I Was Baptized

"I Was Baptized"

Matthew 3:13-17
January 13, 2008

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John
would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to
me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to
fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just
as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw
the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven
said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

When I was sixteen, I had to go through a test of adulthood that many of us had to go
through at that age, and that was, of course, taking my drivers license test. I had gone
through the school mandated class, and was all set and ready to go and take my test at
the courthouse in Hemphill, Texas, with some friends, only to find that the testing at the
courthouse had been cancelled on that day, for some unknown reason. So, all of my
friends climbed into a pickup truck, with one of my friend’s mother at the wheel, and me
in the truck bed, because there was no room in the cab, and we drove to Nacogdoches
to take our driver’s license test, which was about an hour away. Now, let me explain
that I had been doing all my practice driving in my mom’s Chevy Chevette, and now I
was expected to do my driver’s test in a huge pickup that I had never driven in my life.
Almost from the beginning the test went very badly, and I almost ran a stop sign, and I
couldn’t parallel park to save my life, especially in a car that seemed like twice the size
of my mom’s car! Now, there wasn’t much I did well on the test, and I was one point
away from failing the test, and you could tell the officer was more than ready to get out
the car, as he quickly passed me my passing grade of 70. I’ll tell the one thing that I did
really well, however, and that was going into reverse and driving backward—I know
people who can’t reverse without going all over the place, but not me—straight as an
arrow. Going forward was a problem, but going in reverse, not a problem at all. Too
bad I couldn’t spend most of my teenage years driving backwards.

This going into reverse, this ability to stop and go backwards towards the opposite
direction, well, that I know how to do. And that seems to be what is happening in our
story today from Matthew’s Gospel, this baptism scene that is all too familiar for most of
us. In three of the four Gospels, Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, in all the
Gospels except in the Gospel of John—and if you want to know why that is the
case…well, you need to ask a participant of the John class from this past fall: they can
probably tell you why having Jesus be baptized would not have fit into John
understanding of Jesus. But in Matthew Jesus’ baptism actually happens, as it does in
Luke and Mark, and in Matthew a powerful shift is happening, a reversal from what has
happened previously in the first two chapters of Matthew. In the first two chapters,
Jesus and his family are on the run from Herod, who has rejected any possible
competitors to his throne, and you see the family keeping things quiet with the wise
men, and then the eventual escape to Egypt, and the horror of the slaughter of the
innocents in Bethlehem. Finally, the family comes home, after all these attempts to
reject this Jesus as Messiah by King Herod, a puppet king put there to further Rome’s
interest in keeping the peace in a very volatile situation.

There is all this rejection, this refusal of the gift of this child, and then, and then comes
this moment, this moment of acceptance, this reversal from the first chapters, and so
this Jesus begins the adult part of his life by first being accepted by the only One
whose acceptance really matters, the God who sent him into the world as a sign of his
divine love. First, God accepts him as God’s own child, his Son, and then even more
acceptance, John the Baptist comes to accept his cousin as being more than a cousin,
and then the disciples begin to accept that this man from Nazareth may be the One,
and then others, and on and on it goes, until it reaches you and I, in this place, our own
acceptance of this One from Nazareth as being someone to tend to, to listen to, to be
transformed by.

I want to point something that seems awfully obvious, but sometimes we miss the
obviously obvious in these sorts of matters, and that is the importance of our baptism, a
rite that even Jesus himself participated in. Now, some of us can remember our
baptism, because we were raised in traditions in which you did not claim you baptism
until you were of age to make a decision for yourself, and others of us were from
traditions like the UCC and Congregationalism that baptized children before the age of
consent, as the Baptists would say, following an ancient tradition in which the parents
take on the weight of that acceptance, those vows, for their children until they could
“confirm” that acceptance for themselves as young people—hence, “confirmation” class
many of you experienced as youngsters. There is a wonderful joke about this feud
between Congregationalists, who practice infant baptism by sprinkling a symbolic
amount of water on the head of a child, as does most of Christendom, and Baptists,
who believe that only a full immersion into the water, as was done with Jesus, is the only
valid kind of baptism:

It seems that a Congregationalist and a Baptist minister were discussing baptism. The
Congregationalist asked the Baptist if he considered a person baptized if he was
immersed in water up to his waist.“No,” said the Baptist. “Do you consider him baptized
if he is immersed in water up to his NECK?” asked the Congregationalist. Again the
Baptist’s answer was: “No.” “Well now,” said the Congregationalist, “suppose you
immersed him up to his EYEBROWS? Would you consider him baptized THEN?” “No,”
said the Baptist.   “Aha! Well then, there you have it!” said the Congregationalist. “It’s
only the little bit of water on the TOP OF THE HEAD that really counts!”

