Scripture: Psalm 8 Mark 10:13-16.
J made me a little nervous about this sermon. She and B and I were talking a week or so ago about this service, and somewhere in the course of the conversation, J said something to the effect (I know these weren’t the exact words, but I hope I’m quoting the sense of them correctly) “Baptism is one of those things about Christianity that I understand.”
That’s what made me a little nervous. Because I am quite capable of taking some concept that is quite clear at the outset and talking about it until it is anything but clear. In fact that is a danger any time I open my mouth, that I will succeed in making something seem more complicated or confusing than it was before I started talking about it.
That is actually my training. I’m sure there are some seminaries that approach the training of ministers more like a catechism, where they try to pump prospective ministers full of as many answers as possible. The Divinity School that I went to had a different approach. We were barraged with as many questions as you could imagine, and then some. We students came to the conclusion that the theory of ministerial education being employed was that if a person could survive 4 and a half years of questioning every conceivable aspect of the Christian faith and at the end still have some critical mass of faith and belief and affirmation in tact, then he or she must have been meant for the ministry.
We were taught, as a matter of principle, to see everything in as complicated a light as possible, and I can easily remember a number of occasions when people have told me that they thought they understood something before I started talking about but that now they weren’t so sure. Sometimes I took that as a compliment, since that’s what I was intending to do. But other times I hadn’t intended to make things more complicated, but it happened anyway. I am not intending to make L’s baptism a complicated thing today, but there is always that danger, so I’m a little nervous.
Actually my own thoughts about baptism are not especially complicated—at least I don’t think they are—but I do think baptism has multiple meanings and rich meanings and at least for me it creates sort of visceral feelings that may not be so easy to put into words. It is not so much that there is anything terribly complicated, but at the same time it’s true, I believe, that you can’t reduce it to a few simple sentences.
What we have done today is something approximating infant baptism. I say approximating because as anyone can plainly see, the person we baptized is not exactly an infant. But he is a person who is too young to know very much about what is going on, who is not speaking for himself and making his own decision about what is going on, and we used a few drops of water to baptize him rather than a whole tank full or a whole river full. Other kinds of baptism happen also to have some rather deep meanings for me, but we’ll save those for another time. I’ll also save for another time my comments on the meanings I do not find in baptism, but that others have and do. We can discuss original sin, for instance, some other time—not today.
I just want to try to put into words a few of the meanings I experience in this kind of baptism. The first has to do with L’s entry into the Christian community, and this Christian community. Baptism is a sacrament of belonging.
To me, this is its most straightforward meaning. L has just become—officially—a Christian and a Sojourner. Of course there is not one of us who doubted that he was already a part of this community and through us a part of the larger Christian community. But now it’s official, and we have lifted up and celebrated and given thanks for and renewed our awareness of the connections between us—how important they already are and how even more important they may become. This is a sacrament because these relationships are much more important than membership in an organization.
Even here, on this rather straightforward meaning of baptism, my mind goes off in several directions, at least. I think of how lucky L is to have the loving family he does—B, J, K, grandparents, extended family here today and not here, and how lucky he is to have Sojourners as a church family, but also hoping we will be able to live up to what we have promised and all that is involved in being a church family, and knowing how we do fail at that from time to time, all of us. And so there is gratitude and celebration in me but also a bit of fear and trembling about these promises. Hopefulness that L will be here and the rest of us too to have the chance to live out our connections and commitments to each other, knowing we won’t do so perfectly, hoping we’ll do so well enough.
But then I think too of this other matter of bringing L officially into the Christian church in general. That causes some fear and trembling in me too. I am not always proud to be a Christian. Sometimes when I look at what the Methodist church did at its convention recently, and what the Southern Baptists have done recently at theirs, I am glad and proud to be part of the U.C.C. But then I have just returned from the Central Atlantic Conference and I can tell you that the U.C.C. is not identical with the kingdom of God either. I can also tell you that I am not a Christian today because of “the church”. I am a Christian because of some individual Christian people who opened my eyes and my heart to what being Christian is all about.
I hope L has an uneasy relationship with this group he has just become a part of. We have brought him into a body of people that we hope he will have problems with, that we hope he will never live in complete peace with. But then that’s all right. It is not only for his benefit, but for the church’s that we have brought him in. I find myself praying today that we all continue to have an uneasy relationship with the Christian church, even our own part of the Christian church, even while we find within it a nurturing community and enormous resources for our living.
That brings me to a second line of thought. That baptism is also equally and just a truly a sacrament of unbelonging. Like so many things in Christianity baptism has a paradoxical character, expressing two apparently opposite things at the same time.
The conventional wisdom about baptism is that it is an expression of the love of God, but that needs to be unpacked. And that phrase says bunches of things to me.
It says that a child’s, a person’s life does not need to be proved or somehow made to be worthwhile, that the worth, the preciousness, the sacredness is innate; it is given; it is intrinsic to our being. We live in a society, I’m afraid, that wants to quantify everything, that likes to define people according to the functions they perform and the usefulness or productivity they can demonstrate. We live in a society that often does not see beyond the measurable parts of ourselves. We live in a society where people are often looked at according to the kind of thing that might appear on their resumes.
I’m not worried about this for Liam. I figure the chances are good that he will have a pretty good resume some day. But I’m worried for all of us that when we see ourselves completely in this way, that we will sell our souls to the grade givers, that we will become what others make of us or say about us. We are intelligent because someone gives us an A. We are helpful because someone says thank you. We are useful because someone pays us a lot of money. We are important because our name appears in the paper, or on a letterhead. We are worthwhile because of some tangible accomplishments or contributions. Perhaps all this is inevitable. Perhaps it is just the way the world will always be, and the way we will always be—to look for that kind of affirmation.
But that’s why the act of baptism is so important. Precisely the point, or a point, of baptism, especially infant baptism is that God does not first take the measure of us and then decide whether or how much to love us, whether or to what degree our lives are worthwhile. Part of what baptism says is that we are loved before we are able to love, that we are given much before we are able to give, that our lives are deemed not just worthwhile, but holy, before we have any opportunity to prove it.
Baptism is a sacrament of belonging…and unbelonging. Unbelonging because we are always more than what others determine us to be. Unbelonging because the measure of the person cannot be taken by any tools the world has to offer. Unbelonging because we do not belong to other people. Unbelonging because there are places inside us that only God can touch, and that don’t fit anywhere in this world.
The love of God. The touch of holiness on our lives, that does not come from others or from anything worldly. The love of God. If we are honest with ourselves, we need to admit that sometimes the love of God can be elusive. Even the most fervent believers may not always have a clear sense of what the love of God is all about. And if we are honest with ourselves, we know that none of us get by just on the love of God. We need the human kind too, very much. By the grace of God, L will know a full measure of that love, that very human love, during his life. He will need it, as we all do.
As humans we do not get by on the love of God alone, not many of us do. But there are also times when nothing but the love of God will do, when we will need to know from somewhere very deep down inside of us that this life, my life, your life, L’s life, is sacred. The sacrament of baptism says that belief, that sense of God love, is offered to us as a gift. I pray Liam will know that gift too. I pray that we may all know that love of God, offered to us as a gift, and that that love will sustain us and see us through. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 18, 2000