The Baptized Life

Epiphany 1

Matthew 3:13-17

New Yorkers are usually pretty helpful when someone asks for directions.  In fact, I’ve never once seen a New Yorker decline to help a tourist who’s needing to get from point A to point B.  But on the subway a few weeks back, a young man asked an open question to those of us near him -- he wanted to know how to get to a certain neighborhood fast.  Well, perhaps we were too helpful.  We offered him at least two or three ways to get there!  Given his look of befuddlement, I’m not sure if we helped him or not!  

So please, if someone asks you for directions, suppress the mini-essay on the difference between weekday and weekend schedules.  Don’t offer any reflections on which lines you think are more reliable.  Don’t add the nuance of how they might avoid extra walking.  Just do your best to figure out the easiest way for them to get there, and give it to them, unadorned, starting with step one.  First, walk this way and make sure you get the Express train headed downtown . . . 

Incarnation is a community moving forward.  We want to grow into the love of God.  So it’s important to give good directions and be clear about how this journey gets started.  Yes, it’s a complex journey, full of unpredictable twists and turns.  The further you go in the life of faith, the more you learn that flexibility and the capacity to adapt are key.  But when you begin.  When you’re starting out.  You want things simple and clear.  Where do I start?  We start the life of faith in baptism.  We follow Jesus into the water, where we’re dunked and raised blinking into a new light.  You die there, you leave all of yourself in that water.  And you come out clean, powerful, and with lots of work to do.

Baptism marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry.  John the baptizer is busy at the Jordan River baptizing people who repent of their sins.  And here comes Jesus, and John hesitates.  Why are you here for a sinners baptism?  You’re not a sinner.  Baptize me anyway, says Jesus, this will “fulfill all righteousness.”  “Trust me on this one.”  Jesus is the sinless one who lives in complete fidelity to God, so he doesn’t need baptism like we do.  But he goes down into the water with John, and invites us to follow him there.

In baptism, Jesus’ chooses the life that God the Father had chosen for him.  So too with us.  In baptism, we signal that what God wants for us, we want too.  God invites us to be followers of Jesus Christ, and by imitating Jesus in baptism, we say, Yes, we want that too.  We want to belong to a community of his followers.  We want to get busy doing God’s work of love in our corner of the world.

Notice what happens at Jesus’ baptism.  Coming up from the water, he sees the heavens break open and the Spirit descend upon him as a dove.  And then he hears the Father’s voice: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”  This baptismal scene is our cue for how to read the rest of the gospel.  It cannot simply be read as the artfully told biography of the man Jesus.  It is a complex, Trinitarian story about the Father, the Son who takes on flesh, and the Spirit who powers all Jesus does.  Jesus’ life and ministry take place in the power of God’s Spirit.  He heals and casts out demons and performs miraculous signs by the power of God.  But he does not work like a hired hand or a slave.  He works with gladness and joy.  His life is marked by the voice of God’s delight.

So first let me say a word about the gift of the Spirit’s power that comes to us in baptism.  The baptized life is an active life.  It is a life of serving and loving others.  The baptismal Spirit energizes this activity and provides a fruitfulness that exceeds our capacities.  The Spirit enables our efforts to love, and then amplifies those efforts.  By God’s Spirit, we are able to do more than we thought.  That is, your life is no longer just your life.  It is a life in Christ.  Your life is now a way of participating in Christ’s life and ministry.  Your life is a historical continuation of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  You emerge from baptism with a vocation, a calling, a ministry to love and serve God and neighbor.  One constant danger for all of us is falling prey to a low view of the baptized life.  Our task as a church is to help one another find those avenues of service and sacrifice that will be our particular forms of ministry.

And a word about God’s delight in us.  You, too, can hear God’s voice: I take delight in you.  So the baptized life is an active life of service and love.  Yes.  And you can work yourself to death.  You can burn yourself out.  You can grind away out of obligation.  Your attempts to live before God can easily turn into a drudgery.  You might get tired and fatigued of course.  Life is busy, and when you add this calling to active service on top of all you do, it can become overwhelming.  But you also might become cynical and yield to despair.  All your effort to do good, to serve, to love, might meet with tiny or non-existent results.  The looming power of evil may wash over your little attempts at goodness and cause you to loose heart.  Or, you might despair at the incorrigible wickedness of your own heart.  That’s why the baptized life is a life that basks in God’s delight.  God has already lavished on you everything.  God loves you so much that even God’s own life is not withheld from you.  God has given us all the spiritual riches in Jesus Christ.  The baptized life is our grateful and celebratory response for these gifts.  At the center of our lives together is the task of hearing this voice of delight, of celebration.  We work as those who are loved.

