Sermon for The Baptism of Our Lord
January 11, 2009
Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11
Pastor Keith Olstad
The children’s lesson:
Take kids to baptismal font.
Ask them to think about rivers they’ve seen. Can they see where the river comes from? Can they see where the river is going? They only know that it keeps coming and it keeps going.
Being baptized is like stepping into a river. Like a river where don’t know where it comes from or where it goes, but know that it keeps on coming.
Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. This baptismal font is our Jordan River.
And the river tells us something about God. We don’t really understand where God comes from, but God is here. And we know that God will keep flowing into our lives forever.
The sermon:
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God, our Creator, and from our loving Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
“…Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water,” writes Mark in our Gospel lesson, “he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”1
Clean and bright snowfall reminds me of something I have experienced over and over again. Check it out for yourself when you head home this morning. When brilliant white snow covers everything, it is as though all the colors of the world were polarized, reducing every scene to a black and white photograph. All the neutral hues of late autumn—the browns, tans and grays—are replaced by a dominant white, with a deep gray or black the only contrast.
I especially enjoy winter here in the north country. I like it because winter here is so clearly opposite summer’s lush and vital greenness. Yet, for all their differences, for both seasons—winter and summer—there is a common denominator. That common denominator dominates both times of the year, and it connotes both life and death. That common denominator is water.
During most of a Minnesota winter, water is snow and ice. Snow and ice
cover and conceal life. For many of summertime’s creatures—especially those outside the urban areas—winter inevitably brings death. In rural settings, many creatures sleep deeply in burrows or mud, fallen leaves or cracked bark. Meanwhile snow accumulates and drifts, suffocating the world below with too much of one thing. The lone prey or predator that leaves prints in the snow becomes an exciting exception to the deathly vacant snow scape.
Similarly in summer water dominates. But now it is the very stuff of life. During summer, wherever water flows, life flourishes. Fish flash in clear shallows. Larvae crawl from watery cradles to become dragonflies, or mayflies, or mosquitoes. Moose and deer drink at lakeshores or browse in marshes. Flowers of every color blossom in moist soils. Near the shores birds orchestrate their varied songs into symphonies of inexpressible beauty. In summertime, water is everywhere, suckling life of every sort.
Bear with me for a moment while I make a parenthesis. Too often when we do theology, we tend to think that any truth about God we establish in our setting will apply everywhere. Nonetheless, because our world is so diverse, there are many meaningful insights to be found in one place that make little sense in another. The difference between winter ice and summer water is easily understood by us and people throughout the northern and farthest southern climates. But this contrast would have made little sense to the early church, for the early church developed in a climate that offered virtually no ice or snow.
Just the same, water’s power to connote both life and death was not lost on the early church. It became the focal element in one of the church’s two central dramas. Water was the tool for baptism, and the early church exploited its nature dramatically.
In many early Christian communities, in fearful contexts of political or religious oppression, baptismal ceremonies took place in caverns or basements, in dank and heavy darkness. The people about to be baptized were stripped naked and led down into cold, dark pools of water. Three times—as the three persons of our triune God were named—the baptized were shoved under the smothering water until their lungs were about to burst. Death itself stared them in the face in those chilling, anonymous waters.
After the third and last submersion, the baptized were rescued from death’s watery clutches. Lifted up out of the dismal waters, the baptized saw torches being lit until the whole cave shone brightly. They were covered with new, warm white garments that shone in the light. They received the sign of the cross on their foreheads, and the whole congregation burst into glorious song. They had been pulled from watery death and born to a new life. The community of faith now embraced and welcomed them, and they embraced a new life within the community.
It was a terrifying, dramatic experience. All new Christians undergoing baptism knew that faith took them into the very jaws of death on the way to full and abundant life. They had experienced it. And through it they became part of the ongoing life of the One who passed through death into new life. They became part of the ongoing life of Jesus.
About Jesus, John the Baptizer had declared: “After me the one who is more powerful than I is coming, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water; but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”2 Yet in spite of John’s histrionic claims, Jesus came to John to be baptized. Jesus came to go into the water, to let his life be changed. As he came out of the water, Jesus saw the heavens open and the Spirit descended upon him like a dove. And God said to Jesus, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”3
For us, life’s changes are rarely so dramatic. For most of us, it is not common that we find ourselves in ceremonies that so literally plunge us into experiences of death’s darkness, and then draw us out into the brilliant light of a loving and sustaining community. Even in Minnesota, where every year we can witness the transformation of deathly cold ice and snow into life-giving, flowing water, even in this transformation few of us recognize God’s word calling us. We do not allow that God’s Spirit is as involved in this seasonal change as it was in Jesus’ baptism. Even in church we do not even let our baptismal rites become so dramatic and dangerous an event. The baptisms we do here involve mere splashes, barely ripples compared to those early dramas.
But we do face instances of death, and sometimes they are washed in water.
Certainly when this congregation experienced deaths in recent years, there were tears, as death created holes and stimulated memories. When Pastor Anita learned that her sister’s cancer had returned, quickly she feared another death, and her tears flowed. Experiences of death are this way. They remind us that we are constantly changing, constantly facing losses, daily addressing transitions.
Like baptism in the early church, death is a transition to new life. Whenever change or death confronts us with loss or regret, we grieve. Our tears become baptismal tears, and our journey through them is a baptismal passage. But whatever sadness or grief comes from endings and changes, those same events also offer hope for our future, later, on the other side of whatever our baptismal journey we’re on. There is always for us a promise of new life.
Such baptismal passages—passages through death into new life—mark, in small ways or large, our entire lives. Through God’s grace, we share a baptismal understanding of life. Through God’s Spirit, we are gathered into baptismal communities where together we hear God’s Word and are nourished by God’s body and blood to be God’s body in the world. In baptism we find not only imagery and understanding for the events of our lives, but hope for life forever.
Think of what happens during a snow storm when you take off a glove or mitten. Brittle flakes—lifeless and cold—land on the back of your hand and melt. Lifeless flake after flake melts on your warm skin, until enough gather to form drops of water. Those drops—small and insignificant as they seem—anticipate and promise life-teeming water in the future summer.
Those drops may be no bigger than the drops that washed your head in baptism. Yet in each drop is the touch and the promise of your God, who claims you as daughter or son. In such water you have heard yourself declared God’s own beloved, and with you, God is well pleased.
So be it. Amen.
