HOLY TRINITY/BAPTISM SUNDAY

HOLY TRINITY/BAPTISM SUNDAY: June 3, 2012

John 3:1-16

PREACHER: Pastor Carrie B. Smith

Grace and peace to you from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

  This morning we began worship with some sprinkling and the invitation to “Come to the water and remember your baptism.” For those of you who were baptized as infants—which is the norm among Lutherans—this may seem a strange invitation. How can I remember my baptism, when I was only six weeks old at the time? For that matter, how can I remember my baptism, when most days I can’t remember what I had for breakfast?

Gene Bengston does remember his baptism. He was about 12 years old, and he was baptized at Zion Lutheran in Kewanee, Illinois along with his older brother. These were the years of the Great Depression, and in the view of Gene’s father, if you didn’t have money to put in the offering plate, you didn’t go to church. There was no money, so no church for a long while for Gene and his 13 siblings.

But then it came time for one of the older brothers to get confirmed, and when the pastor learned he wasn’t yet baptized, arrangements were made.  It was done in private—just Gene and his parents and brother, and definitely not on a Sunday morning. Some of you (especially Mr. Bengston’s former 8th grade Confirmation students) may enjoy knowing that his primary concern—in fact, his main thought after this blessed event—was, “Hey…maybe I won’t have to go to Confirmation!” After all, at twelve he must already be old enough to fulfill his baptismal promises on his own. Feel free, confirmands, to ask Mr. Bengston how that conversation went with his pastor.

Mary Ellen Thoreson does not remember her baptism, but she knows the story well. She’s been told many times how she was baptized on Palm Sunday—the only day of the year her family’s Methodist church celebrated baptisms—and there were eleven other babies being dunked that day. Twelve babies sort of makes our “Baptismapalooza” look like small potatoes!

Now I have experienced Mary Ellen to be a thoughtful, kind, and somewhat quiet woman. But on that day, 3 month old Mary Ellen was screaming at the top of her lungs. In fact, she screamed so loud and so long that the pastor had to shout to be heard over her! And then, without warning, Mary Ellen was suddenly quiet—and this left the poor pastor screaming at his parishioners: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!”

We can all remember the baptismal birthday of Marianne and Dick Anderson’s daughter Suzanne, because she was baptized on July 20, 1969, which also happens to be the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I couldn’t help but wonder if the pastor mentioned the upcoming moonwalk in his sermon that day, but Marianne says no. What a missed opportunity! I realize the moonwalk didn’t happen until later that day, and those famous words had not yet been spoken, but oh, how I would have loved the chance to mention that baptism is “One small splash for humans, but one giant bath of grace for humankind.” Amen?

Here at Bethany we are preparing to meet next week the young man who is our candidate to be Associate Pastor for Youth and Family Ministries. His name is Paul, and as we began the interviewing process I spoke with him on the phone. I had read in his paperwork that Paul was raised in Utah, so one of the first things I asked was, “Do you know anything about Crystal Lake and the Chicagoland area?” I certainly never expected the answer he gave. “Actually, Pastor Carrie…I think I might have been baptized at Bethany!”

And this is most certainly true: Paul Cannon (and his identical twin brother, Neal, as well as two sisters) were all baptized here in this font, in the midst of this community, a few decades ago. Nothing in his profile would have indicated this to the bishop or his staff, and until he asked his parents for sure, even Paul wasn’t certain of it, for he moved away when he was quite young.

And yet, here we are, preparing to meet a young man for whom this community made promises so many years ago. On the day when Paul and his twin brother were brought to the water, this community promised to support Paul and pray for him in his new life in Christ. As a community, you promised to be there for him—praying, providing a Christian education, supporting his family, forgiving, loving, and most of all, showing him how to be the body of Christ in the world. And now it seems he may have the opportunity to fulfill those baptismal promises himself: praying for us, forgiving us, loving us, and helping to provide a quality Christian education for the next generation in this community.

Community is the most common thread in nearly all the baptism stories I heard this week.  Above all else, we most often remember (or have been told) who was there with us on that important day: pastors, parents, godparents, siblings, friends, a church community. And that’s why, sisters and brothers, it is so very appropriate for us to celebrate baptisms on Holy Trinity Sunday. The Holy Trinity, in all its mystery, is perhaps best understood as God in community.

Camillus Lyimo, in the book “African Christian Spirituality”, writes:

“Though for us knowledge of the life of the Trinity is indeed little, yet we can say that the most perfect community or ujamaa is the Trinity. The Trinity establishes God as community. Jesus Christ revealed the Trinity to us. God wished to share with humanity and with the entire creation his own community life in the person of Jesus Christ…Our life is a shared life in the Trinity.”
In our individualistic culture, baptism is often treated as a personal, individual, “Get out of sin free” card. But on Holy Trinity Sunday, we are reminded that the God who is present with us in the water and the Word is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—one in three and three in one, a community in God’s self—making baptism anything but an individual experience. Through baptism, we are united with all the baptized in the one body of Christ, anointed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and joined in God's mission for the life of the world.

Lutherans baptize infants chiefly because we trust in God’s free gift of grace, seen in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and poured out on all the baptized. But because we baptize infants, we also we put our trust in community. We know that Johnathan, Ivana, Reese, Prestyn, Grant, Jackson and Liam do not come to the water of their own accord or with faith in God today. We trust in community—this community—to fulfill the promises of baptism.

In the years to come we will love them, pray for them, place in their hands the Holy Scriptures, and tell them about Abraham and Sarah, David and Goliath, Jonah and Noah, and Mary and Joseph. We will forgive them as Christ forgave us; we will gather with them at the table to share the bread and the wine; and we will watch eagerly to see how God uses them in God’s mission to the world.
And we will help them remember their baptisms.

When bullies try to tell our children who they are, we help them remember they belong to Christ, in whom they were baptized.

When cancer or addiction or depression try to claim our sons and daughters, we help them remember they have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and claimed as sons and daughters of God.

When society labels children as learning disabled, troublemakers, underachievers, or simply “different”, we help them remember they have been marked with the cross of Christ forever.

When any child of God doubts her worth or becomes weighed down by sin and judgment, we help her remember she has been washed clean, once and for all, through water and the Word.

And when, like Nicodemus, our children ask us, “How can these things be?” we will speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen: God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

And all God’s people said: Amen.