And a voice came
from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11)
“Someday, when she’s
old enough to understand, you’ll have to tell Eloise that she’s adopted.” These
are the words with which I plan to begin my homily for the Feast of the Baptism
of Our Lord this year. We at Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia will be kicking off
2024 with a baptism on that most appropriate of liturgical feasts, the First
Sunday of the Epiphany, the Sunday which celebrates Jesus’ baptism. I’m going
to tell Eloise’s mommy and daddy that, just as the heavens were torn apart when
John baptized Jesus and the voice declared Jesus to be Son and Beloved, (See
Mark 1:4-11) so, when the water is poured on baby Eloise’s head, she will be
adopted into God’s family, become a little sister to all of us, and will
forever be an inheritor of God’s forgiving grace.
I have to give our
evangelist, St. Mark, props for just giving us the main points of the story.
Compared with the other evangelists, Mark’s version is like the Cliffs Notes:
·
John calls people to
a baptism of repentance.
·
People get baptized
confessing their sins.
·
John tells people
Jesus is coming and will baptize with the Holy Spirit.
·
Jesus gets baptized.
·
The heavens open,
the Spirit descends, and God declares, “Yup! That’s my boy! And he makes me
really happy.”
That’s it. You get
washed, and you’re family. I always say that Jesus getting baptized is like
washing in our dirty bath water. He’s totally okay with wading into the sin and
weirdness we’re trying to wash off because he wants us to know that we’re all
in this thing together, and he’s not afraid to be in it with us. He’s willing
to do whatever we do, and to go through whatever we go through. That’s how
God’s family rolls.
So, I thought this year I’d
go over some of the stuff that’s important in this adoption ritual we do[i]. Before we make a
confession of what we believe and what it means to be a Christian, we first
have to distance ourselves from the stuff we don’t believe and don’t want
to be part of our new life and family. Candidates for baptism—or, more
frequently, their parents and sponsors since the candidate may be just a little
too young to speak for him or herself—are asked to renounce the devil and the
forces which defy God, the powers of this world which rebel against God, and
the ways of sin which draw us away from God.
I’ll admit I don’t talk
or write a whole lot about the devil. What’s more, I don’t think you have to
believe in an anthropomorphic demon figure with horns and a pitchfork to get
what this liturgical statement is saying. You would do well, however, to
acknowledge that there’s some pretty nasty stuff that going on in this
world—stuff you don’t want to be part of and you don’t want your children or
anyone you love to embrace. There are spirits of selfishness, hatred, and anger
that are running loose on this planet. There’s the desire to worship raw power
for its own sake, to make a false god out of victory, to dehumanize others for
the sake of self-aggrandizement, to conquer, acquire, and consume at the
expense of the helpless, to control through cruelty and humiliation, and to
waste the resources of God’s creation. In short, there is sin. And we
need to know it, see it, and reject it.
We are also called upon
in our baptismal rite to reject the powers of this world. That doesn’t mean
that we renounce the world and live in caves like hermits, which, let’s face
it, would be difficult to do as there are only so many caves to go around. It
also doesn’t mean we blow the raspberry at all forms of secular government.
What it does mean is that we differentiate between what baptism tells us
and what the culture tells us. Baptism tells us we’re God’s kids, we’re
beloved, and God delights in us. We’re adopted because God our daddy loves us
just as we are—sin and all. The world, by contrast, tells us we can be
beloved if we’re thin enough, pretty enough, accomplished enough, rich
enough, wear the right clothes, drive the right car, live in the right
neighborhood, have the right job, etc., etc. You get the idea. God doesn’t have
time for that slop. God just loves us.
Finally, we’re asked to
renounce the ways of sin that draw us personally away from God. We all have to
learn to take our own inventory at times. We’ve got check our supply of
grievance, cynicism, pessimism, arrogance, perfectionism, frustration,
addiction, indifference, intolerance…yeah. Again, you get the idea. And sometimes
you just have to be okay with not being okay. You have to remind
yourself that, however big a screw-up you are, you’re still baptized. You’re
still part of the fam. Because whenever you think you’ve got it all handled on
your own, whenever you think you know better, whenever you’re convinced you’re
right and the rest of the world is wrong, that’s probably when you’re being the
biggest jerk of all.
If you were a God-fearing
Jewish person back in John the Baptist’s day, you’d take plenty of ritual baths.
You’d get washed if you’d been sick, if you’re girl and you had your period, if
you touched blood, or touched dead things. But the bath we take with Jesus in
our baptism is a one-shot-guaranteed-for-eternal-life deal. It says you’re
adopted and you’re family no matter what. That’s God’s contract with us—a contract
we remember every time we come with the other adoptees as a family to our
Father’s dinner table. Our part of the deal? Just to feel our Father’s love and
respond as our heart tells us to.
God’s blessings to you,
my fellow adopted sibling! May you have a wonderful and meaningful New Year.
[i] You
can find the liturgy I use for Holy Baptism in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress
Publishers, 2006 pew edition) pages 227-231.
Sister to you in Christ I love that
ReplyDelete