Bob Beasley belongs to a Baptist Church in Canada, a church that follows the Baptist tradition of baptizing by immersion. Returning home from church one Sunday, his little girl asked, “Daddy, why did the pastor push that guy under the water? Why, daddy?”
Bob’s wife tried to answer her question, but the little girl, named Rena, just wouldn’t be satisfied. Later that night Bob and his wife tried to provide an answer from a Baptist perspective that a child’s mind could comprehend. They talked about sin and told Rena that when people decide to live for Jesus and to “be good,” they are baptized. They explained that water symbolizes that Jesus washes people from sin; when they come out of the water “clean,” it means they are going to try to be “good” from then on. Rena thought about this for a moment and responded, “Why didn’t the Preacher just spank him?” (1)
Good question. I wonder if it would make more of an impact on people if we spanked them when they became part of the body of Christ, rather than baptize them. If it were up to some people, that’s probably what we would do. It’s important for us to know that the water of baptism communicates grace. I’m not sure what spanking communicates.
To be sure, one of the meanings of water in baptism is the washing away of sins, and, yes, we hope people will straighten out and be good after their baptism. But baptism is much more than being made clean from our sins. After all, Christ had no sin and yet he asked John to baptize him.
Baptism is our entrance into Christ’s family. We become brothers and sisters to Christ and become heirs to God’s Kingdom through baptism. One way to look at baptism is as an initiation into the family of Christ. It is based, of course, on Jesus’ baptism at the hand of John the Baptist. John was a fiery preacher, a preacher of righteousness and repentance. But at Jesus’ baptism, something somewhat tender and touching happened. When Jesus was baptized, Luke tells us, “heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’” That is such a wonderful verse.
Kathy Leonard of Palmyra, Virginia tells about something humorous that happened at her church. She says they had just finished an enthusiastic praise and worship time one Sunday morning. As the worship leader finished the last song, she went straight into prayer.
“Speak to us, O Lord,” she prayed. “Open our hearts to hear your voice.”
Just then they were startled to hear a deep, friendly voice coming from above their heads, saying, “Hello, how are you this morning?”
Kathy says she opened her eyes in surprise and saw that the worship leader and her fellow parishioners were standing with eyes and mouths wide open, too.
After a moment of stunned silence, the worship leader chuckled and said, “Oh! The pastor must have forgotten to turn off his lapel microphone when he went out to greet latecomers!” (2) Well, other pastors have done worse with their lapel mikes on.
Luke doesn’t tell us whether other people besides Jesus heard God’s voice that day or not. But it is a beautiful scene. Jesus is baptized and his Father God tells him how proud he is of him. It’s good when any parent says, “I’m proud of you,” to a child.
Pastor Andy Cook tells about a touching moment at the end of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. That’s the one in which the US hockey team beat the Russians. It was an incredible feat.
During the final game of those Olympics against Finland, the ABC cameras started following different stories. Jim Craig, the goalie, was very close to his father. “His mother had recently died, which made the two men even closer. And the cameras would show [Jim] in action, and his dad cheering.
“When the US team won the game, the celebration was unbelievable. Players embraced, fans were going wild, but Jim Craig wasn’t celebrating. He was near the stands, looking like a lost little kid . . . and then we read his lips: ‘Where’s my dad?’ he asked. ‘Where’s my dad?’
“Craig finally found his dad, and the celebration was complete. They embraced, they cried, and they remembered the years of practice, the years of playing, the years of drills, the years of discipline, the years of bonding. They remembered the woman they both loved, a wife for one, a mother for the other. For Jim Craig, such a moment demanded the presence of his father.” (3)
This is a very special moment in Luke’s Gospel when Jesus is baptized and “a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’”
Every child needs to hear that message from a parent. The Father was giving His personal blessing to Christ’s mission in the world. But here is what should be most heartening to us: God was also granting God’s blessing to all who have been baptized. We read in I John 3 these words, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
Baptism tells us who we are. We are children of God. At our baptism there was an unheard voice from heaven saying, “This is my son, this is my daughter, whom I love.”
Father Henri Nouwen writes, “You are my beloved and on you my favor rests’ is what God says to each human being. We have an identity and a birthright given to us by the one who created and loves us. This blessing and essential birthright is hard to hear above all the other voices of our lives, the voices that shout, ‘You are no good, you are worthless, you are ugly, nobody cares about you.’”
Somebody does care about us. God cares.
Gene Ruyle in his book Making a Life put it like this: “Life has taken three and a half billion years to form and fashion itself into you. Never before has life reached this far. Each day it perseveres, sets another record. Tucked away in every cell of your body are the instructions it has taken all those years to produce. It is a set of plans for bringing into being and keeping alive the particular individual you are, and this blueprint will continue to unfold your existence in an ongoing interaction with the environment that will not end until you die. This persistent striving, which you and I are, is life. For a human being life means being alive. More of you is yet to come. You are not finished until it is all over.” (4)
Let no one tell you that your life doesn’t matter. That you are no good, worthless, ugly, that nobody cares. You have been baptized. You are a child of God. You are a brother or sister of Christ. You have been brought into his family.
Writer Philip Yancey notes that the church he belongs to schedules a “Mom’s Night Out,” with free babysitting for single mothers who need a night off or mothers who simply want to spend an evening with their husbands.
Yancey says his pastor’s wife once happily took advantage of this program to go out to dinner with her husband. Later, when his pastor went to pick up their three‑year‑old son, the babysitter told him about one of the games they had played. She had asked each of the preschoolers what was mommy’s favorite thing to do with them. “You know what your son answered?” said the babysitter. “He said that mommy’s favorite thing is to ‘clean me up.’”
