Branded - The Side Effects of Baptism

Today we begin a new worship series and I want to spend a minute explaining what it's all about. One of my favorite questions for Bible study is: If I took this Bible passage seriously, what would I have to change about the way I'm living? I use the question with groups, too, and I used it last month in the Advent Bible Study. We were talking about what it meant to live intentionally as a Christian and I asked, "If we took this seriously what would we have to change?" And someone asked, "Does that mean you don't think we are taking it seriously?"

The answer to that question is, "Yes. I don't think we have the least interest in taking God seriously." If we took God and the Bible seriously things would look different. People would behave differently. We would not be disconnected from the poor. We would not let ideologies or political stances or media narratives prevent us from seeing what is really going on around us. There would be more humility and less hostility. There would be more compassion and less callousness to life around us - human, animal and plants. We would embrace joyfully the life we know through Jesus instead of living anxiously the lives we try to create for ourselves. No, we don't take this God thing seriously.

So what keeps us connected to this story? What is it that Christians can do to re-form their lives, to re-connect their stories to the biblical story? So I started praying about that. I was wearing my cowboy boots when I was praying about this and I started thinking about this Sunday. Baptism of the Lord Sunday. What do our baptisms mean? And I looked down at my cowboy boots and started one of my periodic day dreams. Every so often I like to imagine that I could head out to West Texas and ride the ranges with a big herd of Longhorns. There I am under that great big Texas sky riding my trusty horse, Augustine. (Hey, you have your dreams and I have mine.) I pull out my harmonica and start playing and stop long enough to yodel and then sing, "Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam..." That's when I look down and see the brand on my cattle - the Rocking J. And that's how this series was born.

Branded! That's what we are brothers and sisters. If you have been baptized in Christ you are branded. And that brand is unique to us in the church. Nobody else goes out there claiming to be baptized. When you join the military they give you dog tags and uniforms and specialized training. When you go to college they give you school colors to wear and a silly school song to sing. When you become a Christian you are branded by being baptized. And your distinctive act is the meal of communion. And you become a minister. Those are the things that make Christians unique and that bind them together. So we're going to spend these weeks between Epiphany and Lent looking at Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry to see why they even make a difference and what it would mean to take them seriously.

To get into baptism today though, I want to introduce you to Naama Margolese. Naama is an 8-year-old girl, born in Chicago but who has immigrated to Israel. She is an Orthodox Jew and you can see from her picture that she is dressed in long sleeves and in a long skirt, the kind of modest dress that Orthodox Jews have long promoted.

Naama made the news last week because when she was on the way to her Orthodox Jewish school a group of people began to spit on her. They called her a prostitute, only they used much more vulgar language than that. And cameras caught her crying as she ran from the bullies who were attacking her just because she was going to school.

Now let me tell you who the bullies were. They were grown men. They were members of an even more conservative Jewish group who believed that the dress code for the school where Naama attends was too liberal. This group, guided by their religious beliefs, goes out every day to yell at little girls and to tell them that they are worthless, sinful, and faithless. They call 8-year-old girls prostitutes.

I'm not singling this faith group out. There are people in every world religion who do terrible things in the name of God. We hear stories in Afghanistan about the abuse of women and Christians that makes our blood boil. Within Christianity it happens and it's why, for many people who have not grown up in the church, the first word that comes to mind when you ask them about who Christians are is 'judgmental.'

But here's what this story reveals - religion becomes dangerous when it obscures the reality right in front of us. When we can no longer see the people right in front of us for who they really are because we have some misguided interpretation of what God demands, we can do monstrous things. And there have been major protests in Israel this week because of this incident.

Here is what I want to say - and really this is the whole point of this sermon. If you don't get anything else, this is it - God is fed up with our lies about the world and about ourselves. God is all about reality and telling the truth about who we are and and what the world is. And the way God shows us that truth is through baptism.

Baptism is where the gospel of Mark starts. We spent a lot of time in the weeks leading up to Christmas talking about John the Baptizer. Mark tells us that people went to him to be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins. There were rituals of cleansing and washing with Judaism, but John seemed to offer something more democratic. It wasn't just the priests being washed before they went into the holy precincts of the Temple. Everyone was coming to him. "The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem." That's a pretty successful ministry for a guy who wore camel skins and ate grasshoppers.

