Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Baptism of our Lord: January 13, 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Matthew 3:13-17
Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
At many adult baptisms I can’t help but feel an uncomfortable twinge as I watch an adult person with a job and responsibilities and a family, bend down, kneel on the hard floor of our entryway, put her head over the font and wait for the water to be poured over her and to splash up all over her clothes. The twinge in me comes from my sense that one dimension of this act is that of submission. And submission has always been difficult for me.
I was one of those children who, when being disciplined by her parents, would do everything she could not to cry, mostly because to cry, would be to show that I was submitting to their will. And so ordained ministry was a perfect vocation for me in that one of the things ordained people get to do is to struggle with, make mistakes about and if you’re lucky, do a little recovery work around are all the issues related to authority—what it is, how you feel about it and what healthy submission is and what it is not.
I’m not the only one, of course, who senses the presence of this issue in baptism and has feelings about it. I’ve seen the look of fear on the candidates’ faces and heard the tremor in their voice as we talk about whether they want to be immersed or get wet through the pouring method. Many adults as well as children are deeply ambivalent about the experience of putting themselves in our hands, submitting themselves to the vulnerability of baptism in front of the rest of us.
In our gospel for today, it is John the baptizer, not Jesus who is the ambivalent one about baptism. This, we hear, is because John believes it would be more appropriate for John to submit himself to baptism at Jesus’ hands rather than the other way around. Jesus will have none of it and insists that he too must be baptized as any other person would be that day who had wandered down to the shores of the River Jordan.
Today we’ll get to see another adult, Matt Markell—therapist, husband, soon to be father—bend down and kneel on that hard floor. And, yes, part of what will be happening is a kind of submission.
But what will Matt be submitting himself to? What is submission (if you can call it that) in baptism all about?
Let me tell you what it’s not about:
In baptism, Matt will not be submitting his identity (and his mind) to a God or to a church that asks him to swallow everything whole, never question God, never question the Bible, never question how the Episcopal Church or this particular parish does things. Baptism is not this kind of submission.
In baptism, Matt will also not be submitting his will, his choices to a God or to a church that tells him just what to do, that lays what political party he should belong to and how he should vote, that prescribes what position he should hold on every political and social issue. Baptism is not that kind of submission.
And so what kind of submission is it? What will Matt be submitting himself to? What have we already submitted ourselves to?
My buddy, Sam Portaro, puts it this way in his book entitled “Sheer Christianity”: Baptism is the sacrament, the holy space, within which we affirm and accede (that is submit ourselves) to God’s affirmation of us as God’s own children.
What’s strange about this is that we usually think of “submission” as going along, against our will, with something we perceive or experience as negative. But in the case of baptism, we’re submitting ourselves to something positive—to God’s affirmation of us as God’s own children.
But, of course, the fact that it’s positive does not mean that it’s easy. And there’s the rub.
It’s hard sometimes to believe and accept that we, like Jesus and through Jesus, have in our baptisms been made children of God. We have so much evidence to the contrary. We have those persistent and pesky propensities in ourselves that trip us up, that get in the way of our living into being our best selves, sustaining our relationships with other people and participating courageously in God’s work of justice and peace in the world. It’s hard to believe that you’re a son or daughter of God when you’re acutely aware of how far short you fall.
But strangely this is where submission comes in. Being a Christian as Will Willimon says “is not self-derived. Somebody had to tell us the story of Jesus, had to live the faith before us, had to serve as our exemplar. We Christians call it, grace, a word that means simply, gift.
Christians believe we are Christians, not primarily because of something we do, or decide, think or feel, but rather because of something that God in Jesus Christ does to us, something that the church lives before us and tells to us. We call it grace.”
This, then, is what we’re submitting ourselves to—not to a set of impossible and burdensome expectations, but to the acceptance of a grace, to a gift, to the admission that we cannot do it all for ourselves and that all has already been done for us. It’s a gift that has both the power to break the backs of the proud and to cause the lowly to raise themselves up, bestowing upon both a new and glorious liberty as well as a solemn and joyful responsibility—that of seeing ourselves and the world as God does, and living, with God’s help, out of this. And, once done, it cannot be undone or as our own Prayer Book says: “The bond God establishes in baptism is indissoluble.”
In her autobiography, An American Life, Annie Dillard tells about her experience of the persistence of baptism. By age seventeen, she had read through most of the books in her branch of the Pittsburgh Library. After reading widely in philosophy, including Nietzsche, she decided that Christianity was worthless. She, therefore, resolved to have her name removed from the role of her church, to have nothing more to do with Christianity. So she went down to the church, Shadyside Presbyterian, and demanded that her name be removed from the roll. There, a kindly old assistant pastor listened to her and then said that he would have her name removed.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“That’s it,” he replied.
“So my name is off the roll,” she asked.
“Yep, you want it off the roll, it is off the roll.”
“So I’m no longer a Christian?” she asked.
“I just said your name was no longer on the roll of the church,” said the man. “You are still baptized. I know what you want, but who knows what God wants of you?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“We’ll see,” replied the old pastor.
Annie then walked out the door of the pastor’s office and made her way down the hall. She overheard the pastor mumble to himself, “She’ll be back.”
She wheeled around, stormed back into his office and demanded, “What did you say?”
“Oh, I just said that I expect that you’ll be back,” he replied.
“No I won’t! It’s my life. And this is the way I want to live it. I’m not going to be back!” she shouted.
“Okay. We’ll see,” he said.
Annie Dillard said she stormed out, perplexed and frustrated by the old man’s attitude.
Then she said, “I am forty-five years old as I write this. Through a circuitous path, I find myself still in this faith. I’m back.”
However you’re feeling on this day—connected to your life or not, connected to the church or not, “back” as Dillard says, or “out there” personally, vocationally or spiritually—however you’re feeling—know that this is the day of the baptism of our Lord and the day of our own baptisms, a day of the remembered watery submission to one whose love has gone before us and is all around us, a day of being lifted up and sent out as God’s own beloved sons and daughters.
Works Cited or Consulted
Sam Portaro, Sheer Christianity: Conjectures on a Catechism
Quote by William Willimon and use of the Annie Dillard story (mostly verbatim) come from Willimon’s own sermon entitled “Made, Not Born” preached at the Duke University Chapel on 1/22/2001
