Baptism

I submit to you this piece of a sermon I preached in January on Mark 1:4-12. It was for a Sunday service where we celebrated remembering our baptisms, and it was a great joy to preach about baptism just a few weeks after I had been privileged with baptizing a baby for the first time. It was a baptism that I will not easily forget... During the liturgy, as I was praying through the statements of commitment, the baby was studying me intently, as though he knew I was talking to him and that this was a moment of deepest truth. But, I reached the question regarding whether, or not, the baby is ready to be baptized. And that sweet boy who is no more than a year and a half old looked me square in the eye and said loudly, "NO!"

What a fantastic moment. Everyone laughed, and obviously, I baptized the baby anyway. But isn't it true that we often protest our baptisms? How often do we say no, when God's grace is desiring us so desperately to say yes?

January 11, 2009 - I performed my very first baptism a couple of weeks ago, and it was a very special service for me – one that I have been anticipating – and fearing – for a long time. This was the moment, when so much of my training about the theology of baptism, my preparation for ministry would come to fruition – I would finally be able to bring a child into Christ’s family. What a great privilege – finally to be “Anna the Baptist.”

But then I dipped my hand into that water and found it to be surprisingly warm and enveloping - and I held that squirming baby who felt like he was trying to leap into the baptismal font on his own volition. I splashed some water on his head and signed him with a cross and prayed for him, and I could not have been more aware of the fact that that baptism had very little to do with me and my own strength and power and training – and it had everything to do with the power of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit, making that water and those rituals and that child anything but ordinary.

God made him worthy of receiving grace – God named him a child of God, and there was nothing I or he could have done to earn it, deserve it, or change it.

As a minister, I am not “Anna the Baptist.” As a minister and a person, I am “Anna, beloved child of God.” And this designation and the power and strength that come with it are not reserved for clergy. Ministers are in no way more worthy of God’s grace than any other person on this planet.

We’ve spoken this morning primarily about being a child of God. But baptism is actually about being children of God in community. When we baptize a child into the community of faith, together we commit to these words: with God’s help “members of the body of Christ will so maintain the common life of worship and service that all children among us may grow in grace and in the knowledge and love of God and of his son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.” This is anything but a selfish and individualistic act.

In baptism, we understand ourselves to be beloved, but we also affirm the belovedness of others around us – even when we don’t feel like it, or we’ve been hurt by others. Just as no one is prevented from being baptized, God affirms all of our belovedness and uses all of us in this family to transform one another gracefully and to walk with each other through times of being in the desert wilderness. We are all called to different things – but no matter what our specific gifts or vocations, each one of us in this congregation has the ability to accept and extend grace, following the example of John the Baptist and preparing the way for Christ to do his great work of forgiving and redeeming.

Commissioned

Not long after my graduation from Divinity School, my family and I packed up my life and moved most of it back home to Pennsylvania, as I prepared to be commissioned as a minister in The United Methodist Church. People ask me about what I do all the time. It's the standard question everyone gets asked - Hi, my name is Joe, what's yours? Nice to meet you - what do you do?

What do I do? Some people joke that well, you're a minister - so, that means that you only work on Sundays, right? These people clearly do not know any ministers. And definitely did not grow up with a minister, as a mother, like I did. No, the job entails more than Sundays.

Other people who are a bit more familiar with church lingo will ask if I'm ordained. Well, the answer is no. But then, they ask, what do you do? How can you be a minister, if you're not ordained? Excellent question - one that we debated often in classes on Methodism.

An inevitably, regardless of peoples' myriad understandings of what it means to be a minister, ordained or otherwise, after I finish explaining that I am commissioned, not ordained, but that I am a minister who does all of the same things that ordained ministers do, they will still look me up and down and proclaim knowingly: Well, you're awfully young to be a minister.

This happened to me just yesterday. And I suppose, in response to that conversation-deadening statement, I could attempt to describe my credentials and life experience, handing them a copy of my CV. But, I really want to tell them two other things, which I believe to be far more important.

First, is that I am in no way too young to be a minister because we don't become ministers. We are born as ministers, all of us. Not just the people who accept God's call to make ministry their vocation. It's not even that some are called to full time ministry while others are not. We are all called to full time ministry. The ministry that God has for me just may look different from the ministry God has for you, depending on what your gifts are or who you were made to be. The important part of what I do is not what I do at all but who I am - and that is a beloved child of God, someone that I have been since before I was born. And it is the same for everyone.