Jesus' baptism seems different again, though. John had said that he was coming. He said he was a servant to Jesus. Said he wasn't even worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He also said, "I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." Water was good for getting off the dirt that was already on you. But transformation required something more. The Holy Spirit was about fire and combustibility. And fire is about chemical reactions - reducing things to their simplest elements. Jesus' baptism was not just about forgiveness. It was about identity - about who we are when you get right down to the core. About reality.

That's clear even in Jesus' own baptism. He comes down from Galilee to begin his public ministry and John sends him under the waters of the Jordan River just like he had done with all those Jerusalemites and Judeans. But when Jesus came up out of those waters something different happened. John looked up and he saw the skies split wide open and a dove descending from heaven - it was the Spirit! And a voice came from heaven and said, "You are my Son, whom I love. I am pleased, well-pleased with you."

Now, we don't know for whose benefit this voice came forth. Did Jesus really need to know that he was God's Son? Since Jesus was God and therefore didn't haven't the problem of sin that we all have, did he really need to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins? We're not even sure that anybody else but Jesus heard this. Other gospels suggest that they did. But Mark reports this as a proclamation to Jesus. "You are my Son. I love you. I am well-pleased with you." Even if nobody else heard it, Jesus could not have been under any illusions about who he was after this. God, in this baptism, is all about reality. And Jesus goes off from here to the wilderness to face down the devil.

You might be saying at this point - OK. Jesus was baptized. I was baptized, too. Maybe your folks got you the font when you were a baby because Grandma Jean insisted. Maybe you had a powerful experience at a revival and a visiting evangelist dunked you in the river. Maybe you've never been baptized. I don't know what your experience was. But the question you may be asking is: What difference does it make? Maybe you don't stay up late thinking about your baptism. Maybe it hardly ever crosses your mind. Is baptism even really necessary? I mean, after all, it's just water isn't it?

Now your preacher is on dangerous ground. Because what if I say, "Oh, no. It's not just water. It is a means of grace instituted by God and commanded by Jesus. If there is anything that is necessary for salvation, it is baptism. And if you have not been up here to get yourself wet then you are bound for hell." What if I said that?

Well, you know the consequence of that. You immediately start thinking of exceptional circumstances. I know of a woman who was a nurse in the maternity ward of a hospital. And if she knew that a child had parents who weren't religious, and especially if the baby had life-threatening symptoms, she would go around in the dark of night baptizing babies in the nursery because she did not want those children to end up in limbo or worse.

Or maybe you think - what if I'm out in the desert and I'm crawling along dying of thirst. There's no water for a hundred miles. And I'm not a Christian but I think I'm going to die and I'm converted by a talking cactus and but there is no way for me to be baptized with water. What then, huh? Huh? [I have got to stop wearing cowboy boots when I do my sermon prep.]

These are ridiculous scenarios - even though theologians through the ages have tried to deal with just these situations. When the whole baptismal thing gets reduced to some physical mechanism where the right minister says the right words with the right water - then we have made baptism into something it is not.

But, OK, let's go back to your question. "It's just water, isn't it?" What if I say, "Yes. You're right. It's just water. It's really just kind of a traditional thing that we do but really the important thing is that you change your life and live better for God." What a travesty! Do you realize what we've done then? If I say that, then what I'm saying is that there is no grace in your salvation. I'm saying that it's all about you and what you do and how well you do it and how sincerely you mean it. If you get it right then we can say that this baptism with water thing was effective.

But that is a lie. The whole problem with this messed up world that we live in is that we believe it's all about us. When we get moralistic and judgmental it's because we think we've got it and the other guy or gal doesn't. We can feel superior because we did it and they didn't. When we get depressed and self-loathing because we know we have messed up we fall into the trap the other way and we still think it's all about us and what we didn't do.

