June 5th, 2011
God’s great creation is an amazing thing, isn’t it? Take, for example, DNA, those little chains of data that make us who we are, at least the physical part of what we are. That double helix of genetic data unzips, replicates, mutates, and, combined with a process called natural selection, produces a vast array of plants and animals that are more or less adapted to their context. It was DNA and natural selection that gave us our thumbs, these amazing opposable thumbs that sent us rocketing up the evolutionary tree, these thumbs that our cats envy… if only cats had thumbs they could open those cans, never mind that they still wouldn’t be able to read the labels to open the right cans! No, thumbs are just plain amazing, hands are just plain amazing, and with these hands, in just a few minutes, I will baptize a child. But for all the seeming magic of DNA and natural selection, for all of the miracle that is every moment in God’s creation, there is nothing magical about these hands. They’re just plain old hands, no different from yours… hands that cook and clean and paint and scratch and do all sorts of other human things you probably don’t want to hear about. So if these hands aren’t magical, it might be worth thinking about what is going to happen in this act of baptism.
Just like the physical stuff of our being, the cultural stuff of our belief has adapted over time. The Bible was not composed in the order we have received it nor were individual texts within it finalized during a single period. It was revised and altered for centuries, it was adapted to new contexts! So it does require a bit of work to follow this evolving belief, and since many of us grew up in different traditions, let’s spend some time together reflecting on what we believe about baptism and its relationship to sin.
The earliest theology of sin and justice we find in the Hebrew tradition centered on family or clan guilt. In scripture we see entire families being destroyed due to the guilt of one individual. Even today, some cultures practice clan justice. In certain African tribes, a crime committed by a male member of a family can still result in slavery for a female relative.
As the loose clans of the Hebrew people developed into what we think of today as a nation, the idea of communal guilt was transferred to the nation as a whole, first to the united monarchy and later to the divided northern and southern kingdoms. When Israel, the northern kingdom, fell to conquerors, a theology was developed that blamed this military defeat on religious infidelity. This was an evolution in belief, a new way of understanding how God acted with humans.
This same framework of belief was in place almost two centuries later in the decades before the fall of the southern kingdom, Judah, with the destruction of its capital, Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile that followed for the Hebrew elite. Then a remarkable thing happened. The prophets, including second and third Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, all revealed a new system of belief related to sin and guilt. No longer would an individual be held responsible for the sins of the nation, nor for the sins of the clan. In fact, children were no longer to be held responsible for the sins of their parents, nor parents for the sins of their kids. Each individual was accountable for their own behavior. And this remained the belief for the next five plus centuries.
When John the Baptizer showed up preaching his baptism of repentance on the shores of the River Jordan, it was individual repentance for individual sins. There is no belief in communal sin by this point, it is simply not part of John’s message. You sin, you repent, or you suffer the consequences, whatever you believe those might be. Jesus also preaches individual responsibility, he forgives individual sins, and sometimes, and this was truly remarkable, Jesus forgave the sins of people when that wasn’t even what they were asking for in the first place! In other words, some times Jesus forgave people that weren’t even sorry yet! Talk about grace!
In the many many centuries that followed Jesus’ execution and resurrection, our evolving tradition has struggled to reconcile the water baptism of repentance preached by John with the baptism in fire and Spirit preached by Jesus, the whole fire thing proving a little impractical and, dare I say it, dangerous. So early Christians kept the water baptism of repentance as both a cleansing before entry into the community and as an initiation ritual.
The problem came when entire households wished to convert to early Christianity, for people asked the apostles to baptize infants, who clearly were not capable of either sinning or repenting. So the apostles did what pastors have done for centuries, what we still do today, we performed the baptism to provide ritual and comfort.
A few centuries later, when Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, it no longer made sense to be initiated into Christianity, for most people were born into it. So the church adopted a particular strain of Hellenistic, or Greek, thought, and invented the idea of original sin. Let me say that again, the idea of original sin was invented centuries after Jesus. Those who invented it pinned the blame on Eve, using the ancient creation myth, and found support in St. Augustine, who had himself imported bits of his previous Persian religion, filled with self-loathing and hatred of creation, into Christianity. Now there was a good reason to baptize babies, they came out of the womb corrupted by sin and destined for hell without priestly intervention. Or maybe they were just going to Limbo. Or Neverland, or Oz, or Hogwarts, or some other made up place.
