ELEMENTAL CHRISTIANITY -- WATER
TEXT: Mark 1:4-11; Ezekiel 36:24-28

Well, last week I preached on fire and somebody set a fire by our dumpster. So I'm thinking that maybe by preaching on water this week, we'll get some rain. We've been looking at Christian basics in terms of the elements of earth, air, fire, and water; and just as I couldn't ignore the theme of judgment on "fire" week, I would be doing you a disservice if we didn't look at baptism on "water" week.

There are a lot of emotions surrounding baptism, and that is not new. Parents have been panicked that their infants will not go to heaven if they are not baptized. Some denominations will not recognize the baptism of an infant or a baptism by anything less than full immersion, yet in Geneva, Switzerland in the 16th century, those who practiced adult baptism were put to death. What is baptism, exactly? What is it for? Why is it important? What does it mean? That's what I want to look at this morning.

Baptism is the way of marking a new Christian, just as circumcision was the way of marking someone new to the Jewish faith. In Judaism, this was most frequently infants, but adult converts were also circumcised. In baptism we do not actually make a mark in the flesh, but we symbolize all that is expected in the Christian life through the symbol of the water.

But before we get into the symbol of the water, let's sort through some of the stumbling blocks around baptizing infants. First of all, it is not true that an unbaptized infant is going to hell. That was a medieval teaching of the Catholic church, but I am not aware of any church, Catholic or otherwise, that teaches such a doctrine now. If God's nature is such that God would send a baby to hell simply because the parents neglected baptism, then we are all in more trouble than we could ever imagine for all sorts of things. That behavior simply does not fit the God revealed in Scripture.

For those who were raised in traditions that baptized only adults, however, there is another stumbling block, and this one I know well, since I grew up Baptist. In Baptist churches of all types, as well as in many other Protestant denominations you are baptized into the Christian faith when you are able to profess your belief for yourself. Infant baptism does not count in those circles because it is tied to a person making vows for themselves and infants cannot do that. Those who advocate for adult baptism also point to Scripture saying that there are not references to babies being baptized in the Bible.

As I made the move from being a Baptist to being a Methodist, the issue of baptism was the toughest nut to crack. In fact, it was just a week before I was to appear before the United Methodist Board of Ordained Ministry in Florida, and I still couldn't make the shift. I knew I was in trouble. I knew the Board was going to look at my papers and see that I had been a Baptist for 26 years. They were going to ask me about infant baptism, and I was going to be in trouble. So I went running around to every professor and pastor that I knew saying, "Tell me why it's right to baptize infants...and make it good. I have to believe it in a week."

Well, they gave me a lot of good stuff. They explained that baptism was about what God has already done for us, not what we can do for ourselves. They explained that the baptism of infants does not appear in the Bible directly because the issue didn't really come up until the next generation. When the faith was new, it only had adult converts. It was only when they had children that the issue came up of whether this child could be considered Christian or not. But as I drove from Atlanta to Florida, I was still wrestling with the issue in my mind.

But then I came to the core question. OK...baptism marks a new Christian. At what point can a person be considered a Christian? Well, at what point did I consider myself a Christian? I thought about that for awhile. And I remembered a time back in my early 20's when I went into a Christian bookstore in Providence and had the sales clerk ask me if I was saved. "Yes," I responded. He wanted to know when. I told him, "All my life." Well, you would have thought I had just announced Satan as my lord and savior. He lit into me telling me that wasn't Biblical and that obviously if I couldn't point to a time and a place of conversion, I had never really experienced it.

I was too stunned to answer him at that point and merely left the store. But I remember thinking about it on the way home and coming up with responses for him then. I wanted to say... "Hey...I'll bet you will want children someday. Isn't my life the life you would want for them...Christian that you are? Don't you intend to raise them as I was raised...so that they can pray before they can speak, so that they experience the love of God before they can even begin to articulate what that means, so that they will look back across their lives and never be able to find a time that they did not know Jesus as a friend?"

As I remembered that scene from my life, I saw the baptism question differently. Baptism marks a new Christian. At what point did I become a Christian? Was it only at my actual baptism at age 11? Good grief, no. I was effectively a Christian from the moment I was born into a loving Christian home. I simply cannot look back at myself at five years old and say that I wasn't a Christian. I may have been an immature Christian...I didn't understand a lot about Christian belief and practice, but I was fully within God's grace and God's church nonetheless.