Now, to be honest, I think these dunking or non-dunking debates don’t really matter—I
don’t think the means of baptism really matters, because the water is not magic, just as
the table we will share together today is not magic. Both of them are simply signs,
reminders of great spiritual truths that must be enacted in this world for us to really see
them, for us to really grasp them. For me, baptism is that moment when we do what
God does with Jesus in that moment in the river Jordan thousands of years ago—we
accept our acceptedeness, or others accept it for us in our name—for the first time we
accept the embrace the God who first reached out to us, and said yes to us, a yes said
to us before the world was created, a yes said to us before even the Christ came to us
in order to show us how accepted we have always been.

You know, I once had a conversation with a young friend when we were both young
about the meaning of baptism, and he believed that if one was not baptized, you were
surely never going to be accepted into the kingdom of God. Even that young, that idea
struck me as absurd, because it seem to put all the emphasis on the wrong thing, as if
the water, dunking or sprinkling, whatever, rather than on the One who asked us to
accept our acceptedness, as Christ did in that water thousands of years ago. I don’t
believe that the water is the point or even the ritual of baptism itself is the point or that if
one is not baptized, one is not accepted and loved and embraced by God. That is to
get lost in the symbol, and forget what the symbol points to—the one who takes the
world’s rejection, and transforms it into acceptance, into a divine embrace that you and
I will spend our lives returning.   In that baptism in the river Jordan, Jesus threw his lot in
with us, he received the baptism of repentance, as John had done with others, a
baptism that says I was going one way, and now I am going into reverse, I am going
another way, a way towards love, a way towards wholeness, a way towards home.
When are baptized, we promise to go into reverse, or that promised is made for us, to
reject the world’s rejection of love, and to embrace, to accept our acceptedness. And
we do that as parents and we do that as a church, when we promise to help raise these
alongside their parents in the faith and love of Christ—we are tasked with sharing with
them the truth that they too are accepted by what they do not yet understand, by the
One who is only a glimmer in their eye on the day of their baptism.

Martin Luther once said that when he was at the brink of despair, when his failures
seemed to be overwhelming, his guilt, his own deep need of repentance was obvious to
him—and he was a man as human as any of us in this room—when he was at that
breaking point, he said that he would crawl back to the one truth that reminded him of
how loved he was, he would crawl back to something he knew was a bedrock, was a
place of safety: he would say to himself in those dark moments, “I was baptized.”
Somehow, in some profound way, what happened to him before he was even aware of
the God who loved him, the moment of his baptism, somehow it had become the
cornerstone of his hope in God and his hope in himself. Baptism was the thing that
reminded Luther that despite of all those times he had rejected God in his life, or had
loved too poorly, or hated too easily, that despite all his failures, he was accepted, he
was embraced as Christ was embraced in the River Jordan by the Spirit of God, who
said “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Knowing that, knowing
a truth that came out of a infant baptism he could not even remember, that only those
who loved him and his church could remember for him, knowing that truth allowed him
to get up, and go forward.

I think there is something for us to learn from in this passage from Scripture, and in
what strengthened Luther in those moments when he didn’t feel good enough to be a
disciple of this One from Nazareth. The lesson, I think, is all about our need to accept
how accepted we really are, to embrace the one who first embraced us, and has and
will always embrace us, even when are instincts are to go into reverse, rather than to
go forward into God’s acceptance of us. Certainly there are times go backwards, but
only if backwards means going back towards the embrace, towards our own profound
acceptedness. Paul Tillich, the great theologian from our own United Church of Christ
tradition, believed that the most profound challenge we humans have is accept is our
acceptedness—the definition of the word repentance actually means turning around,
going the other direction, and that other direction is hopefully right back into the heart
of God. “You are accepted,” are the words Tillich titled one of his most famous
sermons. That doesn’t mean we don’t do wrong, or that we don’t sin—it only means
that we are not longer defined by our rejection of God, or by our sin and failure—God
had done away with rejection all together, and our baptism, like Christ’s baptism is a
profound reminder of that powerful, and yes, life changing truth. If Luther can find his
way out of his own darkness with this reminder that he was baptized, that he is one of
God’s own now, and that will make all the difference in the future, then surely we can
know that truth as well.

So, on this day when we celebrate the baptism of our Lord by John the Baptist, I’m
going to ask you to do what Christ did those many thousands of years ago—to accept
the grand reversal taking place, to see in that act of welcome at the river Jordan your
own welcome into the heart of God. I always think that if we really got how accepted we
are by God, we would never do the things that King Herod did, those things that try to
reject the good things God is trying to give us. For some of us, we can remember the
day of our baptism, for others it remains a memory in the heart of God and others who
were present at the baptism when we were a child. Either way, all that matters is that
God remembers us, and has always remembered us, and asks us in return to keep
within our memory the truth that our acceptance, to remember with Luther the profound
truth of our own acceptance, and to say with him, in all those moments, “I was baptized,
I was baptized.”