“Water Marked and Spirit Born” - Sermon by Senior Minister Deborah K. Stevens Jan. 13, 2008, at North Broadway United Methodist Church, Columbus, Ohio

Scripture: Isaiah 42:1-9, Matthew 3:13-17

In each Gospel there is a description of some sort about the baptism of Jesus. Those of us who are reading Credo read this: “The Bible is true, and some things probably happened.” The baptism of Jesus is one of those things that probably happened. Otherwise, the Gospel writers would never have invented it to teach us anything important about Jesus.

It’s an embarrassment that Jesus had to be baptized. If Jesus is the sinless one and John’s baptism, which was probably one of many kinds of baptisms going on in the culture at the time, is a baptism for the repentance of sins, how do we explain this?

In Matthew, the explanation is around Jesus’ coming for baptism and John agreeing, after some resistance, to baptize Jesus because Jesus says, “We must do this...” – note the plural pronoun, “We must do this...in order to fulfill God’s righteousness. We must do this in order to fulfill God’s purpose.” And then the text goes on to help us see that in his baptism Jesus claims his ministry.

Today, we talk about ‘claiming our baptism.’ If in his baptism Jesus claims his ministry, then we can hardly claim our baptism without taking up Jesus’ ministry. So if you’re a baptized person here today, if you’re able to say ‘I have been baptized,’ ‘I am baptized,’ ‘I was baptized either by my own consent or by the gracious gift of baptism that someone made to me before I was old enough to understand the meaning of the gift,’ then I invite you today to reclaim that baptism as an expression of the fulfillment of God’s purpose. Your baptism, my baptism, fulfill God’s purpose in some way in part. And somehow in the community of the faithful across time, the hope is that God’s purposes in full are fulfilled.

At baptism we are initiated into the community of those who are water washed and spirit born. And so I want us to think today of baptism in three ways: What does it mean to be water washed, what does it mean to be initiated into this community, and what does it mean to be spirit born?

The best way I understand water washed at baptism is through an experience that happened to me with my great-grandmother when I was a small child. When I was a small child, my great-grandmother took care of us quite a lot and she lived until I was almost 15 years old, so she was a big part of my life. The thing about great-grandparents is, they’re generationally removed enough from you that they are just free to love you unconditionally. I remember one time that great-grandma was at our house baby-sitting with my siblings and me – at this time there were three of us – and we were probably about 8, 6 and 4.

Behind our house we had what we called “the sandpile.” Now really, it was just a place on the north side of the house where nothing would grow and so my Dad just dumped sand there and let us play in it. It was near the outside water spigot so mostly what we did was make mud. We had been outside on a summer day for hours on end making mud and it was time for us to come in and have a bath.

We heard great-grandma calling and we went in the back door onto the back porch, the screen door slamming behind us, and great-grandma came out the door from the kitchen onto the back porch and she stopped and she said, “Oh my lands! Who are these little children?” and just pretended she didn’t know us. And we’re like, “Grandma, it’s us, it’s us!” And she said, “Well let’s get you in the bathtub.” So we all got in the bathtub, all three of us together, and great-grandma, who had to be well into her 70s by then, got down on her knees next to the bathtub and she began to pour water over us and get the soap and the washcloth and scrub our faces and as she scrubbed us one by one she said, “Glory be, look at that – there’s Mike. I didn’t recognize you, and underneath all that dirt and grime, it’s Mike!” And then she did the same thing for Peggy, and then she did the same thing for me and she was just thrilled to discover that it was her little Debbie, Peggy and Mike under all that grime, those little children she didn’t know.

What it means to be water washed is to know that God uncovers who we really are, who we were made to be. God recognizes us when we come up from the waters of baptism as the person God made us to be. And if we don’t recognize ourselves because of the grime and the grit and the mud of life, there’s a place in the waters of baptism where somebody is so happy to recognize us.

If you look in your hymnals on page 50, you see what it says in our liturgy about what it means to be initiated through baptism. “Through the sacrament of baptism we are initiated into Christ’s holy church. We are incorporated into God’s mighty acts of salvation and given new birth through water and the spirit. All this is God’s gift offered to us without price.”

