Branded: So You're Baptized. Now What?

Branded: So You're Baptized. Now What?
Franktown UMC
January 15, 2011

Last weekend I was with the youth in Ocean City for a big retreat. It was great fun. The Renners were very gracious in offering us their condo. The weather was great. We saw some great bands. And we learned some sign language.

Reggie Kapps was the main speaker. Very dynamic. Very funny. Very powerful. And in one of his sessions he was telling the story of Genesis chapter 3 - the Adam and Eve story in which God tells them - "If you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die." Reggie really wanted to emphasize this point, so he kept saying, "You will die." He got us to say it with him. "You will die."

After repeating it a few times he looked over at the sign language interpreter who was up on the stage for the whole session and he saw that she had been repeating it right along with us - "You will die." So he got us to do the sign language with her. "You will die." Try it with me - "You...will...die." We've been doing it around the house all week. Somebody does something we don't like - "You will die."

It's a good place for us to start this morning because today we're going to continue our "Branded" series and we're going to talk about baptism again and the first thing that I have to say is - "You will die." Wow. Really?

Now just a refresher on what this series is all about and why we're calling it "Branded." I talked about wearing my cowboy boots as I was praying about this and some of you were singing the theme song to the old Chuck Connors TV show last week when you heard the title: "Branded. Scorned as the one who ran. What do you do when you're branded and you know you're a man?" In the TV show Connors plays a disgraced cavalry soldier who is branded with the label of being a coward. His saber is broken in two and he carries that broken saber as a symbol of what others have come to think of him.

Some of you know what it's like to be marked like that. To have other people label you and to treat you as that label instead of as a person. Maybe you've been through a divorce and you've felt like that has marked you. After the sermon last week, somebody told me that that's how she had felt following her divorce - like some scarlet 'D' was marked on her for all to see.

What we talked about last week, however, was how the brand of our baptism marks us in the most important way. It shows us how God claims us. How God reveals to us the reality of who we are. How it gives us our identity. I showed the clip from the movie Toy Story in which Buzz Lightyear discovers that he is not a space ranger but a toy and how that was a crushing blow to his self-image. Then he looked at his foot and there was his owner's name - Andy - written right there on his boot. Then last Sunday night, Lena Gonzalez came to Bible Study and showed us that she had written 'God' on the bottom of her boot. Baptism reminds us that God has a claim on us and the love of God in baptism is a gift that gives us our identity.

Today, though, I want to talk about what it means for us to claim that gift. Why is it important that we accept the gift of baptism and what do we do with it? And the reason it is important is because - "You will die."

Let's start with another movie, though. In thinking about branding, I started to think about the ways that we brand ourselves. So I asked for some tattoo stories...

[Video clip]

Tattoos are not really about putting something on our skin. Tattoos are really about something going on inside of us. They are about an inward journey. Sometimes those journeys are about remembrance and desire and a reaching for something more. Sometimes, though, those journeys are just about pain. They're about drawing blood and letting the world see what is going on. When young people cut themselves it is often about a sense that they are not right...that the world is not right...that there is so much brokenness and hurt that they have to give it some kind of physical expression. When all we see is pain, the voice we hear is the one that says, "You will die."

So let us hear a new word from Paul. We read from Paul's letter to the Romans this morning. And Paul has a hopeful word. Did you hear it? Paul does not say, "You will die." No, what Paul says is, "You are dead." Doesn't that sound hopeful?

Paul is writing to the new Christian churches because they are all trying to get their minds wrapped around what believing in Jesus means. They didn't have youth rallies and a lot of hymns or even a New Testament to tell them about Jesus. So they often got it wrong. Especially the grace side of things. Surely we have to do something to earn God's love. Surely there is a step we have to take to get God's grace.

Paul says, 'No.' What we have, on our side of the equation, is nothing like merit. Nothing like faithfulness. Nothing we can show that gives us a claim on God's love. What we have...what is ours to offer...is brokenness and sin. And what is the fruit of sin? What does sin merit from God? Condemnation. Rejection. Repudiation. God is great. God is good. God is righteous. God is holy. God doesn't have any truck with sin. God doesn't fool around with ungodliness. That's why it's called ungodliness. And we live in an ungodly world and we lead ungodly lives. So what should we expect from God? "You will die." And what does God give us? "Jesus loves you." God gives us grace.

So when Paul says this, the immediate response is - O.K. We sin and God gives us grace. And God's grace is sufficient to cover every sin. So that means the more sin there is the more opportunity God has to offer grace. So why don't we sin more so God has more opportunity to be God? Makes sense doesn't it?

