First Reading: Genesis 1:1-5
1In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Psalm 29
1Ascribe to the Lord, you gods, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. 2Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his Name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. 3The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God of glory thunders; the Lord is upon the mighty waters. 4The voice of the Lord is a powerful voice; the voice of the Lord is a voice of splendor. 5The voice of the Lord breaks the cedar trees; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon; 6He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Mount Hermon like a young wild ox. 7The voice of the Lord splits the flames of fire; the voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness; the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. 8The voice of the Lord makes the oak trees writhe and strips the forests bare. 9And in the temple of the Lord all are crying, “Glory!” 10The Lord sits enthroned above the flood; the Lord sits enthroned as King forevermore. 11The Lord shall give strength to his people; the Lord shall give his people the blessing of peace.
Second Reading: Romans 6:1-11
1What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. 5For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Gospel: Mark 1:4-11
4John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. 7And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” 9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
I AM Baptized
Because of their age and relative inexperience, our children rarely get asked for advice by adults. Truly this is sad; our young ones have amazing powers of observation, and the free time to ponder the strangeness of human nature. Ask yourself, how many times have we thought our kids were clueless to the world around them, only to find out that our every move and word were being absorbed and processed in their minds, only to come out later at a much less desirable time? I was raised with the adage, “out of the mouth of babes comes all the things we shouldn’t have said in the first place.” I’m sure each of us can think of many examples, but author H. Jackson Brown, Jr. decided to put them in a book.
In his book Wit and Wisdom from the Peanut Butter Gang, Mr. Brown interviews children and young teens to get their ideas on subjects like families and school. Here’s just a small sample of their wisdom: “You can’t trust dogs to watch your food.” “Casserole’ is just another word for ‘leftovers.” “You can’t hide mashed potatoes in your hat.” “You shouldn’t be the first one to fall asleep at a slumber party.” And this final thought comes from Laura, age 13: “No matter how hard you try, you can’t baptize a cat!” This last one I can attest to from personal experience.
Many, many years ago, my younger brother tried to wash a cat in the washing machine; needless to say, the cat doesn’t appreciate it! Not only was there a fight to get the cat into the running machine, but when my mom realized what was going on, the cat came out of the machine, none too pleased. Of course, it’s not always that easy baptizing humans, either. For example, Dr. Drexel Rayford tells, about his experiences baptizing young people at his first church, in Kentucky. This particular church body practices baptism by immersion.
The church baptistery was fed by weak plumbing and normally took over 36 hours to fill. However, due to some quirk of the plumbing, sometimes the water would suddenly start gushing out, and if you weren’t regularly checking back on the level of the water, it could overflow into the choir loft. Compounding this problem was Homer, the church Sexton, a somewhat unreliable fellow.
Homer had a habit of slipping off, and often spent hours at the local tavern. On one occasion, Pastor Rayford told Homer to fill the baptistery on Thursday before a Sunday service in which they were planning to baptize nine young people, eight girls and one 13-year-old boy. Rayford then went out of town and came back on Saturday night. And as these things go, he didn’t think to check the baptistery. Sunday morning came and Pastor Rayford discovered that the baptismal pool was bone dry.
Remember, nine kids were to be baptized in three hours. There was no way to cancel the baptisms for lack of water. So, our pastor friend ran to the parsonage next door, grabbed the garden hose, ran it across the driveway, up the front steps, down the center aisle and into the baptistery. Thankfully, it only took an hour or so to fill the baptismal tank. The problem was the water was cold, really cold, Rayford reports. It must have been all of 50 degrees coming from the limestone well, which might as well have been freezing for the young people being baptized.
Pastor Rayford says, he himself was shaking as he looked up at the baptismal candidates gathered in their thin, little white robes at the top of the ladder. He’d already warned them that the water wasn’t all that warm. Later, he says, as each child descended into the baptismal tank, their little eyes bugged out, and they became stiff as boards, and he had a difficult time getting them to bend enough to get them under the water. The girls all took it well enough, but the boy was more difficult.
The moment his bare foot hit the water, he let out a shocked noise. Getting him under the water turned into a wrestling match. Water sloshed over the glass at the front of the baptistery, soaking the men in the last row of the choir loft. As he emerged from the water the young man shouted loudly, “Oh GOD, that’s cold!!!” By this time, the entire congregation was rolling with laughter. I bet everyone here can imagine the scene. And with that picture in mind, I wonder what kind of reaction John the Baptizer heard as he baptized people in the cold waters of the Jordan river?
Today is of course Baptism of our Lord Sunday and our reading from St. Mark’s gospel is brief and to the point: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (1:9-11).
