Deep Waters 1

Isaiah 43:1-7 (RSV)
But now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
"Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior,
I give Egypt as your ransom,
Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you.
Because you are precious in my eyes,
and honored, and I love you,
I give human beings in exchange for you,
peoples in exchange for your life.
Fear not, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
I will say to the north, Give up,
and to the south, Do not withhold;
bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the end of the earth,
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made."

There is no glory in old family photos…especially the ones that are pictures of me. We have just passed the Christmas season and a lot of us have gathered together with family and one of the things that tend to happen on such occasions is the traditional bringing out of the old pictures. There's something about looking at pictures of myself as a child, or even pictures from younger days that makes me cringe. It's not that I was a horrible-looking child; it's just that those pictures remind me of the child that is still a part of me, the child that I try to hide from the world.

You know you're really committed to a long-term relationship with someone when you allow them to see these pictures of yourself. I remember when the folks first pulled out the old photos and home movies to show Suzanne when we were still dating. It was a terrifying experience. There was me at the age of 10 with hair (!) hanging down to my eyes, mugging for the camera. There was me dancing around the living room floor. There was me in that awful picture that every parent has to take of their child - the nude baby in the bathtub picture. How embarrassing!

What is it about those pictures that make me feel so uncomfortable? Why are we now taking pictures of Joel and Rachel that we can inflict on their future loves sometime down the road? The problem with those pictures, when they are pictures of us, is that they show us at a stage in our lives we like to think we’ve past. In old pictures I look so…immature, so foolish, so vulnerable. I've spent years trying to grow up. As an adult there's always been a part of me that tries to live up to an adult ideal and seeing pictures of yourself with cake all over your face just kind of blows that all right out the window. You can't be dignified and suave when you're elbow deep in frosting. Part of us runs from that image of vulnerability and child-likeness. But we don’t escape. That child is still here as well.

We don't like to be reminded that we have a vulnerable side. In a world where we must compete to survive and where strength means having no weaknesses - in a culture that says to us "Suck it up and go" and "Never let 'em see you cry" it is not fashionable or wise to let that childlike side show. Yet how different our perception of the world would be if we recognized the children still within us, if we realized that who we really are are creatures still growing and never outgrowing our need for others or God. How different our leaders would look! You know, I'll bet that Barbara Bush has a nude baby in the bathtub picture of George W.

Garrison Keillor tells a wonderful story of one of the rites of passage in his fictional village of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. He talks about how, in the middle of the great snowstorms of winter, the teenagers would get a garbage can lid and tie it to the back of a car. (Don’t try this, by the way, if it should ever decide to snow again.) But in this tradition they would take turns riding on the garbage lid down the snow-covered streets. He said that when you got up to 30 miles an hour it stopped being fun. Since your legs had to hang over the side snow would get up your pants legs and fill your britches with snow. The great fun was taking a turn riding in the back seat of the car, looking out the rear window at the victim being pulled along behind, watching him or her lose any dignity they might have had, bouncing up and down helpless behind the car, their pants filling with snow.

Keillor says that it was a way of reminding them of who they were. You couldn't have any pretensions to superiority after riding on the garbage can lid because everyone had seen you at your most foolish and most vulnerable. There's a certain kind of comfort in that. You cannot be other than who you are after such an experience.

Old family photos and garbage can lids are as good a place as any to begin when we talk about an experience like baptism. Today is the day in the church calendar when we recall the baptism of Jesus by John in the river Jordan. It's a day when we celebrate God's gift of baptism which Jesus prepared us for by leading the way through the waters. Yet it is so hard for us to grasp what baptism really means and how we should approach it. Most of the time we don't spend a lot of energy thinking about baptism and yet, along with communion, it is one of the two major sacraments of the church.

It is interesting to me that the Old Testament passage chosen to be read along with the story of Jesus' baptism today has nothing to do with the sacrament of baptism, though it does mention passing through the waters. Isaiah chapter 43 is not talking about our baptism or even Jesus' baptism - it is talking about coming home.

The people who are coming home are the Jews who have been scattered throughout the world due to the Exile. It is 500 years before the coming of Jesus and the Jewish nation has been utterly defeated. The Northern kingdom had fallen first and then later the nation of Judah fell to the Babylonians and the people of the land had been dragged off to Babylon and Egypt. The temple had been destroyed; the king of the line of David was taken from the throne.

The people faced a great theological crisis. God had released them from slavery telling them that they would be given a land that was to be theirs. God had blessed David and told him that his descendents would rule forever. Now there was no land and there was no king and some were beginning to wonder if God had forgotten them.

To put it very simply, the Jews were at the lowest point in their long history. They were weak and vulnerable and unable to help themselves. They could not point to any strength that they had or any achievement they had accomplished. They were far from independent; they were utterly dependent. It was at this time that God came to them with a word of hope.

