DUCK AND COVER
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, January 11, 2009
Scripture: Mark 1:4-11
To begin with, a quick survey: how many of you have been baptized in some fashion or other? How many of you remember your baptism? How many of you experienced your baptism as meaningful at the time it happened? How many of you today still regard your baptism as meaningful?
I had the privilege early in the fall of talking with one of our youth, Maggie Burkett, about her baptism last summer in the St. Lawrence River during the annual Peace Camp of the Baptist Peace Fellowship. It sounded like a perfect baptism, the way the ritual was always meant to be: an experience rich with symbolism, chosen deliberately, happening at a meaningful time and place, in the presence of relationships built and sustained over time. A perfect baptism—
--so perfect, in fact, that it got me thinking about my own far from perfect baptismal experience, and wondering whether I should try it again. I was baptized at the age of 10 (old by the usual standards in my Southern Baptist Church), having answered affirmatively when my pastor asked whether I wanted to accept Jesus as my personal savior (because how could anyone give any other answer to such a question?) and thereby becoming a candidate for baptism according to church practice. Because I had developed a bit of a water phobia by then, the result of some unfortunate swimming incidents, I dreaded the experience. Tipped backwards into chest-high water, completely dependent on a small, aging man to keep me afloat and not drop me, while the whole church watched: it was a situation made for disaster.
But I did not drown, the pastor did not drop me (though I did slip around a bit), and for a long time I interpreted the tremendous sense of relief I felt when the baptism was over as the transformation, the new life that baptism was supposed to usher in for me. Only later did I come to realize that being saved, being reborn, being transformed, and being glad to be done with an unpleasant experience were not one and the same.
Since becoming your pastor, I have had the privilege of baptizing four new members, three by immersion and one by sprinkling, and like parents who discover that parenting allows them to heal vicariously some of the wounds they carry from childhood, the extraordinary experience of baptizing others has filled in many of the gaps in my own experience of baptism. It is an amazing ritual, a ritual that I wish happened more often, a ritual that has given its name to our entire tradition despite a sense of awkwardness, even embarrassment, that sometimes accompanies it. For some of you, I know that having a baptism happen in our church is a powerful symbol of transformation; for others of you, I know that baptisms are a weird remnant of a kind of primitive spirituality that seems out of place these days. We are a Baptist church, yet we go for long spaces of time without baptizing anyone, and our baptistry shows signs of neglect, currently serving its purpose more as a storage space than a vital element of church life. All these contradictions point to the power and mystery of baptism in our individual and collective spiritual journeys: we are not entirely sure what it means, and we do not much like to talk about it.
Baptism during the lifetime of Jesus occupied a somewhat similar position: it was only one part of a ritual preparatory process in the Judaism of the time and was regarded as a kind of cleansing bath, not a meaningful practice in and of itself . Occasionally it was taken up by various odd groups locating themselves outside the spiritual mainstream and given special meaning beyond its part in a cleansing preparation. So when John the Baptist rolled into town, unkempt and with locust on his breath, no one was surprised to see him seize on baptism as a central element in his eccentric spiritual style. While his message was standard prophetic fare—repent, return to God, forsake evil ways, people and society have strayed from the true path—his inclusion of baptism as an essential part of the experience he offered was not standard.
This is the Baptism of Jesus Sunday, typically occurring in the church year shortly after the Christmas holiday time, and it is familiar fare for anyone raised in a traditional church. You may recall the pictures of the story that Sunday School teachers usually held up on this Sunday: Jesus standing waist deep in the waters of the River Jordan, a ray of sunlight with a hovering dove shining down on his upturned face, his hands folded, while others waiting for their own turn at baptism and curious onlookers are scattered around the landscape. As it is usually told and usually artistically presented, the story is a beatific and straightforward confirmation of Jesus’ special status and the launching point for his ministry. And told and presented in such a fashion, the most important parts of the story are left out.
First of all, why on earth does Jesus get baptized anyway? We Baptists see baptism as recognizing a change of heart, a readiness to strike out on a new path in life. John the Baptist claimed that the baptism he offered was part of renouncing evil and provided cleansing from the effects of a sinful life. Did Jesus need to cleanse his own life—and from what, exactly? Did he need to undergo a change of heart—and why, exactly? Before the story gets underway, had John walked over to Jesus and asked if he wanted to be saved, much as the pastor of my childhood church asked me? If Jesus was God’s son, already divine from birth, then would he not have been ready to start his ministry without any such ritual, good to go from the outset? If so, then was he choosing to be baptized not for himself but for those standing around watching, as a kind of symbolic sign for them? And that pretty picture in the children’s Sunday School classroom: the gospel of Mark talks about the heavens being “torn apart,” hardly a peaceful image. So it is not clear why Jesus wanted to be baptized, nor what it meant to him, and it was most certainly not a serene experience, full of gentle sunshine and a hovering white dove.