And when I realized that...somewhere around Valdosta...I realized that for me, it would have been perfectly appropriate to be baptized as an infant. For me, my birth marked the beginning of my life as a Christian. Now that's not to say that we never have to decide for ourselves whether we want to continue on that path. That is what Confirmation is about. Next week we will bear witness with nine of our young people as they confirm for themselves the vows made for them at their baptism. That is an important step...it is just not the step that first makes them Christian. It is the step that confirms their desire to remain a Christian, now that they have been through classes and hopefully have a better understanding of what that means.

I hope that gives a better understanding of why we baptize infants. It's not that we grab babies off the street and baptize them, but when Christian parents are willing to promise to raise their children in Christian faith and practice, there is no reason to call that child anything but Christian. It helps us remember that our faith is, after all, more about how we behave than how we think, and in the end it is more about what God has done for us in Jesus Christ than it is about anything we have done at all. Baptism is the affirmation of the church that the person being baptized is beginning a Christian life.

And what better symbol of what the Christian life is all about than water? It is a complex symbol for a complex faith, and we relate to different parts of it at different times in our journey. Water is a symbol of birth...remember the story of Nicodemus that we talked about when we talked about "Air" and spiritual birth. Jesus tells Nicodemus that we have to be born of water and the spirit...natural birth and spiritual birth. We enter this world in a gush of water, so we also use water to symbolize our entrance into Christian life.

Water also sustains us. Our bodies are mostly water and we need water to live. Health magazines are full of the advice to drink 8-10 glasses of water a day, a regimen that helps just about every aspect of our bodies. We need only to look to the horror of the immigrants in the Arizona desert this past week to see what happens when there is no water. When Jesus encounters a woman drawing water at a well, He says He can offer her living water...meaning that life lived according to his teaching will bring the kind of benefit to our spiritual lives that water brings to our natural bodies. Water sustains life, so we baptize with water to show the way Jesus pours out His living water on us.

But water is a powerful force that can take life as well as bring it. Water carves canyons, tidal waves wipe out entire towns, floods destroy homes and crops, people drown. With the waters of baptism we also symbolize the spiritual death that will be necessary before we can enter eternal life. It is in this piece of the symbolism that the practice of baptism by full immersion really shines. By laying a person backwards completely under the water and then bringing them back up again, it is easy for all to understand that death and resurrection are primary to the Christian faith. Water can kill, and it can smooth away rough places...even on the hardest stone...and we remember in baptism that the Christian journey will require suffering and death.

But water also cleanses. Water washes away dirt, and using water in our baptism symbolizes the way that Jesus makes us clean from sin. That aspect of baptism is not as prominent when we baptize a beautiful new baby. But when an adult is baptized...when someone is really turning from a life of sin to a life with God...they know how wonderful the cleansing part of baptism is. It's like taking a shower. I take a shower every morning, and that's nice. But when I'm all grimy and dirty...boy, a shower is the best thing in the world.

Baptism means all those things. Will Willimon has said that baptism means what water means, and so it does. It gives life, sustains life, cleanses life, smooths life, ends life...all of that together. And I noticed one other thing this week. About 1 am on Saturday morning as Guy Eaton and I stood in the parking lot watching the fire department put out the fire, I realized that water conquers fire...or as the book of James puts it in chapter 2, verse 13: "Mercy triumphs over judgment."

In the Church, we call that "grace." When the waters of baptism become effective in our lives, the rough places are smoothed out, the sin is gradually washed clean and we feel as if we have been born anew. But the waters are not of our own making...the waters are God's gift to us. And that is why we don't actually baptize a person more than once. For the United Methodist Church, it doesn't matter if you were baptized Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist or any other branch of the Christian faith. The beginning of your journey was properly marked with God's gift of water and we honor that.

But we also recognize that at different points in our lives we are more or less aware of what God has done and is doing for us. So we do provide a time for people to come back to the waters and remember what it means to be baptized...we call it a reaffirmation of baptismal vows. It's not being baptized again, it is coming to the water to be reminded.

Once we have gone into our prayer time this morning and shared our joys and concerns, instead of me saying a formal prayer, I will simply invite anyone who would like to come forward to remember your baptism as you would like. You may come and pray at the rail. You may come and touch the water. For those who would like, I will mark your forehead with the water with the words, "Remember your baptism, and be thankful." If there are those who have never been baptized and would like to take that step to mark the beginning of your Christian life, we can do that too, and if you would simply like to remember how the living water of Jesus sustains you, there is a cup of Poland Spring water up here for you to take and drink. The water is no respecter of persons...it is free to all who would come.

Amen.

(c) 2001, Anne Robertson