Crossing Through the Water

1 Peter 3:18-22
For Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order that he might bring you to God, dying in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit, in which also he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, who disobeyed when, in the days of Noah, God waited patiently during the construction of the ark until a few, eight souls, were saved through water.

Now this type is fulfilled as baptism saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven where angels and authorities and powers are made subject to him.

Have you ever been to an event where there was just something out of place? A few years ago I did a wedding for two of my students from UVA. The wedding was held at my old church in Unionville which was my first pastorate. Bethlehem Church is a classic country church on a back road, the kind of place where you might expect to see horses and cows in the field and cats and dogs roaming the village. What you wouldn’t expect is to find cats and dogs inside the church.

That’s just what happened on Sarah’s wedding day. I was in the back with the groom and best man waiting for the procession to begin. The bride had walked around to the front of the church and the bridesmaids had already come to the front. The doors in the back were opened and in came…a yellow tabby cat who proceeded to the altar where a chase ensued. Fortunately the organist had enough experience to keep playing until the cat could be evicted and the wedding could continue. It was not what anyone expected and it was certainly the case that the cat was out of place.

I feel the same way sometimes about the cross. Now you are probably saying, “How could you feel that the cross is out of place, Alex?” It is our most important Christian symbol. It is a reminder of the most important stuff of our Christian faith. It tells us what we believe and who we are. How could you feel that it is out of place?

It’s just that it’s such a dramatic statement and I forget sometimes how dramatic it is. For us, in our day, we are used to seeing crosses almost as brand images, like the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s arches. When we see them we know instinctively – that’s a church or a Christian. We are far more likely to see crosses as fashion accessories these days than we are to see them for what they really were – instruments of cruelty, degradation and death. We are not shocked to see it in the same way that people living in the days of the early Church would have been shocked. The equivalent for us would be to have a hangman’s noose or an electric chair hanging over the altar. The cross was meant to signal suffering and death.

Which puts it at odds with so much of what happens here on a Sunday morning. When I think of worship here on Sunday morning I think about healing and hope. I think about connection and conviction. I think about the joy we experience at a baptism…the music of the band or the choir…the good news from people witnessing to what God has done in their lives…the warmth of the passing of the peace. When we were asking you a few weeks ago about what things you most appreciated about Franktown Church almost universally we heard: the warmth, the family feel, the welcome, the sense that anybody could find a home here. And there above it all – in just about every room in this building but especially here – there is the cross, “an emblem of suffering and shame,” to quote the old hymn.

So why is it there? Paul said that his mission was to “know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified” [1 Co. 2:2]. Why is that? What is it about this cross that makes it so important to us and why do we keep clinging to the old rugged cross? What could it possibly mean for modern people – even postmodern people – like us who live such different lives from those early Christians?

That’s what I want to explore with you during these six weeks of Lent as we move toward Holy Week and the remembrance of Jesus’ crucifixion. We’ve got a cross out in the courtyard. Our colors have turned to purple, a color associated with royalty, but also a color associated with self-reflection and suffering. It was a purple robe that the soldiers put on Jesus when the mocked him and beat him. It’s a good time for us to remember what the cross means for us and not to let it become part of the furniture around here – something we take for granted instead of something that changes the world.

So today we talk about baptism. Now you might think that baptism is an unrelated topic. Baptism is a sacrament that seems to be more about life than death. Communion – now that’s something that reminds us of the cross. We tell the story, as we will do in a few minutes, of how Jesus gathered with his disciples and suffered and died and left the meal as a memorial of what he had done and as a sign of what is to come. But baptism? In our tradition baptism is often about babies and new life and initiation into the community of faith. What does baptism have to do with the suffering and the cross?

Well, let’s listen to what Peter says to us in the reading from this morning. Peter was writing to a church that knew something about suffering. It was a persecuted church. Their gatherings were times of hope and warmth like ours are but they were also conducted under the shadow of oppression and the threat of death from the ruling authorities. Peter was writing to encourage them and to give them the model of Jesus. In this passage he tells them that though they suffer, Christ also suffered and his suffering was liberating. Christ suffered for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous. What Jesus did he did for their sake, to bring them closer to God. They had been far off, but they were brought close by Jesus. The cross was, for them, a highway back to the God that they had left behind through the effects of sin. So Peter tells them their suffering has to be seen in the light of Christ’s suffering. Their “cross” has meaning and purpose because Jesus’ cross had meaning and purpose.

Peter also tells them that Jesus’ suffering was also not the whole story and their suffering won’t be either. Christ died in the flesh but he was made alive in the Spirit. There is the promise of resurrection even in the death on the cross.

Here is the amazing thing about what Jesus did on the cross: It was not dependent on the faithfulness of those he died for. In fact it was “while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us” [Rom. 5:8]. In fact, it was because of our faithlessness that God came among us in Jesus to walk the road to the cross because we may be faithless but God is always faithful…always seeking to save.