So what happens when a person is baptized?  We refer to baptism as a sacrament.  This means that baptism is a ritual we perform in which God promises to be at work.  It isn’t merely a symbolic gesture or an empty ritual.  God gives to us as the church certain practices or rituals and God promises to be present and active in those actions.  God gives us two primary sacraments - baptism and the meal - both actions that look plain enough.  But they’re sites of God’s working in us and on us.  Baptism is our birth into God’s family and the eucharist is the meal by which God feeds the family.  So in baptism, God joins our lives to Jesus Christ.  God makes you a sharer in Jesus’ life.  We participate in his life, his ministry, his power, and his delight.  The Apostle Paul describes the drama of immersing a person under water as a visible symbol of dying, being buried, and rising with Jesus Christ.  This is the way that God transforms our lives into something new.  Jesus is the storehouse of God’s riches, and being joined to Jesus’ life unleashes all these riches into your life.

If we live with God’s power and delight, there will be a consistent flow of people into our midst who are curious about learning more, going deeper.  These new folks will want to know what Step One is.  Step One is baptism.  So if you’re here and you haven’t been baptized and want to be, let’s talk.  Find me today or email me or call me.  Maybe you’re already happily following Jesus and it just never came to your attention that baptism is the starting point.  Maybe you’ve hesitated because you weren’t sure what it meant or whether you’re ready for it.  The upcoming season of Lent is a great time to prepare for baptism.  And you should feel free to ask questions.  These practices of faith can seem strange, of course.

In Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote, the main characters, Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza, wander around pretending to be a brave knight and his courageous squire.  At one point, they wander onto the country estate of a duke and duchess who’ve heard stories about these two.  Quixote and Sancho are furiously trying to make a good impression on this royal couple.  But Sancho gets hung up in his stirrup.  Quixote falls back off his horse expecting Sancho to be there to catch him.  Sancho is hanging by one leg, and Quixote throws his back out.  The duke and duchess stifle their laughter and send their servants to rescue these two.  Back at the castle, they treat the knight and squire to a formal meal.  Instead of washing Quixote’s hands, the servants wash his beard, and use the soap suds to make an even bigger beard.  Other servants wash poor Sancho’s beard with filthy dish water.  But these two are intent on appearing as if they know what’s going on.  They’re not used to eating in castles, so they endure what they take to be strange rituals.  

If you’ve never been a part of a church before, practices like baptism can seem strange.  If you say, Jared I’m interested in baptism and want to prepare for it, we’ll begin a conversation.  There’s no reason you can’t be baptized soon.  Any bathtub, hot tub, or Long Island Sound will do in good weather.  Usually, we schedule it with a church so we can use their baptistry.  And waiting a little isn’t a bad thing - it’s pretty customary to prepare for baptism by a season of prayer and reflection.  My job as a pastor is to make sure you understand what you’re getting into.  You should know the benefits but also the costs.  You are committing to love and serve God in a community of Jesus’ followers for the rest of your life.  You are committing to live in humble fellowship with others, praying, singing, learning, growing, giving, and serving.

We don’t set any particular age for baptism.  It can happen when you’re seven or seventy-seven.  Some churches baptize infants by sprinkling, other churches baptize older persons by immersion, some churches offer both depending on your preference.  Our practice as a church is to immerse those who choose baptism for themselves, when they’re old enough to indicate their desire for baptism.  Now many of you were baptized as infants, and we fully honor those baptisms.  One baptism is good enough.  But when we baptize converts we immerse them fully in water.  That form of the ritual heightens the visual and theatrical drama of a sharing in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection.

At the house where I grew up, there was a pool.  And in the hot Kansas summers, my brothers and I spent most of the day in the pool.  My mom would keep her eye on us from the large windows in the living room overlooking the pool.  She occasionally had to intervene, as you might imagine.  One day after church we were practicing baptizing one another.  We had seen a baptism at church, and obviously it had intrigued us.  The ritual was so interesting.  Two people waded into the baptistry waters, said some official sounding words.  And then the baptized was lowered down and came up wet, gasping, smiling.  We were were artfully re-creating this scene in the pool when my mother cranked out the window and yelled, “Stop baptizing each other!”

I would like to point out two things.  First, the church’s practice of initiating people into the faith through baptism had created in us curiosity and desire.  We were so imaginatively engaged by this ritual that we took to theatrically performing it ourselves in the pool.  It was a way for us as kids to begin expressing our desire to take part in the life of the church.  Second, for my mother, baptism was something full of mystery, and worthy of reverence.  In her mind, this meant grade-school kids shouldn’t be pretending to baptize one another in the pool.  I’m not sure I agree with her on that theologically, but I get where she was coming from.  You can, of course, ape the outward and visible movements of baptism.  But at the heart of baptism is God’s promise to make the waters a place of transformation.  When we follow Jesus into the waters of baptism, God joins our lives to Jesus Christ and to his people.

For those of you baptized, live into the high calling that you received in your baptism.  For those not yet baptized, we invite you into the water, and into this wonderful life of faith in God.  If you’ve spent time dipping your toes into the waters of God’s love, perhaps now is the time to just jump in.  Cannonball!  This is what I want!