Now Jesus did get a kind of affirmation following his baptism, in that he seems to have heard or sensed God actually blessing him and declaring him to be a beloved son. All well and good, a lovely experience for anyone of us to have, to know in our heart of hearts that we are a child of God and loved without condition. A lovely experience—except that what Jesus is about to discover is that anytime he is acknowledged as the son of God, something awful usually happens shortly thereafter. Satan calls Jesus the son of God, and immediately proceeds to tempt him; demons cast out of a madman acknowledge Jesus as son of God, and his presence makes the townspeople so anxious that they want to throw him off a cliff; individuals healed by Jesus call him the son of God and create the beginnings of suspicion and plots against his life on the part of the religious and political authorities; both devout believers and mocking onlookers call him the son of God at the moment he is dying on the cross. Perhaps being a son or daughter of God is not all it is cracked up to be, as it seems to involve challenges, suspicion, mockery, rejection, ridicule, torture, even death. The title sounds wonderful—yet the reality is anything but.
In a bit over a week, our nation will inaugurate a new President who comes with impossible expectations already attached to him. Not having even taken the job yet, I suspect President-Elect Obama might readily admit that being President is not necessarily a wonderful position to hold, given that it comes with challenges, suspicion, mockery, rejection, ridicule, criticism and judgment, and demands from all sides that he honor the wishes of every constituency in every respect at every moment—or face their wrath and withheld support. Just as everyone had a particular, and different, opinion of what Jesus should do, how he should act, who he should favor and who he should reject in order to be considered a prophet, a Messiah, a son of God, so does our newly elected, not yet installed President face the particular, and different, opinions of each of us regarding what he should do, how he should act, who he should favor and who he should reject in order to be considered a liberal president, a faithful Democrat, an agent of change. Like the people of Jesus’ time, like the people of any time, we confer a special status on those who would lead us and then promptly make it impossible for them to lead us unless they do precisely what we, in all our wisdom, deem they should do.
And in two weeks, this congregation will hold its annual meeting, an occasion that is typically greeted with heavy sighs, much eye-rolling, and trepidation. While in theory an annual meeting should be a celebration of all that has been accomplished in the past year, and a hopeful look at what is planned for the coming year, more often than not annual meetings deteriorate into conflict—sometimes healthy conflict, and sometimes nasty conflict—over priorities, typically as those priorities are reflected (or not reflected) in the proposed budget for the coming year. Those of you who have been watching the numbers reported in the newsletter and in the bulletin, or who have even taken a close look at the offering plate as it passes you by each week, will not be surprised to know that the budget for the coming year is likely to be a challenge for all of us, as our hopes and dreams exceed our current grasp, and there is a significant gap between dollars pledged and promises sought. How shall we go about determining what matters most to us in this annual mud wrestle over limited resources? Who among us can say what is most important for our church to accomplish: launching a new Sunday School program for our children? Starting a new community artspace in our basement? Feeding increasing numbers of hungry people in our community? Maintaining a building that some of you regard as a blessing and others as a curse? Ensuring our endowment stays intact? Paying our staff appropriate wages? Donating to our benevolences, the causes and organizations we believe are worthy of financial support? Our Baptist tradition and our church constitution says that the congregation, all of you, determine what is most important and what receives funding as we seek to carry out our mission. But I am fairly certain that if I polled each of you this morning, I would receive at least as many answers to the question of what matters most as there are persons present in this sanctuary. Many, perhaps most, congregations who practice our form of governance, congregational polity, determine priorities the same way we do: members argue about them, and the best arguers win.
Yet I wonder what would happen if we experimented with speaking a different language entirely in discussing our church priorities. What if we no longer spoke in “I” statements, saying “I think this” and “I want that” and “I believe this is most important” and “I don’t know if I can keep coming here if we do that,” what if determining priorities was not an exercise in deciding what we want, but instead was about what God wants? What if we asked, what is it that God is calling us to do as a church?
My guess is that the heavens would be torn apart, just as they were when Jesus, by being baptized, heard his identity as that of being God’s son, and then set about his mission, only to find in short order that the mission did not look like what everyone else, perhaps even including Jesus himself, had envisioned. He found himself annoying almost everyone, consorting with disreputable people, risking and ultimately losing his life, and with no evidence whatsoever of success at the moment of his death. Answering a call from God, doing God’s work, acting as the children of God in the world, means upsetting everyone, spending time and forming partnerships with people you don’t like and who are not at all like you, taking risks, actively courting failure because the work of God does not measure success by the same standards the world uses to measure success. Success as a church is not measured by a sizeable bank account, numbers of members, a fancy building, high standing in the community. Success as a church is measured by faithfulness to the mission—not the mission I want, nor the mission you want, nor the mission you want, but the mission God offers to us. To do anything else is to cease being a church.
I believe our church stands at a critical juncture, a crossroads full of tremendous opportunity and great danger. We could make safe choices, we could make foolish choices, we could make risky choices, we could grow in ways we never imagined, we could fail spectacularly. Doing God’s work often does involve painful failure, which is probably why so many churches so often choose to do something else more comfortable.
To mark our setting out on a new path, I considered the possibility of having some sort of mass baptism, of dunking or sprinkling as many of you as I could get my hands on. But I could imagine such a plan quickly going awry, for while a few of you might goodheartedly cooperate with my mass baptism, most of you, I suspect, would run for cover if not rise up in revolt. We may call ourselves Baptists, but that does not by any means imply that we all like being baptized or regard it as a purely positive experience.
So I abandoned that particular vision, and also realized that like it or not, we may well be heading for another baptism, this time a baptism by fire, as we prepare to launch our church into the next stage of our collective journey. Our way ahead is not easy; it will be hard, it is not clear; the stakes are very high. But we can have courage, for we do not make this journey alone: we walk with one another, and we always walk with God.
