PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22                                                      You Were Baptized into Christ
Sermon January 10, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

          Today is the First Sunday after the Epiphany.  In the Church’s devotional calendar it is celebrated as “Baptism of Christ” Sunday.  With his baptism Jesus began his three-years ministry, so the event marks a step along the path of the life of Christ.  What I want us to take hold of is the surprising parallel between Jesus’ being baptized and you being baptized:  you have shared his baptism; and because the Church historically baptizes persons “into Christ,”[1] this means that you have symbolically and morally entered the Jordan River with and through Jesus.  This must mean something; and that’s what I want to talk about today. 

          “Meaning”:  ah, now there is a complicated word.  The “meaning” of Christian baptism is multiple:  there are a lot of things it means, and in this barrel-full of meanings you can separate them out into categories.  The New Testament is full of statements, both literal and figurative, about baptism.  If we limit our understanding of baptism to just a few Bible verses we would fail to grasp the fullness of its power.  But I can’t cover all these meanings in a twenty-minute sermon, or forty minutes, or an hour and a half—it’s too big a subject.  Whole books have been written on the subject, and people still say it’s not enough. 

          What I’m going to do, then, is to talk about what I call “the five meanings of Christian baptism,” and you can add twenty-five more.  In a couple of weeks we’re going to baptize a child at our baptismal font; when we do, I urge you to take home that bulletin insert that has the baptismal liturgy printed out:  read it closely:  that brief liturgical ceremony has more than a dozen “meanings” of baptism stated clearly and in a useable fashion.  But for now, my “five meanings of Christian baptism.”  They are: 

   1)  God claims me as his own.
   2)  I state publically my faith in God through Jesus Christ.
   3)  God applies the atonement of Christ’s cross personally to me.
   4)  The church confirms our evangelical witness in the world.
   5)  And I become Jesus’ disciple, with the help of the Holy Spirit.

          The first thing about baptism that Christians have to say is about God, not about us:  Baptism means that God claims me as his own.  It doesn’t matter whether your parents bring you to the font when you’re a baby, or whether you go forward at a revival meeting when you’re twelve years old, or whether you knock on the parsonage door some evening after your seventieth birthday and ask to be baptized:  it doesn’t matter whether you receive baptism by being plunged completely under the water, or by having water poured over your head from an escallop shell, or by having water sprinkled on you—you don’t baptize yourself!  Somebody else baptizes you, and that somebody else is a representative of God.  In our church, the representative of God is the congregation—the congregation baptizes the child.  The child receives baptism.  And that means that God is making a claim on her or him.  You are baptized, and God claims you as God’s own. 

          The Apostle Paul used the idea of “adoption” to get at this.  God chose the descendants of Abraham and established an eternal covenant with the Jews; but we Gentiles, when we turn to God, get “adopted” into the family.[2]  Now admittedly this is a metaphor, and like all metaphors it has its weaknesses; but we get the idea—the one with the initiative is not me, it’s God.  In historic Protestant theology this was called “prevenient grace”—which means that God gives the grace to believe first, and then we can believe:  the initiative is God’s. 

          So when I stand here and you are seated all around, and I pour the water over a baby’s head—or an adult’s head, for that matter—this baptism means that God claims him as God’s own.  That’s the first meaning of Christian baptism.

          Second, baptism means that I agree.  It’s sort of like an eyewitness giving testimony for all to hear.  I state publically that I believe in God through Jesus Christ.  This second meaning of baptism is most visible in those churches where people wait until they’re old enough to make their own confession of faith.  I grew up in a church like that.  When I was eleven years old, a minister who was an old friend of my parents, came to our church for a revival; and on a Saturday night I stepped forward at the invitation and requested that the friend perform the baptism; but what I said aloud for everybody to hear was that “I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 

          Most churches have a parent or sponsor speak the testimony of faith; and the way we usually do it is, we offer the Apostles’ Creed.  The church has been allowing the parent or sponsor to speak for the infant since about the fifth century; and so when the child grows to be about twelve years old, he or she participates in Confirmation Class and then on a day in the spring they stand in front of the church alongside other youths their age, and they nervously affirm their faith.  Confirmation is the completion of the baptismal testimony, and it shouldn’t be ignored:  it makes a child’s baptism complete. 