This is why we Methodists believe that Christ didn’t just die for those who were good or those who were chosen. Christ didn’t just die for those who could make it by their own wits and efforts. Christ didn’t just die for the righteous. Christ died for everybody and because of that your salvation didn’t begin the moment you decided to become a Christian. You weren’t redeemed by anything you did. Your salvation began on a cross on a hill outside Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago. Your salvation. And when you finally get around to claiming it as your own, that salvation becomes complete. Jesus came for the sins of the whole world and he came for you.

That’s also why we Methodists baptize infants. You know that’s one of the things that we do that makes us different from our Baptist brothers and sisters. We baptize infants because we believe that they were claimed a long time before they were able to say anything about it. They were loved a long time before they got here. And they live under that promise a long time before they can claim it for themselves.

We baptize infants, and those who are mentally challenged, and those who cannot respond for themselves because we believe that there is never a time when God has not claimed us and offered us grace. Baptism is God’s mighty act uniting us to Christ’s suffering and death so that we can experience the new life and resurrection that Jesus has to offer us. It’s not just a bath, it’s a mighty act, like Noah and his family and all those creatures on the ark, we are being saved through the water. We are challenged to respond to this gift of grace. If grace is truly working in us we will want to respond…we will have to respond to what God is doing in our lives. That’s the role of confirmation and the rest of our lives – we are called to claim this salvation as our own, to claim Jesus as our own. But it begins with God’s movement toward us in this water.

That’s why Martin Luther, the great reformer, made such a big deal out of baptism – it’s what allowed him to move forward in confidence through each day. Whenever a child was baptized he would instruct his pastors that they were to make the sign of the cross over them as a reminder that they lived in the shadow of that cross, a reminder that every battle that needed to be fought was already won through Christ’s work. They had gone through the water with Christ and the cross was their ark, bringing them to the new life they were given in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Whenever Lutherans make the sign of the cross it is for them a remembrance of their baptism.

That’s a liberating thing to hear. We still live in a world of suffering. Though I am baptized I know that it does not make me immune to the pains of the world. Every day I see people I love who are facing deep crises and deep needs. I watch Jim and Lynda Hewitt, two of the most spiritually-connected people I know, going through heart-breaking challenges as they have faced cancer and grief. I see people in our congregation who deal with problems and trials that they would never ask for. I know, in my own life, how hard it is to watch my children face illnesses and problems at school. Being a Christian does not remove us from suffering, but in the shadow of the cross that suffering is seen in a new light. It’s not as though Jesus is there saying, “You think you have problems? Look what I went through!” That’s not it at all. What we know is that we find a place to take all those pains because we are united to Jesus. Suffering is a moment on the way to resurrection. All these broken pieces of our lives, all these loose ends, will all be gathered up. We have that promise. And when it seems beyond us, that’s fine, because it is. Baptism reminds us that God has been there first and Jesus has won the victory.

We know suffering here, but you also know that Christians around the world are suffering. In many places it is not an easy thing to be a Christian. President Bush was in India this week and praising a tradition of religious tolerance there, but India is a difficult place to be a Christian these days. Christians have deep roots in India but pastors and missionaries are being beaten and killed. In Nigeria there are horrible conflicts between Christians and Muslims that are threatening to break apart the country. In Palestine and Israel the small Palestinian Christian population which only a few years ago was 20% of the population has dwindled to less than 10% because of persecution. The days of suffering Christians have not ended.

In addition there are many places where Christians live in poverty and need. For them the cross is not an embarrassment or out of place. It is a sign that Christ is present with them in the midst of their trials.

A few years ago I went to the city of Reynosa, Mexico as I was preparing to take a group of college students on a mission trip. On the last night of my visit the director of the mission work took me to the newest church that the Methodist Church in Mexico is building. It was just getting dark as we headed over so that I could barely see, but what I saw was bad. The area where the church was located was on the site of the city landfill. This was not the old landfill, this was the current landfill. Reynosa is a city of one million people and this is a huge landfill. Squatters had set up shanties all over this landfill. There were no street lights and no municipal services. Every day people would go out with carts tied to mules and collect trash to bring back to the landfill so that it would grow.

In the fading light I could see hundreds of children playing in the dirt streets surrounded by trash. Along the river I could see islands formed by the dumped trash and on those islands, more shanties. 20,000 people lived in this place that offered absolutely nothing to those who lived there. And it was all less than one mile from the border of the United States.

But this is where the Methodist Church of Mexico had decided to build a church. Of all the places they could go with their limited resources, they chose to go to the dump among people who had nothing. But there it was: El Sendero Iglesia Metodista – The Way Methodist Church. It was three buildings surrounded by a wall that made a nice oasis in the middle of this neighborhood. One building was a dining hall that served breakfast to children every morning. One building was a clinic offering services to those who would come with many diseases aggravated by the living conditions. And the last building, in the center, was a church with a prominent cross and the symbol of the Methodist Church of Mexico which is a boat sailing through a sea to salvation.

Christians don’t glorify suffering. Movies like The Passion may make you think that we do, but we don’t. There is no glory in suffering and death. But we know that God has come to us in Jesus Christ to overcome even suffering and death. We have crossed through the waters with him. We have found new life in him. We are no longer relying on our own powers, but on a power greater than every foe in the universe. Love is stronger than death. Passion fierce as the grave. Many waters cannot quench love. Thanks be to God.