LIVING WITH A BAPTISMAL IMAGINATION
Texts: Mark 1:9-11, 16-17; Acts 2:37-38; Romans 6:3-5;
Galatians 3:27-28; 2 Timothy 1:5-7; Matthew 28:19-20

John Calvin once wrote:

God knows we are creatures, and so
loves us in ways that we can understand:
In bread and wine and water.

Today we’re talking about how God loves us with water, that is, in baptism.

Baptism is the central emblem of our life in Christ. Walter Brueggemann says we live with a “baptismal imagination," this emblem firing our imagination, shaping the way we think and live.
So today, this sermon on baptism. How we practice it here, and what it means.

I

The apostle Paul, urging the young church toward “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” wrote:

There is one body and one Spirit
...one hope of your calling, one
Lord, one faith, one baptism,
one God and Father of us all,
who is above all and through all
and in all.
Ephesians 4:4-6

It was in that great spirit and hope that our first senior minister, George Heaton, in 1950, stunned the congregation by saying we should honor and accept all baptisms as sufficient for membership, even as we continued to practice believers baptism by immersion as our form. He said he’d had a bad dream about Albert Schweitzer coming to join the church and he had to say, No, you can’t join because you were baptized by the spoonful rather than the gallon.

The next night the deacons took him on and said they were not ready for such a change. Heaton then wrote a letter to the congregation saying that it was the congregation, not the senior minister, who set policy for the church (do I hear an Amen!?), and that the church would continue its traditional Baptist policy. He then added one of the best sentences I’ve ever heard from a minister: “This is not the first time people and minister have disagreed. I hope it will not be the last.”

But he had set wheels in motion, and in 1960 the Commission of Forty affirmed the change to accept all baptisms. In 1968 the Mecklenburg Baptist Association asked us to change our policy or be “disfellowshipped.” - - that’s the Baptist euphemism for being booted out. We refused and in 1969 were kicked out of the local Baptist association. (We and St. John’s Baptist.)

But it was our change in baptismal policy begun back in 1950 that helped shape our becoming an ecumenical people of God.

We continue to practice the Baptist form of baptism as our practice: believers baptism. It is our best reading of the New Testament: Baptism as the faithful act of a person who has decided to follow Jesus.

It is “sacrament”, a sacred action, a meeting place between the divine and the human, where the person is acting, and the congregation and God is acting.

II

Now to the meaning, or symphony of meanings, of baptism. If baptism is a sign of salvation, the central emblem of our life in Christ, it must have a symphony of meanings not one or two. Today I identify seven meanings. There are more, always more.

First, Following Jesus and calling him Lord. “Follow me,” Jesus said to his disciples, and men and women dropped their nets, dropped their lives, and dropped their attachments and followed.
In the book of Acts people were baptized in “the name of Jesus.” We hear his name as a tattoo - - The more Jesus hopefully more enduring that Billy Bob or Angeline - - as a daily reminder of who we are and who we’re trying to be: Persons like Christ.

The earliest confession of faith, used in the New Testament as a baptismal confession, was: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” It is the only confession we require here at this church, no longer creed.

What does this compact and many layered confession mean? It means, among other things, Jesus is “anointed one” of God and I follow as Lord of my life, my spiritual center. He is the Living One, the Risen One. He is the one whose way leads me to God and shows me how to walk God’s way in the world. He is the decisive disclosure of God to me. At baptism we say “Jesus Christ is Lord.” And as we follow him we learn what this means for us. It’s final meaning is not written in a dictionary but in our life. As we follow.

Second meaning: New birth as the beloved of God. When Jesus was baptized the Spirit of God descended and a voice said, “You are my son, the beloved, in you I am well pleased.” When we are baptized God says to us: You are my beloved daughter, son, in whom I am well pleased!” Henri Nouwen writes:

We are intimately loved long before our
parents, teachers, spouses, children and friends
loved or wounded us. That’s the truth of our lives.
That’s the truth I want you to claim for yourself. That’s
the truth spoken by the voice that says, “You are
my Beloved.”1

Third meaning: Washing Away of Sins. Water washes, as does God’s love, as a mother bathing her child. Baptism means forgiveness. It means a forgiveness that has been on its way to you from God’s heart from your birth, and a forgiveness that will be part of your life every moment forever.
And all your sins are forgiven, not just some of them. In baptism we get all wet, completely wet, not a little wet. God washes all your sins, not just some.

I baptized a young adult in a river one day. The next year he lost his job, falsely accused. He fell into a deep depression, checked himself into a hospital. He said what kept him from killing himself was a photograph he kept close by, a picture of his baptism in the river.

Luther said we should rise every morning from our pillows with the words: “I am baptized!” I am forgiven, the beloved of God.