The whole point of baptism, though, is to show us that our salvation, our identity, our reality is not something we create. Did you hear where we began the scripture reading this morning? That first reading. From Genesis. There's water. It's dark. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. There are way too many days when I wake up and say, in the beginning I created every good and and every bad thing that I associate with myself. And those are the days when I am an arrogant unbeliever who may give lip service to God but who really believes that he is the source of all life.

Do you hear where I am going with all this? Baptism matters because we are a forgetful people. Baptism is necessary because we need a God who can save us from ourselves. Baptism is necessary because God wants to give it to us. Laurence Stookey, a professor at Wesley Seminary says, "In short, we are oblivious to the identity we have been given by our Creator.  God, aware of our malady and of our inability to effect a cure (or even recognize the impairment), acts to reveal our true identity to us."* And how does this happen? Through baptism.

Is it necessary? Well, how well do you think we do at remembering our identity without it? The theologian Gerhard Forde says, "To use the analogy of love, one might say that baptism has about the same necessity as that of a lover's kiss.  That is certainly not a legal necessity!  If it is, love has already flown.  But if the lover were asked, 'Is this really necessary?' what could the answer possibly be?  Most likely one would reply that the question was ridiculous!  What sort of necessity is behind an unconditional gift?"**

One of the hardest things for us to accept is that baptism is a gift. It is given because God wants to give it. Jesus told his disciples in the Great Commission to "Go into all the world making disciples and baptizing them." Baptism exists, not because we need a mechanism to express our faithfulness to God, but because God wants a way to bless the world.

O.K., but if God is letting me know who I really am...if God is able to tell me through baptism what I'm really like...then how can that be a good thing? Because who I am is a pretty broken thing.

Someone posted this picture on Facebook this week. It's a picture of a girl with her dog and it's such a wholesome picture. But the words say, "Wishing your pets could talk is fun until you remember all the things you've ever done in front of your pets." That's the danger, isn't it? My cat Whiskers knows me better than any person because I am totally unguarded in front of her. And if she could talk...

So if God knows us as we are - how can God still offer us grace in baptism? What do we do about the problem of sin?

Isaiah 49:16 talks about a branding. Speaking to the people of God in exile, God says, "Look, I have inscribed your name on the palms of my hands." Think about that for a minute. Your name is inscribed, branded into the palms of God's hands. It's a metaphor, of course. God doesn't look like a human being. God doesn't have features like a human being. God doesn't have hands to be branded.

Except God does. God's hands gripped Mary's finger in a Bethlehem stable. God's hands rubbed the wood in Joseph's carpenter shop. God's hands touched lepers and little children. God's hands broke bread. God's hands were pierced by nails. And in the piercing of those hands, God took on the sins of the world. God accepted the brokenness of the world. And when they pierced his side, it was not just blood, but water that flowed forth. Water that reminds us that we may be sinners, but that is not all that we are. Born through water, born again through the Spirit, we are free to be who we really are - children of God.

In the movie Avatar there are these ridiculous blue creatures called Na'Vi. But they greet each other with the phrase, "I see you." It's not just a visual thing like, "Hey, I see you over there." It's a recognition of the real essence of the person. "I see you. I know you. I encounter something holy in you. I am with you." It's just what God says to Moses from the burning bush. "I know the suffering of my people in Egypt," he told Moses. And that Hebrew word for 'know' has the character of experience. "I see the suffering of my people. I know the suffering of my people. I experience the suffering of my people."

Do you think the world sees Naama Margolese? Do you think the religious people who shout epithets at her and cause her tears can see who she is?

Do you think the world sees you? Do you think the sin and the hurt and the grief and shame and the burdens of your life are all that others see? Is it all that you see?

Because the God who moves across the face of the waters sees Naama and loves her. The God who descended in the form of a dove sees you and this whole sin-blasted world. And what does God say when God sees you? "You are my child, whom I love. With you I am well-pleased." How do you respond to a gift like that? Thanks be to God.

*Baptism: Christ's Act in the Church, Laurence Hull Stookey [Abingdon: Nashville, 1982], p. 13.
**"Something to Believe: A Theological Perspective on Infant Baptism," Gerhard O. Forde, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, Vol. XLVII No. 3, July 1993, pp. 231.