“The Baby and the Bathwater”

Mark 1:4-9

            The Reverend Victoria Millar

                                                    Covenant Presbyterian Church, Racine, WI

                                                                  Sunday, January 17, 2010

This sermon is the second of two parts.

The first part was Pastor Melanie’s sermon on baptism last week titled “Remember Who You Are.”

Later in today’s service, you will be invited forward to re-affirm your own baptism.

Mark 1:4-9

Listen for the word of the Lord to us.

4John the baptizer appeared* in the wilderness,

 proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

5And people from the whole Judean countryside

 and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him,

and were baptized by him in the river Jordan,

 confessing their sins.

6Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist,

 and he ate locusts and wild honey.

7He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me;

I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.

8I have baptized you with* water;

 but he will baptize you with* the Holy Spirit.’

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee

 and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

10And just as he was coming up out of the water,

he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

11And a voice came from heaven,

‘You are my Son, the Beloved;* with you I am well pleased.’

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

On my dentist’s office wall is a framed poster which I study twice a year.

            No doubt I am looking for distraction in that office but the poster is conveniently complicated.

                        It is called Proverbidioms.

The drawing is a surreal outdoor scene

       with a house, yard and a stream running nearby,

                                                done in muted colors like illustrations from old children’s books.

                                                      I’ve seen this drawing on jigsaw puzzles too which makes perfect sense

because this very busy drawing is itself a puzzle.

The drawing is composed of proverbs, idioms and clichés made literal.             

      The point is to guess what each item in the picture is trying to convey.

            My success so far has been appallingly low but these were the easy ones.

·        In the sky is a pocketwatch with tiny wings.  Time flies.

·        In the yard is a woman with a broom bending down to lift the edge of a carpet. 

Sweeping  under the rug.

·        In the yard, a kitten is prancing out of a lunch sack.  The cat is out of the bag.

·        And leaning out a window of the house is a woman with an infant in a basin. 

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater—that is not good.

            Discard the cold bathwater if you must

but save the baby.

I am actually quite convinced that in our religious history, we threw the baby out with the bathwater.

We don’t often mention Catholicism from the pulpit of a Presbyterian church.

But as Protestants, we are the protestors,

the people who left with Martin Luther when he split with the Catholic church in 1517. [1] [2]

                        As Presbyterians, our heritage is through John Calvin, some twenty years after Luther.

And the bathwater—what we got rid of—was indulgences, a pardon purchased for certain kinds of sin.[3]

            And we threw off the pope and the church’s top-down government.

The Protestants claimed salvation by grace through faith alone.[4]

We claimed the scriptures were central for worship, not in Latin, but in common, understandable languages.

We claimed the scriptures were the foundation for all Christian life,

            which led us to be crazy in a good way about education

because everyone had to be able to read in order to read the Bible.

But we also threw out the baby.

    With our emphasis on words, we have a tendency to live in our heads and to over-process.

We lost an appreciation of Catholic ritual and spiritual practices which reach beyond words and speech,

            their use of stained glass, stone arches and votives to convey God’s majesty,

            their practice of dipping fingers in water to make the sign of the cross across their bodies.

                   We bring our minds to worship but neglect our other senses.

We’ve lost the spiritual power of kneeling or of a sanctuary charged with incense.

    Rare are those among us who have ever done a silent retreat.

Feasting on words, education and explanation,

the Protestant tradition lost much of the taste and hunger for divine mystery.

I am so convinced we threw out the baby with the bathwater

            that I spend time regularly with the sisters at a place called Holy Wisdom Monastery

                        where I am an oblate. (JD is an oblate too)

An oblate is a person who has studied with

 then made a commitment to participate in

the spiritual practices taught by that community.

            In this case, the community is Benedictine

 which has been within the Catholic church

for about 1500 years.

It would be ironic for a person like me who feels Protestants became wordy and wary of mystery,

            to try to explain today’s scripture about the mystery of the sacrament of baptism.

                        Except that today we are invited to come forward and re-affirm our baptisms,

which I hope is an experience deeper than words.

In today’s text from Mark,

            the scruffy John the Baptist is standing in the river Jordan

                        as swarms of people wade in to confess their sins and be baptized.

                                    John’s baptizing seems akin to the Jewish practice

                                                of ritual washing

                                                      as a way to become pure before God.

                                                            Mark’s gospel says John’s baptizing

                                                                        was about personal repentance and receiving God’s forgiveness.[5] John himself says:

The one who is more powerful than I is coming…

I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.

8I have baptized you with* water;

 but he will baptize you with* the Holy Spirit.’

The earliest baptism, then, is in a flowing river, among the crowds, at the rough hands of John the Baptist.

    What would that feel like?

            See the crowd shivering and hear them whispering along the shoreline.

Feel the mud under your feet and the strong current.

                                    Feel the water closing over your head,

immersing you completely in God’s forgiveness,

leaving you startled and awake like never before,

as if your whole life was now a clean slate.