“In truth,” said Yancey’s pastor the next Sunday, “that isn’t Susan’s favorite thing to do with her son. Cleaning him up is an excuse to hold him. Absorbing the mess is just part of the process of getting close. And it’s the same with God.” (5)
Baptism says that God yearns to hug us close to himself. We are God’s own children.
But there is a second thing we need to see. Baptism offers us the opportunity for a new life.
Here is where the water of baptism is important. It is a symbol of being washed clean, yes, but it is also a symbol of a new birth. And with that new birth there is an opportunity for a new life.
Next week we will be celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. day. Dr. King often stood at the front of civil rights demonstrations as firefighters and police turned on him and his fellow demonstrators with high‑pressure water hoses. It had to sting badly.
Dr. King once remarked that he and the other demonstrators had a common strength baptism. Recalling the fire hoses that Bull Connor turned on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Dr. King once said: “There was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out . . . We had known water. If we were Baptists or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodists, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.” (6)
Do you understand the water of baptism can be a powerful force in our lives? When the water was applied to us in baptism [as an infant or as an adult] something powerful was taking place. The Holy Spirit was taking up residence in our lives. We became part of God’s kingdom on earth. As such, we became God’s agents in our family and in our community. As we ponder our own baptism, it might cause us to ask, “Am I being all that God created me to be? I know I am blessed of God, but am I living a life of significance?”
Edward DeBono, the creativity guru, once told a wonderful story about elevators and mirrors.
Have you ever noticed in some really tall buildings skyscrapers, if you will beside the elevator doors, there are often mirrors? Well, apparently, some years ago, there were a lot of complaints about the time that people spent waiting for elevators. And the higher the buildings grew, the more the problem existed. So engineers were called in to try to speed up the elevators or to see if new elevators could be added in the shafts that they had, but there seemed to be absolutely no solution to this problem at all. They spent a lot of money on their consulting fees, until someone spoke up and said, “Let’s fix this with mirrors.”
“What do you mean, fix it with mirrors?” Well, the person suggested, the problem really wasn’t the speed of the elevators or the number of elevators in the building, but the real problem was in the minds of the people who were waiting for the elevators.
So he suggested, “Let’s give them something to do. What do people like to do most?” Oh, they like to look at themselves in the mirror! “How can we enable them to do this?” they asked. And the answer? “Put mirrors all the way around, and the time will just fly by.” And sure enough, they did it. And the time flies by. (7)
Let me ask you a question: how much time to you spend looking in mirrors looking at yourself and how much time do you spend looking out windows, considering the needs of others and society? That’s a simple way of asking, are you simply existing living a life centered in self or are you living a life of significance?
This is an appropriate question to ask at the beginning of another new year. God has called us to join Him in “reconciling the world unto Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Baptism reminds us that we are God’s children. Baptism offers us the opportunity for a new life, a life of purpose, a life of significance.
And one thing more. Baptism reminds us that God will always be there for us.
A pastor, Reverend Eugene Nelson, tells about a young man in his church who returned home from his first year at college. He appeared at Nelson’s office to tell him that he would not be at church while he was home over the summer. When Nelson asked why, the young man said, “Well, you see, I have been doing a lot of thinking about religion while I was at college, and I have come to the conclusion that there is not much to this religion thing. I found out I don’t need the church to get by.”
Nelson responded by saying that he found all this very interesting.
“Aren’t you worried?’ the young man asked. “I thought you would go through the roof when I told you that!”
Nelson had known this boy for about five years, had baptized him a couple of years ago, and watched him grow during his high school years. He came from a difficult family situation. The church had been very interested in him and had a hand in helping him to go to college.
“No,” Nelson responded. “I am interested in what you said, but not overly concerned. I’ll be watching to see if you can pull it off.”
“What do you mean, ‘pull it off’?” the young man huffed. “I’m nineteen, I can decide to do anything I want to do!”
“Yes, I thought the same thing when I was nineteen,” replied Nelson. “What I’m saying is, I’m not so sure you will be able to get away with this.”
“Why not?” the young man asked.
“Well, for one thing,” said Nelson, “you are baptized.”
“So, what’s that have to do with anything?”
“It means that there are people here who care about you. They made promises to God when you were baptized. You try not showing up around here this summer, and they will be nosing around: asking you what you are doing with your life; what kind of grades you made last semester; what you’re doing with yourself. And then, there is also God. You see, no telling what God might try to do with you. From what I’ve seen of God, once He has claimed you, you don’t get off the hook so easily. God is relentless in claiming what is God’s. And, in baptism, God says you belong to Him.”
Eugene Nelson ends his story this way: “The boy shook his head in wonder at this strange unreasonable brand of reasoning and more or less stumbled out the door of my study. In a week or so, he was back at his usual place in the second pew. The baptizers had done their work.” (8)
“A voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’” That was the voice of God at Jesus’ baptism. But it could have been our baptism. We are part of God’s family. As such we are part of God’s kingdom, God’s ongoing plan to redeem the world. We belong to God. Wherever we go, whatever we do, God is there with us. There is no more important statement about our lives than this: We have been baptized.
1. Cited by Dale Bigham, http://www.ardenroadbaptist.com/sermon/ephesians/ephesians28.html.
2. “Lite Fare,” Today’s Christian. Cited @Wit & Wisdom.
3. www.lifeway.com/lwc/article_main_page/0,1703,A%253D162447%2526X%253D1%2526M%253D200272,00.html
4. New York: Seabury Press, 1983.
5. Rumours of Another World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), p.157.
6. Cited by David Reynolds, http://www.gbgm‑umc.org/elktonvaumc/sermons/2006%20Sermons/jan0806.pdf.
7. Cited by David A. Renwick, http://www.2preslex.org/S020217.HTM.
8. http://www.uccseb.org/Sermons/2002/Jan%2013%202002.htm.