Sermons

The Sacred Mystery of Baptism

May I speak to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit. Amen.

Earlier this week, I received an email that said, my “best for a weekend full of reflections on the layered meanings and significance of Juneteenth, Pride, and Father’s Day!” And I thought “Oh no! Because what I really wanted to preach about is baptism!” And so let me first say happy Father’s Day to all of you who are fathers and who are celebrating today, and for all of us who have lost fathers, who have complicated relationships with our fathers, who wanted to be fathers but couldn’t, I wish you peace on what can be a hard day.

And let me also say Happy Pride! I’m wearing my rainbow earrings and I also wore them yesterday with Mitch, Gary, Chris, and Elin, and a few other folks who were out representing St. Mark’s and the Episcopal Church at Capital Pride yesterday. It’s an important time for the church to show that not only are we composed of many people who are part of the LGBTQIA community, but we will also wholeheartedly stand up for their rights.

And finally, let me wish you a happy and reflective Juneteenth. This holiday is a time to celebrate the resilience, fortitude, and strength of those Black people who were enslaved in this country, and to give thanks for all that they and their descendants have contributed to the nation. And it is a time, especially for those of us who are white, to examine our own relationship to whiteness and white supremacy, to make sure that we are standing for justice and equality. I was reminded in my research for this sermon that some slaveholders refused to baptize those they enslaved. Because, as the Apostle Paul writes in another letter, that one to the Galatians, in Christ “there is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.” The slaveholders believed that if those whom they enslaved were their siblings in Christ, it would no longer be proper to enslave them. So it’s clear that they read the Bible, but completely missed the message of compassion, love, and mercy that is pouring forth from it, a shameful part of our history.

About six weeks ago, our bishop, Mariann Edgar Budde, preached a Sunday, which was similar to today because it also had several baptisms at the 9 am service, that time five, today four. In fact, between May and August of this year, we’ll have had 13 baptisms across 5 services. But on that day last month, Bishop Budde preached my favorite kind of sermon. It’s a sermon that in some way answers the question, “Okay, so what are we doing here?” And so I want to try to also answer that question today. The bishop focused on the arc of Jesus’ story. Today, I want to look at the ritual of baptism.

Today’s reading from Romans discusses the theology of baptism. Through water, we are buried with Christ in his death, and through rising again, we are joined with him in resurrection. The death and resurrection imagery makes a lot more sense in terms of symbolism in a world where we are standing in a body of water, doing full immersion baptism. Water, which can be a deadly force in a flash flood, is also the root of all that sustains us as it nourishes the plants and animals we use for food.

Before I went to seminary, I am now extremely embarrassed to say, that I think I believed that we were too good for standing in a stream. Who needs a body of water when we can just pour water into a beautiful bowl? No need to get dirty! But in Austin, I had the good fortune to participate in two Episcopal Sunday morning baptismal services on the bank of a river, complete with vestments and Books of Common Prayer. And when we renounced the spiritual forces of wickedness, we faced the west, toward darkness. And when we renewed our faith, we turned toward the east, toward the sun. It was an embodied baptism unlike any other I’ve experienced, and I immediately got how rich the symbols are when experiencing them in that way.

There’s a book by Gail Ramshaw with a truly awful title. I’m not just saying that, I used to write headlines for a living, and this one is really bad. It’s called Christian Worship. Not the most engaging name. But the subtitle makes it. The subtitle is 100,000 Sundays of Symbols and Rituals. In the book, Ramshaw details the practices of Christianity by how many tens of thousands of Sundays a tradition has been practiced. For reference, 10,000 Sundays is approximately 200 years. Baptism begins at the beginning.

100,000 Sundays ago, Christians would have been reading the stories we know now from the scriptures, the story of Jesus’s baptism, of the baptism of households in Luke. They would have been reading the actual letters from the Apostle Paul.

90,000 Sundays ago, Christians in Syria made changes to a house where they were meeting to
section off one small room with a font the size of a bathtub.

75,000 Sundays ago (roughly the year 500), Easter became the time designated for baptisms, because it is when we celebrate the Paschal Mystery, the death and resurrection of Jesus, the same death and life that Paul writes about in the Romans reading today. Lent was designated as the time of preparation for baptism, but your formation could last for up to three years.

50,000 Sundays ago, the baptism of infants became the norm because of the doctrine of original sin, which made people believe that their children would go to purgatory or hell if they died before being baptized, leading to a really unconscionable amount of fear for parents. Please note: this is not what we believe now, nor is this why we baptize infants. This was also when less and less water was used. Don’t want to take a baby into flowing water with no floaties.

25,000 Sundays ago, some protestants started to reject infant baptism, believing that baptism should be a choice made by adults. Baptism of infants and children continues to divide denominations today.

And so here we are today, at St. Mark’s Church on Capitol Hill, participating in a sacred and mysterious ritual, one that has been passed down to us for thousands of years. It’s humbling, honestly, to pour water on someone and baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. It is something so far beyond us, and which connects us with Christians, near and far, across all of time that is past, and all that is yet to come. You may not know this, but in an emergency, any baptized Christian can perform a baptism. What an incredible responsibility!

A note about infant baptism. There are actually two different forms for the baptismal service, but because we use bulletins and prepare the suitable rite for the occasion, it’s easy to miss the difference.

In the version for infants and small children, the parents and godparents make the promises on behalf of the child and promise to support the child in their life of faith. In the adult version, the candidate takes on the promises for themselves, and the sponsor (rather than a godparent) acts as a support figure. I love that, whether child or adult, for every baptism, the whole community commits to “do all in [y]our power to support these persons in their life in Christ.” And here we believe that, wherever you are on your faith journey, whether you are 1 day old or well into your later years, baptism is a ritual of commitment to the Christian faith, a recognition that you are a child of God, and a mystical incorporation into the paschal mystery, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I don’t remember my own baptism, which took place when I was about five months old, nearly 40 years ago. My church had a tradition that when the priest escorted the baby or young child down the aisle after the baptism, any of the congregation gathered could whisper a word or phrase in their ear, a hope for their life. When I visit my home church in Oklahoma today, there are still people who remember what they whispered to me that day, a manifestation of the vows they took those many years ago.

I had a lot more to say about baptism than I thought! I want to end with this line from the Thanksgiving over the water:

“We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with
Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are
reborn by the Holy Spirit. Amen”