SERMON Baptism

Baptism of Our Lord C (07): Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 15-17, 21-22

There is something so compelling about baptism. I discovered just how compelling baptism can be a dozen years ago when I did my chaplaincy training at Northwestern Hospital -- a hospital that is, as I am sure most of you know, a regional center for high risk pregnancies and deliveries; a hospital with a state of the art neonatal intensive care unit.

For the first several weeks that I was on call, I was called to be with parents whose babies had died. On my very first call like that, the baby (a boy) was full term, a beautiful, perfectly formed infant, who had mysteriously died minutes after being born. And his distraught and grieving Lutheran parents, both in their early thirties, wanted nothing more than that this child be baptized. We didn’t baptize him. We blessed him and named him Peter and committed him to God’s care. We didn't baptize him because baptism is for living, and not the dead. Several days later, their Lutheran congregation had a service of Christian burial for Peter. But I understood where the parents were coming from that night. There is something so compelling about baptism.

I thought about this often when, in the weeks after the first few, I was called to baptize babies who had not died but who were not expected to live. The very first baby that I baptized was born at twenty-three weeks and weighed less than sixteen ounces. It is hard to describe how very small he was. His mother was in Chicago from Ohio for a professional meeting when she went into labor. By the time I was called, the father had flown in from Ohio. Like the parents of the infant who had been born full term, they were Lutherans and, like those parents, were anxious that I baptize their baby. Which I did. My first baptism. But not my last. Most of those infants lived only a few hours.

So what is about baptism that makes it so compelling? So compelling that we baptize infants who are not going to live? So compelling that we even want to baptize the dead?

Easy answers might harken back to beliefs that only the baptized are saved -- and all the superstitions that arise from those beliefs. But I don't think that's it. Certainly not with the parents whose babies we named or baptized in the five months I was at Northwestern.

But what is it? Why so compelling?

An interesting question in light of what we just heard.

In many ways Jesus' baptism is anything but compelling in Luke's gospel. One of the dozen or so things we can say with confidence about the historical Jesus is that he was baptized by John the Baptist and, in all probability, was John's disciple before John's imprisonment and beheading. Luke and the other gospel writers are quite aware that the implications of Jesus' being baptized by John has the potential of making Jesus look like a Johnny-come-lately, second banana to John the Baptist -- someone who had a strong following well into the late first century. Luke even recognizes John's continuing influence in Acts when he tells of Paul's going to Ephesus and finding individuals who had been baptized "[i]nto John's baptism" (Acts 18:3). It also makes Jesus look as if he needed John's baptism of repentance.

Jesus' baptism was so non-compelling to the gospel writers that the author of the Gospel of John doesn't even mention that Jesus was baptized (even though it is obvious that he knows that he was).

Luke takes a different approach. Jesus is baptized. Good writer and story teller that he is, Luke goes to great lengths to reexamine John's relationship to Jesus and to disguise any role that he plays in Jesus' baptism.

Part of Luke's approach is to place the nativity stories about John in the context of the nativity stories about Jesus.

You will recall that Mary, pregnant with Jesus, visits Elizabeth, pregnant with John. And when Mary greets her, we hear that "the child leaped in [Elizabeth's] womb." (Luke 1:41) And, as John leaps in Elizabeth's womb, Elizabeth cries out to Mary, "Blessed are you [Mary] among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb [Jesus]." (Luke 1:41-42)

When John is circumcised, his father foretells that John will be "a prophet of the Most High [who will] go before the Lord to prepare his ways." (Luke 1:76). Luke's approach includes what we just heard John say: he -- John -- is not the Messiah, but one more powerful than he is coming, the thong of whose sandals he is unworthy to untie (a job, by the way, that was left to only the lowliest of slaves).

And then Luke obscures any role John plays in baptizing Jesus. The verses we did not hear this morning are Luke's account of John's imprisonment by Herod. Only with John in prison does Luke mention that "Jesus was also baptized." (Luke 3:21) He never says by whom.

But Luke does not stop there. To reinforce John's statement that he is not the Messiah, Luke reports that after Jesus' baptism, the Holy Spirit descends in the physical form of a dove, and God tells Jesus, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22). To dispel any thought that Jesus is John's disciple, Luke distinguishes John's baptism of water and Jesus' baptism of the Holy Spirit.

And it's baptism by the Holy Spirit that we hear about in Acts. Philip has baptized the Samaritans with water in the name of Jesus Christ. When that occurs the top guns -- Peter and John -- are sent from Jerusalem to baptize with Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands. The same two part baptism happens to the disciples of John whom Paul encounters in Ephesus (Acts 19:2-6).

So if Jesus' baptism is something that had to be explained away if not ignored, what is it that makes baptism so compelling for us?

Well, let's remember, it is the early church, not Jesus, that finds Jesus' baptism by John non-compelling. Jesus is baptized. By John. Like us, Jesus finds baptism compelling.

And the reason why he does is obvious. For John, baptism involves water and the redirection of one's life. "Repentance" meant "turning around." And that is what Jesus is doing as he is simultaneously baptized and beginning his public ministry -- not that he is turning from a sinful life but that he is redirecting his life to God's work. But more. For Jesus, baptism also marks God's acknowledgment through the Holy Spirit that he, Jesus, is indeed God's son -- an event in Luke (and only in Luke) that occurs when Jesus is praying.

And for the early church, this baptism was carried one step further. The new believers in Samaria are baptized by water in Jesus' name. But then they are also baptized, as Jesus had been, by the Holy Spirit -- in their case, through the laying on of hands by the leaders of the church. Simultaneously, those newly baptized were acknowledged through the Holy Spirit as God's children and as members of the body of Christ, the church. They were empowered to live in God's grace and to do God's work, marked (figuratively but not literally) with the sign of the cross forever. They were baptized into community. For service.

Which is why baptism is so very compelling. It is why we want even the smallest members of our families to know and to grow in God’s free gift of grace through baptism.

Two weeks ago I received what has become an annual Christmas card and letter from Ohio from Audrey and Larry and their son Daniel. The letter has always been written as if by Daniel. Several years ago Daniel's letter was very special because it reported on a to Chicago and to Wicker Park Lutheran Church. Some of you may have even been here and met him and his parents. It was a very moving visit.

Moving because, when Daniel was born in 1995, Northwestern had just begun having success with the survival of babies born at 23 weeks. No hospital in his home town in Ohio was any where as close in successfully handling infants that premature. Daniel’s actual due date in February and the end of my training coincided. With his parents, I lived through almost daily setbacks and crises. But through it all, we saw this incredibly small gift of life grow and develop to gestational age. Always, I would think, in God's grace and love.

In a few years, Daniel will affirm the baptismal vows made by his sponsors that February after he left Chicago, just as the two dozen babies we've baptized in the last two years will someday re-affirm the promises that their sponsors and parents have made for them. As witnesses to and participants in those baptisms, let us affirm today, both as individuals and as a community, that we will seek and serve Christ in all persons, strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. Can anything be more compelling? I don’t think so.

Amen

January 7, 2007

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Chicago, Illinois