January 13, 2008 Des Moines

Text: Matthew 3:13-17

A Good Way to Begin

The baptistery dressing rooms at my home church enjoy the same light blue carpet as the hallway outside connecting the nearby choir room and the sacristy with the sanctuary itself. The small spaces are clean and painted white, with cleaned white robes hanging at the ready.

I don't really remember the baptismal dressing spaces in the Houston church I served just out of seminary. That said, neither do I recall the church having much need of a baptistery during that period – but, then, as Associate Minister in a sort of strained staff relationship that spanned a grand tenure of 22 months, I hardly had the time – nor, frankly, the permission – to involve myself much in such intimate sacramental activity.

In Athens, baptismal candidates dressed in a space halfway up the stairs between the choir room and the youth lounge. It was a nice sized room, subdivided by a collapsible wall when gender separation required it, that I otherwise used as study during the week for sermon preparation.

When I moved to Lufkin, candidates were forced to move all the boxes of Christmas decorations out of a drab and trashy old space up a few steps behind the sanctuary – until, that is, a thoughtful family chose to use memorial funds to remodel the area into something special – with nice carpet and fresh paint and sacred art on the walls. “I think this is a holy moment,” they reflected as they guided the remodeling to its lovely conclusion, “and this should be a holy space to house it.” And it became so. I don't recall what happened to the Christmas decorations.

Here in Des Moines, the baptismal dressing area is something of hell-hole back behind the chancel, with cold, hard and slippery floors and dingy little rooms routinely jammed with miscellaneous storage until the one or two times each year we hurriedly haul stuff out and sweep to make room for the nascent holy.

If baptism marks the official beginning of a Christian's new life, these beginnings to the beginning have as much diversity as baptismal practices, themselves.

There was presumably nothing to sweep nor boxes to move in preparation for Jesus' baptismal moment. According to Matthew, here at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus simply got in line with all the others who had come out to the riverside where John was performing this ritual. And apparently it was a long line -- “the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him,” records Matthew, “and all the region along the Jordan.” To be baptized; confessing their sins.

Now, for some that wouldn't necessarily take much time. I've known many, many beautiful saints whose souls simply didn't need much cleansing. But there are those whose confessional needs could keep them there awhile -- like the guy that country singer Randy Travis sings about named Eddie Lee Vaughn. According to the song:

Everybody gathered where the river runs wider
at the edge of town
to see if that Eddie Lee Vaughn baptism
was really gonna go down.
Folks bet their hard earned money
that water wouldn’t change a thing.
They set the odds at a hundred to one
his soul wouldn’t never come clean.
Then the preacher said,
“people take a moment or two;
there something we need to do:
pray for the fish.
They won’t know what’s coming
when the sin starts rolling off the likes of him.
Lord be with em, they ain’t done nothin'.
Please won't you leave them just a little bit ‘a room to swim.
Pray for the fish.

But surely Jesus wouldn't muddy the waters much. Surely the fish would hardly know he was there. After all, wasn't he supposed to be sinless? But if that was so, why was he getting baptized in the first place? That was exactly what John wanted to know! Why, indeed? According to Jesus – or to later generations who recounted this story, it had less to do with repentance from sin than it did the “fulfillment of all righteousness.” But that still sounds confusing, given that our understanding of righteousness tends to boil down to moral purity – getting “right” with God and correctly and fully following all the rules. Which essentially puts us back where we started, since surely Jesus wasn't needing that kind of realignment. “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that the problem is with our understanding of righteousness – that we have unnecessarily constrained our understanding of the word. According to him, righteousness certainly has something to do with conforming our moral life to God’s intent, but more than that single slice, righteousness, he argues, is more accurately and fully understood to be “the power to give life.” And fulfilling it means to participate in that creative work. The power to give life belongs solely to God, but God shares it with those who find their own meaning and purpose and vitality and hope in relationship to God's own movement. And so it is that God entrusts this holy power to the church. (Hope within History, p. 28)

Righteousness as the power to give new life – a power shared with the people of God as a manifestation of God's own present movement. So how might that work? What would it look like? How, in other words, does the church give life? Well, how in this story does God go about giving it?

In three ways, it seems to me.

¬ First, by publicly naming and acknowledging a relationship: “This,” God proclaimed to more, the grammar presumes, than merely Jesus alone, “is my son.” Jesus is not just an individual – not just a person in isolation – but is a person whose relatedness is claimed and acknowledged.

¬ Second, God verbalizes and makes affection plain: “you are my beloved.”

¬ Third, God publicly takes pleasure in Jesus' particular gifts – “This is my son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”

This certainly isn't the beginning of our ministry, but it is the beginning of a new year, and I can't imagine a better, more life-giving way to begin it than hearing those words for ourselves. It is, after all, our conviction that God publicly acknowledges a connection with us, no less than Jesus, making consistently plain a deep affection and pure delight. We would do ourselves a life-giving favor to start this year off by feeling that dove-like spirit descending on us, and hearing our name included in those words of connection and affection. “You, Bob, are my child, my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.” “You, Steve, and Scott, and Jane and Jo Ann, are my children, my beloved; and you make me very happy.”

We get so beaten down, after all – so stretched by struggle and so diminished by disappointment. Sometimes we even begin to feel like maybe all the dismissals and disregards that others can sometimes show us; the rejection letters and unreturned phone calls; the impatience and failure to take us seriously and the arm's length cordiality is an accurate measure of our worth.

But not as far as God is concerned. “This,” God says to us at the same time God announces it to the world, “is my child.”

But here is the rest of the story. That affirmation is also ordination and the ministry we are charged in baptism to perform is fulfilling all righteousness: stewardship of the power to give life. So here at the beginning of this new year of ministry, who is it with whom we need to be in public relationship? Who needs to be told they are loved? Whose life and whose gifts need celebrating as a way of giving life, itself?

Just think of all the people walking around feeling like they don't matter – like their contributions don't count, or the air they breathe is thereby squandered. Think of all the people who have defined their life as one giant mess up, in the way, a tolerated annoyance; social and spiritual orphans whose very spirits are shriveled for lack of holding.

What if the measure of our ministry had less to do with the purity of our thoughts and the correctness of our deeds and more to do with the lives we nurtured? What if our evangelism this year this year consisted of calling out names, acknowledging to any who care to hear, “This is our brother, this is our sister; someone we love; someone in whose gifts and unique graces we take special pleasure”?

I think it would be a good place to begin – for us, to be sure, but almost certainly for them.

I suppose the down side could be that we would be forced to clean out those baptismal dressing rooms a little more often. But then, maybe that is a small enough price to pay.