Category Archives: baptism

March 2, 2009

Lent 1B

By Keith Anderson

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Grace and peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Anna
This week I received a wonderful email. It was from Laura Scales about something that happened on Monday with her 22 month old daughter Anna. She wrote, “Anna had a smudge on her forehead, and I wet my finger and wiped it off.  She felt the water and touched her forehead, looked up at me seriously, and said, “Same like Keith!” (thinking of the blessing during communion at church).  She’s paying attention!”

And she is living into her baptism, one little blessing at a time.

It is a great moment to lead us into our readings for today – readings about water, blessing, baptism, and grace.

Noah
This morning we begin with the story of Noah and the Ark. This is how it the story goes: God saw that the world had become wicked, violent, and corrupt, so God told the only righteous person he could find, Noah, to build an ark and gather two of every living creature. Noah did as God commanded, and when the time came, God sent the great rains, and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights straight. Everything and everyone besides those in the ark were drowned and destroyed.

Finally, the waters began to subside and the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. Noah and his family were the only eight people left on earth. The world was completely silent, except for the sounds of the animals from the ark, echoing down into the valley below.

They step out of the ark onto dry land for the first time in about a year, weary with what Martin Luther, called the “great trepidation, fear, sorrow, and danger Noah and his people must have been in.” Noah’s first act on dry land is to build an altar to the Lord and make burnt offerings to God…and when God smelled the pleasing scent of Noah’s offering, the Bible says that God was moved in his heart, and says to himself, “I will never do this again.” Then, God comes close and makes a covenant with Noah (our lesson for today):

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

The God we see in this story is a God who is grieved by human sin, but also grieved by the Flood itself. We see that God, who had just brought the worse destruction ever on humankind, is still deeply in love with it. There is a familiar Jewish Midrash that explains that in the Exodus when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians and drowned them, the angels in heaven cheered, but God rebuked them saying, “How can you cheer when my creatures are dying?” How much more would God, then, grieve the flood, where nearly every one of his living creatures was destroyed?

For God, the cost of cutting off the world and its people again was too great. God would rather run the risk of being angry, made foolish, ignored, cursed, even rejected (and God has been all those things) than being cut off from us.

And I don’t believe for a second that God was under any illusions that humans would not sin again after the flood. After all, it didn’t take long for the hero of our story, Noah, to build a vineyard and get drunk and for his son, Ham, to dishonor is father. And it wasn’t very long after that that some of their descendants get the idea to build the Tower of Babel.

That’s not why God makes the covenant with Noah. Nor does God make the covenant because Noah is going to do something for God. You see, whereas most covenants in the Bible are drawn up like contracts, where you say, “You do this, and I’ll do that.” Or, “I won’t do this, if you don’t to that,” God’s covenant with Noah is unique because God does all the talking and takes all the responsibility. All the vows and all the actions are God’s. It is God’s own peculiar, intentional, unilateral act – an act of a free and gracious God on behalf of a world that did not have to ask, earn, or even respond to it. God simply made up God’s mind that he was never going to do that again.

Commentators point out that in ancient art gods were often depicted as wielding bows. In the story of the flood, God hangs his bow in the sky – the rainbow, which signifies retirement from battle, that God has laid down his arms against human kind in order to embrace them.

Peter
In our second reading, Peter draws a line right from the Flood to our Baptism. He writes, in the Great Flood “eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured – now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body…but as an appeal to God…through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

Just like the flood, in baptism God decides to be our God, not for what we will or won’t do, or what we have or have not done. God decides to continue to live with us despite our resistance, violence, and corruption. While in the flood God hung up his bow in the sky, in Jesus, God hung up on a cross for our sake, to overcome the corruption, violence, the resistance of humankind once and for all, by subjecting himself to it.

Our 40 Days
What does this have to do with Lent? Usually, the first Sunday in Lent we hear about Jesus in the wilderness, about desert times, stripping away, simplifying, perseverance. This is a different starting place. We have traded the desert for the flood, austerity for abundance.

The invitation from our texts this morning and this season, the task of these forty days is to, like Anna, live more deeply into our baptism. That is, to know and to live like we are God’s Beloved.