That's how Paul begins this sixth chapter of Romans - with this question hanging in the air. And his response is "Me genoito!," which is Greek for "Are you crazy?" Once you know that sin equals death you can't go back to believing that it's a harmless thing. I mean, you can. There are plenty of baptized Christians who have gone astray. Some of them are named you and me. But when we do that we are not in our right minds. Being baptized in Christ, we have been exposed to the news about who we really are and what the world really is. We have been immersed in grace. When we sin we're just being stupid - putting our fingers in our ears and pretending that God doesn't care.

We can make God out to be the big, bad authority figure when we do that. We can say, "God doesn't want us to have any fun. God is just sitting there with a willow switch waiting to whack us when we do something God doesn't like." But the reality is God is standing there watching us beat ourselves with willow switches when we sin. We can blame God, but it's always been the case that we do the greatest damage to ourselves.

Stephen Dobyns wrote a poem on the Garden of Eden story that ends with the line: "Kicked out, kicked out. Who could believe that lie? We'd begged him for a chance to make it on our own."* Dobyns is playing with the notion that perhaps being kicked out of the garden is not the best explanation for what happened. We can push the blame off on God, but it's really we who want to try to make it own, apart from God's grace.

But here's the thing that's most amusing. Dead people don't have the power to harm God and when we sin we are dead. Do you remember that this was the good news? It's not that "You will die." The truth is "You are dead."

Romans chapter 6 verse 1 - "What then should we say? Are we to persist in sin in order that grace may increase? Me genoito! Are you crazy? We are dead to sin - how can we still live in it? Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized to death?" You were baptized to death. You gave your life to Jesus, he sucked you under the waters of baptism, you drowned, you died. I know it seems all sweetness and light when we take a baby in those beautiful white gowns and douse him with water...when we lay hands on her head...but when we give that baby to Jesus...we are baptizing her to death.

Jesus did not come to walk the earth so that we could keep on playing our pretend games. Jesus did not go to the cross so that we could mess around like life doesn't matter. Jesus didn't put on a crown of thorns so that we could fritter away our potential on things that do not last. Jesus came to baptize broken people to death.

The poet Franz Wright was baptized as an adult after facing down many demons in his life. In his poem "Baptism," he writes about how the broken person he was is dead:
I drowned him
and he's not coming back.  Look
he has a new life
a new name
now
which no one knows except 
the one who gave it.**
This is the good news - that we are dead, but, look, "he has a new life, a new name now, which no one knows except the one who gave it."

Paul's way of putting this is that we were buried with Christ through baptism into his death so that we also might walk in newness of life, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. You were baptized to death so that you can walk in newness of life. You were baptized to death so that you can live.

Then Paul says in verse 5, "If, being united with him, we are dead"...that word 'united' there is an agricultural term. "Sumphutoi" is the word. It's what you say when you're planting seeds together in the ground. They are "sumphutoi." That are united in death. The seeds go down into the earth and you cover them up and you think that they're gone for good. But something happens down there in the earth. Some mysterious power brings something forth from those dead, inert seeds. Some new life raises up from the grave. Some new shoots begin to spring up. Some new growth breaks through the earth. Something green is growing.

And it doesn't happen all at once. It's not a full grown plant. It's got a lot of growth ahead of it. It will have to brave the wind and the heat. It will have good days and bad days. It will still have to depend on having the nutrients it needs. The water it needs. The sun it needs. But those seeds that were dead. They are alive. And there is no more miraculous thing on earth than when dead things come back alive.

If you are baptized into Jesus, you are dead. Maybe you forgot that. Maybe you're acting like a zombie and wandering around in some sort of half-life where you forgot that you are dead and then all of your actions have the character of sin. But you have been baptized to death so that you can truly live. The grace that claimed you is yours for the having. You are fearfully and wonderfully made and the Love that made you is waiting for you to claim it. The evil of this world...the sin in your life...has no power over this Love.

Every day that you are alive you have this Love - not because you earned it, but because God gives it. But every day you have this Love, you have the opportunity to live it. You are branded. Thanks be to God.

*from a Facebook post by Mary Karr, 14 Dec 2011. She goes on to say, "Talk about hubris. The human arrogance of projecting onto the place where we imagine God sits all our own fear, malice, dread and loathing."
**"Baptism," Franz Wright, in Walking to Martha's Vineyard [Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2003], pp. 44-45.