"God is Still Speaking through Baptism"
July 24, 2005: A-Pentecost-10
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, co-pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org

Scripture:
Acts 2:38-39
Peter said to [the gathered Pentecost crowds], "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to Christ."

Sermon:
As I was talking with Louise and with Jenni and Jeff in preparation for Elias' baptism this morning, it occurred to me that there was another major player in the liturgy with whom I had not talked: you, this congregation. You, too, are an important participant in this sacrament. And though we celebrate the sacrament of baptism here at United from time to time—not ever as often as we might like—to my memory, we've not spent much time talking about it, what it means and why we do it the way we do.

Don't get me wrong: As a general rule, I think we all-brain and no-body Protestants tend to talk way too much—and no smart cracks from the peanut gallery about long-winded preachers, now! I'm talking about myself, too. I mean, really, I'm standing up here right now talking about talking. But you know how we are. We have second-hour programs to talk about issues. We have book groups to talk about books. We have Bible studies to talk about the Bible. We're likely to spend more time talking about praying than actually praying, perhaps because we are more comfortable talking about God than talking with God.

But baptism, like communion, is a sacrament, which means it's not all about the words. In the classic Protestant understanding, the two sacraments are "outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace." But the word, "visible," just barely begins to cover it. In the same way that God came to us in Jesus, taking our flesh and blood, our whole human life upon God's own self, becoming the sign "Immanuel", that is, "God with us", so the sacraments are ways of embodying the grace of God, making it tangible, real in deed, not just word. In the waters of baptism, in their sound, in their touch, in the way they are poured out and flow over us, and in the ways we gather in networks of human relationships around the font as individuals, families, and communities of faith, we experience the grace of God in action with our whole bodies in a way that words alone cannot convey.

It's just that, well, so many of us have come to this congregation and to the larger United Church of Christ from someplace else, some other Christian tradition, or no Christian background at all, and, well, it's been a while since the rest of us were in Sunday school, that it serves us well to pause every once in a while and reflect on just what the heck we're doing here. Look: We've got water, we've got a baby... what's going on? So this morning, I am going to take a moment to talk about what we mean in this congregation—and what we don't mean—when we do what we did to Elias this morning. We say famously that "God is still speaking", so just what is God saying through the sacrament of baptism?

Of course baptism has been a part of our Christian tradition since the very beginning—since before the beginning, in fact, before the church itself was born. All four Gospels remember that before Jesus arrived on the scene, John the Baptizer "appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (Mark 1:4), calling the people of Jerusalem out into the desert to rededicate themselves to the vision of the just reign of God through the sign of baptism, already a part of the Jewish religious vocabulary. And all four Gospels tell that Jesus went out to John to receive baptism at his hands but got more than he bargained for. In his baptism with water Jesus also received the blessing of the Spirit of God who named him God's own beloved and claimed him for a saving ministry of embodying the good news of God's kingdom of love, justice, and peace for all people. And after Jesus' death and resurrection, when the time came for him pass on this ministry to his disciples, he also passed on to them—to us—the tradition of baptism, charging them in the Great Commission to "go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19).

So the story of the early Church, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, is the story of baptism—the mass baptism of those Jerusalem crowds under the influence of the wild Pentecost Spirit; the intimate roadside baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch; the converting baptism of Saul, persecutor of the church, into Paul, apostle of Christ; the boundary-breaking baptism of (1) Gentile (2) Roman (3) soldier Cornelius and his household, where Peter was led to exclaim in exaltation and a little exasperation, "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" (Acts 10:47) In baptism, the spreading church did not bring God with them but witnessed to what the Spirit of God was already doing in the lives of people near and far and welcomed them into the growing community of the body of Christ.

Down through the centuries, the church in every generation has added their own overlapping layers of meaning to this sign of water and the Spirit. In our tradition, the Reformed tradition of which the United Church of Christ is a part and in the tradition of this particular congregation, some of those layers are more and some less helpful to our understanding of what this sacrament says about our relationship with God. So as we explore just a few of those layers this morning, let's first be clear about what baptism does not mean for us.

Baptism is not magic. It is not the "exposure to the Son" that "may prevent burning" our neighbors in Christ up Whitney Avenue are advertising on their outdoor sign. It is not a muttered incantation, a wave of the hand, and a sprinkling with holy water designed to ward off the imagined horrors of limbo. And it is not some kind of supernatural Christian lockerroom shower to clean you up and "make ya feel better after ya done some sinnin'" and so to be desired early and often.