When we are baptized, we join the ecumenical community of faith, Christ’s church, and as we move through the liturgy of baptism and as we move through from our infant baptism to our confirmation or from our adult baptism to our reception into membership in the church, we then join an immediate family, a local congregation. We take up the ministry of the congregation because it’s our family’s ministry. It is the contribution of our family, our family of faith, our unique faith community to the ministry of Christ’s church which exists across time and in history, to reveal God’s presence and grace to the world.

Our baptism calls us into ministry. In the Book of Discipline, in the section on our theological self-understanding as Christians in the United Methodist tradition, we are told this: “All Christians are called through their baptism to this ministry of servanthood in the world, to the glory of God and for human fulfillment. This ministry is both gift and task. The gift is God’s unmerited grace. The task is unstinting service.” Baptism, our theological language tells us, “is followed by nurture and the consequent awareness by the baptized of the claim to ministry in Christ placed upon their lives by the church.”

The church asks something of us because it is the church’s proper role to be the venue through which we are given opportunity to fulfill the service that becomes our task when we receive the gift of baptism. But it’s something beyond just this exchange of gift and task. It’s something beyond this kind of economic understanding that God gives me grace and I give God my service, although that is a vitally important part of baptism. But there’s something else in Matthew’s text that hints at what it means to be initiated into Christian community and that is that place in the text where the spirit descends and Jesus hears these words: “This is my beloved one.”

Jesus is given the blessing and the affirmation of belovedness and that his belovedness is pleasing to God at the beginning of his ministry. It isn’t at the end of his ministry when God says, “Oh you did a great job, therefore you’re my beloved.” It’s at the beginning of his ministry: “You are my beloved one.” That’s where we start, not just where we end. And so we are initiated into what some have called the beloved community, and our liturgy tells us what the characteristics of that beloved community are, how together as members of the beloved community we take up these tasks.

There is a rhythm of saying no and saying yes and saying no and saying yes that has to do with the gift of baptism and the task of ministry. We say no to the spiritual forces of wickedness and reject the evil powers of the world, and we say yes to the freedom and power God gives us to reject evil and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. But more than that, we become people who are in union with the church. “Do you promise to serve Christ as your Lord in union with the church?”

Yesterday, as I was at the delegation meeting for West Ohio Conference, I sat down at a table next to a man I didn’t know. He was an older gentleman, a lay member of the delegation and I asked him where he was from. And he told me, and I said,”What congregation are you a member of?” And he told me and I said, “Well then you probably know a friend of mine,” and he immediately said, “Oh my yes, we’re all praying for her.”

Now I have been praying for this friend for awhile. She has been my friend since my first day of college at Ohio Northern. She developed within the last year heart problems and now has been diagnosed with a progressive deteriorating disease of the heart muscle from which she may die if she does not get a heart transplant. I had received the news that she was now at the point where she would probably require a transplant earlier this week in an e-mail from a friend who is a member of a church in the East Ohio Conference and who also went to college with us.

And so as I sat down next to this man and discovered that we were both praying for her, I had what some people call “Holy Spirit goose bumps” and what I realized was that I felt her presence there with us, because here was a man who was a stranger to me but a friend to my friend. And then you know what I found out? This man has relatives at North Broadway.

Now some of that is about our connectional system. But some of that is about what it means right now at this moment in time for my friend to be a member of the body of Christ, the family of faith, upheld by the community across geography and time. There’s a web of connection that we cannot discern but that God knows is there. We are initiated into beloved community, and all of us will come to a time in our lives when we need beloved community.

Baptism is about being spirit born. Ah, that elusive spirit. We don’t breathe oxygen from the air until we are born. And anybody who’s ever been in the room when a child was born knows what it’s like to wait for that first breath that goes in as air and usually comes out as a cry. In the biblical text, the spirit is described externally as wind and fire but internally as breath. When God breathes life in Genesis into humans, it is the breath of the spirit. It’s the same word for spirit in the text.

Our spiritual birth takes a long time. God uses the days of our lives to give us this spiritual birth. It is a process. Baptism does not complete it; baptism inaugurates it. Events of our lives are the wind and the fire that purify and define us. As Jesus went to the water, we daily go to God to discover our ministry, our call, our particular role in the ongoing life of Christ in the world. As John agreed to baptize Jesus, so the church continues to invite us into the waters of baptism.

