With You I Am Well Pleased

Our scripture today frames the large arc of history from the beginning in Genesis to Jesus’ baptism.  We see all of human history framed as God’s relationship to humanity.  Jesus’ baptism becomes the very sign of God walking with humanity on this very earth and in this very flesh.  Sometimes we hear these scriptures and we forget to let our imagination roam deeply about what these words might truly mean.  As baptized Christians we are somehow, in some way, connected with the very creator of the universe.  Imagine what this means!

Will you pray with me?  “Holy God of eternity and of our very holy now, we thank you for creating the entire universe, and us within it.  We thank you for the sacrament of baptism which is the sign and seal of our sacred relationship with you.  For these and all thy blessings, we thank you.  Amen.”

John’s baptism was by water.  It represented the cleansing of repentance.  On the other hand, Jesus’ baptism was of the Spirit, marking his personal relationship with the living God.  In other baptisms, early Christians experienced what came to be known as baptism by blood when they were martyred.  We also know of baptism by fire, where someone is thrown into a tough situation and survives the events to tell the story again, rather like being a Californian who is called to a Connecticut church and survives the first Christmas season without an Associate Pastor!  And I am still standing!

Baptism comes from the Greek word baptisma, which means to wash or cleanse.  Through the process of baptism, we are therefore washed and cleansed.  But if we are cleansed, what is the stuff that is washed away?

The history of the Christian church reflects the history of varied answers to this question of what is washed away.  John the Baptist washed away lives of sinfulness, asking the people to repent.  Repent in the Greek means to change one’s mind, or to turn away.  So John asked people to mark their lives with a baptism that indicated their lives would turn away from sinfulness, turning to cleanse their lives and live a more holy and sanctified walk with God and each other.  In John’s baptism, the old way of living was cleansed by baptism, and a new life begun in relationship with God.  John’s baptism of the people was a sign, a signal, a promise, a covenant to change their ways and walk with God anew.  It was the beginning of a journey with God, not the end.  It marked a new journey, not a destination or endpoint.  And the people flocked to John for this cleansing, to mark a new beginning in their lives with God.

And then, along comes Jesus to be baptized.  In our reading today in Mark’s Gospel, John baptized Jesus with no comment.  But the universe itself commented on the baptism once it was completed.  The heavens were torn apart, and the Spirit descended from heaven like a dove, directly down onto Jesus.  So the baptism of Jesus obviously meant something very special to God.  If baptism is cleansing, have you ever wondered what was being washed or cleansed off Jesus?

Although Mark’s John does not comment on Jesus being baptized, Matthew’s John the Baptist protested baptizing Jesus, saying Jesus needed to baptize him instead the other way around.  Luke’s John the Baptist says nothing about the baptism either, but after, when Jesus was praying, the Spirit descended on him.  The Gospel of John assumes Jesus was with God and baptized “from the beginning,” so, the Gospel of John does not even tell a baptism story.  But for Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus’ baptism was an important event.  Luke in particular indicated that Jesus’ baptism was an ongoing event, closely aligned with Jesus’ entire ministry.  Listen to Luke 12:49 and 50, where Jesus says; “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  I have a baptism with which to be baptized and what stress I am under until it is completed!  Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.”   Jesus goes on to teach that even households will be divided by his baptism.  This is a different slant on baptism, isn’t it?  Not the cooing baby baptism at all.

So what do we make of this type of baptism, a baptism that Matthew says tears the heavens apart and Jesus in Luke says divides even families?  This last winter, you suffered through a baptism by snow and ice, a cleansing of the old roofs and gutters, and a making way of the new.    The image of water used in baptism can be the soft gentle water of a spring rain, but water can also be the raging waters of a perfectly violent nor’easter, ice dams, relentless glaciers, and powerfully destructive floods.  Jesus uses these images of water also—a powerful cleansing that washes dirt away.  Some people will welcome the washing, and others will cling to the dirt, no matter what happens.  This is the division Jesus speaks of.

When I think about what was washed away when Jesus was baptized, I return to what Jesus said was the most important concept in his life as a Jew.  Do you remember, Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your mind.  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments hang all of the Law and the prophets.”

