Baptism

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

January 10, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Most Blessed Holy Trinity,

We thank you for many blessings. We pray you may bless and fill our family with love, peace and prosperity. We also pray for joy, abundance and strength. We pray for great health and continued healing. We pray for our loved ones. We pray for your kindness and mercy. We pray for your guidance and protection, Amen.

Mark 1: 4-11

John the Baptist Prepares the Way

1The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, 2as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:

“I will send my messenger ahead of you,

who will prepare your way”—

3“a voice of one calling in the wilderness,

‘Prepare the way for the Lord,

make straight paths for him.’ ”

4And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. 6John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

The Baptism and Testing of Jesus

9At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

A Message

“Baptism”

I’ve touched on these notes a few times in the last couple of weeks, but just for a recap: 2020, man that was a rough year. Violence on a local, national, and global scale spreading from the backlash against racial justice protests right here in our own cities to wildfires that consumed Australia; the most tumultuous Presidential election season that I have ever lived through; and the deaths of over 300,000 people to the novel Coronavirus.

2021 had, and has, all the promise to be a much easier year for all of us. A new President gets inaugurated in 10 days, two different covid-19 vaccines are being distributed to the public, and our hearts have held so much in the last year that all of us are truly ready for some big changes. It’s unsurprising that when we got to December 31 of 2020, many of us prayed as midnight approached, Please God, just let this next year be easier. And I’ve only been bringing up our communal struggles. For you reading this, 2020 may have been a very rough year for reasons that have nothing to do with the pandemic, the violence, and politics. In your own life your health, your family, your work or school situation, or something so personal I wouldn’t even be able to guess it, may have brought such enormous challenges that it eclipsed the horror show that you saw on the news. Please hear me when I tell you: my heart is with you.

So…now we’re just over a week into the new year. How’s it going, folks? A few days ago a friend of mine joked that she was going to cancel 2021 because she’d already experienced the seven-day free trial and she wasn’t impressed. I hear that, too.

Of course, it’s Wednesday afternoon that weighs so very heavily on our hearts and minds. I found out something was very wrong when my Facebook feed was full of posts that read “Oh my gosh turn on your TV!” “What’s going on in the Capital???” “How can this happen in our country?”

It was so devastating. An angry mob with Confederate flags and red hats stormed the Capital and invaded it for the first time since the British army attempted to conquer our country in the War of 1812. Congress, who had been meeting to confirm the results of the Presidential election, had to be rushed to immediate safety. Windows were broken. Offices were broken into. Sacred, historic property was vandalized, stolen, and smashed. Garbage and human filth was scattered about. A noose was hung outside, intended for our current Vice President, who had been labeled a traitor. The invaders were proud of themselves. Few of them wore masks, and one even wore his work ID. They took selfies and posted them to their social media accounts. They waved their banners high in the air, confident that they were doing what was right even though it was so, so wrong.

They were incited to violence by a man who, just earlier that day, held a rally down the street and told his angry crowd to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and take back what was rightfully his. They had been programmed meticulously by a man who has laced all of his speech with misogyny, nationalism, and white supremacy for years. I’m so angry I don’t even want to say his name.

Where on earth do we go from here? Our sitting President has been blocked from social media out of fear that he could organize more mayhem, and he faces a second round of impeachment trials. Tender hearted people still make the news sweeping up garbage and broken glass at the Capital. The country is divided, the Church is divided, our families are divided. The world feels so broken.

Please here the first piece of Good News I have for you today: we may only get one chance every twelve months to start a fresh new year, but every single hour God gives us opportunities to repent of our selfish ways and start over. This second Sunday in January is always called “Baptism of the Lord Sunday”, and that looks all well and good on my church calendar. But speaking to our souls, this might be a moment in this spiritual journey where we have needed the changing power of Jesus’ baptism more than ever.

Baptism is one of our two sacraments in the United Methodist Church, but it means so many different things to each individual believer. Many of us don’t remember our own baptisms at all because they happened when we were babies. Some of us were baptized as adults. Some of us have never experienced a baptism. Some of us have very fond memories of the baptisms of our children, our grandchildren, or children in our congregation.

Whatever your own experiences with this sacrament have been, baptism is something so profound that it pulls us all in. The first time I ever tried to explain this sacrament to another person was about eleven years ago when I interned at Fairport United Methodist Church, east of Rochester, and I was talking to a mom. She was telling me about the church she got married at, and then how she moved and she baptized her kids at another church, and when the B word came up her little boy suddenly darted into the conversation and said, Mommy what does baptized mean? The woman looked flustered, turned to me, and said…Well, maybe Natalie can answer that question. I told the little boy that there’s a story in his Bible where Jesus was baptized, and his cousin put water on him and made him part of God’s family. Then this very smart little boy looked angry and told me, But everyone is part of God’s family! You don’t have to be baptized to be part of God’s family! Then while his mom scrambled to explain how much Grandma needed pictures of you in that little white dress for the family photo album, I explained that when you got baptized you also became part of your church, and the congregation promised to look after you. Then this very wise boy got all serious and asked, But what if someday I don’t go to this church anymore? Will they still look after me?

And that brings us right back to today. Because your Christian family will still look after you, even when things come between us. Your Christian family will still look after you even if people at your church worship very differently than we do, or believe very different things about God than we do, or if you don’t go to church at all. Your Christian family will still care about you even if you vote differently, if you live differently, if so many factors make it hard for us to talk that we nearly give up…we won’t. Because we can’t. We promised. And God keeps us to our promises even when we really don’t want to follow through on them.

We also promised, whether it was at our baptism, our children’s baptisms, or the baptism of someone who happen to attend our congregation, to obey a covenant. We promised to renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, to reject the evil powers of this world, to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves, and to accept no one but Jesus as our Lord.

We have a new day, and another fresh chance to turn away from the evil that nearly swallowed us whole last Wednesday and follow Jesus instead. And if you’re tempted to say that you don’t need to do that, you didn’t storm the Capital, and you aren’t “one of them”—let me tell you, you aren’t getting off the hook that easily. It’s super tempting for us to deny fault, and say the behavior we saw on Wednesday doesn’t reflect who we are as a country or as a Church. The problem is, it does. And we can’t move on until we own it. My friend Steve Smith, who a lot of you know because he was the pastor at EPUMC for 8 years, said it best:

“Don't tell me that violence isn't what we're about in the United States. As a nation we participate in violence, celebrate violence, worship violence. We deify tools of destruction, ordain militarism, enshrine brutality. Yes, pray for healing. Yes, pray for peace. But, you can't do that without admitting our complicity. Any prayer for peace and healing rings hollow if not preceded by a prayer of repentance. Don't tell me this is not who we are as a nation, because it's just not true. You know it, I know it, God knows it. Unless we acknowledge it, unless we confront it, unless we change it, there will be no healing, there will be no peace. Are we better than this? With God's help we can be.”

What happened on Wednesday was a long, long time building. Our rash human tendencies and our idolatry have led us to violence over and over and over. Today is the day that we get to decide: are we going to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves? Are we going to honor our promises to God and follow Jesus? Are we going to pull a hard 180 and choose the path Jesus lays out for us? For the sake of our country, our Church, and our world, I sure hope so.

Amen.

I invite you to receive the benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. And as all God’s people we say together: Amen!