Baptism of the Lord

“Blaze, Spirit, Blaze!”

Isaiah 42:1-9 ? Matthew 3:13-17

Let us pray. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight,

O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Baptism is our theme this morning, on this “Baptism of the Lord Sunday.” Today is all about baptism – all the way from our call to worship, to our confession of sin, to our scriptures, to our hymns, and finally to the rite of “Renewal of Baptism” that will come shortly after the sermon. Today is all about baptism.

While I was thinking in this baptismal vein as I worked on today’s sermon, I found that baptism has been the subject of more than a little church humor. One pastor whose sermon I read, for example, tells the story of little Johnny, following the baptism of his baby brother in church that morning.

Little Johnny, it seems, was sobbing all the way back home in the back seat of the car. His father asked him three times what was wrong; but each time Johnny denied that anything was wrong at all. Finally, though, he broke down and admitted what was really on his young mind. “Daddy,” he said, “that minister back in church said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home; but, Daddy, I just wanna stay with you guys.”

Or maybe you’ve heard about the Baptist congregation that got together to buy their new pastor some rubber waders, so he wouldn’t get wet when he immersed people in the church’s baptismal pool. The local Presbyterians heard about it, and felt a little bad that they hadn’t bought their pastor some kind of a baptismal gift. So they got together and bought him a baptismal gift too – a set of rubber gloves!

But the humor isn’t all make-believe. Much of it is real; and every pastor has his own favorite story. Some of you have heard me tell my own favorite story about the baptism of a three-year-old boy, back in the early 1990s.

Now this was a very active little boy, I want to say. And from the day when he, I and his parents got together to “rehearse” the baptism with him, I suspected trouble.

Now, since a three-year-old is too large to be held in the pastor’s arms, and too small to stand on the floor and bow at the font, we had commandeered the church’s little two-step stool that stood before the hall drinking fountain in the children’s area. It was just tall enough to let the three-year-old get up to the font “like a big boy.” And we had rehearsed the little boy in climbing up the two stairs and bowing his head over the font, so he could be baptized.

Or at least we had tried to do that; but not once during our entire rehearsal had this actually happened. So I was more than a little concerned about Sunday – and so was the Dad, who knew his little son all too well.

Sure enough, when Sunday came, and the boy was standing on the top of the second step, I saw him catch a glimpse of something or the other off to the left of the font. As three-year-olds will do, he forgot all about the baptism, and started climbing down his little stairs to head over and check out whatever it was that had caught his attention.

Dad, though, had come well-prepared. “Look!” he said to his son; and he pointed his arm at the water in the baptismal font. The boy climbed back up the two little stairs to see what Dad was pointing to. And it was at that precise moment, the Dad let slide out of his suit jacket sleeve… a tiny plastic boat that now floated in the baptismal water.

As the boy leaned his head down to see the boat, I quickly took a handful of water, poured it over his head and said, “Jimmy, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Just in the nick of time!

And stories like that only scratch the surface, I can assure you!

II.

But, apart from the stories, we might ask in a more serious vein, “What is baptism all about?”

If we look to the Bible, we will find that there are all kinds of explanations of baptism – all kinds of theologies of baptism; and all kinds of resulting reasons to be baptized. Some Scripture verses would talk about baptism as a washing away of sin; others would talk about baptism as a kind of “badge of faith,” representing a decision to follow Christ; other passages would talk about baptism as the seal of God’s Spirit – a visible sign of an invisible grace; or others would talk about baptism as a dedication of self to God; or yet others as an overt proof of obedience to God’s will.

Over the years, what has mostly happened is that each of our many Christian denominations has fastened upon one or the other of these explanations or theologies, and has claimed it to be the only valid one. So that many of the disagreements among Christians have centered on how we baptize, or what we believe happens in baptism.

And all that is worth being discussed and debated, I’m sure. Yet, when it all comes down, isn’t the central thing about baptism simply that our own Lord was baptized? And isn’t the central reason for us to be baptized, just as simply, because our Lord was baptized, and because we want to be like him?

We want to be like him, because that’s what Christianity is all about – becoming like Christ. Indeed, the word “Christian” itself means “little Christ.” And if we mean anything at all when we call ourselves “Christian,” we mean we want to be a little Christ and live a life that looks like his:

We mean that we seek the grace of God to so live that someone, some time, might say of us, “I believe he or she is as much like Jesus as anyone I’ve ever met.”
We mean that we want our life to be his life – his life lived in our own flesh, in our own circumstances, in our own time.
We mean that we want to so seek the will of God that the power of the Spirit will blaze in the ministry to which we are called, just as it blazed in the ministry to which he was called.

So, as we seek to be and live like Christ – seek to be a “little Christ” – we begin the Christian journey by being baptized like Christ.

III.

Baptized like Christ…. We know the story; indeed we heard it yet again in our Gospel Lesson this morning. After eighteen or so years when the Scriptures tell us nothing at all about Jesus, suddenly Jesus appears by the banks of the Jordan River. And strangely enough for one whom we profess to be sinless, we find him asking to be baptized by John the Baptist – John, you remember, who was baptizing for repentance and the washing away of sins.

