Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Good morning! I don’t know if any of you have yet caught on to the irony that today is Baptism Sunday, but that we do not – in fact – have a baptism today. Now, the pastor side of me was looking forward to today because if there had been one scheduled, it would have been my very first baptism. So that side of me wants to look out at all of you and say, “Come on people, you need to start making more babies! I need some dunking practice!!!”
But then I think about the 28-year-old-married-without-children-who-has-parents-that-are-getting-a-little-anxious-for-grandchildren side of me that is simultaneously screaming “Noooooo thank you! I am not ready for that kind of commitment. I can barely keep my dog alive, let alone a human baby! Plus, there is only so much poop that I can bare cleaning up after in one day!” Which is all to say that “No, you will not find me admonishing anybody here to have more children, less I become the object of scrutiny amongst you.”
But it is my duty and honor as a pastor to talk with you all about what Baptism is all about. Now, I’m sure that there are some of you who have been raised in the faith, and perhaps know more about Baptism than I could possibly explain. But my guess, is that more than we would like to admit, there are a lot of us here that have really only a vague notion of what Baptism is and why we do it. So today, is going to be primarily a day about teaching what us ELCA Lutherans think about this ancient rite, and why we do things the way that we do them.
Now, there are many, many things that we could say about Baptism. In the readings today, there are images of water and fire, there’s a dove coming down from the sky, John the Baptist talks about repentance and fruit, there’s some allusions to hell-fire and salvation, etc etc – and this is all just a small cross-section of what the Bible has to say about Baptism.
But today, I want to break it down into three things that as Lutherans, we think are the important – and the first one is grace. If there is one thing, and one thing only that I hope you remember today about baptism, it’s that it is first and foremost God’s grace being poured out onto all of us. The Lutheran Church confesses that baptism is entirely God’s work. And that means, it is not about how much we believe and it is not about us making a decision to follow Christ, it is about God bestowing on us the gift of grace. And that’s the reason that, unlike many Christian churches, the Lutheran church baptizes infants: we think that baptism is about God making a decision for us, not us making a decision for God.
Some people might ask, “Why on earth would a little tiny baby need grace?” Aren’t they perfectly innocent little creatures whose only job it is to love us and make cute cooing sounds? Now, this might sound a little bit harsh to some of you, but here me out before you get angry: Babies are selfish. In fact, they might be the most selfish creatures on the planet. And I don’t have to be a parent myself to know that this is true. All I have to do is to see the haunted look in my mother’s eyes when I ask her what my twin brother and I were like as babies.
Now, my mother loves my brother and I about as much as a parent can love a child. And even though she would never say a bad word about either of us, she can’t help but let a few details slip. Things like “You and your brother used to take turns waking up in the middle of the night.” Or “you were both over eight pounds at birth.” Or even “I stopped being able to sleep in after you two were born.” From these little details, I know for a fact, that my brother and I were pretty darn selfish as babies. We caused my parents many a sleepless night, we made messes in quite a few pairs of diapers, and we never cleaned up after ourselves.
All of that is simply to say this: that from the very beginning – even as babies – we need grace. And like my parents who loved us unconditionally – despite us being the headaches that we were slash are – in Baptism God declares his own unconditional love and grace for all of us.
The second Lutheran understanding of Baptism might be a little startling if you aren’t used to this kind of language, but I’ll just go ahead and say it in the most straightforward way that I can: in baptism, what we receive … is death.
Now, this is confusing and hard to hear for a lot of reasons, but one thing that Martin Luther stressed was that we ought to “call a thing what it is” or in other words, we strive to be as straightforward and honest as we can be. We live in a broken world. All around us every day we are witnesses to people hurting each other. On the news we see image after image of unimaginable violence. We experience brokenness in our own communities when we see people experiencing homelessness. We experience brokenness in our own families when we can’t even speak to each other during the holidays. We experience brokenness in our friendships when we bury our hurts for the sake of keeping the peace.
And God’s response to all of this is to say that this needs to change. And the kind of change that is required isn’t about tweaking who we are like in self-help books. It’s not about sweeping the bad parts of ourselves under the rug and saying everything is “okay.” The kind of change that God requires is total and complete change. The kind of change that comes first from death – more specifically, the death of Jesus on the cross. That’s why the apostle Paul asks in his letter to the Romans, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” “Therefore…” He writes, “just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
And that is exactly what the last part of baptism is all about: resurrection. The great mystery isn’t that we die in the waters of baptism, but that God creates new life. I want to be clear though that this doesn’t happen in some mystical sense, but it happens in a way that we can feel and see and even touch. God is actually making something happen in baptism.
Most importantly, when God raises a baptizee up from the waters, that person becomes a part of God’s family – God’s church. In my experience, this has been particularly true. A lot of you know by now that I was actually baptized right here at Bethany in 1984. We moved when I was only five, so I have very few memories of Bethany or Crystal Lake. It was 23 years before we came back. We moved to Ohio for my grade school years, and then out to Utah for Jr. and Sr. High. Afterwards, I went to college up in Minnesota and finally to Seminary in the Twin Cities.
And in all my travels, I never dreamed that I would be back in Crystal Lake, much less Bethany Lutheran church. I certainly didn’t think that anybody would remember me. Yet when I was called here, I was welcomed back like an old member of the family. You invited me into your homes, some of you brought out old pictures of me as a kid, and you swamped my wife and me with baskets full of food!
And that’s exactly the kind of tangible baptismal experience that I’m talking about. Even if you are the kind of person that has strayed away from your baptismal roots; even if you haven’t seen the inside of a church building for the past 23 years because you’ve been addicted to alcohol and too ashamed to come; even if you have depression and feel like you are unworthy and that nobody could possibly remember you – in God’s family, you are always known and loved and remembered.
After Jesus himself was baptized in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit comes down and God announces from heaven “You are my son, the beloved; with you I am will pleased.” Or in another translation from The Message “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.”
And those are the very same words that God utters at every baptism. And at your own baptism, when you came up out of the waters as a completely new person, God said to you “You are my Son or daughter, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.” And no matter how far you stray or what you might do, that can’t be taken away from you. God will always love and remember you.
Amen.
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