God Only Knows

It’s such a simple act. Some scripture is read. A prayer is offered. Water is poured. A name is called. An ancient formula is repeated: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

When reduced to its essentials, there’s really not much to the sacrament of baptism. Words, water, action – that’s all there is to it. Why all the fuss? Why go through this ritual again and again? Why set aside a Sunday year after year to revisit the baptism of Jesus and our own?

Perhaps part of the answer is that, after almost 2,000 years in the school of hard knocks, the Church of Jesus Christ is finally learning to go back to the basics.

As the Church declines in what we used to call the Old World and expands dramatically in the so-called Third World, Christians are having to re-think what it means to be Christian. The old labels don’t work anymore. What use is denominational identity when there are more Presbyterians in South Korea than in Scotland and the United States put together? What does a Pentecostal believer in Peru have in common with a United Methodist in Minnesota? What sign transcends barriers of culture, race, and language?

From the very beginning, from the moment Jesus entered the muddy water of the Jordan and submitted himself to his cousin John, that sign has been baptism.

It was so when, by the Holy Spirit, Peter was dragged kicking and screaming into the home of that untouchable Gentile, Cornelius. Peter felt the gorge rise in his throat as crossed their Gentile threshold and smelled their Gentile cooking. He was so disappointed in God’s poor judgment that he could barely utter the insight that felt to him as much curse as blessing: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him."

No longer could the gospel of Jesus Christ be possessed by a single race or nation. The Spirit that brooded over the face of the waters on the first day of creation was now blowing over the whole earth. Can anyone stop this? Can anyone deny to these people so different from us the sign of God’s inclusion? "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?"

We are the spiritual descendants of Cornelius, you and I. God’s grace has come even to the likes of us, and the sign and seal of that amazing grace is baptism.

And so we return to these water at least twice a year – on this, the Lord’s Day called "Baptism of the Lord," and during the Great Vigil of Easter – to renew the covenant sealed in these waters. I could preach every Sunday about the meaning of baptism. (I hope that, in a way, I do preach every Sunday about the meaning of baptism). But this morning let us consider only three perspectives on this sacrament of grace by asking three questions:

How did we get here?

Whom do we meet here?

Where do we go from here?

First, how did we get here? No, I don’t mean, "Did we come by car or bus or foot?" It always seems to me as though people who come downtown on Sunday mornings drive at least two cars a piece, judging from the way parking spaces fill up. I mean, "How do we arrive at baptism?" I am convinced the answer is always, "We are brought to baptism by God."

This is a sacrament of human response to God’s initiative. We don’t come to baptism. We are brought here. Whether carried as babies in our mother’s arms, or kneeling in middle age with arthritic knees, we don’t get here by ourselves. We’re brought here by God, who calls us by name, who knows us better than we know ourselves, who seeks us until we are found, who opens arms wide to greet us even while our backs are still turned from his welcoming embrace.

At times in the history of the Church we have tried to make this sacrament about something else – our initiative, our intellectual readiness, our sincere repentance. Every time we do that we distort the essence of the grace this sacrament proclaims. This isn’t about our choosing God; it’s about God choosing us.

How do we come here? We are brought here by the Holy Spirit of God.

Second, whom do we meet here? We meet the Lord Jesus Christ.

We are so accustomed to this ritual that it is easy to forget what a shock it was for John the Baptist to meet Jesus here. There he was at the Jordan River, warning people to get ready for the wrath to come, rejecting the scribes and Pharisees who came to him, and baptizing the true believers for the forgiveness of their sins. It is completely safe to say that Jesus was the last person John expected to meet in baptism. According to Matthew, he says as much:

"Let it be so now," Jesus replies, "for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." An ocean of ink has been spilled in an attempt to explain that saying. I think means, This is what God wants. This is necessary for me to fulfill my calling from God and for you to do the same."

In other words, if Jesus is to be what the Nicene Creed calls "fully God and fully human," he has to meet us at the point of our deepest need – our need for God’s forgiveness.

John was, for all his courage, wrong about baptism, or rather he was only partially right. Of course it’s about our sin and our need for repentance, but even more than that, it’s about God becoming flesh to meet us in these waters of repentance and new birth. We meet Jesus here.

The oldest pictorial representation of Jesus’ being baptized by John is found in a floor mosaic in the ruins ancient Pompeii. It shows the two of them knee-deep in blue waves. John is pouring water over Jesus’ head with a bowl. The water that cascades from Jesus’ head in that image of his baptism day prefigures the crown of thorns that he will wear on the day of his crucifixion.

In these waters we meet Jesus. In them we not only receive forgiveness. We also share in his death and his resurrection. This font is the tomb in which we die with Christ and the womb from which we are born to new life with him.

How do we come here? God brings us. Whom do we meet here? Jesus Christ himself. Where do we go from here? Ah, to that question we do not yet have the full answer.

Baptism, you see, is not the sacrament of ending or arrival. It’s the sacrament of beginning, of embarkation. It’s less about where we’ve been than where we’re called to go. That’s why it’s impossible to speak of Christian vocation, or calling, without linking it to these waters.

Our sister Mary Vance is about to called to become pastor of the Fellowship Presbyterian Church way up north in the Killearn frontier. Her journey toward the ministry of word and sacrament has been, let us say, an interesting one. It includes a long period when she had no interest in the church at all, a career in the law, an experience of spiritual rebirth, a long course of study in seminary, and a sojourn amongst us, her "adopted" congregation. In a couple of weeks Mary will preach her trial sermon and be examined on the floor during a meeting of the Presbytery of Florida.

I was explaining the ordination process to a young person in this congregation the other day. "You mean, since she wants to be a pastor, she has to have her head examined?"

Indeed. Anybody entering the ministry of word and sacrament needs to have his or her head examined. And her heart. But most of all, her baptism.

You see, we are all called to ministry. That call starts right here, in the waters of baptism. Here God calls us from death to life, to live as disciples of Jesus Christ. The call to specific ministries, such as the ministry of word and sacrament, is only one way of living out a baptismal vocation.

For some of us that vocation leads to pulpit and table. Others God calls to the bar, to the classroom, to the laboratory, or to the counter of business. Some are called to public service – what John Calvin considered the most sacred and useful of all vocations.

I know for a fact that one of the reasons Fellowship Church is calling Mary to be their pastor is because her journey hasn’t followed a predictable path. They like the fact that she knows what it’s like to go for years without darkening the door of a church. They like the fact that she had a career in the law, and knows what it’s like to hold her own in the secular world. Those years leading up to this moment in Mary’s life were not wasted. They are part and parcel of her vocation, a vocation born of water and the Spirit.

Who brings us to this font? God does. Who meets us here? Jesus does. Where do we go from here? Only God knows. The journey isn’t over until our baptism is complete in death. 

Remember your baptism and be thankful.