Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on Baptism of the Lord Sunday, January 8, 2023. Based on Matthew 3:13-17.
We often think of baptism as a quintessentially Christian ritual that sets us apart from Jews. In reality, it was a re-imagining of the mikveh. Throughout the Torah, and especially in Leviticus, there are commandments to “wash with water.” For example, Leviticus 17:14-16:
“For the life of every creature—its blood is its life; therefore I have said to the Israelites, ‘You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off.’ All persons, native-born or alien, who eat what dies of itself or what has been torn by wild animals shall wash their clothes and bathe themselves in water and be unclean until the evening; then they shall be clean. But if they do not wash themselves or bathe their body, they shall bear their guilt.”
Leviticus 17:14-16
Uncleanness is different from sin. There are other parts of Leviticus that talk about sins like murder and stealing. Uncleanness is a ritual status that keeps a person out of the community. Think about Paul’s writings about Jews and Greeks eating together. Mainstream Jewish thought in Paul’s time was that Greeks, or Gentiles, were unclean, and therefore not suitable to eat with or associate with. Jews could become unclean for a variety of reasons spelled out in Leviticus, and in fact, ritual uncleanness was a part of daily life. But all uncleanness could be resolved. Depending on the circumstances, maybe there was a sacrifice needed, or maybe there was a waiting time, or maybe there was an inspection. But in practically all cases, the uncleanness was ended by a ritual bath, or mikveh.
The mikveh was also used to prepare a priest for service. Jews in normal daily life would accumulate some uncleanness, but nothing insurmountable. Priests, though, had to be totally clean, so before being anointed, they needed to ritually bathe.
The mikveh was and still is used to prepare anyone who wants to convert to Judaism. Jews generally don’t proselytize any more, but occasionally someone will want to become Jewish. Men need to be circumcised, of course, but both men and women need to ritually bathe. The mikveh washes away their uncleanness, accrued during a life separated from God, and brings them into the Jewish community.
It was this ritual bath that John the Baptist re-imagined as his baptism. He called people to repentance and a renewed relationship with God. He extended the concept of ritual uncleanness to moral uncleanness, sinfulness that needed to be washed away. Even the Pharisees and Sadducees saw the merit in ritual bathing, so they came to him. John embraced the Law of Moses but not the religious establishment. He was in some sense like the Christian reformers of the sixteenth century. Like Luther or Zwingli or Calvin, who accepted Christianity but rejected the Pope and the Roman Catholic hierarchy and its teachings, John the Baptist accepted the Law as taught in scripture and in the synagogues, but rejected the high priest and the Temple power structures. He was a fundamentalist of sorts. He proclaimed that the Jews of his day were inheritors of an ancient covenant but had fallen short of their obligations. They had become unclean not by eating non-kosher foods but by ignoring the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and by appeasing the Roman authorities. Like many back-to-basics reformers, he attracted a number of followers who could sense that there was something wrong in their lives.
Into this mix, Jesus appears. By submitting to John’s baptism, Jesus implicitly endorses John’s world view. By baptizing Jesus, John implicitly endorses Jesus’s ministry. This scene is a transition of power, a demonstration that John and Jesus acknowledge each other’s legitimacy and Jesus’s superiority.
If we think of baptism solely as washing our sins away, we are left to wonder why Jesus had to do it. We believe that he was the Son of God and therefore incapable of sin. So why did he need to be baptized?
Well, think back to the purpose of the mikveh. Ritual bathing isn’t about sins so much as about community. If you do something to become unclean, you cannot worship God and are separated from the holy gathering. After becoming clean, you are welcomed back into full membership in the community and are able to approach God with confidence. Jesus enters John’s community and literally enters his stream of thought as he is baptized in the waters of the Jordan River.
In the past year, we have welcomed two new members of Christ’s body through the sacrament of baptism. If all goes well, we will welcome another this year. I have been working with Cassie over the past month to teach her about Presbyterianism. One important lesson was about sacraments. Roman Catholicism has seven sacraments, but Protestant churches just have the two that Jesus did: baptism and communion. Baptism is a one-and-done sacrament. It’s a grafting onto Christ’s body, which is the Church. Different denominations and Christian movements have different understandings of its function and requirements, and so some only acknowledge baptism done the “right” way. For example, Catholics only acknowledge Catholic baptisms done by a Catholic priest. Missouri Synod Lutheran churches do not acknowledge baptisms done in our denomination or even in ELCA Lutheran churches, I think because we ordain women. Baptist churches and churches in the Christian Restoration movement like Greentree only acknowledge baptism by full immersion, undertaken by someone who is old enough to make a conscious decision.
We Presbyterians are pretty open-minded. We acknowledge any baptism that satisfies two key requirements: water is involved, and the baptism is trinitarian, done in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We reject baptisms from Mormons and other non-trinitarian sects, but we acknowledge infant baptism, or adult baptism, done by sprinkling or immersion, performed by someone of any gender.
