Baptism

Ann Beaty
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

January 16, 2011

Matthew 3

Some of my favorite words from our United Methodist liturgy are the words of introduction spoken each time we begin a baptism in worship. 

They are directed not only to the person or parents of the one being baptized.  They are intended as words of reminder to the whole congregation.

Listen to them as if we were preparing for a baptism this morning:

“Brothers and sisters in Christ: Through the Sacrament of Baptism we are initiated into Christ’s holy church. We are incorporated into God’s mighty acts of salvation and given new birth through water and the Spirit. All this is God’s gift, offered to us without price.”

As a pastor, what a privilege it is to announce and remind the community of faith of the sheer abundance of God’s generosity extended to us in baptism.

• We are initiated into the church – we are coming into a community where we belong.  We belong for love, support, and accountability.

• We are incorporated into God’s mighty acts of salvation.  We are celebrating a ritual where we are incorporated into God’s saving grace that has been present since the beginning of time and will go on long beyond us and can not be undone by anything we might do or neglect to do.

• We are given new birth through water and the Spirit.  We have an opportunity to start fresh and new as the “old” in us is washed away and we are strengthened in the presence of the Holy Spirit – God’s gift of presence with us forever.

All of this given to us as gift – gift bestowed upon us, not because we have done something to receive it, but because we are responding to God’s love working in our lives.  It’s all right there – in the introduction to baptism.

In the United Methodist Church, we offer the sacrament of Baptism to people of all ages.  While young children are not yet able to choose Christian discipleship for themselves, we believe that Jesus welcomed children and that in baptizing children we are stating that they do indeed belong to the community of faith.

Parents answer the questions of faith and re-submit themselves to the path of Christian discipleship.  They take a sacred vow to assume responsibility for raising their children in this way. 

I remember not long ago a parent telling me when she was expecting her third child that an older sibling asked her one night when saying prayers together… “Mom, are you going to make this one a Christian too?!”  Children understand what it means to belong.

Children who have been baptized as infants than have the opportunity to re-confirm the vows for themselves as youth in Confirmation when they are commissioned to take responsibility for their own path of discipleship – all done in the context of worship with the assurance of belonging to a supportive, loving, encouraging community.

In the scripture today from Matthew, we go back to the very beginnings of our history in Christian Baptism.  We find Jesus, at the very beginning of his ministry, coming from Galilee to be baptized by John in the Jordan River.

John has been working to prepare people for the coming of Jesus.  He has been preaching a “baptism of repentance” – encouraging people to turn away from destructive living towards God and to prepare for the one that is coming. 

And now, here he is.  And Jesus is asking John to baptize him.  John’s first impulse is to resist this.  For John, it is all wrong.  Jesus is the greater one.  Jesus should be the one to baptize him, not vice-versa.

What John doesn’t yet understand, perhaps because Jesus’ ministry is just getting started, is that what it means for Jesus to be the greater one is for him to submit to the lesser one. Soon we will hear it everywhere Jesus goes: the last shall be first, the least greatest, the humble exalted. 

In Jesus’ baptism, we don’t hear Jesus preach this message; we see him embody it.  Jesus’ gift to John is the gift of submission.

He is the long-awaited Anointed One, the very Son of God, who, at the same time, allows himself to be plunged into the water by John and as a result, he emerges from the water as the Beloved Son of God.

It is Jesus’ obedience to God and his willingness to be anointed as a servant in God’s name, for it “fulfills all that is right and true” – we are told in the scriptures.

I’ve spent a great deal of time this week considering the Biblical meaning of submission for a totally different occasion than preaching this morning.  I did a wedding yesterday and the couple requested Ephesians 5 as the scripture to be read. 

Without going into a lot of detail, Ephesians 5 is the passage of scripture that talks about the wife submitting to her husband in marriage.

Over the years, many people have taken those verses out of context and understood them as a means of male dominance where the woman is far from cherished and respected as a loving partner.

I learned this week in researching that scripture that Paul, in writing to the church at Ephesus, was really talking about husband and wife modeling the relationship of Christ to the church.

Submission in marriage is actually about cherishing one another and being more concerned about what one is called to GIVE than what one is GETTING.  Paul is reminding us of the true meaning of submission – exactly what is being modeled by Jesus in the scripture for today as he practiced submission to John and to God in being baptized.

Baptism is our rite of submission – of surrender – into the church and onto the path of Christian discipleship.

When we bring ourselves or our children for baptism we are saying we believe that because we are loved and cherished so much by God, we want to submit ourselves – we want to surrender ourselves totally to the path of Christian discipleship.

In baptism, we too emerge from the water as beloved sons and daughters whose new life, in the pattern of Christ, is one of servanthood.

The challenge for those of us who are baptized is to live into the gift of our own transformation. 

We are in the season of the church year called Epiphany.  It is the season that begins right after Christmas and continues until the beginning of Lent – the time when Jesus begins his final journey towards Jerusalem and his death.  It is about 8 weeks.

It is in this time in the church year that we will follow Jesus through the scripture stories as he moves into his ministry teaching, preaching, and healing.

We will learn more about what it means to be a follower of Christ and how through our own discipleship, we can participate in the transformation of the world in love.

But for today, we remember the beginnings of Jesus ministry and as we remember our own baptism or contemplate that sacrament for ourselves or our children for the future, we renew again our vow to go on that path with him – the path of Christian discipleship.

Let us pray…