Over the many years of faithful service here at Antioch, I’m certain pastor George examined this passage and highlighted the various aspects of the story. Things like the voice from Heaven where God the Father affirms Jesus as His Son and how pleased He is with Him. Of the Holy Spirit descending to confirm what John had foretold just one verse earlier: John the Baptist said, “I have baptized (or washed in the Greek) you with water, but he will baptize (or cleanse) you with the Holy Spirit” (vs. 8). And George probably examined the fact that Jesus didn’t need to be baptized by John since He was sinless. Jesus did this to fulfill all righteousness. So I’m not going to focus on these aspects of the story today. Instead, I simply want to look at two areas today; first, what we receive in Baptism and second, what I like to call the “what now.”
In the waters of Baptism, we received a great many gifts. Chiefly, we receive the forgiveness of sin, we’re welcomed into and become part of the Body of Christ and joint heirs of God’s kingdom. As John the Baptizer also points out, we receive the Holy Spirit, we’re made members of the church, and given the promise of eternal life. As Luther wrote in the Small Catechism, baptism “works forgiveness of sins, rescues from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the words and promises of God declare. It indicates that the Old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.” As I said, we receive so many benefits by faith in the waters of baptism. So why would anyone choose not to baptize their child or be baptized themselves?
As Jesus Himself tells us in Mark 16:16, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” One should rightly ask, with so much to gain and nothing to lose, why not accept this free gift? The answer may come in the second part of what I wanted to address today, What I like to call, the what next?
You see too many people want to stop at the benefits of baptism and never allow themselves to acknowledge the other side of that equation. In an alternate Epistle reading assigned to today, St. Paul helps us to answer this question when in Romans chapter 6 he said, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (vss. 1-4). Then two verses later he wrote, “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin (vs. 6). And finally, down in verse 11, he wrote, “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” In baptism we die to sin and are made anew in Christ.
Someone was once quoted as saying, “The worst thing that can happen to a person is this life is baptism.” Please hear me out here! The worse thing that can happen to a person in this life is baptism, because in baptism we die to the old us and are raised anew in Christ. This is what St. Paul tells us in Romans chapter 6. What Paul is saying is, that in Baptism, our goals become His goals, that our desires become His desires, and that our need to serve ourselves is replaced with the yearning to serve Him. In the waters of Baptism our priorities in this life change. This is why Luther challenges us to remember our baptism daily. But too many people want only to talk about the benefits, refusing to accept the responsibility that comes with being a disciple of Jesus.
Our sinful self wants to say, “I’ve been washed in the waters of baptism. There is nothing more I need to do.” From a salvation perspective this is true. However, as Paul reminds us in Romans 6, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” Think about the last time you attended a service where the rite of baptism was celebrated.
Recall if you will that when a child is brought to be baptized, the parents and sponsors stand before God and the congregation and make this promise: “to faithfully bring the child to the services of God’s house, and teach them the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. And as they grow in years, they [promise] to place in their hands the Holy Scriptures and provide for their instruction in the Christian faith, that, living in the covenant of their Baptism and in communion with the Church, that they may lead godly lives until the day of Jesus Christ.” You as parents and sponsors made those promises when you brought your children to be baptized. And then as they grew, that promise was assumed by the now young adult.
During Confirmation, each of us and our children then assumed responsibility for these promises when they first renounce sin and the forces of sin when they say, “[I] renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God. [I] renounce the powers of this world that rebel against God and [I] renounce the ways of sin that draw us from God. Do you remember making these promises?
After renouncing the forces of evil, the confirmand then affirms their baptism by saying, “[I] intend to continue in the covenant God made with [me] in holy baptism: to live among God’s faithful people, to hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper, to proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed, to serve all people, following the example of Jesus, and to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.” Each of us promised to do these things when we were baptized and confirmed. It’s important that we remember our baptisms daily be case we made a promise to God. We gave God our word, we need to remember that!
In the frigid waters of the Jordan river, Jesus, although He had no sin to forgive, affirmed the necessity of baptism, and He promised to give us a great many benefits: forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, acceptance as a child of God, incorporation into the Body of Christ and the gift of eternal life. Benefits of which we are eternally grateful. But those benefits come with great expectations.
As children of God, we can rejoice. But we also made promises. We renounced sin and satan and the forces of evil. In the waters of baptism, we recognize that the old Adam was drown, killed, and we were raised anew in Christ to live for Him, to serve Him and to realign our priorities, desires and goals to God’s. Yes, there are lots of expectations associated with baptism, but the benefits we enjoy are experienced both in this world and in the world to come. So, before we leave today, and every day for that matter, I encourage you to pause for a moment, reflect deeply on all God has done for us, then touch our forehead, making the sign of the Cross and gratefully say, “I am baptized, Thanks be to God!”
Amen
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