Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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    Mark's Gospel has no Christmas story.  No stable, no shepherds, no star -- no "little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie."  In contrast, Mark begins with strife and conflict.  Jesus is grown up, entering  his active ministry, and Mark wants us to know that, from the beginning, Jesus caused trouble, divided people, revealed all their fault lines, made it impossible any longer to "fudge" on the God question.  We open Mark to Chapter One and can feel the tension in the air.  John the Baptist, a wild man with a serpent's tongue, is raging in the wilderness of Jordan, calling Israel to repent.  That's insulting to the self-righteous (and there were many self-righteous in Israel at the time), who said to themselves -- if not out loud -- "we don't need to repent.  Others do, but we don't."  John called them vipers.   Jesus appears, is baptized, and is immediately put to the test by Satan -- forty days in the wilderness, a terrible way to have to begin.   And then, as Jesus emerges from the wilderness, John is arrested and thrown into prison, eventually to die an awful death.  What more can happen?  And it's all in the first half chapter of Mark's Gospel!

    God's love is a tough love -- it never pretends, not for a moment.  It never says that people are essentially good and don't need to repent (that's a modern conceit), nor does it say that testing one's faith isn't necessary because we can trust everyone to be strong when tempted, nor does it say (least of all does it say!) that bad things don't happen to good people.  But, in Mark's Gospel, all that hard reality (all the roughness of this world, which he tells about so openly, with no effort to hide), all that pain is served to us along with some very good news.  It comes at the same time as baptism, our most beautiful sign of God's love and grace.  The Baptist doesn't just condemn.  He washes.  Jesus isn't just tested.  He aces the test and defeats Satan, foreshadowing ultimate victory for him and for us.  John isn't just thrown in jail.  After he has done his essential job of presenting Jesus to the world, he becomes (in his death) an everlasting witness to man's brutality and God's victory over it.  Baptism is like that, too: it is a simple sign which proclaims the triumph of God in an evil world and in evil people like us.

    Today we are delighted to baptize little Robert and Sarah Stewart, twins, four and a half months old, frighteningly small at birth but saved for us by the patient care of doctors and nurses, by the love of family, and by prayer.  We mark them with a sign this morning, a sign of God's love and cleansing power.  We do it with the most ancient words in the church: "I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."  The oldest symbol of the Christian Church, you remember, was a fish.  That had to do with the spelling of the word "fish" in Greek, and how the letters of that word formed an acrostic for the phrase, "Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior," but the fish also symbolized water and the rite of baptism.  Nothing is older in the church, or more central to our faith, than this remarkable little ceremony.

    By happy coincidence, this is also the Sunday when we are asked to remember the baptism of our Lord.  So we might stop and consider what baptism really is.  What was John the Baptist up to?  What are we up to today when we take a little infant and sprinkle water on his or her head?

    John baptized, of course, and he proclaimed.  There is a proclamation that comes with baptism, that is part and parcel of it.  What is the proclamation?  Well, there wasn't a whole lot to John's message; it was short and to the point (for he was only the herald).  It was designed to get people's attention and prepare them for the full truth of the Gospel which they would see in Jesus.  So what was his message?  Mark summarizes John stump speech by saying, "He preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins."  Listen to that.  To repent and have one's sins forgiven: why that's the front door of our faith, isn't it, just as baptism is the front door of the church!  This is the way we come in (sometimes we call it conversion), and if we try to enter any other way (if we try to get in based on education, or money, or ancestry, or goodness) we are, in fact, trying to break in as thieves and robbers, Jesus said.

