January 13, 2002
First Sunday Of Epiphany/Baptism Sunday
Year A
Title: The Great Reversal Begins…
Theme: As we retake our Baptismal vows, let us remember what those
vows mean—that we are people in the midst of being turned upside
down and who are in the midst of turning the world upside down.
Many of you here attend the Lectio Divina Circle that meets in the church
office on Monday evenings and this week we poured over this passage
from Matthew that we have before us this evening. We have some
incredible discussions around Scripture passages and one of those
discussions happened this week, when we started to talk about baptism
and whether or not it was right for infants to be baptized, especially since
they don’t know what is happening to them and they certainly didn’t have
a choice to accept this gift of inclusion in the body of Christ. Most of us
here grew up in Protestant churches, and we grew in Protestant
churches that didn’t practice infant baptism, so we tend to forget that the
vast, vast majority of Christians—many Protestants, all Roman Catholics,
and all the Orthodox churches practice infant baptism. In the midst of
that conversation, I told them the story of my own baptism, actually the
story of my baptism here in a very large Baptist Church in Edmond. To
make a long story short, I was scheduled to be baptized one Sunday
morning, I found myself in the room where you prepare yourself for your
baptism—now, for those of you who don’t know much about Baptist
churches and how they do baptism, just know that they practice baptism
by immersion, which means all of you gets plunged into the water. But
since there are not rivers next to every Baptist church in the country,
most Baptist churches have a pool in their sanctuary, usually in the
chancel somewhere, a rather small pool where at least 2 folks could fit in
and where there was enough room for you to slowly fall back into the
water under the hopefully graceful and strong hands of the preacher.
Well, I was in the room putting on my galoshes—oh, I forgot to mention
that you had to put on a pair of huge plastic galoshes that went up all the
way up to your arm pits, and then you put on a cotta-looking thing, much
like what our communion servers where—well, anyway I was putting on
my galoshes and the preacher had one of his deacons put a piece of
tape on my wrist, so that as he looked down he could get my name
right—now, keep in mind that I had at least two heavy duty conversations
with him on the nature of baptism, so I had expected him to at least
remember my name for this sort of event. But, since I have a hard time
with names as well, this was certainly forgivable. Anyway, I went through
the actual event of my baptism without any real mess-ups, but it was
what happened after the actual baptism that I most remember most
about that day—I was getting out of the galoshes and I heard that
deacon make a comment that I was number 400 and something—and I
suddenly felt like a number, like another niche on the old pastor’s belt
buckle, and the minister replied with the exact number—he knew what
number I was. But, you know, over the years, it hasn’t bothered me that
much, because I think over the years I think I figured out the truth about
baptism—I mean, I think I got the truth that baptism is not about what I
was feeling, whether it was a wonderful spiritual high, or whether it made
me realize how sadly cold and institutional the church can sometimes be,
it wasn’t about whether I was a baby, unaware of what was happening to
me, or whether I was an adult who had a made a decision to become
baptized—baptism is not about what my feelings were at that moment, or
even my lack of feelings—baptism was all about what God was doing at
that moment, whether I felt or didn’t feel it, whether I had made a choice,
or whether that choice was made for me by people that had committed to
raise me as a Christian. You see, baptism is the beginning of the great
reversal, the beginning of God turning my world upside down, whether I
made that decision as an adult, or whether someone gave their consent
in my name as an infant—it is the beginning of God turning my world
around, and, oddly enough, the promise that God will one day ask me to
do the same, to join with God in turning the world upside down, to turning
the world upside down.