Is it possible that the Baptism of Jesus washed away all else that is not included in these two great commandments upon which the entire law and prophets hung?  Paul said it this way in Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  Imagine that!  Jesus’ baptism washes away all the differences in us as members of the church.  Jesus’ baptism points to our baptism, which makes us one in the Spirit.

But, in addition to these differences that are washed away, we could add in our modern context, there is no right-handed or left-handed, there is no able-bodied and dis-abled bodied, there is no right-minded and wrong-minded, there is no liberal or conservative, there is no right-aged and wrong-aged, there is no chosen race, or not-chosen race.  And since our Open and Affirming Statement says so, we could even add there is no straight or gay.  As believers, Jesus says we are just people who love God with our entire being, loving our neighbors as themselves.  But Jesus comments in Luke that there will be differences between the church and the outside world.  There will be divisions between those who live lives of love and those who choose not to.  But within the church, our baptism cleanses us from the issues of divisive diversity.

Several times within the last few months, I have heard members of this congregation wonder aloud at the presence of an agenda of a particular group here in the church.  Are we a church that supports a particular agenda?  Well, I would say to those who think other agendas might be present, that the agenda here is very simply the agenda of Christ.  “You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your mind.  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments hang all of the Law and the prophets.”  If you discern another agenda lurking about in this place, it is a false one.  We have been cleansed by the baptism of the spirit from these false agendas that attempt to divide us.  We are one in our baptism.

So if you hear of the right-handed agenda, or the progressive agenda or the liberal agenda, or elder agenda or children agenda or straight agenda or gay agenda, these are all false concepts and issues.  First, all these differences are built on stereotypes, and we deal with individual baptized human beings here, not stereotypes.  Second, groups of people cannot be lumped together as ever thinking or behaving the same.  All left-handed people are not the same.  Neither are all conservatives nor all progressives the same, even as much as the media continually pounds into us that they are.  Just as there is no straight agenda, there is no gay agenda.  These “agendas” are false divisions used to hide behind discrimination and segregation.  And neither discrimination nor segregation is appropriate in this community of Christ.  All of that was washed out upon our baptism.  All that dirt of division and separation is now gone, banished by our baptism in Christ.  We are baptisma, cleansed as one in the spirit.

I have another concern for these dualities that Paul presents—the neither-nor lists.  In our modern world, we have discovered that things are not simply right or wrong, left or right, yes or no.  There are many shades of differences even within individuals.  We may be mainly left or right-handed, but we can still use the other hand, as everyone who has ever had a cast on their dominant hand knows.  Some people are even bi- or ambi-dextrous.  People are not just progressive or liberal, but a mish-mash of ideas and thoughts and beliefs that are a complexity of ideas—not to mention that no one can precisely define what it means to be either conservative or liberal—everyone has their own definition of these things.  The political parties would have you believe otherwise, but we are all a mixture of left and right politics, just as we are a mix of left and right-handedness.  Even gender classifications are not strictly classified anymore, as doctors now report 1 out of every 100 babies does not have a gender-normal body.  There is a scientific spectrum of male-female bodies and gender proclivities.  And the classification of Jew and Greek—well, a simple DNA test of any human being demonstrates that none of us are individually of a pure race at all.  We are all a mixture of races.  So when Paul says there is neither Jew nor Greek, male or female, we now know he is scientifically correct in addition to being spiritually correct.

Our baptism is a sign and seal of the spirit, but it does not guarantee a life lived in the spirit.  Just as Jesus reminds us, the work of our baptism is life-long, ongoing and never complete.  We are challenged to work daily to love God with all of our being and love one another.  When we are baptized, we are sealed as Christ’s own, but we must work daily to live lives in the way of Christ, to make our baptism into our flesh every day.

So what does God think about all of this?  When God looked down on Jesus’ baptism, he said in our passage today, “You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.”

And in our baptism we are sealed with Christ by the Spirit into that same baptism.  In our baptism, God looks down at each one of us—yes each one of us—and says to every one of us, “You are my beloved child, with you I am well pleased.”  Now that is a baptism worth celebrating and working toward each day of our lives.  Be baptized as Jesus was baptized: in love for God and one another.  Because everything else has been baptisma; washed away.  Amen.