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January 11, 2009
Beth Foote - January 11, 2009
1 Corinthians 4: 1-5 ; Matthew 6: 24-34 ; Psalm 131
Baptism of our Lord
Genesis 1: 1-5
Mark 1: 4-11
Every summer our family goes to Johnson’s Beach on the Russian River in Guerneville, for a daytrip and a swim in the river. I love this place. The snack bar has soft serve ice cream for $1.00, and $2.00 homemade hamburgers. A kind way to describe it would be “homespun.” The changing room is a shack behind some willows. On the roof of the snack bar there’s a scratchy speaker that plays Frank Sinatra, and the old guy who runs the place sometimes bellows over the sound system at people on the beach who are horsing around. It has memories for me. I went there as a child, and I have photos of my grandparents there in the 1920’s. I rediscovered it when our kids went canoeing there with St. Dorothy’s summer camp.
Besides the retro ambiance of the beach, there’s something really cool about swimming in a river. As a life-long city/suburb dweller, I notice the lack of chlorine when I swim in a natural body of water. And unlike the Pacific ocean, and Lake Tahoe, it’s not that cold.
Today we’re standing on a similar kind of beach, Baptism Beach, ready to plunge in with several young candidates…Cairo Blair, Ava, Lydia and Teddy Honerkamp, and Jackson Sims.
Welcome to all of you who are here to support the Honerkamps, Sims, and Clowson-Blairs and your families and godparents to this wonderful occasion. It’s great to share this day with you.
Now, have you ever wondered why we use water in baptisms? Why do we get people (mostly little people) wet? Is it just to hear them cry? I promise the water is warm…
I think it goes back to Genesis, as we heard in our reading today. We heard about the very beginning of the world. A formless void. And a wind from God blows over the face of the waters. Water is the basis of life on earth. God creates water before anything else, before the first day.
Water is a mystery. Water is cleansing, quenches our thirst, and you feel so good when you’re well-hydrated. Water is always changing, flowing and moving. Water needs a container or plumbing system to make it work for us. We can try and manage water, but it’s a very wild thing. It can spill, flood, do damage. In fact, back at Johnsons’s Beach, the Russian River floods on a regular basis.
Water, like Life, is a mysterious, and wild phenomenon that can sometimes overwhelm us. We can even drown in it. And ironically, I think that is one reason why we use water in Baptism.
It makes the rite of Baptism that more real to us.
In getting our candidates wet, we acknowledge that life, like water, is unpredictable, messy, and sometimes dangerous.
Now, as parents and godparents, we protect our children from danger as best we can. But it’s still out there. The best we can do is to keep protecting them and to understand that God is with us and our children. In the baptism service today we will say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” By being baptized, we’re saying yes to the essence of life, and yes to God being with us on our unpredictable, amazing journey.
We’re also saying yes to God’s cleansing power. Baptism takes the form of ritual bath. By being baptized we acknowledge that we need God’s help because we are human. We need to be washed in God’s holiness. The symbolism of water’s cleansing properties reminds us of that.
In our reading from Mark we see Jesus standing on his Baptism Beach at the River Jordan. I imagine that beach on the Jordan might have been a little like Johnson’s Beach. A little rough around the edges. John the Baptist has always sounded a little cranky to me, like the guy at Johnson’s. Instead of a yelling over the public address system, John just shouted. Mark says that John wore an eccentric costume: camels hair with a leather belt around his waist. And who knows, with so many people there from Jerusalem and Judea, there may have been a biblical snack bar. Although I have a feeling only John ate the locusts and wild honey.
So Jesus comes to John down on the beach to be baptized. We don’t really know why he wanted to be baptized. It does seem important because this story that is in all four Gospels, and Mark’s is the earliest version.
If Jesus was sinless, why did he come down to the river to confess his sins and repent?
My sense is that Jesus knew his ministry was beginning and he wanted to mark it in some way. Perhaps he wanted to be dipped into that experience of being human, of washing and acknowledging that people are flawed and need forgiveness. Perhaps he did it to be more closely attuned to our human predicament, and prepare for his earthly ministry.
And really, isn’t it a bit mysterious why do we bring our children to be baptized, or come to be baptized ourselves?
Not so long ago, we baptized largely out of habit and fear. For hundreds of years, babies were baptized automatically right after being born. The Church believed that if you weren’t baptized, God might not let you into heaven, you didn’t belong. And there was the very real spectre of infant mortality. Infant baptism was part of the Christian culture. It’s just what you did. And perhaps there’s an element of that with us, still. We want to do the right thing.
But now, in this post-Christian world, I think that people make more of a conscious choice about their beliefs and the way they will live their lives and raise their children.
I think, like Jesus perhaps, we yearn for sacraments, for rituals that are markers for the transformative moments in our lives. As parents, our children grow and change before our very eyes.
Baptism acknowledges this and gives us an opportunity to pray and dedicate ourselves to their nurture and care with God’s help. We offer them to God’s care, and bring them to our Church community for care and so that both parents and the community can promise their involvement and support.
And just as Jesus marked his commitment to humanity, when he was baptized, our baptism marks our commitment to God. When we are baptized, we are join with Jesus in his journey from life into death and into resurrection. And our Baptism marks the beginning of our Baptismal ministry, which lasts the rest of our lives.
Mark says that John predicted that Jesus would come to be baptized. John said to the crowd, “I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
This is another mark of Baptism. We invoke the Holy Spirit to come just as the Holy Spirit came when in the form of a dove when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan. We may not see the Holy Spirit arrive like a dove---we can always hope that will happen---but at every baptism the Spirit does show up in some way.
It’s very powerful. The invocation of the Trinity, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit,” is the way all people in all branches of the Christian church are baptized, in fonts, rivers, lakes, and pools. It is the universal sign of there being One baptism, One Lord of all.
It’s an interesting sidebar today that we have the reading from Acts that shows something of the evolution of baptism. The Ephesians were baptized in a similar way as Jesus, for repentance. Paul says that receiving the Holy Spirit is crucial to baptism, but there is missing the three-fold Trinitarian formula of being baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In Acts, we see the beginnings of the Church and of the Sacraments.
Our Sacraments are an outward and visible signs of inward and invisible grace. And it’s no coincidence that our Sacraments are physical. In Baptism, we use real water and get wet. God knows we are physical creatures and that we crave physical assurance that we are loved. Likewise in the Sacrament of the Eucharist that we’ll share after the Peace, we eat real bread and drink real wine to help us understand that God becomes part of our very being.
Baptism is a one-time thing that lasts forever. You can’t “unbaptize” someone. One of the most beautiful moments in our service is when we anoint each candidate and say, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever.
As a Mom, I’ve reflected on that phrase in times of struggle and found strength in knowing that our children are sealed in the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever. The sign of the cross remains with you all the days of your life and beyond.
The river of life takes us many unexpected places. By being baptized we know in a sacramental, deep way that God knows us each by name.
In the next few moments our parents and godparents will proclaim their intention to do some very important things: to renounce Satan and the works of evil, and to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their savior.
This is all good stuff, but hard to do along with working, taking care of small children, driving to after school activities, doing the laundry, and paying the bills on time.
But remember that you’re not in this alone.
The whole community will also renew their Baptismal Vows and vow to uphold you in your promises.
You wonderful people are loved by God, and are supported by our Trinity community.
Let’s join Jesus on the Beach now, and prepare for Holy Baptism.
Amen.