And that great reversal, that moment when God puts the world in
reverse, when She puts the gears in reverse and, unlike Thelma and
Louise, He makes the decision not to allow the world go off the cliff—the
moment that hints that something different is going on happens with John
the Baptist and his cousin Jesus from Nazareth standing at the river
Jordan, having this crazy, crazy conversation about who should baptize
who. Now, this really an odd moment, if you look at it, and John here has
every right to be a little puzzled at what his cousin wants him to do—
“YOU want ME to baptize YOU?!?! I need to be baptized by YOU,
Jesus!” I mean, here John is baptizing people who have made the
decision to repent, which actually means in the Hebrew, it actually means
to go in a different direction “Repent, repent, for the kingdom of God is
near!” wild-eyed, camel-cloth wearing, locust-eating John is screaming
from the banks of the Jordan. What in the world would Jesus have to
repent of—I mean, we Christians believe this Jesus to be perfect,
because we believe that whoever this Jesus was, he was clearest, most
perfect picture of who God really is. And John is there in Jordan,
stunned and confused, and asking a very good question of his friend
and relative Jesus.
And Jesus simply replies with the words, “Let it be right now, for it is
proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Its that word
righteousness that confused me at first, but now I realize what it means—
a professor once had to get his car fixed in Israel and the mechanic,
after he had worked on the engine, climbed into the driver’s seat to hear
the engine running perfectly again, and then the mechanic grinned and
said “zadik” which is the same word that Jesus here for
righteousness…odd, isn’t it. But it points to the idea that Jesus was
talking about putting the world into reverse, to making the world all right
again, to getting things working smoothly again, fixing what is broken with
us and the world. “By doing this, John,” Jesus seems to be saying, “you’
re playing your part in the great reversal—and the first reversal, the first
of many shocking moments is my taking on what it means to be human.”
It is to stand with you and I in knowing our pain over being fragile
creatures who so often choose death over not life, sin over goodness.”
Jesus here begins turning the world upside down by doing something
that he doesn’t need to do, something that shows us that the craziness
of the Gospel is there from the beginning—up is down, down is up, left is
right, right is left, to become great is to become a servant, to live is to
die, to have hope is to be with the despair of the cross, good people are
not so good and the bad people are not so bad, the poor are rich, the
rich are poor, the perfect one allows himself to be plunged beneath the
waters of the Jordan in a ritual designed for imperfect folks like you and
me—this moment, this baptism is just the beginning of Christ showing the
world that it will be unraveled by goodness and that it will be shown how
God really sees the world. The creator, the one who has flung the stars
and the worlds into their places in our sky, has no need to be baptized,
but She does so because it will help get engine running perfectly again,
He does it so that the world will finally get back on track and realize its
own worth and beauty in the eyes of its creator.
And so on this Sunday when much of the church celebrates the Baptism
of Christ, this day that we are reminded of why Christ was baptized, we
are asked to think about our own baptism, our own time of rebirth, and
we are asked by Christ to join him in the great reversal he began some
two thousand years ago—we’re asked to help God get the engine
running perfectly again, or as close to perfect as our human hands can
muster. From the very beginning, the intention of God was to get His
creation back on track, to get the engine of humanity, and indeed, the
universe, running smoothly for the first time in a long time. And that
means remembering that we are baptized to do the same thing Jesus
spent his life doing—which was calling people to the truth that we are
created to love recklessly, to do justice passionately, to hope fervently,
and to live absurd lives like Jesus did, forever turning the world upside
down by doing all those things Jesus did in his life. Whether we were
baptized as babies or baptized as adults, there has been a promise
nestled inside those baptismal vows—and that promise was that one day
Christ would ask us to join him in that great reversal, that he would ask
us to join him in doing the crazy work of putting the world in reverse. In a
few minutes here at the Cathedral, for those who are already baptized
and who are ready to respond to Christ’s invitation to turn the world
upside down, we’re going renew our vows of baptism. We’re going to
sing the first two verses of I Was There To Hear Your Borning Cry and
then we’re going to renew our baptismal vows and then we’ll wet a finger
in the bowls that will be passed around and mark our own foreheads to
show our own commitment to do justice passionately, to love recklessly,
to hope fervently, and to live our lives with joy and goodness. You know,
we are the instruments, the means by which God will continue that great
reversal that Christ began in a river two thousand years ago—choosing
this moment to say yes to Christ in his invitation to join him will make all
the difference to this world, and it will make all the difference in your life
and in my life. Amen and amen.