So, what’s it all about when a sinless Jesus becomes baptized with a baptism for the remission of sins? It’s only later in his life that this becomes understandable: Jesus was not being baptized for the washing away of his sins; but he was being baptized to take our place fully – he was being baptized for the washing away of our sins.

John, though, didn’t know that, when Jesus approached him at the Jordan; and so he initially demurs: “I need to be baptized by you” he stammers, “but you are coming to be baptized by me?!” Nonetheless, after a brief discussion, John goes ahead to baptize Jesus, as Jesus desires.

And the result? Well, the immediate result is impressive enough: the heavens open, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove comes down and alights upon Jesus, and a voice from heaven booms out: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” That much we heard about in our lesson.

But it’s what is yet to come that really impresses. After overcoming the devil’s temptation to misuse God's blessing, Jesus enters into the ministry to which he is called, preaches powerfully, teaches impressively, heals wondrously, and does miraculous things – all crowned by the supreme miracle of resurrection.

In short, with his baptism, the power of God’s own Spirit blazes in and through the life and ministry of Jesus, so that a whole world is changed – and is still changing today.

IV.

When you and I are baptized – or when you and I seek God’s grace, as we will do today, to renew our baptism – we are asking God for the same sort of thing. We are asking God that we might be like Jesus and also receive that Spirit that would blaze in and through our life and ministry. As a line in our second hymn will have it, “Blaze, Spirit, blaze, set our hearts on fire….”

Or at least that is what we will be asking publicly and liturgically. But, if we’re like most other Christians, there is a part of us that rebels – a part of us that backs away, wants nothing to do with all this “hearts-set-on-fire” sort of stuff; a part of us that says, “What’s that minister doing, messing with our service of worship like that?” There’s a part of many, if not most, of us that resists the claim on our life that baptism wants to make.

If so, we’re not the first to recoil at what baptism might mean. Maybe you’ve heard the story of Ivan the Great of Russia. In the fifteenth century, he was converted to Christianity in the Orthodox faith. When it came time for his baptism, five hundred of his soldiers asked to be baptized with him. The baptism was to be by immersion – as is ordinarily if not always the mode in Orthodox Christianity.

All was arranged for the mass baptism. But suddenly there emerged a problem: the Church at that time forbade professional soldiers – as opposed to draftees or conscripts – from being baptized and becoming church members. A professional soldier had to choose between his profession and Christ.

But what to do? Ivan wanted to be baptized; and the Church surely wanted to baptize him. But he wouldn’t go forward without his soldiers. Here was the solution that all agreed to: as each soldier was being immersed into the water, he reached down with his arm, withdrew his sword from its scabbard, and lifted it high above his head. So each soldier was baptized in that way – all except for his fighting arm and sword.

Now not to denigrate or lessen that wonderful historical exercise in mediation, but when we are baptized – or when we renew our baptism as we do today – Christ asks for all of us; and we are asking for all of Christ. But when we look at the church sometimes and say that it sure doesn’t seem like it’s full of people who have given all to Christ, it’s because church members have wanted to be baptized while still holding one arm above the water – one arm, still clutching whatever it is that we are reluctant to turn over to Christ: one arm still clutching unresolved anger; one arm still clutching a refusal to forgive or seek forgiveness; one arm still clutching a way of life or habit we don’t want to give up.

But there is no such thing as a baptism of part of a person. It’s all of us that is baptized; just like it’s all of us that becomes Christian. And it’s only when all of who we are is baptized that we find the Spirit coming upon us, blazing within us, and then moving us to a ministry that blazes within and through us.

Oh, not that we don’t fall back and regress sometimes; because even the most fervent Christians do. Because baptism, or its renewal, is only the beginning of a process.

That’s what one pastor knew when he baptized an infant girl, and then spoke these words to her in front of the congregation: “Little sister, by this act of baptism, we welcome you to a journey that will take your whole life. This isn’t the end, it’s the beginning of God’s experiment with your life. What God will make of you, we know not. Where God will take you, surprise you, we cannot say. But this we do know and can say: God is with you.” [Wm. Kincaid III, And Then Came the Angel, CSS Pub. Co.]

Life has its ups and downs. The Christian life has its backs and forths – its moments of full and total devotion and its moments when we are trying desperately to lift one arm up out of the baptismal water, and hold on to whatever it is that we can’t bring ourselves to let Christ take control of.

But God still accepts the vows of our baptism, and understands them as authentic. Because God intends to be with you – be with us through all our baptismal journey. God intends to be with us in Christ, and make up for our shortcomings. In his providence, God intends to be with us and mold together the ups and the downs, the backs and forths of our lives, toward one great and grand result.

All toward the end that the Spirit will blaze anew in and through our life and ministry, just like it blazed from that day forth when Christ himself was baptized by John in the River Jordan.

In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.