What Jesus Baptism Means to Me (Not Me, You) Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 First Presbyterian Church of Greenlawn The Rev. Frederick Woodward January 13, 2013 Isaiah 43:1-7 (NIV) But now, this is what the LORD says-- he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the LORD, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior; I give Egypt for your ransom, Cush and Seba in your stead. Since you are precious and honored in my sight, and because I love you, I will give men in exchange for you, and people in exchange for your life. Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bring your children from the east and gather you from the west. I will say to the north, 'Give them up!' and to the south, 'Do not hold them back.' Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth-- everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made." Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 (NIV) The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Christ. John answered them all, "I baptize you with water. But one more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." What Jesus Baptism Means to Me (Not Me, You) And so my sermon title for today is what does Jesus baptism mean to me, which I tried to clarify, not what does Jesus baptism mean to me, Pastor Fred? but what does Jesus baptism mean to me if I happen to be Betty or Bob or Arlissa or? So my job this morning will be to preach a little, and your job will be to fill in an answer to that question, what Jesus baptism means to me is And what we are trying to work up to is an answer to the question, what does my own baptism mean to me? Because those questions are connected: the question of Jesus baptism and the question of my own baptism. So take a stab at that right now. In a quiet place in your hearts, say these words to yourself, for me, Jesus baptism means and then listen to the way you fill in the blank. For me, Jesus baptism means. And then try, and what my own baptism means to me is. 1
So what did you come up with? Don t say it out loud. Just think it. And by the way, it is okay if you didn t come up with anything. There may be some of you who have literally blanked out. There may even be some of you who are starting out the day badly and found yourselves saying, not for nothing, but Jesus really doesn t mean a whole lot to me. Or, my own baptism really doesn t feel like any big deal. And if that s the case, don t be too hard on yourself. God isn t done working on you. God isn t done working on me either which is good news, because I need a lot of work, and it may take a long time before any of us can say, Jesus baptism means everything to me or my own baptism means life itself. But that s the direction I d like to take us in this morning. How far we ll go together, I don t know. What I do know though is that it will do none of you any good for me to just to tell you that Jesus baptism should mean everything to you. Shoulds just don t cut it in Christian faith. Shoulds don t get us where we need to go. I can tell you that that you should love your neighbor, that you should love your enemy, I can tell you all of that until I am blue in the face, but if you don t like your neighbor and if you hate your enemy, none of my shoulds are going to do you any good. And I know that. I think that our breakthroughs in faith come when we get out from under the tyranny of our shoulds, when our shoulds become, by God s grace, cans. Like, I can do all things through him who strengthens me (Phil. 4:13), not I should do all things through him who strengthens me, but I can. Or Nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:39?); not nothing should separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ, but nothing can. Now I can t explain how shoulds become cans; and I probably shouldn t bother to try. I hope you get the irony of my saying that, my making a statement about shoulds and cans using the words shoulds and cans. No, I can t explain how shoulds become cans, but I know that they sometimes do. And I do know that when shoulds become cans, it is never because of us, but because of God. So I am not going to tell you what Jesus Baptism should mean to you just like I am not going to tell you that you should forgive those who have hurt you or you should let go of all the resents that are burning inside you like a corrosive acid. But I will suggest to you that it is precisely in your baptism that Jesus begins to turn all the shoulds of your lives into cans. I will suggest that in your baptism, Jesus has not only extended God s forgiveness to you, he has also begun to give you a power of forgiveness that you didn t have before. I will suggest that when you come to the place where you can forgive someone because God has given you the power to forgive, and when you accept that power in your life not because you should but because you can, then you are on the path of getting right with yourself. You re turning a dark corner, becoming more human, and maybe becoming a better friend to yourself than you recently have been. Faith, I think, is all about the cans, not the shoulds, cans that are rooted in the power and grace of God in Jesus Christ, not in us. So the most I can do is make suggestions. So here s a suggestion or two as to why Jesus baptism might mean everything to you, and some reasons it has come to mean everything to me. The first is that if Jesus submitted himself to John s baptism, there really is hope for me. I once heard someone say that if Jesus had to be baptized, then there must not be any hope for the rest of us. I think I know where that person was 2
coming from: Jesus is divine; I m not. If Jesus, who was divine, had to be baptized, then I m really in trouble because I m only human. I see all that, but I look at it in a very different way. The way I see it, because Jesus was baptized there really is hope for me after all. That Jesus lines up with everybody else tells me something important about who Jesus is, that he s not just fully God, which is only half of it for me, but also fully human. You see, by virtue of his baptism, I recognize Jesus as my brother, and when I finally recognize Jesus not only as the Son of God, but also as my brother, it begins to get through my thick skull that I am also a child of God. Because of who Jesus is, I learn who I am as well, and who I meant to become. And what I am meant to be, which I continue to learn in school of hard knocks, is not some wanna-be god, who pretends to have a bunch of knowledge and power that he simply does not have. I am a creature of God, pure and simple. And I am happiest and most in sync with myself when I am content to be human, nothing more, and nothing less, just as I was created to be, warts, wrinkles, bald head and all. And so it is not my goal anymore to achieve the sort of faith that could enable me to walk on water like Peter. I m not supposed to walk on water. My job, it seems to me, is simply to trust in Jesus Christ, and stay in the damn boat until he makes his way my way to save me. And then, to do something about it. Go where he tells me to go, and stop telling him to tell me where I think he should be telling me where I should go. In other words, my greatest task is simply