And so, people ask, what is the point of this commissioning - ordaining thing? Why do you need to sew a special collar onto your shirt?

On the way to the interviews that would decide whether, or not, I would be commissioned as a minister, my father and I drove past a place in rural Pennsylvania where there used to be a shirt-making operation. And my dad described to me the process of making a shirt, as he understood it from a woman he knew whose job it was to sew on the shirt collar. She told him that sewing on the collar is the last step to finishing a shirt.

It seems it is similar in life and ministry. Wearing a collar does set ministers apart, and being commissioned or ordained to that role sets ministers apart, as well. But putting on the collar doesn't make me who I am. It doesn't make a shirt a shirt. It simply reminds me of what I am supposed to look like. It reminds me of who I am, who I have always been, and who I am called to be.

Sewing on a collar only happens when the rest of the shirt has been fitted and shaped to a specific pattern that will fit your body. It only happens after sewing in different pieces and finding the perfect buttons to hold it together and matching the perfect threads to sew everything in place and create beautiful designs.

As I stood at the front of the congregation when I was commissioned, as a minister, I was excited, having anticipated that moment for a long time. It was a weighty moment, when I was quite aware that all of the papers I had written and interviews I had passed and prayers I had prayed were at a point of culmination when while I had done a lot of work, it was the huge, swooping dove of the Holy Spirit who had been working and continued to work in that moment in ways far beyond my understanding.

I was aware that the Spirit had been busily threading and sewing piece after piece of my life together, slowly helping me put on a new identity and leading me to that point. After the bishop prayed over us, we turned around to look out at the congregation. What looked like two thousand people all smiled back, and from out of the deepest part of me welled up a rushing, uncontrollable sob. It was a sob of sadness and of overwhelming gratitude. Because from where I stood, I could see person after person who had walked beside me, sewing and piecing me together. People from childhood camps and parents of friends. One of my own dearest friends and her mother. My dad, smiling and crying in the front. Friends and colleagues of my mother who had known me since before I was born. My family and mentors. And my mother was not there - and yet, she was. It was all too much, to see the threads and pieces of life coming together before your own eyes. To see the love of so many people whose love had sustained me, taught me, and reminded me who I was, who I am, and who I am called to be.

I am commissioned as a child of God who wears a collar that says I am committed to allowing the Holy Spirit to work through me, as it has worked in the past and as it will work in the future in extraordinary ways. It is a collar that says I am committed to being a part of God's work in piecing the world together through seeking justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. It is a collar that says, I desire not just to look more like Jesus but to be more like Jesus - to fit the pattern and form of Christ. And I have discovered for myself, although I was told it before, that this is the greatest privilege and delight, but it is going to take more than a lifetime, and it often comes with great cost.

I was reminded of this joy and this sacrifice in the covenant prayer that we all prayed, as a church, this past Sunday, as we recommitted our lives - recommissioned one another - to the calling of Christ:

"I am no longer my own but yours.
Your will, not mine, be done in all things,
wherever you may place me, in all that I do
and in all that I may endure;
when there is work for me and when there is none;
when I am troubled and when I am at peace.
Your will be done
when I am valued and when I am disregarded;
when I find fulfilment and when it is lacking;
when I have all things, and when I have nothing.
I willingly offer
All I have and am
To serve you,
as and where you choose.

Glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
You are mine and I am yours.
May it be so for ever.
Let this covenant now made on earth
Be fulfilled in heaven. Amen”

(Adapted by John Cooper)

Backtracking

It is impossible to communicate any of God's sustenance in my life over the past year without first backtracking a few paces and mentioning the joy of graduating from Divinity School and being commissioned as a minister. The picture of graduation that I include here, I include not because it is any great photographic feat. In fact, it's obviously blurry. But, it reminds me of the joy with which I initially embraced this calling - the kind of joy that sustains us through pain and frustration. It is the kind of joy that can only exist in the context of community, and so I am supremely grateful for the community of people that I remember every day in the United States and for the community of people I have found here in South Africa. I have seen God's faithfulness and creativity and hope in the faces of all these people, and I will, thankfully, never be the same.

Graduation from seminary was also a moment of truth because I realized then that I had learned a lot of knowledge and an entirely new vocabulary for how to view and describe the world at school, but I would never be able to find all the experience and wisdom there that I would need to be the kind of minister Jesus calls us to be. For that, I would need a whole different kind of schooling - one that has often brought me to my knees, where, it seems, true wisdom is found.