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The Bounds of Baptism
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 21, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 12:29-32 Galatians 3:23-4:7
No doubt some of you read the article in the Inquirer last Sunday about the so-called Presbyterian new church development opening its doors on Rosh Hashanah in Plymouth Meeting Mall. Having addressed the issue of “Messianic Judaism” from this pulpit before, I do not intend to take that on again this morning. I mention the article only because David O’Reilly’s lead sentence seemed to coincide with our topic for the morning: “A bronze baptismal font glowed in the morning light of Congregation Avodat Yisrael’s stained glass window,” the article begins. “But Andrew Sparks, spiritual leader of the fledgling congregation, did not want it in the photograph. ‘It wouldn’t express us,’ Sparks said as he pulled the font away from the window and out of the picture.” On this Sunday morning when we send our baptized and yet-to-be-baptized children across the way to learn the story of God’s loving purposes “from the first days of our disobedience, unto the glorious Redemption brought us by Jesus Christ,” I believe we would do well to consider why it was that the Reformers insisted the baptismal font be at the center of the picture of our common life. For living as we do and raising our children in an increasingly pluralistic and theologically confused world, our identity--as baptized children of the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ--is no casual matter or chance affair. Being Christian in a religiously deregulated era, when the latest divine revelation hot off the press is what passes for truth, the burden of discerning the truth worth our lives and worth our children’s lives is placed solely in these frighteningly ill-equipped, theologically gullible minds and hearts of our own. Moreover, given the gods before whom we will unwittingly continue to bow, and the gods that will vie for our children’s allegiance all their life-long, there can be no more important and daunting a task before this congregation than that of introducing our children to the God who is God. Publicly and visibly, the introduction begins around the baptismal font, and so in the presence of Kirk and kith and kin. Though before we consider the meaning and practice of the sacrament of baptism with water, a prior word must be said about baptism by God’s Spirit: about the invisible beginning of the Christian life. When Paul writes to the Galatians that we are God’s adopted children because God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, “Abba! Father!” he is telling us God’s Spirit has interceded, between our naturally idolatrous hearts and our worship of gods that are no gods, to turn our generalized cries for help or meaning or purpose toward the God who hears and saves. Or to put it another way, because human beings are not born with a gene for faith in the living God, but rather are born vulnerable to the voice of every huckster shouting promises down the long corridor of human history [“The human heart,” said Calvin, “is a factory for idols”], a life turns in trust toward the God who is God only by God’s grace. Again, God’s Spirit intercedes between our restless hearts and all the other gods vying for allegiance, graciously turning us to know and serve the God who is God. Therefore before we can speak about what happens visibly in the community of faith around the font, we must confess that our turning in faith, even our presenting our children for baptism in faith, is the prior invisible initiative of God’s Spirit in us and toward us. That being said, we are invited to see how the regular celebration of the sacraments not only reminds us of the reality of God’s initiative with us in Jesus Christ, but also how our lives are thus ordered in response to God’s initiative by our diligent use of these means of grace: how they put us, so to speak, in the way of grace. Of both sacraments, the Second Helvetic Confession says God “offers unto our sight those things which inwardly [God] performs for us, and so strengthens and increases our faith through the working of God’s Spirit in our hearts”: an outward and visible sign, we once memorized, of an inward and invisible grace. Baptism with water is a sign and seal of what God’s Spirit has already done. Why, then, once baptized, does it not seem to take? Why do our children bolt from the church at the first opportunity, only to embrace any spirit at hand, or nothing much at all, in a culture that tells them who they are? Why do so many in our adult number absent themselves from the community of faith and belief once the children “have been done”, only to join a world bowing down before the two-dimensional altars of secular existence? From his chair at the University of Edinburgh, David Wright speculates that, “When baptism is so easily given and received, it cannot amount to very much…. Its injection of a minimal dose of the virus of Christianity has successfully inoculated generations of…men and women against catching the real thing in later life.