In his book, The Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World, the great spiritual writer Henri Nouwen says that the entire goal of the spiritual life is simply this: understanding and accepting ourselves and living like we are God’s Beloved, as the fully and completely loved children of God that we are.

He writes [in a sermon], “many…people…hear voices that tell them that they are no good, that they are a problem, that they are a burden, that they are a failure. They hear a voice that keeps saying, “If you want to be loved, you had better prove that you are worth loving. You must show it.”

But what I would like to say is that the spiritual life is a life in which you gradually learn to listen to a voice that says something else, that says, ‘You are the beloved and on you my favor rests.’”

Nouwen writes that there are four marks of being God’s beloved. He says God’s Beloved are: taken, blessed, broken, and given. Taken, blessed, broken, given.

First, we are taken, chosen by God, precious in God’s eyes. Second, we are blessed. Despite those voices telling us that we are no good, God declares us good, and we aspire to claim and live this blessing. Third, we are broken. We are wounded. Nouwen writes, “Yes, I am hurting. Yes, I am wounded. Yes, it’s painful. [But] I don’t have to be afraid. I can look at my pain because in a very mysterious way our wounds are often a window on the reality of our lives. If we dare to embrace them, then we can put them under the blessing.” Fourth, we are given. Chosen and blessed, we are sent out into the world to be a blessing for others, to be of service to others. We are given to the world.

Taken, blessed, broken, and given.

For your Lenten discipline this year, why not choose one of these four aspects of your Beloved life to grow into.

You might seek to grow in trust and acceptance that you are chosen and precious to God – or see another person or people with whom you have struggled or perhaps not forgiven as precious and beloved of God.

You might seek to recognize the many blessings in your life and acceptance of those blessing, to hear good words about yourself from God and others, and bless others.

You might acknowledge your brokenness and wounds, fears, and, instead of running away from them, live with them, pray with them, find blessing in the midst ofyour pain.

You might allow yourself to be given away – to reach beyond yourself and let yourself be given in service for the healing of the world.

Chose one: taken, blessed, broken, given – and let that be your prayer and your discipline this Lent.

Anna Scales has already begun this work. She started her Lenten journey by remembering that she is blessed. That’s what the water on her forehead is – a blessing, with these words: “The Lord bless you and keep you in Jesus name. Amen.”

Let us now follow Anna’s lead – living into our baptism, embracing our belovedness, growing in love. Beloved. Taken. Blessed. Broken. Given.
Amen.

Leave a comment | posted in baptism, lent, Mark

January 11, 2009

Baptism of our Lord, Year B

By Keith Anderson

Grace and peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Two Baptisms

I don’t talk about it much, but I was actually baptized twice.  The first happened in the traditional way, when I was a baby, at Salem Lutheran Church in Catonsville, Maryland.  With my parents, my godparents, family and friends gathered round, the pastor poured water over my head, and baptized me in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  My mom still has the pictures, the certificate, and the candle.  And, to this day, I walk by that same font when I go to church with my mother.

The second happened when I was a teenager.  I was confirmed in the Lutheran church but then, like many, I drifted off.  Eventually I found myself attending a little Pentecostal church in the Florida Bible belt.  There I found a loving community and a place to explore my relationship with God.  After a while, I was invited to be baptized as a symbol of my commitment, which happened, not in a font, but in my youth pastor’s pool with several others.  

Needless to say, they were two very different experiences.  

This morning, in our second reading from the Book of Acts, we find St. Paul talking about two different kinds of baptisms: the baptism of John and the baptism of Jesus.  In Ephesus he runs into twelve people that Luke, the author of Acts, calls disciples.  They were, it seems, disciples of John the Baptist.  They had been influenced by John’s preaching, and received the baptism of John, that is, “the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” which we heard so much about in Advent.  They believed the Messiah was coming soon, but had not yet heard of Jesus.  Paul explained to them that Jesus was the one John preached about, the one whose sandal he wasn’t fit to untie, the one who would come after him that was greater than him, the fulfillment of everything John talked about.  