"Don't be afraid," God said, "for I have redeemed you." Redeemed here means "I have paid the ransom to release you. I have bought you back from slavery." Then God throws in the astounding word of good news. The same God who had warned the people about straying from God. The same God who had sent the prophets to tell them about a coming disaster. This same God now tells them, "I have called you by name and you are mine."

I have called you by name and you are mine. Mine, all mine! The people of God couldn't hear that word while they still had a kingdom. In their moments of strength and power they couldn't or wouldn't hear God offering to be with them or telling them not to be afraid. It was only when they recognized their own vulnerability that God could come to them with a note of grace or hope.

That is what makes this passage appropriate to talking about baptism. Not because it prophetically told about what Jesus would do, but because it reminds us that Christ's work in baptism is to offer that same good news of hope and grace to us - the real us behind all of our masks and facades.

A lot of folks wonder why it is that the United Methodist Church baptizes even young infants. Why is it that we don’t, like some other denominations, wait until a child is “of age,” when they can claim for themselves the gift of salvation that God offers in Jesus Christ? Why do we open the door to baptism so widely? Don’t we cheapen what this water means when we place it on the heads of infants? Wouldn’t it be far more effective to do it when it could “mean something” to the child?

But what is it that we’re saying when we say these things? Even when we baptize adults is it the fully-formed mature person who can comprehend all that the mystery means who receives God’s grace, or is it still really the young infant, the vulnerable soul of a person that God touches. There is nothing we can do to earn the gift that is given to us - the gift symbolized by this water. We can't succeed in some great test, we can't know all that there is to know. We can't say some magic words that will prove we understand, because we can never understand the magnitude of this gift of water. The young infant is just as prepared as the learned adult to receive the gift of God's love.

It is a gift that can only be received in weakness and vulnerability, when our neediness is clear. It is a gift that cuts through all of the pretensions we have and all of the professions we make to strength and competence. We are all incompetent when it comes to entering the kingdom. We are all beggars at the banquet. We are all children once more, and what is it that children do? They laugh ferociously and cry pitifully as if life, as if every moment of life, really mattered.

That's the real rub in this baptism story. We don't think about it and we don't regard it much because we're not really sure life does matter. It doesn't need to matter when we're at the top of our game. It doesn't need to matter if we feel secure. But when it all falls apart, as it does for every one of us in the midst of our tragedies and trials, life really matters and it takes a kind of spiritual poverty to appreciate the abundance of life God offers.

There’s also a message of courage and endurance in the baptismal water. Isaiah, in talking to the exiles, reminds them that they had been here before. They had been threatened with destruction before, but they had passed through deep waters and God was with them. They may have been slaves in Egypt, but now they were servants of Yahweh. They may have been no people, but now they were God’s people. They could cling to this God who had brought them through deep waters before and had promised to do so again.

If you have been baptized, you have passed through deep waters as well. The ancients were terrified of deep water because to them it represented the chaos that threatens all life. Deep water symbolized the forces of darkness that always hover on the margins, ready to break forth in death and destruction. That fear still remains. When I am kayaking I still have an irrational moment of terror when I realize that I am traveling over a deep channel. Whether the water is 7 feet deep or 70 feet deep doesn’t really make a difference because I couldn’t stand in either one, but somehow the murky depths of the 70 foot water are much more threatening. Deep water, our minds tell us, is dangerous.

But Christians look at water differently. Paul says in Romans that when we are baptized, yes, we are baptized into a death like Christ’s death. When we pass under the waters we are passing into that death. But we are also raised with Christ into a new life. We share, not only Jesus’ death, but also his resurrection. What God intends is for these waters to represent life.

That’s why Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, when he was fighting his own demons would yell at them, “I am baptized. I am baptized!” It was his way of reminding them, and himself, that no power in the universe was stronger than the love that had claimed him in Christ Jesus. Our baptism was not meant to be a one-time event but something we claim every day, reminding us of God’s claim on our lives, of God’s promise to forgive our sins and God’s promise of eternal life. It’s also the thing that makes us part of a family – God’s family which we know in the church.

So today we come to the baptismal font once more, a broken and hurting people - intoxicated with our own independence and alienated from each other and God. We see this water which once cascaded over our brother Jesus, opening the door for our own salvation through following him. Here God meets us where we most need to be met - not in the place of our greatest strengths, but in our weaknesses. Not in the Olan Mills studio portrait, but in the nude baby in the bathtub.

God says, "I have called you by name and you are mine...You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you. I will give people in exchange for you and nations in exchange for your life." And what does God ask in return? That we accept that we are accepted. That we refuse the lies that the world tells us about who we are and what we are meant to be. And that we follow our brother Jesus through the waters and beyond. Thanks be to God.