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it more starkly when he railed against the German church for giving away the word and sacraments wholesale: “…we baptized, confirmed and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…. With us, it has been abundantly proved that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations.” Or to paraphrase the Religion Journal of yesterday’s New York Times, ‘You can maintain a religious identity for only about four generations after the rituals are given up,’ after the sacraments are given out with no substance or discipline. “Cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer concludes, “has turned out to be utterly merciless to our…Church.” No doubt this is true for most American mainline Protestant congregations in our time: so eager are we for young families to join that we downplay the discipline necessary for discipleship, the study essential to a faith that seeks understanding, the sacrifice inextricably bound to faithfulness. Though I will tell you a curious thing: lately a significant number of parents seeking a church in which to baptize and raise their children have taken to scrutinizing us! Sometimes this is to make sure we are not like the church of their childhood from which they are running still; but more it is to be assured that the God to whom their children will be introduced is a God they and their children can know and trust with their whole heart and mind and soul and strength. All of which brings us to the font at the center of our lives, knowing this is where we also must begin our believing. For every Sunday when we gather at this font and act out what is already so—that this child has been claimed as God’s own before he or she knows or believes or understands a word of the faith we profess—whether we articulate it or not, together we are bearing witness to what it means to have a God who is God. “Whatever you hang your heart on,” said Martin Luther, “is your God,” and so with a mere sprinkle of water, we promise to hang the heart of a little child or a kneeling adult or a trembling parent on the God made known in Jesus Christ…and not another. “To have a God properly,” wrote Martin Luther in his exegesis of the first commandment [“You shall have no other gods beside me”] “means to have something in which the heart trusts completely.” By “properly,” he meant to distinguish between having a possession [an idol] and having a relationship [with the God who is God]. “To have a God,” he goes on, “does not mean to lay hands upon him, or put him into a purse, or shut him up in a chest…. To cling to him with all our heart is nothing else than to entrust ourselves to him completely. He wishes to turn us away from everything else, and to draw us to himself, because he is the one, eternal good.” Therefore, when Christian baptism was practiced in the early church, the one to be baptized faced west, “where the light vanishes,” and declared, “I renounce you, Satan, and all your pomps and shows,” the pomps and shows, that is, of whatever brand of spirituality was flying off the bestseller shelves at the Borders in Ephesus or Philippi or Thessalonica. We are not the first to do our believing and baptizing in a pluralistic context. First century Christians did the same. Unlike the disciples (all of whom were first century Jews hearing the gospel as a continuation of the story of salvation that had begun with Abraham and Sarah), when gentiles heard the gospel, they heard it, says Robert Jenson, as “a summons and permission to turn ‘from idols, to serve a living and true God…. In the act of faith,” Jenson goes on to say of us, “gentile believers recognize themselves as those who have worshiped or might worship Moloch the baby-killer or Astarte the universal whore or …the Free Market or the Dialectic of History or the Metaphor of our gender or ethnic resentment, or on through an endless list of tyrants. Only a naiveté impossible for the apostolic church, which fully inhabited the religious maelstrom of late antiquity, can think that religion as such is a good thing or that gods are necessarily beneficent.” Only a naiveté impossible for the 21st century church, which fully inhabits the religious maelstrom of post-modern spirituality, can think that religion, as such, is a good thing or that the gods are necessarily beneficent. Accordingly, the service for baptism in the new Book of Common Worship has reintroduced what are called “Renunciations.” “Do you renounce all evil and powers in the world which defy God’s righteousness and love? Do you renounce the ways of sin that separate you from the love of God?” the minister asks the confirmand or the parents of the child to be baptized. “I renounce them,” the candidate replies…“We renounce them,” the parents reply, followed by the question of our turning: “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior?” “We do,” comes the parents’ reply. Then the minister shall say, “With the whole church, let us confess our faith,” and in so confessing—not only with our lips but our lives…sometimes missing our cue, often forgetting to come, wrestling into the night with our own doubts, confessing every folly and foible in the book…in saying “I believe,” do we introduce our children to the God who is God. “It’s funny,” writes Anne Lamott, “I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bend old tools—friendships, prayers, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they are enough,” enough because God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts too, crying “Abba! Father!” Thanks be to God! Amen. |