Paul said John’s baptism was good.  It was about their desire to repent, to turn from sin, to live good lives as they got ready to welcome the Messiah.  However, Jesus’ baptism was much, much more and is on a whole different order.  It wasn’t about a new resolution.  It wasn’t about getting ready, it was about receiving.  Like John’s it was about forgiveness, but also salvation, being claimed by God, receiving the Holy Spirit, the inner dwelling of God.  John the Baptist knew this.  As he says in one translation, “I’m baptizing you here in the river turning your old life in for a kingdom life. His baptism–a holy baptism by the Holy Spirit–will change you from the inside out.”  Immediately they were baptized in the name of Jesus and received the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Into what were you baptized?

In their conversation the line that stands out most to me is Paul’s question to them, “Into what then were you baptized?”  For them the question was between John or Jesus.  For me it is the question between my two baptisms.  For us, it is about how we live our lives in God.

When I came back to the Lutheran church as an adult I discovered that we believe that we only require one baptism.  One baptism once and for all.  That is because baptism not based on our commitments, our dedications, or our promises, but on God’s.  I didn’t know then – that even though I wandered and stopped going to church after confirmation and didn’t take an interest in church or God, God still had a vested interest in me.  God was still there, still alive in me, waiting for me to see it.  And so now I claim my first baptism as my only baptism.  My experience in that pool as part of a good experience with a loving group of people, and a good story, but not a baptism.  

I didn’t realize then that I was already and always had been God’s beloved.  That’s the word we hear at Jesus’ baptism: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  For me, that’s the key word and key difference between these two baptisms.

In baptism, God also calls us Beloved people.  God claims us as God’s own, once and for all.  And from that point on, nothing we do will make God love us any less or any more.  In a time of year when we make all kinds of new resolutions, we do well to remember that we do not have to re-commit ourselves to God.  For, God is always and forever committed to us.  It is something we have to be continually reminded of because we often find ourselves acting as if God will love us more if we do more or do it better. In most of our lives, the love, honor, respect we receive is earned, and not given.  It is wholly contingent on our actions – on what we can produce.  But our relationship with God is different.  It is based solely on God’s love for us.

Martin Luther used to say that when we feel tempted to doubt, and I would say, tempted to go down this road of feeling that we are enough for God we are to repeat over and over again, “I am baptized.”  Not “I am a Christian” or “I believe.”  But “I am baptized.” The strength of Luther’s faith was found in his baptism – when God put God’s claim on him. When we are tempted to feel like we have lost God’s love, or that we can earn God’s love back, we ought to say with brother Martin, “I am baptized.  I am baptized.”

Luther also said that “Every Christian has enough in baptism to learn and practice all his life.”  One baptism is enough.  This font and these waters is where we start.  It’s where we live in God.  It’s where we end when all is said and done.  We are beloved then, now, and forever.

Beloved

There is a wonderful little book called Falling in Love with God, which is a meditation on the Old Testament book The Song of Songs, a book that uses the word “Beloved” a lot.

The author of this book, Tara Soughers, invites her readers to imagine themselves, to imagine ourselves as God’s Beloved.  She writes, “Too often we do not consider ourselves beautiful.  Too often we are more aware of our flaws and weaknesses than our beauty.  Too often we do not see ourselves as worthy of God’s passionate love.  That is because we look at ourselves through the wrong set of eyes.  We look at ourselves with the eyes of our culture, which tells us, for example, that we must be young and thin.  We look at ourselves with the eyes of others, who may discount us because of our race or disabilities.  We look at ourselves with the eyes of those who may have criticized us when we were growing up, making us feel we were never good enough.  We look at ourselves with our own guilty eyes, knowing how far we are from what we would like to be….The Song of Songs [and I would add the Bible, the Baptism of Jesus, and our own Baptisms] calls us to look at ourselves with another set of eyes.  It calls us to look at ourselves through the eyes of the One who loves us – through God’s eyes.  When we do, we are in for a surprise.  For through the eyes of love, we are indeed beautiful, more beautiful than we could possibly imagine.”  “We are irresistible to God…and if we let ourselves, we will be irresistibly drawn to God as well. That is the power of love.