to become more and more human over time, not more godlike, which means accepting myself for what I am and what I am not. That s part of what I get out of Jesus baptism. And if Jesus were willing to cast his lot in with everybody, and even with all of us, then what his baptism means to me is that that I shouldn t stand off from other people as if I were better than them in my sin than they are in theirs, or to pretend, in other words, that we don t share the same gene pool as sinners. If Jesus stands with all the people who were being baptized, then I ll stand where Jesus stands. I mean, where else would it make sense for me to stand except where Jesus stands? In an interview Larry King had with Billy Graham back in 1990, King asked Graham what he thought of homosexuals who act out their desires for one another. And what Billy Graham said was, Well, I d put them right up there with gossipers. Now whether or not you believe that acting on same sex desire is a sin, which Billy Graham of course does, you have to grant Billy Graham a lot of wisdom here. Because he knew how tempted we are to hone in on the sins of others that don t happen to enamor us, or maybe even offend us in our self-righteousness, while at the same time dismissing as benign those sins we are pleased to tolerate in ourselves like gossiping, or clinging to our resent, or envying our neighbors for everything that they have that we think should belong to us instead. Billy Graham knows that all sin, no matter what kind, destroys the fabric of community with ourselves, with our neighbors and with our God, and we have no justification for privileging some kinds of sin over others just because we like to do them. And there is Jesus, sinless, but standing in line with the whole lot of them, with the whole lot of us, with all the people as Luke puts it. So Jesus baptism tells me that I ought not put on any airs. I shouldn t pretend I m different from all the people because I m not. If Jesus queued up with everybody else, got in the boat with the rest of us, so to speak, then I shouldn t pretend that I deserve some special place in that boat, or outside it, like walking on the water like I m some really special disciple, a super disciple. 3
And you know that ministers fall into this trap all the time, I m not just speaking of priests who have been told that that they have been given special graces, and who by virtue of their consecration, have become special partakers in the priesthood of Christ. I am speaking here also of evangelical pastors for whom this way of thinking has led them not just into a spiritual cul de sac, but sometimes into the very pit of hell. Google sometime List of Scandals Involving Evangelical Christians and you ll read about four dozen prominent evangelical leaders who forgot something important about themselves, that they were sinners too, like everybody else. Maybe it was the pressure of some holiness ideology, or a belief in their own perfectibility, or an excess in their confidence about their ability to in triumph over sin, whatever it was or happened to be, it brought ruin on themselves and others. Some of them committed fraud- my old agency arrested one of them- Jimmy Bakker, and he went to jail. Some of them consorted with prostitutes, both male and female. Some even faked their own deaths to free themselves from the weight of all the false expectations that were laid upon them and with which they colluded. If Jesus got baptized when all the people were being baptized, then Jesus knows what we are going through. He s in solidarity with me and with you. But even more, he knows something about the tragic dimension of life, that none of us is truly innocent; though all of us are inclined to believe we are, even to pretend we are. That none of us lives unambiguous lives, that none of us makes sinless choices in this sin-sick world. I mean, how could we? Because Jesus got baptized when everybody else was being baptized, he knows that every choice we make is a choice we make in a fallen world. He knows that even our best and most selfless decisions are tainted with some self-interest. He knows that even on our way to undertaking our most noble actions we are busy tidying up and prettifying our vested interests that still stand in direct opposition to our Gospel. That Jesus got baptized when everybody else was getting baptized gives me the courage to accept myself more fully for who I am, and who I am, as Luther put it, is one who is simultaneously caught up in the condition of sin and one who has at the same time been made right. Sinner and justified, not just one or the other, but both at once, and that knowledge permits me to make the most of this God-given journey in reliance on Jesus Christ toward the recovery of a deeper, fuller humanity. So if Jesus baptism means little to you, and if your own baptism means even less, then maybe God wants some quality time with you. Maybe today. Because by virtue of his baptism, and by virtue of our very own, we are claimed and called by God. Like Jesus who was baptized before us, we belong to someone who is special and we are called to do something special. But our specialness is in way a very ordinary kind of specialness: the ordinary specialness of being fully human and being able to cast our lot in with those who are human just like us. Because we are baptized, we are accepted, and part of our task as humans is simply to accept the fact that in Jesus Christ we really are accepted. We are accepted; even more, we are deeply loved by God, not only in spite of who we are, but also because of who we are, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ who was baptized alongside us. We are, in other words, part of a family. And as part of this family, we continue to learn about God s grace, the nature of faith, and the meaning of Christian community, how God has chosen to be gracious, and how this grace comes to 4
us in and through the natural elements of the world which God has created in love. Like water. In a moment I am going to invite you to join together in a renewal of your baptismal vows. I will invite you to come forward, if you wish, to drop the little polished amulets you received on coming in into the baptismal waters, and to receive an anointing of oil as well as a seashell to help you remember your baptism. A word about those little amulets. They re lovely aren t they? They represent all those things to which we ve become attached, maybe can t live without out, things maybe that didn t start out being bad in themselves, but have become bad for us because of the relationship we now have with them. So the invitation to you is to give them up, all those pretty little things that are keeping you from real relationship with yourselves and with God, and to trust that Jesus has something better for you when you do. Now you don t have to come forward if you do not wish to, but I would encourage all of you to get into contact again with what it means to you that Jesus was baptized, and what it means to you that you yourself have been baptized. And I would invite you to remember your baptism, and to live again fully into God s call to you, and not just because you should, but because, by God s grace, you can. Halleluiah and amen. 5