Fourth meaning: The Gift of the Spirit. At baptism Jesus was anointed with the Spirit. The ancient symbol of the giving of the Spirit is the Laying on of Hands. It is part of our baptism ceremony.
And we are given the Spirit to be God’s ministers in the world. All of us. Baptism is the ordination of the whole people of God. We are priests to one another, and to the world. The Spirit’s call and the Spirit’s gifts may change as you go through your life. So stay turned. “Keep on being filled with the Spirit,” Paul says.

Fifth meaning: Turning and entering the kingdom of God. The English word derived from the New Testament is “Repent.” But the Greek and Hebrew words are better. The Hebrew word is turn, turn to God. The Greek word is metanoia, a change of one’s mind, being given a new mind.

Paul liked the phrase “New Creation” to describe the kingdom of God. “If anyone is in Christ,” he wrote, “there is a new creation, he, she is a new creature. The old has gone, behold the new has come.”

So baptism means “conversion,” but conversion is more than a moment, it is a life-time of turnings.

William Willimon cites Reformation scholar David Steinmetz who said that the Reformers believed that the sin was so deep and strong and that the gospel was so demanding and different that it took a lifetime of conversions to become the new creation God made us to be.

I can count 6 or 7 conversions for Peter in the New Testament - - and those are just the ones I can see. I cannot count my own - - and I pray there are more coming. Williman writes:

Presumably, we never become too
old, too adept at living the
Christian life to be exempt
from the need for more conversion, additional
turning....Conversion is a process
more than a moment.

Every day we let go of more and more of the old self, the false self, and everyday we embrace more and more or the new self, the true self. Thus we enter the work of God’s new creation in the midst of the old.

Sixth meaning: Becoming Part of the Body of Christ. We are given a community at baptism. “No one gets to heaven alone,” said John Wesley. We need one another, far more than we ever know. Maya Angelou writes:

Lyin’, thinkin’ last night
how to find myself a home
where the water is not thirsty
and the loaf bread is not stone
and I came up with something
and I think I’m not wrong
nobody, but nobody can make it all alone.

And this community, it is itself a place where the new creation is happening, a community of equals and a community of friends. The “old creation” divisions are falling away. “In Christ,” Paul says, “there is no Jew or Gentile, master, slave, male or female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The differences will always be there, delicious and challenging differences, but here they lose their power to divide. “Hospitality,” says Henri Nouwen is the creation of a safe space where people can come and be who they are without fear. This is the space Christ creates in the community of God. In baptism you get a family.

Seventh meaning: We merge our life with the life of Christ. He lives in us and we in him. We enter into his life and death and resurrection. This one takes a lifetime to understand.

It has a spiritual/mystical dimension: His spirit lives in us and ours in him. It has a psychological dimension: There are parts of us that need to die in order for something to be reborn, things we let go of so we can be all God has made us to be. Anne Lamott says that everything she has ever needed to let go of in life has claw marks on it. It is the pattern of true life: life, death, new birth.
It has a moral/ethical dimension to it which we see enacted in Jesus this Holy Week. Our life becomes a life for others, we take on their suffering, defend and befriend them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s friends of Union Seminary begged him not to go back to Germany where Hitler was holding sway. But back he went, this brilliant young, theologian, to be with his own people in that terrible time, to help Jews escape, to oppose Hitler and be put to death, April 9, 1945, 61 years ago today. He was 39 years old.

He wrote of “costly discipleship.” There is no discipleship without a cost, a cost determined in your own relationship with Christ and the suffering of the world. Everyone bears a different cost, a different cross, but there is always a cross. Bishop Tutu said that when we stand before Jesus at the final day he will ask, Where are your scars?

We follow a Lord who entered Jerusalem on a donkey, servant king of a new kind of kingdom, who opposed the powers-that-be and was put to death by the Roman state.

It was a huge scandal for the early church that their Messiah and Lord was killed on a cross. It is a huger scandal for the church today that there is so little cross involved in our lives. Get involved with the suffering of this world, and there will be a cross, some cross. And in the cross Christ’s life and yours merge as one.

The final, wonderful meaning of life, death, and resurrection lies beyond the walls of this world. We live, we die, and we shall rise with Christ and live in the eternal love of God. We each will have our Easter.

Conclusion

When a baptismal candidate enters the water I introduce them and ask them to share their faith. They say in voices high and low, young and old: “Jesus Christ is Lord!”

Then I ask the congregation to say these words to the candidate:

We rejoice with you,
we will pray for you,
and we will walk with you
in the way of Jesus
Then I baptize them with these words
Upon the confession of your faith
in Jesus Christ as Lord
and in obedience to his command
I baptize you
in the name of Jesus
and in the name of God
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
One God,
Mother of us all.
Under the water they go and when they rise I lay hands on them and offer this blessing and commissioning, baptism as their ordination to be Christ’s minister in the world:
May the Lord bless you and keep you
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you
and be gracious unto you.
May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you
And through you, give the world peace.

And you? Is Christ calling you to follow in baptism this day?