On the other hand, neither is baptism "merely" symbolic. It is not just this thing we do with some water and a few words to welcome people into the church, like teaching them the secret handshake or giving them the keys to the executive washroom. It is a sacrament. It is a sign, a time and a place and an action where, as our ancestors in faith recognized, our deep human desires—to know and to be known, to be welcomed and to belong, to be valued as individuals and to participate in the larger design—and God's deep intention to save all people come together and kiss. And where God is present, the world... and we... are changed, for real and for true.

This is the mystery of the sacrament, for the word "sacrament" itself means "mystery" in the root Latin. We do not understand just how God is present in the water and the words and the welcome, but we know God is. And so we use poetry to express the effect God's presence has on us. We use the poetry of nurture—of the warm waters of the womb in which we all begin life, of the gentle rains that water the earth and coax the seed to become seedling, shoot, and spreading vine. We use the poetry of naming—of dedicating new life to the Creator in whom we believe we all live and move and have our being, the God who names us and claims us before we first draw breath. We use the poetry of covenant and community—of redrawing the lines of faithful relationships that bind us together with God in the body of Christ to include the new members the Spirit brings into our midst. We use the poetry of repentance—not merely rejecting the sins of our past but embracing the way of God afresh even as God embraces us always. We use the poetry of resurrection—of being washed away and then reformed, dying to a way of life without God and being raised to new life in Christ by God.

And most of all, we use the poetry of grace, especially as we baptize the children God gives into our care. For these little ones clearly have no need to repent. They do not need to have their sins washed away. True, they are born into the same broke-down world as the rest of us, but they themselves are signs of pure potential in the world. They may do and become so many things for good or for ill over the course of their lives. But in the sacrament of baptism, the still-speaking God gets the divine word of grace in first: "Regardless of who you may become, I have created you, and created you good. You are my beloved, in whom I am well pleased." As we said moments ago during Elias' baptism, when we bring our children to these waters, we see God's grace poured out for them and for us. In God's embrace of these little living mysteries we glimpse part of the great mystery of grace, that there is nothing we can do to make God love us less and there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. We pray that Elias will grow into his life grounded in a deep, more-than-words understanding of this grace, and we commit ourselves here to teach him about God's love for him even as today he has taught us.

It is precisely this insistence on the power of God's grace to supercede any human action, even an action of the church, that led the members of this congregation back in '96—1796, that is—to decide that unlike in 99.9% of all other Christian churches ever baptism is not required for membership in this congregation. Now our forebears here were neither radical relativists nor theological slackers. Quite the opposite, in fact: they were prophets of grace, for they knew that God's love extended to their Quaker neighbors whose own worship of God in Christ did not include the practice of baptism. And so, rather than let a little water come between them and their sisters and brothers in faith, they recognized that God's grace trumps everything and removed the formal requirement. Look it up. It's all still there in our by-laws. Gathered here today we stand as heirs of their decision to embrace the grace of God that embraces us, all of us—male and female, young and old, rich and poor, straight and gay, of every ability, of every race and nation—without requirement and without reservation.

That being said: Baptism is still a good and holy thing, and the wider church of Jesus Christ recommends this sacrament for our prayerful reflection and our use as a tool to help shape our life together in faith. It is for this reason that Jenni and Jeff brought Elias before God in this community this morning, to help shape their life together as a family of faith within this larger family of faith and to ground that life together in grace. And so this morning, I want to invite you to remember your own baptism.

Now let's pause a moment and let the patent absurdity of that statement sink in. Remember your baptism? Few of us can do that. Most of us who were baptized received the sacrament much as Elias has today, as an infant, before our memories began to stick in any conscious way. True, some may have been baptized later in life, as is more common in some other Christian traditions, as among the Baptists or the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and they may remember, but some others of us may never have been baptized at all! How can we remember what we don't remember or what we never received?

So let me rephrase that: This morning, I invite you to remember and imagine your baptism. I invite you to remember and imagine that you are God's beloved child, chosen by God in love before you were born, before you yourself could choose for good or for ill. I invite you to remember and imagine that your whole being is grounded in the wild and powerful grace of God that knows no bounds, that flows free through the world nurturing us and naming us, washing our wounded lives, joining us in covenant community, and raising us to new life in Christ.

But enough words already. God is still speaking through baptism, and so this morning I invite you to touch the waters of baptism and remember and imagine... and believe.