It's Not About Us, It's About God
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on the Second Sunday after Pentecost (B), June 6, 2021.
Genesis 3:8-15; Psalm 130; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35
Ralph Wood, professor of theology and literature at Baylor, tells a story about being issued an invitation by a Baptist pastor-friend: Would Ralph accompany him to the local minimum-security prison for a baptism? He writes:
The prisoner’s family and home-town preacher would probably not attend, and so the cloud of witnesses celebrating the new birth of this convert would be small indeed. My presence might, in fact, double the congregation.
Over lunch I learned that the newly professed Christian was no ordinary prisoner. He was incarcerated not for stealing cars or selling dope but for the crime our society is perhaps least prepared to pardon. [He abused a child – his daughter.]
My suspicions were instant and numerous. Was this a convenient jail-house conversion that might lead to a quicker parole, a sentimental turning to God because there was nowhere else to turn, a desperate search for pastoral acceptance when societal rejection was sure to come?
The pastor told me something that caused me to doubt my doubts, however. [He told me how his conversion happened.]
The real turn had come several days earlier when the man's wife and daughter had visited the prison in order to forgive him. It was only then-when freed from the burden of his sin by God's humanly mediated grace-that [he] got on his knees and begged for the mercy of both God and his family. Surely, I thought, this is the true order of salvation: our repentance is always the consequence and not the condition of divine grace. [1]
This morning, three people will be baptized into the household of God. Three people will respond to divine grace and be consecrated through the waters of baptism as God’s own, forevermore. They will be claimed by God, God who has been in mad pursuit of them since before time as we know it.
If this moment were about Hannah, Patrick, and Caroline it would be about their commitment to letting God have God’s way with them. Their commitment to offering their very selves to God’s service as members incorporate in the mystical body of God’s Son. Their commitment to uphold the vows they will make –renunciations of evil and promises of deep goodness, of right relationship with God and God’s created. If this moment were about them, I would say welcome. Look around. Here are your mother and your brothers. Here is your family. Not just those who sit in this sanctuary or who worship with us online, but each and every Christian the world over. Here is your family. Welcome.
If this moment were about us it would be about our witness to this blessed event, this Sacrament that is happening now, this morning, and yet is also ongoing, never over, forever and always at work in the lives of the newly baptized. If this moment were about us it would be a reminder of our own baptisms, or, perhaps, a call to be baptized if we have not already.
As a reminder to the baptized, it would underline one central truth: you are God’s beloved. God has been in loving and relentless pursuit of you and, in the waters of baptism, has claimed you. That means something. In fact, it means everything. The promises of God are for you, are forever bound to you and to all the baptized. You cannot escape them, even if you tried. It is your origin story.
In the words of Nadia Bolz Weber:
You had about the same chance of choosing your God as you had in choosing your parents. The God of Sara and Abraham, this God who so madly loved the world God created that God . . . walked among us as Jesus . . . this God who speaks through [unlikely] prophets and kisses lepers and makes whole that which is broken, this very God has chosen you . . . claimed you and named you as God’s own. It’s a wonderful mercy. A wild mystery to have a God who comes down to claim you in water and words forever. [2]
But this moment is not about Hannah, Patrick, and Caroline. And it’s not about us. It’s about God. It’s always about God.
Baptism is an act of God upon us. It is not us in our faithfulness, but God in God’s faithfulness. It is not us in our need, but God in God’s abundance. It is not us in our personal journey toward God, but instead God in pursuit of us -and not as individuals- but as one essential part of the vast creative narrative that is and will be the Kingdom of God.
In Baptism, heaven opens. Our lives take on a depth and breadth that, while there before, was not in the same way apparent to us. The Holy Spirit comes to call and then, frankly, becomes like a guest who will never leave.
In Baptism, God claims us. Marks us as God’s own. Forever. Gives us a new family. Here are your mother and your brothers. Gives us a name. Beloved. Quite apart from what we do or don’t do, we are loved in the deepest, truest sense. This doesn’t start at our baptism, but baptism names the reality of this unexpected, unwarranted, unending grace.
In Baptism, God calls us to seek, serve, and love Christ in all persons; and to strive for justice and peace among all people respecting the dignity of every human being. And God has shown us the way in Jesus the Christ.
It is a crucified and resurrected Lord who calls to us and the nature of that call, enacted in Baptism, is death and resurrection. Dying to self so that we might live in God. Not once. Not twice. But again, and again, and again. This is grace -that in our need God reaches down into our deepest graves and gathers us up, refashioning us into a people, alive, into the very Body of Christ for this broken and beautiful world.
As Ralph Wood so aptly noted, “This is the true order of salvation: our repentance is always the consequence and not the condition of divine grace.” He continues his reflection:
The baptism turned out to be an event for which joy, though a good biblical term, is altogether too tame and tepid a word. It was as close to a New Testament experience as perhaps I shall ever have. A guard escorted the prisoner from behind a fence topped with razor wire. . . . There were just the three of us, with the guard looking curiously on. To the strumming of the chaplain's guitar, we sang a croaky version of "Amazing Grace." We did not balk at declaring ourselves wretches.
After a pastoral prayer, the barefoot prisoner stepped into a wooden box that had been lined with a plastic sheet and filled with water. It looked like a large coffin, and rightly so. This was no warmed-and-tiled First Baptist bath, with its painted River Jordan winding pleasantly into the distance. This was the place of death: the watery chaos from which God graciously made the world and to which, in rightful wrath, he almost returned it.
Pronouncing the trinitarian formula, the pastor lowered the new Christian down into the liquid grave to be buried with Christ and then raised him up to life eternal. Though the water was cold, the man was not eager to get out. Instead, he stood there weeping for joy. When at last he left the baptismal box, I thought he would hurry away to change into something dry. I was mistaken.
"I want to wear these clothes as long as I can," he said. "In fact, I wish I never had to take a shower again." [3]
Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound.
Amen.
*Image taken by Alan Lomax, 1915-2002, in 1935 and is available at WikiCommons and at the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Lomax Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-111157].
[1] Ralph C. Wood, “Baptism in a Coffin,” Christianity Today, Winter 1993: Conflict, https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/1993/winter/93l2096.html.
[2] Nadia Bolz Weber, “Sermon on Baptism and the Devil,” Sarcastic Lutheran, Patheos, 28 Jan. 2013, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/01/sermon-on-baptism-and-the-devil.
[3] Ralph Wood, “Baptism in a Coffin.”