Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

June 15, 2008

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

I don’t do this very often, but I’m choosing for my text none of the three readings that we have had this morning. The text I wish to use instead is the baptism that we all just witnessed this morning. We have had quite a few baptisms of late, and I wonder sometimes just what we think we are doing when we have a baptism. Or do we think about it at all?

My wife Andrea works as a consultant for various organizations, most of them not-for-profit. I just love some of the jargon that she and her colleagues sometimes use: words like “deliverable,” “the billable hour,” “focus group,” “market research plan,” “donor base,” “best practices,” “promising practices,” “branding,” “SWOT analysis”—S-W-O-T, not S‑W‑A‑T—“logic model.” And then there is the all-important word, that is, it's the most important word when it comes to funding a project—“measurement”—because in our world if you can’t measure the result it’s not worth the investment. This way of thinking is good for some things, but it’s not good for other things. It’s not good for baptism, for example.

What is the measurable in baptism? We invest something in baptism. We dress up, maybe we buy special clothes, we get a special candle, we plan a ceremony, we invite friends and relatives, we take pictures, we use some water, we embroider a special baptismal cloth, and spend some of our precious time to do all this. So what’s the return? What’s the result? What do we expect to see? What is the measurable?

I would suggest to you that baptism is as close to the heart of what the church is all about as it gets, and there at the center of our ritual life is a nonmeasurable. And this isn’t only true about baptism; it’s true about life, because baptism is a sign and symbol expressing the significance of being human, as a child of God.

What are the effects of baptism? How is Kate different now than when she came in this morning? What did baptism do to her? We could run all kinds of tests on her and I think we would find that she has been in no way permanently physically altered by the event. I don’t think any of us would expect her necessarily to be a better person just because she was baptized today. I know some unbaptized people who are an awful lot nicer than many baptized people.

So why do we baptize? Why are you baptized? Well, you might say it’s for eternal life, and that is what we say. But sometimes we get tricked by our own language. We think of eternal life as something that begins when we die and lasts a long, long, long, long time, forever and ever and ever, like sermons sometimes feel.

But what is eternal has no beginning or end. It cannot be measured in terms of time. It is outside of time. Eternal life has no beginning. Although we say that baptism confers eternal life, it doesn’t mean that eternal life begins for a person at baptism.

We cannot say that Kate’s eternal life began on Sunday, June 15, 2008, at twelve minutes after nine in the morning. We can’t say that. Nor can we say likewise when life begins. The argument over when life begins—whether it begins at conception, or at birth, or somewhere in between—is absurd. It’s a question that cannot be answered, because life doesn’t begin. Life takes on form and changes form, but life itself doesn’t begin anywhere or at any time. Your life preceded your birth. It preceded your conception. It preceded the conception of your parents and the birth of the very first parents in the world. Life, all life, is eternal. Other cultures than ours understand better than we do that a person’s decedents live inside of them and that it’s only a matter of time before they take visible shape in the world.

So what does this have to do with baptism? Well, first of all, baptism—Kate’s baptism, your baptism, my baptism—is eternal. We think of baptism as a one‑time event. There it was, right there, at a few minutes after nine in the morning; maybe it was even caught on video‑tape. There it was; it happened. Baptism is not a one‑time event. It’s a symbolic act that reveals the truth about Kate’s life, that although she was born recently as a beautiful little body in the world, she is God’s dearly loved child. God’s love for her did not begin today, nor did it begin at her birth, or ever. God’s love for her, and for you, simply is. That’s one thing about baptism.

Another very important aspect of baptism has to do with the water. Water is both absolutely essential to life, but it also brings death. In baptism, we acknowledge both of those realities. Human life is waterborne. In terms of evolution, we understand that the human organism arose from the sea. Genesis 1 poetically echoes that, saying that life takes on a shape on the earth when God moves over the face of the waters. Each human body takes on shape in the waters of the womb. Once we’re born into the air, water keeps us alive and constitutes most of what we are. We are of water. We live by water. But water isn’t pure life. It also means death. Water brings death, as it did in the story of the great flood and Noah that we refer to in the ceremony. There are people in Iowa City this morning who need no reminder that water can mean death as well as life.