At the start of the Protestant revolution, many of the leading Christians came to believe that original sin was false and unscriptural, that infant baptism therefore made no sense, and so they rejected it. The predecessors of modern day Quakers and Mennonites, the Anabaptists, were even executed by drowning because of their practice of “re-baptizing†adults who had been baptized as infants, for the Anabaptists didn’t think the baptism could count if there was no mature belief. Today many Christians, including Quakers, Baptists and Evangelicals, practice what they call “Believer’s†baptism. And we in our part of the Reform tradition have been stuck in our own theological limbo. We believe the child is not stained by original sin, is not headed to hell or limbo or Oz, yet as pastors we continue to baptize infants. It can be a rite filled with meaning for the community, because it provides comfort, but more important, it is a celebration of covenant.
In the tradition we have inherited, infant baptism is provisional. Few know this, but the full name of Confirmation is the “Rite of Confirmation of Baptism.†What I will do today is only the first part of a two part act, the latter part coming when the community and the then-grown child, Kristofer in this case, decide to celebrate a mature decision to repent of any sins actually committed and to accept the individual as an active member of the community on the Way of Christ. In that period between baptism and confirmation, it is the responsibility of the parents and the community to support and form the child as a Christian. We might end every Rite of Baptism with the words “to be continued.â€
And let’s be clear. We need the Way of Christ. We are flooded every day with the same message. It’s all about you. If you buy the right products you’ll be happy and worthy. If you take the right pharmaceuticals, you’ll never be sick, never get old and never die. If you vote for the right candidate, your little tribe will taken care of, to heck with anyone else. That is the cultural message that washes over us every day, so let me ask you: how’s that been working out for you?
The individual initiative and creativity, the get’er-done gumption of an earlier age has been replaced with reckless greed and selfishness. In God and in the people of God we find an alternative story, we find a story of people who live in radical covenantal love for one another and for God, and who are passionate about sharing that love with others. It is a powerful alternative story. That is what this baptism is about: Kristofer is being written into that story.
So lets’ recap… after all, this has been a lot of information in a short period of time. We have thumbs and cats do not. Hands are nifty and miraculous, but my pastor’s hands don’t have any special mojo about them, just the ordinary magic of being made by a creating God. This baby is not corrupt and filled with sin, that’s just made up. And this baptism is just the first half of a two part rite. What will happen is we will enter into a covenant, which means we enter an agreement to which God is a party. It’s holy and important. The parents covenant to raise this child in this Christian community, or maybe in another one. They promise to develop this child’s faith. They promise to turn to this community in times of need. And they promise to do their best to be good Christians, to worship, to deepen their own faiths, to offer their first fruits to God and to be there for others. And you as a community promise to accept and love this child and this family. To provide appropriate opportunities for both this child and these parents to develop their faith and to worship. You promise to be there for them in times of need and in times of joy. And, if all goes according to plan, in about twelve or thirteen years, Kristofer will be a young person who chooses to follow the way of Christ. The Way of Jesus, radical, bold, adventurous love, not some race or ethnicity or social club, but a way, a method of living in this world. We are writing Kristofer into our story, the story of God’s people gathered as Sayville Congregational UCC. We are writing him into a story that stretches from the sands of the Sinai desert to the sands of the South Shore. It is a beautiful joyous exasperating crazy cool story. For that is what we are all about, isn’t it? We walk together following in the traditions and practices of our ancestors, adapting them to today, trying our best to use the method Jesus taught us to live in this world. We do justice, we love kindness, we walk humbly with our God, together, always together, always blessed, always miracle. And we know that by joining together in holy covenant, our God is present with us, that we, as the people of God, are the context of God’s grace, that sanctification takes place right here, right now, through us. But that is a topic for another day. May this baptism be the first of many we do in our time together, baptizing young and old as we walk together along the way. Amen.