory, b) was never saved or c) some other vague consequence to the child because the baby was not really baptized. I may have assumed that God was bigger than that and could figure it out, but my colleagues told me I was wrong. Baptism has always confused me. In divinity school a professor asked a student from Yale College downtown to come to our class on the hill to talk about his conversion to Christianity. Jesus freaks, as they were then known, were still new enough and alien enough that mainline Christians didn t have a clue what to do with them. This young man talked about being saved, feeling sorry for the people who were not, and being thrilled that his baptism guaranteed him a place in heaven. At this point in my spiritual pilgrimage I still did not believe in God so I was fascinated by my classmates reaction to this young man. They were furious. They accused him of being judgmental. They said there was a lot more to being Christian than a gooey feeling of being saved. They stopped short of saying that merely being baptized wasn t enough. In short, these young men and women preparing for ministry appeared mightily annoyed that their well established brand of Christianity and its flavor of performing rites were being challenged by an upstart expression of Christianity. I thought of that event one day ten years later when, as a young, baptized Christian minister, I found myself on the receiving end of just such an attitude. A young woman in the church I was serving married a Roman Catholic man and converted to Catholicism. The priest insisted she be rebaptized into the true faith. The baptism of the Congregational Church in which she was raised wasn t valid? I was furious. With great maturity and in the true spirit of both Jesus and the prophets, I essentially reacted by thinking, Oh yeah? Well I think your religion is just superstitious hocus pocus! Nyah. This was not one of my better moments. For almost three decades now my wife has been serving on an ecumenical, international commission that tries to find and create common ground between different Christian communions. Much good work goes on there yet sometimes her stories to me make me despair. In regards to baptism there is a raging argument over the correct formula that must be used if a baptism is to be valid. According to some, unless a child is baptized, In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit it is not valid and the child is not baptized. In my own mind I refer to this as the School of Religion by Harry Potter. Unless we say just the right magic words and wave our wands in just the right way, then the spell doesn t work. Do they really imagine God watching a baptism and saying, Whoa, Page 1 of 5

3 you used the wrong word there! THAT child is going to hell. And YOU, you weren t baptized yourself, so I am going to punish the kid. We religious types worship very small gods sometimes. SCRIPTURE READING Luke 3:15-22 The Baptism of Jesus As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fork is in his hand, to clear his threshingfloor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison. Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. SERMON PART II Making It Clear at the Outset John being thrown in prison by Herod is a very important piece of today s scripture lesson. No matter how you look at it, John dissented powerfully from both the religious and secular authorities of his day, so much so that his detractors said that he had a demon (Luke 7:33). This is curious because he was raised as an insider. His father was Zechariah, a priest in the temple in Jerusalem. This is a bit like having one s father be an ordained mucky muck at denominational headquarters. John left the safety of an easy life of an insider and traveled, both literally and figuratively, to the margins. Dressing in animal skins and eating locusts and wild honey, John described the religious authorities as a brood of vipers! Or, as one translation I read rendered it, snake bastards. John was not what you would call gentle. This is critical to remember on a day when we remember, and possibly renew, our baptismal vows. Every year, every single year, on the first Sunday following Epiphany, most churches invite their followers to hear the story of Jesus baptism and to reflect upon their own. We have done this every year that I have served here. Since we are to model our baptismal faith on Jesus, it is helpful to consider the context that Jesus chose for his own baptism. It says a lot. What Jesus did not choose to do was to follow Jewish baptismal or purification rites as commonly practiced. In Jesus day people commonly used a baptismal or cleansing pool a mikveh for various reasons: to symbolically wash away sin, to prepare oneself for high holy days, to convert to Judaism, to prepare oneself to prepare a body for burial. At the temple a person would enter the mikveh by descending steps into the pool, immerse him- or herself, and ascend out the other side by a different set of steps. If Jesus had wanted to follow current practice, if Jesus had wanted to remain centered in contemporary religion, he would have done this. Jesus instead chose to go outside, to the wilderness, to find a prophet with a reputation for dissent, and to be baptized by him... in the river Jordan where the people of Israel left behind an Page 2 of 5

