After the baptism of his baby brother in church, little Dennis sobbed all the way home in the backseat of the car. His father asked him three times what was wrong. Finally, Dennis replied, “That priest said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, but I want to stay with you guys!” As Art Linkletter used to say, “Kids say the darnedest things!”
Let’s say you’re at a job interview, and the interviewer asks you this question: “What has been the most important day of your life?” Many things could come to mind: graduation from high school or college, the day you met your spouse, your wedding day, your first important job, the birthdays of your children, perhaps the day you decided to change the course of your life through some important decision.
How would you answer that question? What has been the most important day of your life?
May I suggest to you that the most important day of your life was the day of your baptism? How many of you even know the date of your baptism? Yet it was on that day that your life was changed forever, for it was on that day that you became a Christian, a member of the Body of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of eternal life with God. As the baptismal rite says, “You were sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.”
In baptism, a change takes place, and that change is called baptismal regeneration. Francis Hall, in The Church and the Sacramental System, says this of baptismal regeneration: “Regeneration has often been confused with conversion. Conversion is a change of disposition and aim, and is moral; whereas regeneration is a change in level of being and capacity by the involution of a supernatural vital principle, flowing from the Body of Christ. Described by physical analogies it is a biological change. For this reason, it can be, and frequently is, accomplished once for all by the Spirit in unconscious infants, before they are able to make any moral response.… It means that they come to the task of working out their salvation as having the vital capacity and status as members of Christ’s Body and children of God by adoption and grace.”
That does not mean that with baptism the work of salvation is over. In fact, with baptism it has only just begun. Probably most people here today were baptized before you had any cognition of what was taking place. Your consciousness of your Christian being only gradually took place as you grew in the knowledge and love of God. At some point along the way you may have made a conscious decision that you would live what you were made at your baptism. A lucky few can simply not remember when you didn’t live with Christian consciousness in your being. Probably for most of us the process of conversion into becoming what we are has contained many points of conversion.
When Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, it was a prefiguring of his death and resurrection. Going down into the water prefigured his death and coming out of the water his resurrection. Likewise, our baptism is a participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. If we immersed people in their baptisms, it would be a stronger symbol of that reality, but the meaning remains the same. Through baptism, we die to self and rise to newness of life in Christ.
The Christian life is one of learning throughout our lives what it means to die to self that the risen Christ may live in us. The irony that our faith teaches us is that without Christ we are headed to death—eternal death—for life without Christ is life lived, as the old baptismal rite said, for “the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all the covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh,” and ultimately under the influence of “the devil and his works.” Only when we die to self and allow the living Christ into our lives do we have true life. Simply put, you have to die to live.
We live a good deal of our lives in a kind of routine in which we are not aware in any real sense of the real meaning of our lives. Our Christian faith tells us that this life is a preparation for eternal life with God and that all that happens in this life is ultimately a battle between good and evil. Sometimes something happens that breaks into our lives, revealing this battle for what it is. Such an event occurred for the world last week in the terrorist attacks in Paris. They were painful reminders to us of what happened in our own country on the 11th of September 2001. Once again, it reminded the world that the thin veneer of civilization can be ripped apart by people guided by a terribly wrong principle, an evil principle.
Those terrorists didn’t just one day wake up and decide to do something unspeakably evil. Their descent to that depth was undoubtedly in small steps, one decision leading to another, until the point where they felt that something unspeakably evil was actually good.
Each person in this world is on a path that leads either to good or to evil, to God or to Satan. Henry, Charles, Bradshaw, Geovanna, Chloe, Cecelia, and Aaron, who are going to be baptized this morning, are going to be changed forever through their baptism, even though most of them have no idea what is taking place. Yet they will be given the forgiveness of sins, made participants in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, made members of the Church, and will be given the gift of the Holy Spirit. May God grant to their parents and godparents the grace to make the most of this most important day in their children’s lives, that the seed that will be planted will grow and blossom, that they will grow into the full stature of Christ, and ultimately will live with God for ever in his heavenly home.
Sermon preached by The Very Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, Florida
Feast of the Baptism of our Lord
11 January 2015