    To repent (which means, literally, "to turn around") -- to repent is, to quote the old communion service, to "acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness….to be heartily sorry for our misdoings, (so much so that) to remember them grieves us."  Communion begins, "Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sins…."  You can't even start communion, you see, you can't participate in the full life of God's church, unless you are penitent.  You have to go to confession before you can come to communion.  Always and forever.  It doesn't mean we hate ourselves.  It means we are honest.  It means we love ourselves, but based on God's love for us, and not on false pretenses of righteousness.  Martin Luther, speaking to a group of mature Christians, said we must always see ourselves "as weak in faith, cold in love, and faint in hope."  When we do that, he said, it makes us hunger and thirst for God and prevents in us self-righteousness.  People who do not know the saving grace of God will never repent, for to admit sinfulness (under that premise) leaves us utterly defenseless and hopeless.  But once you understand that we have been finally and forever delivered from sin, you can admit to it freely.  For it no longer has power over us, unless we deny it.  So when Mark begins his Gospel in tension and strife, he is not despairing.  He knows how the story ends, so there is no reason to paint a pretty picture.  He doesn't need to.

    Lucy says to Charlie Brown, "Life is like a deck chair.  Some people place it so they can see where they are going.  Some people place it so they can see where they have been.  And some people place it so they can see where they are now."  Charlie Brown thinks for a moment and says, "I can't even get mine unfolded."  I often feel like that.  People laying on me their philosophies of life, their rules for living: do this, don't do that.  Eat this.  Don't eat that.  Associate with these people, not those.  Dress this way.  Speak this way.  Look this way.  And the more I think about these things, the more unsure I am.  (and the more unsure, I think, they should be.)  When I try to live my life by rules and precepts, I can't even get my deck chair unfolded.  For I know not only that the world's wisdom changes, I know also my sinful heart: how I will inevitably subvert even my best intentions.  I need baptism.  I need to be washed by hands other than my own.  I need God, in the midst of my confusion, to give me a sign of his grace.

    When the early missionaries went into certain underdeveloped countries, they found that converting people was sometimes too easy, was sometimes accomplished en masse.  A tribal chieftain would simply announce to his people that, from now on, they were all Christians, and that they should go get baptized.  Of course, that left a lot to be desired.  Many continued to practice their pagan rites; went right on living as they had always lived.  So the missionaries of the next generation often took as their theme, "Remember Your Baptism."   It not only must be done; it must be remembered.  When we truly repent, and know that God has forgiven our sins, and made it so that sin and death cannot destroy us (as they otherwise would), it changes the way we live.  It brings courage, and hope and renewal.  We are changed in baptism, and in remembering our baptisms.  Baptism is a sign of what God does for us, and a reminder of what we must do in response.  And God gives us some help with that.

     John the Baptist promised that those he baptized with water would soon be baptized with the Holy Spirit.  The power of baptism, of course, is not in our words and rituals but in the Holy Spirit of God.  There and there alone is the power to change.  And it is some power!  In the old Latin mass, at the holiest moment, the priest would lift the bread to heaven and say, "Hoc est corpus meam."  ("This is my body.")  And the peasants in the back pews, who didn't understand Latin, thought they heard him say "hocus pocus."  And they knew something magical had happened up there on the altar.  Faith and magic are two different things, but I think it's o.k. to say that when the Holy Spirit enters a person (or a church, or a family, or a nation) something magical happens.  It is a power far beyond any human understanding.  And it changes people, grabs people, convicts people.  And baptism is it's sign.

 William Booth, who left the Methodist Church (to our everlasting shame), because he said Methodists had lost their compassion for the poor and downtrodden, founded the Salvation Army.  He was asked later in his life why he thought God had used him so mightily.  "I will tell you," he said.  "God has had all there was of me.  There have been men with greater brains than I, men with greater opportunities, but from the day I got the poor of London on my heart and the vision of what Jesus Christ could do with the poor of London, I made up my mind that God would have all of William Booth there was."  He remembered his baptism and gave himself entirely.  He could not see himself as better than anyone, but saw all men as sinners like himself, rich and poor, and all in need of God.  And he gave himself one hundred percent.  One military person said, "Baptism is a commissioning ceremony.  It gives us authority and sets us out on a mission."  The mission is not done when the water is applied; it only begins there.  It marks us for the rest of our lives.  When we have been baptized, we belong to God.