Before performing a baptism, the priest approached the young father and said solemnly, “Baptism is a serious step. Are you prepared for it?”
“I think so,” the man replied. “My wife has made appetizers and we have a caterer coming to provide sweets for all of our guests.”
“I don’t mean that,” the priest responded. “I mean, are you prepared spiritually?”
“Oh, sure,” came the reply. “I’ve got a keg of beer and a case of whiskey.”
A little more catechizing is in order!
When I was in college I lived in a basement apartment my grandparents had fixed up for me. It was quite dry, and was never known to leak. One night, when I was a junior and was away for the evening, we had a 100 year storm. When I realized how bad it was, I set out for home. Flooding had already started, and when I got about a quarter of a mile from home I could go no further by car. So I got out of my car, and waded home, sometimes even having to swim. All the while, I feared there might be some water in my basement home.
When I arrived, my grandparents met me at the door and told me there was water in the basement. I opened the door, and the water was all the way to the top step. The outside door to the basement had caved in under the pressure, and within a few minutes the basement was full. All I could think about was that my entire library was under water. Every book I owned, three years of college textbooks, went down the drain that night. I had had an intellectual knowledge of floods, but I never really knew what it was like to experience a flood until that night.
There’s power in water. Life is dependent upon water, but it also has the power to destroy.
We began our life of faith in the water of baptism. Even part of this room is called by a name that should remind us of water. The main part where the people’s pews are located is called the nave, from navis, Latin for ship. The Church is a refuge from the chaotic waters of this world. Water is not only symbolic of life, for through the water of baptism we are made inheritors of eternal life; but also, it’s symbolic of death. That image is more clearly seen in baptism by immersion, symbolizing our being buried with Christ and raised to new life. Going down into the water signifies death to the self; coming up out of the water signifies being raised to new life in Christ, so that with St. Paul we can say “it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” The Church, the Body of Christ, is a ship giving safety from the waters of death.
All of this is to say that our faith is not something that just affects those things that are on the periphery of life, where we all too often relegate it. At the root of the battle between life and death is the self. What has to die in baptism and on a daily basis thereafter, is no less than the self—the self who wants to be served, who wants fulfillment, who wants to be the lord of all of life. We live in an age in which there seems to be no limit to what the self can demand. Our language is full of slogans that reflect this ideology: Do what you want to do; be what you want to be; self-actualization; indulge yourself; have it your way; spoil yourself. Where does God fit into this picture? The only real commitment there is is to the self and its happiness.
Yet living with the self at the center is ultimately self-destructive. The only life that’s lasting, ironically, is the life that dies to self and lives for Christ. Benjamin Franklin said, “Deny self for self’s sake.” Jesus said, “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” It’s a constant battle, for the self, in its fallen condition, wants to be lord. It isn’t accidental that the water of baptism brings us into fellowship with Christ. Its power both to destroy and to give life is signified in our baptism. It’s only as we reject living to gratify the self, and replace it with love for God that we can have life that is lasting.
Helmut Thielicke tells this story: “I once knew two elderly ladies who were sisters. One of them was the mother of a family who seemed to have within her all the fullness of life. She had poured out her life in service to her family and sacrificed herself for them, but in the process she had become a vivid, vital person who had developed all that was in her to an amazing extent. Her sister, on the other hand, was single and highly cultivated, who all her life had thought of nothing but the development of her personality and had absorbed all the benefits of culture she could obtain. And it was she, the very person who wanted to develop herself and made her personality an end in itself, that seemed dried up and one-sided compared with the other who had forgotten herself and lived for others.”
Please don’t miss the point. It’s not that marriage is the only “model for the fulfillment of love in life.” The point is that “only those who love and don’t think of themselves actually find themselves; and inversely, those who live to fulfill the self are always cheated.”
The purpose of the Christian life is to become what we are through our baptism, so that along with St. Paul we can truly say, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
Sermon preached by the Very Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
Baptism of our Lord
8 January 2017