Baptism is a visible sign and seal of God’s invisible grace. Since we cannot control God’s grace, we cannot act as gatekeepers for baptism. The reason I led Bryan through classes, and I’m teaching Cassie now, and the session “inspects” candidates for baptism (or their parents, in the case of infants), is to make sure they know what they’re signing up for. Baptism grafts a person onto Christ’s body. What does that mean? Well, they are supposed to then act as if they were a part of Christ’s body. They are supposed to be Christ’s eyes and ears and hands and mouth in the world. People are baptized into a particular community, so they need to understand the expectations of that community.
Those expectations can sometimes be draining. It can be hard to love people the way God does. It can be hard to trust in God’s providence. That’s why we have the second sacrament, communion. The Lord’s Supper provides sustenance as we grow into the people God intends us to be. It’s like when a farmer grafts a branch onto a tree: it will only grow if the host tree provides nutrients to sustain it. Each month, we partake of Christ’s body to sustain our work in the world and our growth as Christians. To help us to fulfill our baptismal vows.
Let’s review what those vows are. Before being baptized, each candidate needs to answer affirmatively to three questions.
One: Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world? This should be the easy one, but everyone here knows how hard it really is. I would guess that everyone here commits a sin of some sort every day. I doubt many people here have committed murder, but as Jesus taught, being angry is almost as bad. Early church fathers taught that having two coats is a form of stealing, since the second one should be given to someone who has none. Boy, I’m guilty of that one! Not only do we all sin, but many times, we compromise with the forces of evil in the world. You all can probably guess my political leanings, and I can guess many of yours, but we must all remember that all political parties accommodate some forms of evil. We make compromises so that some good can be achieved, and turn a blind eye to the evils inherent to the systems in which we participate. The world’s political and economic systems are sinful, and that sinfulness infects us all.
Two: Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior, trusting in his grace and love? OK, this really is the easy one. Well, it’s simple, at least. In the Baptist tradition, candidates need to be old enough to make this decision for themselves. In our tradition, parents can make this decision on behalf of their children. The main thing is that you need to acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and reject all other gods, including gods like money.
Three: Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love? This is the flip side of the first vow. It is not enough to turn away from evil. We vow to actively pursue good. We vow to study Jesus’s teachings and then to put them into action. We vow to show his love to everyone he loves, which means everyone.
John taught that people should “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” I’ve talked before about salvation and my belief that everyone is saved. Others believe that a person needs to accept Jesus Christ as their savior in this life in order to be raised to eternal life. That belief drives evangelism, because believers are driven to “save souls.” If you believe in universal salvation like I do, the goal is not to save souls, but to save lives. Jesus extended John’s teachings and, like a new Moses, provided rules for how we are all to live in this world. He taught us to love God and also to love our neighbors, and taught us who our neighbor is and how we should love them. Being a good disciple means studying Jesus’s teachings and then putting them into practice to bear good fruit.
Baptism is a rite of passage, like graduation. Remember that a graduation ceremony is called “commencement,” which means “beginning.” It’s an end to one phase and the beginning of a new phase of life. After completing high school or college or some training program, there is a public acknowledgement of your achievements, a welcome into the new community of finishers, and an exhortation to go put your learning to work. I want to tell you about this new ring I’ve been wearing for about a month. There is an organization called the Order of the Engineer. In 1922, a professor at the University of Toronto convinced his colleagues that engineers needed to take a vow to uphold the standards of their profession, and asked Rudyard Kipling to write the vow for them. The first ceremony was held in 1925 in Montreal. Then in 1970, some American engineers adapted the Canadian ceremony and instituted the Order of the Engineer in Cleveland. It’s not a membership organization. It is simply a vow that engineers make that is signified by a stainless-steel ring on the last finger of their working hand. The vow is a public pronouncement of obligations to the standards of the engineering profession, and the ring is a visible sign and reminder of that vow. I have here the certificate that I received. If you could see it, you would recognize that it is signed not by some representative of the Order, but by me. It is another reminder of the vow that I made.
I had never heard of the Order of the Engineer until this past fall, but I have often said that to me, engineering is more than just a job or career or profession, but an identity. So it made perfect sense for me to acknowledge that identity publicly.
In the same way, baptism is an affirmation of a person’s identity as a child of God and a part of the body of Christ. You are all already beloved by God, whether you have been baptized or not. Baptism is a visible sign and seal of invisible grace. It is an external indication of something that happens internally. It is a declaration that you accept God’s love, and a welcome into one particular community of believers as representatives of all the saints in every time and place. It is a beginning of a new life of following Jesus.
Once you have been baptized, you are commissioned to be a disciple of Christ. You are a part of that body of believers who received the Great Commission to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything” that Jesus commands us. Baptism makes God’s grace visible to the person being baptized, who then makes God’s grace visible to the world. We are instruments of baptism for the whole world. Jesus said that streams of living water would come from the heart of those who believe in him. That living water is the love of Christ channeled through each one of us, flowing out to each person we meet.
God desires that the whole world will be transformed into their holy dwelling. God desires that the whole world will be washed of its uncleanness and brought into holy community. We who have been baptized are part of that community. We have pledged to be Christ’s faithful disciples, obeying his Word and showing his love as conduits of his living water. Let us always remember that pledge and strive to be visible signs of an invisible grace at work in each person we meet, binding us together and birthing a new heavenly earth. Amen.
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