There’s an old Brazilian folk tale that tells about two babies in the womb discussing the great question of all time: Is there life after birth? “There is,” the first baby insists, “there’s a whole world after this, just waiting to be explored.” “I don’t think so,” the second baby countered. “How could there be, everything we need is right here. And anyway,” always the voice of reason, “we couldn’t go far with the umbilical cord.” “After birth we won’t need the umbilical cord,” explained the first. “We’ll be free.” “No umbilical cord!” the second shouted, aghast, “but the umbilical cord is life, it is air, it is nutrients, it is everything we need, how could we live without it!” “The mother will take care of us,” replied the first. “The mother,” scoffed the second, “don’t tell me you believe in that old fairy tale of the mother.” “There is a mother,” insisted the first. “The mother is all around us. The mother protects us, provides for us, cares for us. Now we only feel the mother, but after birth we will be able to see the mother face to face. Others have gone from this womb, and the mother took care of them. So too will the mother take care of us.” Seeing an opportunity, the second countered, “but no one’s ever come back from being born to tell us what it is like. How can you believe in something you cannot see?” “I just know,” said the first, “I can feel it. There is life after birth.” [Pause]
So this morning is Baptism of Our Lord Sunday, the morning when we discuss the new life we receive in Christ through the sacrament of baptism. A topic that may seem as esoteric as two infants arguing about the meaning of life. What is baptism, anyway? As Lutherans, we practice infant baptism which means that some of you probably don’t remember your baptism. I don’t remember mine. I was three months old. My father remembers his, we were baptized together, me because that’s what you do to babies in my family, him because the pastor wanted him on council, and the church constitution at my parents church stipulated that council members be “baptized members of the congregation.” Either way, baptism for both of us marked an entrance into membership in the life of the church. And that’s true. Baptism is this promise that we have been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit. It is a tangible sign of the promise, something we can hold onto, touch, feel, something we can go back to whenever we need assurance of that promise and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, even when we don’t believe it, that we are children of God.
Both as a pastor and as a person of faith, baptism for me is an important part of my spiritual identity, and as I think is important anytime we talk about baptism in the church, I want to make a quick plug here and say that if you have not been baptized and you would like to be, or you are at all curious about the sacrament, please talk to me after the service. Or, during, really, we have water right here. This is God’s gift, I just get the privilege of being the one who gets to get my hands wet in the process.
But I also want to say something else about baptism. Because over millennia of talking about it, I think we, and here by “we” I mean myself and other theologians and church professionals who’s job it is to talk about such things, have put too much emphasis on baptism as this beginning step and we’ve turned baptism, what Martin Luther called “God’s greatest gift to us” into this hoop or this gateway that people have to jump through in order to be part of the family. Like fire insurance or having your wisdom teeth pulled, baptism somehow became this thing that we did so that our church record keeping could be clear. So we could tell who was in and who was out. But our Gospel reading for this morning is about the baptism of Jesus, and what we know about Jesus is that anytime a line was drawn between who was in and who was out, Jesus always managed to find a way to be on the wrong side of that line. If there were sinners, Jesus ate with them, tax collectors, he taught them, lepers, he touched them, he healed them. Throughout scripture, Jesus again and again thwarts the expectations of what it meant to be a “good religious person.” So if baptism becomes a line we draw as to who is in and who is out, Jesus is never going to be on our side of it.
So back for a moment to our two infant philosophers, arguing about the meaning of life after birth. The story is silly and cute to us, right, because we know how it ends. We know their argument is completely irrelevant. Because regardless of what the infants believe about life after birth, it exists. And, whether they believe in it or not, the twins will be born. Born in a rush of water and blood, born into a bright new world, the depth and the colors and the complexity of which they cannot even imagine. And the Mother, during our story only an abstract idea, the Mother loves them now, even though they do not know Her. Even though they are as yet only abstractions, the Mother loves them with an unbounded love, such that they cannot even understand.
That’s baptism. Baptism is God loving us before, during, after, at every moment, in every aspect of our lives. Like a stone dropping into a pond, sending ripples through time and space, God’s love is not contained or constrained by our ability to say yes to it, but it moves beyond limitations pulling us deeper into God’s cosmic embrace.
Our Gospel reading for this morning is from the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel. We heard part of this reading already, in the second week of Advent. So you may remember, or have noticed, that the bulk of this reading is not about Jesus at all, but is about John. How John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism for the repentance of sins. How he wore a cloak of camel’s hair tied with a leather belt, how he ate locusts and wild honey, how the crowds flocked to him in the Jordan River to confess and be baptized. And then, almost as an afterthought, in verse nine, Jesus came from Nazareth and was baptized. This is Jesus’ first appearance in the Gospel of Mark. There is no birth narrative in Mark’s Gospel, no long genealogy connecting him to David and Abraham and Adam. No angels announcing his conception, no star heralding his arrival, no shepherds, no wise men, just Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee, coming to the Jordan. This is also before everything. Before Jesus called his disciples, before he offered any teachings, before he healed any lepers, loved any broken, forgave any sinners. This Jesus who came on the scene in verse nine to be baptized by John in the Jordan is just another face in the crowd, an unknown and unimportant stranger from the small village of Nazareth in faraway Galilee.
But as Jesus emerged from the waters, the heavens themselves were torn open and a voice from heaven proclaimed, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” That promise of belovedness echoed back and forth through history. We who stand on this side of history can see that Christ’s belovedness did not start or end at the Jordan. But this promise of Christ’s belovedness echoed through the Word made flesh, the one who was with God at the birth of creation, the one who taught and healed and loved and lived, the one who came to die, who was crucified on a cross and was buried, the one who rose again, and who still comes to us today, meeting is in water and word, in bread and wine. All of that, the entire history of creation is bound up in that promise in a moment at the river, when the heavens opened and God declared, “you are my Son, the Beloved.”
This is baptism, it is a promise that we are children of God. It is a promise totally dependent on God who meets us where we are and who we are and says to us, “you are my Child, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” Like the Mother’s love for the philosophizing fetuses, it is true wherever we are on our journey of faith whether we believe it or not, whether we know it or not, whether we have been to the water or not. Like ripples in a pond, the love of God flows back and forth through time and space reaching us wherever we find ourselves. So come to the water and know that this promise is for you. You are God’s child, the Beloved. And in you God is well pleased. Amen.
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