In baptism, water symbolizes both life and death at one and the same time. We think of death and life as opposites. A person is either dead or alive, but not both. Baptism tells us differently. Baptism tells us that death and life go together. They coexist all the time in everyone and everything. In death, life doesn’t end, it just changes form; and that’s how life proceeds all the time. Every birth entails some kind of death—and I don’t need to remind the mothers in the room of this—a former life, a former body-shape, regular sleep, are gone, at least for awhile.

We depend on death to live. We’re nourished by taking the lives of either plants or animals. But the plants and animals are, in turn, nourished by our death as well. And the water of baptism expresses that in life there is always death and that in every death, even as terrible a death as Jesus hanging on a cross, newness of life comes. Jesus died and rose to live in a new way. The old Jesus passed away and the new one rose. So it will be with each one of us.

My last point this morning has to do with evil. Why do we bring that up in baptism? Why spoil such a beautiful event with talk of evil? Why offend the minds of modern, sophisticated people with talk of the devil? The three renunciations of the devil have been part of the baptismal service for nearly two millennia, but that in itself is not reason enough to keep on doing it.

Well, first, about the devil. Horns and a pitchfork? No. But names for the devil help us see perhaps more clearly what we’re talking about. “Devil” means, from Latin, literally “The Evil,” or “The Evil One.” “Satan” is a Hebrew word for “Accuser.” And “Lucifer” is from the Latin and means “Light Bringer,” “Angel of Light.” Lucifer was imagined, of course, as the “Chief of Demons” by Dante and John Milton. Poets understand that what we might call forces or energies or principles in life are really best described and imagined as persons and presences, so we speak of “Lady Liberty,” “Father Time,” “The Grim Reaper,” “Lady Luck,” or “Mother Earth.” And we do so because our experience with these often seems more than impersonal. It feels more like dealing with someone than with some thing. Something is dealing with us back, is messing with us, is beckoning us, is chastising, or tempting, or teaching us, or has us in its grip. In the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, these presences are imagined as angels and demons. In the Greco-Roman world, they were imagined as gods and goddesses. In Native American tradition, they are imagined as spirits, often in the form of animals.

What we’re expressing in baptism by ritually renouncing the devil and evil forces is that the experience of evil is part of human life and that each of us, individually and all of us together, are engaged in a very, very difficult struggle with the presence of evil in our lives and in our world. Evil can and does take hold, individually and systemically. Evil has different guises. Evil as “Accuser,” or in Hebrew “Ha-Satan,” sometimes as a self-accuser: “I’m dumb,” “I’m fat,” “I’m lazy,” “I’m worthless,” and “I’m bad”; sometimes as an accuser of our brothers and sisters: “It’s those Jews.” “It’s those blacks.” “It’s those immigrants.” “It’s those infidels.” “It’s those gays.” “It’s the kids these today, they are responsible for what’s going wrong in our world.”

But evil is also an “Angel of Light,” and Martin Luther was very attenuated to this idea. He said at times God and the devil are hard to distinguish one from another. He worried most of all about transgressions done in a spirit of righteousness, not malice. He understood that great evil can be done to the neighbor in the name of goodness.

Listen to these words from a few centuries back in the American colonies, from an eyewitness account of Africans disembarking a slave ship:

A hundred or so Negroes, freshly arrived from Africa, would be herded into a church. Whips cracked, and they were ordered to kneel. A priest, followed by the acolytes and carrying a basin of holy water, walked slowly down the aisle and scattered water over the heads of the crowd, chanting in Latin. The whips cracked again. The slaves rose from their knees and emerged into the light, converts to Christianity.

Baptism is not some pie-in-the-sky, airy-fairy, nicey‑nicey ritual that has mostly to do with our sentimentality towards babies. Nor does it have to do with our superstitions concerning heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo.

Baptism is extremely realistic. Baptism tells it like it is. It tells us what life is like for God’s children in the world, and it does so in specifically Christian imagery. It declares that we come from God and we return to God, and this is eternal life. It shows us that it is an illusion that we live and then die. The life we have is continual death and rebirth, up to and including what we call death. It tells us that we are engaged from birth in a difficult, difficult struggle to recognize, to name, and to resist evil, first in ourselves and then in the world.

Baptism is serious, with far more meaning than can be expressed here in a few minutes. But if we begin to see, that is enough for now. It doesn’t come with measureables; none of our rituals do. That’s not the point. What they bring us into contact with is unmeasurable. It is the mystery we call God; it is the mystery we call life.