Psalm 133; Ephesians 3:14-4:6
How was your Valentine’s Day? I hope it filled your hearts with good measures of gratitude, sentimentality and security, warm remembrance and hope. It was such a beautiful snow-covered morning! With the crystalline white winter landscape greeting us out our windows, our family shared a fun family exchange of colorful, wonderfully worded cards along with some chocolates and other special gifts. It’s such a pure joy to celebrate the bonds of family love … especially in time-honored, traditional ways.
Thursday morning was also quite a contrast to the night before … when we were at Lower Valley Presbyterian sharing with others in an Ash Wednesday worship service. This start to the Lenten season was deeply meditative and marked by darkness and dust. In the moving words of the prayer litany we all shared in, it was a time to come face to face with “all we have failed to honor; every difference we refuse to celebrate; every fear-based judgment that drives us away from love; every certainty that lifts us above our brother, our sister, our neighbor, our enemy.”
After this back to back experiencing of both the somber reminders of sin and the bright bonds of family love, I then settled into deeper reflection on the meaning of baptism. I realized again and afresh that these two realities come together at the font. They completely converge in Jesus Christ. The time-honored, traditional sacrament somberly reflects our fallen, finite human nature. It reminds us that we are all unclean in the presence of our Creator, that we cannot remove the stains of sin from our souls. It also brightly reflects the faithful family bond that we, in all of our diversity, are gifted with the redeeming grace of God. The deep relevance of this gift in our lives was stated a few minutes ago and it was shared during the four funerals I conducted over the past few weeks – we are baptized into the life and the death of our Lord, so our baptisms are in fact not complete until we pass into resurrected glory.
To help us further understand the truly identifying significance of this sacred convergence here at the font, let’s review the ABC’s of baptism (which are truly the ABC’s of God’s eternal love.) Let’s review our Adoption, our Belonging, and our Cleansing.
Since we are reaffirming faith on this first Sunday in Lent, would you please repeat after me … “I am Adopted.” When we reflect on how sin stains our relationship with God, on how it spurs us into shameful rebellions, we might be tempted to think of another “A” word. We might come to believe that God has abandoned us. I believe that time and time again we all come to understand that we are never good enough or faithful enough, that we all fall short of the righteousness the Bible calls us to live. And just as when we feel or flat out know we’ve failed in our human relationships, we fear we’re not wanted or worthy. We feel that forgiveness and fresh starts will never come.
But the blessed stories of Scripture reveal the amazing news that God never abandons us. If ever in doubt, just re-read God’s relationship with the often stubborn ancient Israelites and review Jesus’ loving embrace of people who certainly felt and indeed were socially abandoned. God is always calling us and receiving us and forgiving us into blessed new beginnings. By divine providence, God never ceases being interested in and protective of our welfare. This bond, this family bond, is unbreakable and it is irrevocable. Thus, every time I administer the sacrament of baptism I make the sign of the cross and say the words “You have been signed and sealed as God’s own forever.” I make the same mark, by the way, when I administer ashes. So in moments when you are most tempted to believe that God is not present with you, loving you, rearing you in righteousness through all your life lessons … stop, pray and say, “Amen, I’m adopted.”
Then go on to say the next part of our holy ABC’s – say, “Amen, I belong.” Reaffirm that you belong to God in life, in death, in every moment in between. Even more relevantly, reaffirm that you completely belong to and in Christ’s community.
In the chapter “The Who’s Who of Baptism,” one of my favorite books about baptism offers this bold declaration – “We can no more be baptized and avoid participation in the [church] community than water can be boiled without becoming steam.”[i] Don’t forget this image! Don’t forget the facts that when you boil water you always get steam, and that by being baptized you always get incorporated into the Church. The belonging of our baptisms reminds each of us that in all our uniqueness, we are all always welcome. Our Lord receives us with great joy the way the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son acted. It really should be called the Parable of the Prodigal Parent – for prodigal means lavishly abundant and profuse, which is exactly the amount of love given to the child at homecoming.
We are adopted, we belong, and, to complete this trinity for understanding God’s baptismal love, let us say, “Amen, we are cleansed!” As the Apostle Paul proclaimed so wonderfully to the early Christians in Ephesus, Christ’s power at work within us is able to accomplish more than we could ever ask for or imagine.
Being a visual person who is always well fed by poetic metaphors, I picture pollution when I think about sin. I don’t’ just mean human sin’s toxicity to the beautiful planet that God originally charged us to be good caretakers of. I also mean pollution of the mind and spirit. I mean the pollution of violent words and actions on our innocence and holy intuitions. I mean the pollution of shame, staining our self-esteem and faithful understanding of our fully redeemable worth as children of God. I mean the pollution of moral laxity that seeps into our personal lives and oozes up through social structures. Baptism, praise God, symbolically reminds us that in Christ we are ultimately purified of sin’s pollution!
Now, this doesn’t mean we who are baptized no longer commit sin. But it does remind us to repent (which rhymes with Lent!). The sacramental water summons us to prayerfully ask for the grace to stop acting contrary to our true loyalty to Christ. Our baptismal cleansing did not happen just once upon a time be it in our infancy or today – it’s a daily spiritual reality for us to live by. The 16th century church reformers were right – remember your baptism every single time you clean yourself!
I end today’s review of these ABC’s by sharing what the author of the book I mentioned a few minutes ago, a book titled “Baptism: Christ’s Act in the Church,” has to say at the end of his helpful writing. He talks about how we are always on a journey to reexamine the Good News of Jesus Christ and to reassess our experiences of God’s grace. This is particularly true of our intentional focus throughout the Lenten days and weeks to come. He then punctuates his point by saying that this is a “pilgrimage we need not fear,” because each of us walks “in the land between the river of Eden and the river of the eternal city of God.” By our baptisms, we are always headed in this right direction. God, who made each of us a “promise in the past is faithful to the very end of the future and beyond,”[ii] so we can live out every day with confidence. We can celebrate the proclamation of the Psalmist about “how very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity,” for our Lord has “ordained his blessing, life forevermore.” Amen.
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