                                                                                    And hear the promise:

“One is coming who will baptize not with water

but with the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus was the one John said would baptize with the Holy Spirit.

            And like a bridge from the old to the new,

                        Jesus accepted baptism in the Jordan from John.

                                    And as he was coming up out of the water

                                                the heavens were opened, torn apart, accessible in a new way.

                                                            And the Holy Spirit like a dove touched him

                                                                        and a voice from heaven claimed him saying:

                                                                        “This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased.”

This baptism, then, is about heaven breaking open, engaging all the senses—

            feeling the water,

                        seeing the Holy Spirit like a dove,

                                    hearing the voice of God full of love and approval.

                                                In baptism, the true identity of Jesus is revealed—

                                                            he is the Son, the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased.  

So this, also, is what baptism means:

feeling the Holy Spirit draw near,

perceiving God’s claim upon us as beloved child with whom God is delighted.

A few decades after the death of Jesus, St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans:

                        “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death

                                    so as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father,

                                                we too may live a new life.”[6]

Baptism, then, took on additional meaning as if plunging under water was like dying with Christ 

            and finally arising from the water was like being raised from the dead,

resurrection into a new life.

Over the early years of Christianity, the Catholic church baptized adults

in a particular way of expressing what the ritual meant.

In Italy in the year 387, at age 33[7], the experience of the great St. Augustine was this.

“At Easter, the rite of baptism itself emphasized the momentous nature

 of the transformation which Augustine was undergoing. 

 On the eve of the Easter, Augustine and the throng of [all those who had completed catechism]

 all ages and both sexes

 would troop to the Baptistry beside the main church in Milan. 

Passing behind curtains, Augustine would descend, alone, stark naked, into a deep pool of water.

 Three times the archbishop would hold his shoulders beneath the gushing fountain.

 Later, dressed in a pure white robe, he would enter the main church ablaze with candles,

 and amid the singing of the congregation,

     the newly baptized would take their place on the slightly raised floor by the altar

 to await Easter morning.”[8]

This then, is what the ritual tried to convey:

First, years of study to make a profession of faith.

Then willing to shed everything, vulnerable and stripped down, choosing to die to sin and immersed in grace.

            Rising out the water as resurrected, cleansed, robed in white as if,

in the words of St. Paul “clothed in Christ”[9] and alive to a new way of living.

                                    Joining the community of white robes, welcomed with beauty into the great congregation,

                                                counting the hours in the vigil

to the great celebration of victory over sin and death which is Easter. 

There is a child I cherish--9 month old Peter who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

            He is the first child of my niece, Wendy and her husband Doug.

                        Grand Rapids is four plus hours away so it’s always an overnight to visit them.

                                    And the ritual every night at 6pm is Peter’s bath so he can be in bed by 6:30.

                                      Wendy believes the ritual bathtime soothes Peter’s nervous system.

                                        Imagine, she says, being so young and growing so fast

and stretched all day trying to respond to the world.

                                           She believes the bath communicates wordlessly

that it’s time to relax and get ready to sleep.

Their house has a lot of baby gear.

            At bathtime, there is a special soft basin that fits inside the regular bathtub.

                        The basin is carved out to support the baby maybe at a 45 degree angle,

                                    and even has a little safety strap.

It’s my job to find the perfect warm water temperature to fill up his basin

            then to use a big plastic cup to rinse baby shampoo from his little head.

There, safely cushioned and cradled,

surrounded by the sweet fragrance of soap,

                        with the warm water poured over him again and again,

the look on his small face is bliss.

He can’t explain what’s going on.

            But in some way, he perceives he is safe and held, delighted in and loved,

so much so that he relaxes and receives.

This also is what baptism means.

            Presbyterians and Catholics alike, we baptize infants to show we are all small and needy

                        and God always claims us in ways beyond our understanding.

                                    We baptize infants to try to express God safely holds each of us

delights in and loves each of us

so much so that our only response is to relax and receive.

I don’t know if or when they will baptize Peter.

And they might not because baptism today also holds the promise to raise the child in the community of faith

            and they haven’t made that step.

But whenever I rinse his lovely head, I silently make the threefold promise of baptism,

still the truth about his identity:

Peter, you are a child of God, sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.

 An Episcopal priest writes to an infant with these words:

“If I could tell you what this meant,

this threefold blessing,

this fluid touch,

this moment sanctified by promise.

You in your infant distraction

would certainly dismiss it…

But some things are taught

while others are best lived and learned…

Still, something happened on this day of such great simplicity

it might pass by unrecognized.

Clearly there was not birth and death [in the sense of]

human severance and pain.

But portals opened that are unseen

and forces moved to befriend your soul.

You were enrolled into God.

This may seem a small thing…

but trust the ones who brought you here:

There is nothing [greater].”[10]                            

So, come, this morning, soon,

to feel the water on your skin.

And to remember you are a child of God, sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.

Amen.