She suggests that we ask God to help us see ourselves as God sees us and spend some time being open to a new way of looking at ourselves – through the eyes of God’s love – especially when our resolutions fail, or we find ourselves frantic or anxious, or hear that little voice in our heads saying that we are not enough.

In those times, we must remember which baptism we received – Jesus’ and not John’s.  

Baptism is the well-spring of the Christian life.  This font is for us like a life-giving spring at the center of our life together, renewing us, refreshing us, reminding us that we are God’s and God’s alone.  That, as God’ Beloved, we can confidently and courageously live our lives, enter into one another’s pain and joy, and rejoice in one another, follow Christ out of love and not fear. Baptism is also the crossroads of life and death. For, when we are baptized, we are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection.  God is always bringing life, surprising us with the measure of love and the gifts of the Spirit.

This is the baptism that we have received.  We are God’s Beloved, and in us God is well pleased.

Amen.

1 comment | posted in acts, baptism, RCL B

April 1, 2008

Easter 2A

By Keith Anderson

Grace and peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

First Church, Jerusalem

The very first church service nearly 2,000 years ago was nothing like you see here today.  John tells us in this morning’s Gospel lesson that it took place on an evening, Easter evening.  The disciples were gathered in a house, not a place of worship.  The door was bolted shut and they were very much afraid.  Jesus, their leader, had just been crucified, and it was still possible, and perhaps likely, that they too would be implicated and subject to death.  In fact, the question on their minds…was probably not so much ‘will we be next?’ as it was, ‘how long do you think we can last?’  These disciples, who were supposed to be the ones walking confidently out into the world, full of the Holy Spirit, announcing the Easter triumph of God, were now hunkering down, cowering, hoping that nobody in town would know that they were there – a long way from the spirit of joy and celebration and welcome we have here this morning.

While we worry whether we are going to offend someone or seem pushy by sharing our faith, they were worried about being put to death for theirs.  While we enjoy freedom of religion, their practice of it could have gotten them killed – and eventually most were.  While we live in an homogeneous area, they lived and preached in a hostile environment, crowded with other religions.  They preached to people that knew little or nothing of Jesus, and they began in Jerusalem, the melting pot and crossroads of the world’s languages and cultures.  They were starting from scratch.

There in that locked room rested the fate of our faith.  These disciples were the eyewitnesses to Jesus life, teaching, and miracles.  They would eventually tell and retell those stories, write them down, and they would, they have, become the Gospels as we know them.  But at the beginning of our reading from John, they are just plain scared and not at all sure what to do.

Although Thomas is front and center in our Gospel, the thing that fascinates me most is how this group of people went from being so afraid and locked in their room to being so bold in their proclamation.  How do these fishermen, whose leader has just died become the great leaders of the church?  How do regular people like you and me become preachers, healers, teachers and ministers of the good news?

If we look at the story, we can see that when Jesus comes among them he gives them three gifts:



First, he gives them himself.  He shows them his wounds.  He gives them his resurrected life and his peace.  “Through Jesus’ life, suffering, death, and resurrection, God is participating in our very being, bringing healing and peace in ways we cannot fully comprehend.”  Second, he gives them the Holy Spirit.  So, he sends them out, but does not send them alone.  They preach and teach and minister under the power of the Spirit, the Spirit of Pentecost.  And third, he gives them the Good News of forgiveness.  He forgives them and tells and gives them to forgive others and share this message to share with the world: Jesus died and was raised for you.  “There is nothing in your past for which you need to atone, there is nothing in your future you need to fear.  By the power of the Holy Spirit we are free to entrust our whole lives to God’s promise.”(1)

Sacramental Sunday

Thanks to their sacrifice and witness we can have a morning like this one.  We are so blessed today to have both David’s baptism and Chad, Helen, Andrew, Gavin, and Emily’s first communions this morning.  You can have Easter, I’ll take today, this sacramental Sunday, every time.