4 identity of slavery and crossed into an identity of God-given purpose. This was a powerfully symbolic act on Jesus part. Don t forget, this is the very first story we have of Jesus as an adult. We hear about his birth; we hear about his dedication at the temple when he was 12-days-old; we hear about his discussion with the rabbis in the temple when he was 12-years-old. And then there is a silence of roughly eighteen years where it is assumed Jesus lived in Nazareth with his family and worked as a carpenter. Then all heaven broke loose. Jesus began his ministry with a symbolic baptism that clearly made a statement. He stood outside established religion. He chose to create a new Way. As blogger Dan Clendinen writes, No wonder that after this radical rupture with his family and with conventional society by identifying with the desert troublemaker, eventually Jesus's own family tried to apprehend him, and his entire hometown village of Nazareth tried to kill him as a deranged crackpot (cf. Mark 3:21, Luke 4:29, John 7:5). 1 This leaves the preacher of an established church at the center of society in a very awkward position. Or maybe I have that wrong. This leaves the members of an established church at the center of society in a very awkward position. If your religious upbringing was anything like mine no one ever told you that your role as a Christian was to follow a deranged crackpot. Ours was a domesticated religion, a faith so tame it didn t even need a leash, a church so rudderless that it never left the dock of its placid trout pond. In fact, it maybe bored us to tears. And yet, we are here. Weird, huh? In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard reflects on her own upbringing in church and how odd it is that she stayed: Week after week I was moved by the pitiableness of the bare linoleum-floored sacristy which no flowers could cheer or soften, by the terrible singing I so loved, by the fatigued Bible readings, the lagging emptiness and dilution of the liturgy, the horrifying vacuity of the sermon, and by the fog of dreary senselessness pervading the whole, which existed alongside, and probably caused, the wonder of the fact that we came; we returned; we showed up; week after week, we went through it. 2 This, of course, brings me back to the beginning of the sermon and the stories of baptismal sniping between churches of different denominations and approaches. Christianity has become so domesticated and tame, so rule oriented that it fights about how to perform a baptism during a service of liturgy, rather than how to live our baptisms in the service of God s mission in the world. This is a classic example of how an institution becomes so lost that it expends its energy on its own maintenance rather than on its purported mission. Sweet Jesus, save us from ourselves. We covenant together as the gathered people of First Plymouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, to worship God, to nurture people on their Christian journey, and to witness to God's love in word and deed. Relying on the grace and power of God, known to us most fully in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, we aspire to be a community which is biblically based, intellectually open, theologically progressive, and inclusive of all people Dillard, Annie; Teaching a Stone to Talk; Harper & Row; NY; page 39 Page 3 of 5

5 That is the first part of our mission statement. We said it together as a community last week, as we do at every communion service. It is not a wimpy affirmation. It asks us, as individuals and as a covenanted community, to aspire to follow the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. That s not minor, people! If we paid attention, truly paid attention to the words we speak and sing during liturgies and hymns each week, our limbs might shake with terror at that audacity of what we are claiming to do and who we are claiming to be. Which is really, weird because the number one reason that people leave mainline churches such as ours is not because they are being challenged to live as Jesus lived and love as Jesus loved, but rather they leave mainline churches because they find them so stultifyingly boring. Later on in Teaching a Stone to Talk Annie Dillard writes, Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?... On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. 3 I like to think that the sleeping God has woken and is drawing us out... and we don t want to return. Perhaps it is just hubris, but I like to think that First Plymouth is really not so boring. Over the past number of years we have become increasingly intentional about understanding what it really means to be a church; we have been intentional about walking the talk and even the faith. I like to think that for Lent one year we gave up being domesticated and tame and we just never went back. I like to think we are learning to take our baptisms very, very seriously, because we understand that being baptized is not about ritually using the right words, but instead intentionally following the way of the God. To this end I now invite you to participate in a liturgy of renewal of baptismal vows, and to thus remember to take seriously what it means to be a church. We will then invite you forward to renew your vows and to reclaim what it means to be part of an intentional Christian community. RENEWAL OF BAPTISMAL VOWS Minister: Dearly Beloved, friends in Christ, we have been received into the church through the sacrament of baptism. In baptism we die to all that is unrighteous and are reborn in newness of life. All: We have found nurture and support in the midst of the family of Christ. Through prayer and study we have been led by the Holy Spirit to mature in our faith. Although others may once have spoken for us, welcoming us into the Church, we speak now for ourselves, affirming our commitment to the way of life taught us by Jesus and covenanting with God and with each other to serve all creatures as we are guided in love and in wisdom by the Spirit. 3 3 Dillard, Annie; Teaching a Stone to Talk; Harper & Row; NY; page 52 Page 4 of 5

6 Minister: We do take it upon ourselves to renew those solemn vows of Holy Baptism by which others (for us) renounced evil and all its works, and promised for us to serve God faithfully in all places and times. [The Congregation stands and the Minister continues with the People responding:] Do you renounce evil, its power, and all its works, renewing your commitment to Jesus Christ? I do. Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayer? Will you persevere in resisting wrongdoing, and, whenever you fall into brokenness, will you repent and turn to God? Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God as taught us by Jesus? Will you seek to serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every living creature? Let us pray together: Almighty God, who in baptism received me, your servant, into the church, forgave my sins, and promised me eternal life, increase in me the gifts of thy Holy Spirit. Grant me love for others, joy in serving you, peace in adversity, patience in suffering, kindness toward all creatures, purity of soul in times of evil, faithfulness in temptation, gentleness in the face of opposition, wisdom in all things. Strengthen me in the ministry to which you have called me in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. May God Almighty, who has given us new birth by water and the Spirit, keep us in eternal life. Amen. (adapted, Book of Worship (UCC)) Page 5 of 5

A Question of Identity January 13, 2019 The Reverend George Anastos

SERMON A Question of Identity January 13, 2019 The Reverend George Anastos Text: Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and