Baptized with the (Free) Spirit

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Baptism of the Lord Sunday - January 7, 2007
Rev. Samuel Schaal
[Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7/Acts 8:14-17/Luke 3:15-17, 21-22]

The Christmas decorations are down – both here at the church and probably at your own homes.  But we continue to celebrate the Epiphany, which is the manifestation of God to the Gentiles.  Today we mark the Baptism of Jesus. In the Eastern church, these two holy days of Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord were combined and it’s only in the Western tradition that they were separated out.

In some ways today is the final celebration of our Advent/Christmas/Epiphany cycle, a transition into the church’s “ordinary time.” Yet today we celebrate something that is not quite ordinary—the baptism of Jesus.

It is a time to reconsider our own baptisms.  Most of us in this room probably don’t remember our baptisms since most of us were baptized as an infant.  But I remember mine well, for I was baptized as an adult.  As I’ve told you, I grew up outside the church.  When I married, we found a small Disciples of Christ congregation. To join the church I had to be baptized.

The Disciples of Christ practice “believer baptism,” so they don’t baptize infants, but wait until the child is of an age when he or she can make a decision for Christ, usually around adolescence.   Occasionally an unchurched person such as myself straggled in, and so they would baptize an adult.  Which, by the way, was more interesting since the Disciples baptize by full immersion, like the Baptists.

So when I was 24 years ago, I suited up one Sunday in some sort of a long waterproof baptismal garment – like a big rubber robe with wader boots on as well.  I was dipped, full body, into the water three times.  It’s a little frightening being held under water.  It’s also messy. This was the ‘70s and I had “big hair” (and this was in Texas, so I had really big hair!) and when I got out of the tank, my hair was no longer the blow-dried wonder that it had been going in. 

Now, if truth be told, my heart wasn’t really in it.  I got baptized because I had to, to join the church.  I was struggling to merge my freeform spirituality of the time and my wife’s more conventional background and we finally found a little church where we thought that might work.  But my heart wasn’t in it and I can’t honestly say I was ready to really give my life to God.  My religious journey was not over—it took me from that spot to Unitarianism, where I found my home until finally, drawn more and more by the Christian story, I found my way here.

As I am now engaged in the practice of Christianity, I have gone back to that moment of baptism many times in my memory. I regret that, for me, my baptism and my actual coming into the Christian story were two separate and distinct events.  But nonetheless I have remembered that moment when the preacher pushed my full body underwater three times, and it is only now, it seems, that I am emerging out of the waters into that new and more opened world.

The opening of a new world is a theme that unites today’s texts. In Isaiah the exuberant text expresses the powerful pronouncements of a powerful God who will redeem a troubled people in a dark time.

And then in the New Testament lesson we see Peter and John praying for the Holy Spirit in Samaria.  The Samaritans were a people who were looked down upon, a people ethnically and religiously “other.”  So they were reaching out to the formerly despised, because in God’s family, all are one. 

In the gospel passage, when Jesus is baptized, heaven is opened, the spirit descends and a voice clearly blesses Jesus as the Beloved Son.  This is the inauguration of a new era in human faith history.

And this suggests that baptism ushers us into a realm beyond our control—a realm that cannot be domesticated, a realm where God is sovereign. So baptism isn’t merely a ritual that gets you in the club.  Baptism takes us to a new life, and this explains the importance of the Holy Spirit.

When we think of baptism, we probably don’t think of the work of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it makes us uncomfortable since the spirit suggests a direct encounter with God, in personal and intimate ways.  It is tempting for a lot of us, I think—I know it is for me – to want to keep God far away, above the clouds.  God is not as threatening to us if we keep God far away. But God is also known intimately – up close and personal – in the presence of Jesus Çhrist, and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

At this point in my own spiritual journey, I’m drawn to the idea of the power of the Holy Spirit, both in my life and in the life of our church.  I too often get stuck in my same old ruts.  I get used to certain things and become afraid to try new things.  Life in God, it seems to me, suggests being open to new experiences. 

One scholar (Charles Cousar) says of today’s gospel text: “The coming of Jesus Christ does not baptize the status quo; rather, it overthrows every power and undermines all that seems certain in the world’s eyes.” The coming of Jesus Christ does not baptize the status quo.

Our Faith and Film offering this month is this Friday at 7:30 p.m.  It’s the movie “Chocolat,” about a woman who opens a chocolate shop in a French village and comes up against the status quo of the village, as well as of the church.  The film has been criticized by some for taking a stereotypical view of Christians as narrow-minded bigots.  And yet there is in a film a wonderful subtext of a rich and blessed life of the spirit, with the themes of both the coming of the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist. 

Too often we forget that life in a banquet.  In that famous line from Auntie Mame – and I have to slightly edit how it was voiced in the original novel – you’ll remember her teaching her nephew Patrick that “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” 

Life in Christ is a banquet. We are not baptized into the status quo.  We are baptized into the bold realm where we assert that God is living, that there is a divine power at work in the world and that we can participate in that.  We are baptized into a community of those who minister to a hurting and sinful world.  We are given, through Christ, the power to act in imitation of him who came to redeem us.  We gather, we support each other, we lend a hand to the hungry, the hurt and the hopeless.  We heal, we work toward regeneration of the human family and all creation.

We do not do this on our own and we do not do it with our own power.  We do it with the power of God, active in Jesus Christ.

To do this, we have to trust God and relinquish our own little death grasp on small matters.   Just as years ago I held my breath while being forced underwater, we submit to another power. I remember the feeling of being forced and it was uncomfortable.  I understand it when babies cry when we baptize.  Though the parents are usually embarrassed, it’s the appropriate response to the inbreaking of the Holy Spirit into his or her young life.

When I was baptized I was not yet ready to go into that new realm—I just went through the ritual.  It took many years but eventually I got there.  I am still learning. I am learning that our God is a free God who, if only we will open ourselves to the experience, will take us and use us and bless us freely.

My sermon title suggests we are baptized in the free spirit.  For to follow Jesus is to be immersed in God’s freedom (not merely our own human freedom), to be willing to let go of that which is not of the highest, or of God, and courageously follow where the spirit leads.

There’s a little prayer that I just found that expresses that and I’ll close with it. It’s a prayer by Methodist founder John Wesley.  Last Sunday I went to church in Dallas, to the church where the writer of our final hymn (John Thornburg), used to be minister.  And I discovered this prayer that they were using in a service of covenant renewal.

I offer this to you now, as an expression of the giving up of our little selves to the larger purposes of God, of opening ourselves to the freedom that God provides. While it is not a baptismal prayer, it could be, as it speaks of us entering a new realm in the family of God.  Here is the prayer:

I am no longer my own, but yours.
Put me on whatever task you will; rank me with whom you will.
Put me to doing; put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you,
Exalted for you, or brought low for you.
Let me be full; let me be empty.
Let me have all things; let me have nothing.
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
You are mine, and I am yours. So be it.
And this covenant now made on earth,
Let it be ratified in heaven.

May this unfolding year beckon you, both in your individual life as well as in the wider community of our congregation, to go forth into more and more adventures of the spirit, to go where God leads.

Amen.