          This is also why at least one of the parents must be a baptized Christian:  at least one of them must already be, shall we say, “certified” in the faith in order to be able to speak the faith for the baby. 

          So, second, baptism means that I preach the gospel:  I state publically that I believe in God through Jesus Christ. 

          Third, baptism means that those Bible stories, and especially the story of the cross, burial and resurrection of Jesus, cease being narratives of events that took place two thousand years ago, and they become my story, because God applies the forgiveness of Christ’s cross and resurrection personally to me.  I get “plugged in” to the Jesus story, and his story becomes my story.  Paul wrote to the Christians in the Galatian territory of Turkey:[3]

God applies the cross and resurrection power of Christ to my life.  And that has moral and ethical implications.  Notice how Paul immediately talks about three different kinds of social problems—ethnic superiority, slavery and sexism.  Our “clothing ourselves with Christ” and having Christ’s story applied to our life  means that we get changed morally and ethically by the inner working of the Spirit of Christ.  So baptism means that God applies the atonement of Christ personally to me.  And my sins are forgiven. 

          So baptism means that God claims me, and that I claim God back, and that my sins are forgiven.  Fourth, baptism means something for the church, too.  I said before that it’s the whole church that performs the baptism and thus represents God:  now we see that by baptizing someone the church confirms our evangelical witness in the world.  Jesus gathered his apostles after the resurrection, and as he was preparing to ascend to the Father he gave them and the whole church a mission.  We call it “the Great Commission”:[4] 

That’s what the church was created to do—to be the Christ community in the world, for the world, and by our words and deeds to call all humankind to faith—our evangelical witness.  And so when you baptize someone, you are again proclaiming Christ to the world—you are doing the church’s work. 

          Now I need to say, evangelization and church growth are not the same thing.  Church growth is about the institution; evangelization is about bearing witness to Christ, even if the world doesn’t want to hear it, even if the world turns away.  A recent Gallup Poll found that in 2009, “78 percent of Americans identify with some form of Christian faith.”  In 1948 it was 91%.[5]  Jesus never promised that the church would get mobbed when we proclaim the gospel:  he did warn about persecution, martyrdom and hatred.  So I don’t see this statistical report as a failure.  What if the percentage of Christians in America simply means that the church is being more faithful and more specific about what Christ wants people to do, about how Christ wants people to act—“faith, hope and love” made practical as “justice, mercy and faithfulness”?  Well, I could say a lot more about this, but my subject is baptism.  Baptism means that the church confirms our evangelical witness in the world. 

          And fifth, baptism means that I become Jesus’ disciple, with the help of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus’ word to you is the same as his word to those first fishermen at the lakeside:  “Follow me.”  When I am baptized, or after I grow old enough to claim my baptism through confirmation, I learn to identify myself as a disciple, a follower of the universal Christ; and with the guidance and the sustaining of the Spirit of Christ I learn to value this identity, to live according to this identity, to listen—learn how to listen to the Spirit, and live in this world as a man or a woman who has “clothed myself in Christ.”  This is what my baptism means—it means that I’m a Christian because I mean to be a Christian.

          The word “Christian” has come to mean just a “good person” in our lazy, secular culture.  As fewer and fewer “good persons” consciously identify with the faith and instead become more and more secular, maybe the name “Christian” will reclaim its sharpness, its clarity, its energy and idealism.  To be baptized is to become Jesus’ disciple, with the help of the Holy Spirit. 

          So here are my “five meanings of Christian baptism”—at least the five I have time to talk about today.  The wealth of meaning in your baptism is not nearly exhausted by this.  Again, I urge that you take home the baptismal liturgy the next time you participate in it; read it closely, think about all the power it signals. 

          I close with a story about Martin Luther that I’ve told before, but I think it’s important.  Luther, as a pastor, had a lot of parishioners come to him worried about their souls. Somebody had told one that if they didn’t stop doing this or that, they were going to hell.  Some had begun to worry about whether they were good enough to please God:  their conscience was bothering them.  So they went to talk to Pastor Luther, and this is what he told each one:  “When your friend or your conscience assails you and threatens you with eternal punishment for not being good enough, preach the gospel to your heart—say, ‘I am baptized.’”        AMEN