Sermon For JANUARY 9, 2000
First Sunday after Epiphany
JEWISH TESTAMENT: God’s Spirit Over the Waters ~ Genesis 1:1-5
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: Jesus is Baptized ~ Mark 1:4-11
Well I find myself a bit distracted this morning. We just got back Friday evening from going down to the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot in San Diego to celebrate Matthew’s graduation. We brought him with us when we came back late Friday night. Yesterday we had a party at the house with Matthew’s friends and then tidied up after that so that we could welcome all of you to our house this afternoon. But the graduation was an experience that we would not have envisioned a year ago. We thought that Matthew was headed some other direction. As this decision evolved we had time to become accustomed to it, but it was still quite a powerful experience to be sitting in the bleachers before the parade grounds. Ten football fields is what I figured it to be, which is a large amount of space. But if you put ten football fields side by side all the way down, that was the parade ground where the Marines did their drills and marched for graduation. Some four hundred and three marines graduated on Friday. That happens week after week after week after week, with occasional breaks, but groups are always coming in and going through their thirteen weeks of life changing experiences and then moving to the time of graduation. We watched as they came on in their uniforms with their shoes sparkling in the sunlight. That was an amazing part of the vision. I find myself now at one of those “Kodak Moments,” where it’s “turn around and you’re three. Turn around and you’re twelve. Turn around again, you’re out the door.” I have talked for a long time about being ready for “empty nest,” but it is a little bit difficult when it begins to happen right at this point. It reminds me of a time, about nineteen and one half years ago when I was also preoccupied on a Sunday morning. We were anticipating Matthew’s birth. As the time got close we discovered that we would know the exact day of his birth because he was upside down and wasn’t going to come out without some good help. He was delivered on a Friday and then two days later I was scheduled to preach. The scripture passage that morning was about Nicodemus asking Jesus what he had to do to lead a faithful life. Being told that he had to be born again. He said, “How can I be born again? How can I enter my mother’s womb and be born all over again?” Jesus said that he had to born of the Spirit to begin his life anew, in order to have the right relationship with God. What I talked about that morning was the way that Matthew had come into the world, not in the usual way or the natural way, but through a c-section with help from the doctors and the nurses. The baby was every bit as welcome as a baby that would have been born vaginally. That he was every bit as much of a baby as any other baby was. And that there wasn’t a “right way” of being born into the world. The important part was being born into the world. Now we had a congregation much like part of you. A congregation in which people who had been born into the church and were now sixty or seventy years old. They had been part of the church their whole lives. To talk to them about being born again was a phrase that was not familiar to them. In fact, for a lot of people it was a very uncomfortable phrase. When you have always been a part of a faith community, when you have always believed in God, believed in love, believed in a greater power, then how do you become born again when you have already been born into a life of faith? Yet there are others that insist that if you are going to be a proper Christian that you need to have some life-changing experience. When all of a sudden you saw the errors of your sinful ways and decided to pick up and turn your life around and return to God’s purposes and to God’s love. What I said that morning was that there is not one correct way to be in a relationship with God, not one right way to be part of the faith community, part of the family of God. Instead, some people come upon their faith gradually. Over the years as they learn more and more and they grow into their faith. Others are born into their faith and it grows and matures, but it has always been there. Still others find that they have a point in their life where they have reflected upon their activities and the things that they have done and have decided that changes are necessary. Those people then do have a powerful life changing experience, to become born again as Christians. But there is no one right way to become a Christian. You can be a Christian in all of those different ways, and probably many more.
When we come to baptism we can talk about that same sort of issue. I want to say, first of all, that in the Protestant tradition baptism is a sacrament of the church. It’s not a magic action. It is not somehow conveying something that wasn’t there already. The situation is not one in which you are unloved before you are baptized then after baptism you are full of God’s love. God has loved you from the very beginning. Baptism is a sacrament of the church. It is part of the ritual of the institution, it is a faith action. It is when someone stands up before the gathered faith family and says, for himself or herself as an adult of a teen-ager, that, “I believe in God. I believe in Jesus of Nazareth. I believe that God was revealed in Jesus as the Christ. This is the place I want to be. These are the people who will help me grow.” When you are baptized as an infant your parents are standing before the community saying, “We now have this beautiful child and we want this child to grow and love God. So we stand before you here this day and ask for your help, so that together we may raise this child to be a good and loving person, a disciple of Jesus Christ, and a follower of God’s ways.”
There is not one right way to be baptized. And however you are baptized, you are baptized into the Christian Church. You are not baptized as a Roman Catholic. You are not baptized as a Lutheran, or Presbyterian, member of the United Church of Christ. If you are baptized by sprinkling. If you are baptized by water poured from a shell. If you are baptized by immersion by being dunked under the waters of a river or a lake or a special baptistery. However you are baptized you become part of the church, not just this church, but you become part of the whole Christian church. You are not assuring God’s love. God loved you before you were baptized. Sometimes things need to be said out loud. You can show in your actions that you love somebody. Sometimes those words have to be spoken out loud. Two people can have a loving relationship, a marriage, without having gone through a ceremony. Without even having the state approve it, you can have a good loving relationship. But if you have a marriage ceremony, you are standing before friends and family, saying, “We love each other. We are committed to each other. We want your help so that we might maintain our faithfulness to one another. When all of you were baptized, either you made a statement or your parents made a statement for you and this church became a part of your life. This church became your faith family. And it nurtured you as long as you were able to be part of this church, and if circumstances and decisions took you to some other place, this church still was part of your faith history, part of your spiritual journey.
We are here as God’s people. We are not here to be a special club. Instead we are here to be a nurturing faith community. Helping people to grow up to love themselves, to love others, to do the things that Jesus taught. I am pleased that all of you can be here today for this special celebration. If you are now far away from this place, or somehow you have moved away from the church, I urge you to take steps to reconnect with faith communities. The faith community is a very important part of being a person in today’s world. We need the help of others to sort through what is good and bad. To help us sort through what God wants us to do in our lives, because we get very many confusing messages.
Thank you again for being here. May God’s blessing be upon us. Amen.