Sermon on Sunday, January 10, 2016
Based on Luke 3
This is the Sunday of the Baptism of our Lord. It inspired me to take a look beyond the traditional gospel reading for this day, which varies only marginally in the different accounts in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It always features the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, we hear cousin John understating his own importance and pointing toward the one who is greater than he. We learn that the Holy Spirit descends upon Christ and a voice from heaven is saying, “This is my Son, the beloved.” This morning I would like to veer off a little bit from this storyline and try to peek into the waters of the sacrament itself and ask, “What does it mean?”
A few years ago two of our young people had the wonderful opportunity of visiting the Holy Land, courtesy of a special connection between their Chester County School and an affluent Jordan family of Christian faith. Hosting a large group of American school students, the family introduced them to the treasures of their land. Among the sites: the mountain from where Moses looked into the Holy Land, Mount Nebo, and the place where it is believed that Jesus was baptized. We showed slides of their trip at one of our Basic nights and I still remember the pictures of the historic Baptism location. It showed a wonderful river with crystal clear water, purified by heaven itself. O.k., I just told you a lie! No, in reality it was more like a mud hole in a small creek that carried less water than the Upper Wissahickon. A little bit disappointed by the visual, I was tempted to think that maybe during Jesus’ time it was a cleaner and bigger stream in a more pristine environment. Or that the photo was taken at a bad time of year. Maybe mudslides had recently come down from the surrounding hills. But I am not so sure.
What if Jesus was indeed baptized in less than perfectly clean water? What if the quality of the water doesn’t really matter because what matters is the one who works through the water to make us clean inside? What if this is exactly the point: God can use a mud hole to purify sinners! And what if this is the point to boot: don’t ever think that the outer circumstances of your life can deter the Lord from blessing you! Imagine Jesus being baptized in murky waters and God saying, “This is my beloved Son and I am sending him into this muddy, sinful world with its myriad of problems and guess what? I’m not pretending that it is going to be an easy journey!”
I would like to go one step further in acknowledging the role that life’s mud and dirt, life’s imperfections and challenges play in the making of our Christian identity.
One of the more obvious metaphors in baptism is that of cleansing, the washing away of our sins. Washing of course is a very fundamental, every-day task, which sometimes involves more than a little bit of soap and water. In my reflection I came to think of the times when cleaning wasn’t so easy, tough stains stubbornly refusing to get off my skin. Like when I painted a ceiling and, young and dumb, didn’t use any head protection. Splashes of thick paint dripped down and stuck in my hair. What a joy to get it out! Or the time when, as a boy, I cleaned out a sheep manure stable with my dad. If you never smelled sheep manure before I have a recommendation for you: forego the experience! I remember when Peter as a toddler massaged his head with Vicks Vapor and his greasy hair shone like an Elvis impression. It took many washings to get that out…. Here is a nice topic for our coffee hour conversation: what was your toughest cleaning job on yourself…? (maybe not.)
The thing is, sometimes there are good reasons to get dirty. Most of the time You get “schmutzig” in order to get an important job done, a job that you may not like and that may require some extra protection but a job that nevertheless will get stains on you at some point. And both, the act of work which gets you into dirt and dust, and the job of cleaning up are necessary. When you apply that to baptism and to our spiritual cleanliness it holds true as well. Both, the act of dealing with life’s imperfections, with people’s sinfulness and your own, and your need to clean up and be cleansed are necessary in the formation of our Christian faith.
Let me explain this. Most Christians are conditioned to think that sin is always bad, right? Sin is bad!!! But what if some sin or at least exposure to the malicious side of life, confronting mistakes and misjudgments, experiencing your own limits, experiencing failure, is necessary? Have you ever met a person in a leadership position who has not made head scratching mistakes or done some wrong on people he or she worked with or overstepped a boundary at some point? I didn’t think so. My point is that some sin is as necessary as life itself, as necessary as cleaning yourself up every morning and every night. So baptism to me is not the great labeling of a person as a “sinner,” but an acknowledgment of two realities: my human condition and my imperfectness and the divine condition, the unconditional love of God. Both realities meet when we are washed in the waters of baptism and make no mistake, they continue to meet every day throughout our lives!
In the literature of leadership it is widely acknowledged that you can’t grow or be successful without making mistakes. In religious language we could say: no spiritual growth without sinning. Not every mistake of failure equates to sin, I know, but there is often a connection. A man who knows a thing or two about leadership and success wrote, “It is fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” It was Bill Gates. Another fine and respected leader in our country, Colin Powell, wrote, “Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty and persistence.” Pretty much anyone who has achieved something would tell us that failing and learning from it is part of the game. How can it be different in our spiritual lives? When parents baptize their children, they pretty much acknowledge that they are raising a life with flaws, a life that will need to make some mistakes and will need to be corrected, a life that will nevertheless always be loved by God and hopefully by their parents as well.
Most people grow from mistakes that they at some point realize and regret. That is the true context of Martin Luther’s famous quote, “Sin boldly!” As a Lutheran I have a pretty relaxed view of the word “sin” or “sinner.” To me it’s just a way of being honest with myself. When I look into the waters of baptism, I see the reflection of my own sinfulness, but I also see God’s grace and love and life shining through, his voice reaching out to people, saying: “You are my beloved son. You are my beloved daughter. Do not be afraid. You are allowed to make mistakes! Grow from your flaws and become human and whole and maybe wise. You are baptized and free!” Amen.