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Scripture: Mark 1:4-11
Audio: A Strange Road
Sermon:
Living the Christian life is
strange. It always has been. It has always been counter-cultural.
When society says you should veer left, the Christian faith says that
you should veer right. Secular society and sometimes even common
sense says you should hate your enemies. The Christian faith says
just the opposite; you should love your enemies, and not only love them,
but forgive them. Secular society says that when you die, that’s
it. The Christian faith says that you have to die to be able to
live. The Christian faith is strange, no doubt about it.
So we should not be surprised that in this day when we celebrate the
baptism of Ava and Campbell, that we are reminded of its strangeness.
Will Willimon is a noted pastor
and writer, and he tells a story about becoming a Christian, He says,
when one joins the Rotary, or Shriners, or the League of Women Voters,
they give you a membership card and lapel pin. But when a person joins
the Body of Christ, we either splash water in your face, not one, not
two, but three times; or we pour a gallon of water over your head, or
you can choose door number 3 where we fully immerse you.
This is Christian baptism –
the Christian rite of initiation –and it is strange stuff.
When you are baptized and initiated
into the church, you are initiated into a life of expectation.
The church has expectations of what it takes to be Christian, not only
individual expectations, but expectations of us as a community.
The church has expectations of how we lead our lives, expectations of
how we treat one another as family, friends, partners, employees, managers
and especially strangers. There are expectations about parenting,
business dealings, service, forgiveness, about managing our anger, our
relationships and our finances.
This is how baptism works,
all are welcomed to the waters of baptism, but there’s a certain path
you have to walk to get there – the path of repentance, the path of
change. The path that leads to Jesus. When we are baptized,
we are expected to change our minds about who we are, about what’s
important to us, about the way we have lived our lives up to now, and
about how we plan to live life from here on out.
All this, and much more, these
are the expectations placed on you in and through your baptism. Through
baptism, you become a new creation. There is so much more to say,
but at some point it seems fitting to fall silent in the awesome presence
of the glorious mystery of baptism, to be rendered speechless by the
great mercy of God that takes a pool of water and a bit of oil and calls
forth from them a life-giving sacrament of salvation, community and
of restoration.
This glorious mystery is possible
only because of the strange thing that happened when a wild man of a
prophet known as John the Baptizer, stepped into the river Jordan with
a carpenter-turned-preacher from Nazareth, known as Jesus, and plunged
him beneath the water.
Thanks be to God for the Baptism
of our Lord. Thanks be to God for our baptism into our
Lord. Peace and Blessings Always to each of you, and to our newest
disciples, Campbell and Ava. Amen.
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Queen Anne 