We take up the ministry of Jesus when we claim our baptism, and we reject those things that are not life-giving, not of the spirit. Our rejection is both an act of decision and discipline on our part that requires rigorous thought and a vigorous search for understanding, and also an invitation to live an alternative life. We must rigorously discern what is that injustice and evil that we must say no to. And we must rigorously discern what is the ministry of justice and peace and righteousness and love and serving in the name of Jesus that we are called to take up. What does that look like? Not on the banks of the River Jordan, but what does that look like today - January 2008 - in Clintonville in Columbus, Ohio, for us, for me, for you?

The spirit assists and enables this discernment. It helps us understand what to reject and what to say yes to. It helps drive out of us the distortions that keep us from seeing ourselves as beloved, and most importantly, the spirit helps drive out of us as we breathe it in the distortions that prevent us from seeing the belovedness of God in every other person, in one another.

We breathe in grace and we live out love. We breathe in peace and we live out justice. We breathe in forgiveness and we live out mercy.

In most of the gospel texts there is a kind of invisible character in the narrative. In some of the texts, particularly in John, this character is given voice. But in Matthew there is an assumption that there’s a crowd, because John had disciples. So when we imagine the scene of Jesus’ baptism, there’s a crowd gathered around. And there’s John and there are those who have been baptized by John and those who are curious and standing around on the margins, and then there’s Jesus, who walks into the water. And there we have Jesus, whom we know to be the embodiment of God in the world and the Spirt of God that descends on him and the voice of the creator God that speaks. And in this moment of baptism all the fullness of God resides.

Baptism did not call Jesus to an easy life. Baptism does not call us to an easy life. Baptism calls us to a purposeful life. It calls us from the margins, from the crowd. Maybe we’re in the crowd, maybe we’re standing on the margins. Maybe today’s the day you’re in the water. But God calls us from the margins and from the crowd to walk into that water, not so we have an easy life or a prosperous life, but so we have a life of belovedness and purpose.

Water is a great symbol for baptism. There are different kinds of water people. Carlene Tripplett and Ann Davidson and I went to Sandusky awhile back for a funeral visitation together and we went to a restaurant right on the shores of Lake Erie and ate supper together I looked out the window while we were having dinner and I said, “Ah, there’s my lake,” and Carlene said, “Well, it’s a nice lake, but it’s not the Ohio River.” Now Carlene is a river person – she grew up on the banks of the Ohio River. It’s that kind of water that gives her life. So we agreed to disagree about the sacredness of Lake Erie or the Ohio River.

I don’t know what kind of water makes you feel new, but whatever kind of water it is that makes you feel new, let this water be that water for you today. Let this water that is the water of our Christian community let you know that you are water washed, and let your recommitment to the waters of baptism be an entry into the life of the spirit.

I rarely take a shower without remembering that time when coming out of the bathwaters, my great-grandma was rejoiced to recognize me. Let these waters wash away whatever disguises your true identity as a child of God.

Jesus claimed his ministry in his baptism. As we claim baptism, let us claim the ministry of Christ. I absolutely positively guarantee you that there is a ministry for you. Some of you have said to me, “I’m too old. I can’t do the things I used to do.” Pray for the people who are on our prayer list. If you can sit and pray, you can be in ministry. I guarantee you there’s a ministry for you. Maybe it’s already in place here at North Broadway waiting for your gifts and graces to energize it and extend it. Maybe it’s a ministry that the community desperately needs that God will call you to begin. But it is in and through these ministries that we are sent into the world to demonstrate the truth of the gospel. Not to talk about it; to demonstrate the truth of the gospel and to gather others, inviting them to approach the waters with us to be water washed, spirit born, and received into the family of God’s beloved ones. It is a cycle of life, our coming, our being blessed and our going. Let this renewal of baptismal vows and the touch of the water be an entry point into that cycle – water washed, spirit born, called and sent.

Beloved ones, God loves you and calls you to love God in the world. May we be faithful to this call.