What I want to you see this morning is that what happens to them and to us in these sacraments is exactly what happened in that closed room on Easter evening.  In the sacraments, Jesus comes among us.  He is truly present in water, bread, and wine.  And he gives us these same three gifts.  He gives us himself.  He gives us his own wounded body and blood in communion.  In baptism he trades places with us.  We are joined to his death and resurrection, and so we take on his resurrected life, while he takes on and takes away our sin.  He washes us in the waters of salvation that stretch from the waters of creation, the flood, the exodus, Jesus’ own baptism, all the way to David this morning.  He gives us the Holy Spirit.  At baptism we are given the Holy Spirit, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.  We believe that it is only through the Holy Spirit that we are able to do good things in Jesus’ name.  It is the Holy Spirit that enables us to believe and draws us to Jesus.  The Spirit is always doing that, but most especially in communion.  Finally, we are given the good news of forgiveness.  Our sin is not just washed, but drowned, in the waters of baptism.  Each time we receive communion we receive forgiveness.

It is these three gifts that we receive in the sacraments that enables and emboldens regular people like us to live and speak our faith.  We could not do it otherwise.  

I think of Thomas insisting that he touch Jesus’ wounds before be believed the other disciples.  There is some Thomas in all of us.  And I think that the sacraments are the way that we see and touch Jesus now.  In the sacraments, Jesus holds his hands open to us.  He guid
es our hands into his side, and we discover that these marks of death are the very things that give us life.  We discover that there is another world in there.  This is where we most concretely touch and are touched by God.  Just look at the bread in your hands, taste the wine on your lips, feel the water on your forehead.  You want to touch Jesus?  Here it is.  

In being washed and fed, we become the Body of Christ.  We become the hands and feet and side of Christ.  We become, like the disciples, the proof, the evidence that Christ is risen.

There are lots of Thomases out there – and I mean that in the best possible way.  There are people out there that need to hear and see and touch Christ in the Sacraments and in us.

Once, the frightened followers of Jesus became the most articulate messengers of the Gospel, although it cost them their lives.  Now, you and I are witnesses.  We are the hands and feet and side of Christ, wounded and yet healed, broken and forgiven, and completely loved by God.  Outside these closed doors our vitality, our creativity, our need to give will be found, challenged, and fulfilled.  Out there are people we can learn from, grow with, serve and love.  Out there is Christ in every seeking, hurting person.  As we heard last Sunday, he is always going out ahead of us.

Having been given these gifts of Jesus himself, the Holy Spirit, and forgiveness, we have every right to be as bold as Thomas.  The risks that we face are not life or death, but they effect the life our congregation, the proclamation and the living of the Gospel, and our world.

In four weeks, on May 4th, we will have our stewardship Sunday where we will make our annual pledge to the church for the coming year.  Our work and our gifts continue to allow this to be a place where people meet Jesus in a multitude of ways, most deeply through the sacraments, but also through community, learning, and loving and serving our neighbors.  It is also the place that teaches and equips us to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world.  In strengthens that ancient witness, which is not our charge, both inside and outside the closed doors of this room.

Conclusion

I’ll tell you, the Sundays after the great feasts of Easter and Christmas are tough ones.  We don’t get of easy.  Always after Christmas we hear the story of the Holy Innocents, those children that were murdered by Herod in his quest to kill the Messiah and preserve his own power and authority.  And after Easter, we always hear the story of the fearful disciples and the doubting St. Thomas.

Both of these Sundays remind us that there is a cost involved in this great undertaking of faith and that something is expected of us.  We are not bystanders or onlookers in this enterprise.  We are right in the middle of it.  We are sent out.  We sacrifice.  We are called to risk, to trust in God, to commit ourselves to proclaiming the risen Christ. It may not be too much to say that in this room rests the fate of our faith.  It is the same each Sunday, but it seems, most especially so now as we move out from Easter and approach Consecration Sunday.  Like the disciples, we cannot stay here in this room, we must go out.

Let us proclaim confidently that Christ is Risen and bear witness in our testimony and our service to his redeeming love in our lives.

Amen.

(1) Observation and quotes from Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson

Leave a comment | posted in baptism, easter, first communion, John

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