Sunday

Deuteronomy 26:1-11 / John 6:24-35

Well, we’ve just seen the baptism of Benjamin—in fact, you are each an accomplice in it.  So what does it mean to us?  Have we been unfair to Benjamin because he’s too young to have a vote?  I think it could only be unfair if what we’ve done is not a blessing, but a curse.

Yet what we’ve done is to bless Benjamin with a trinity of promises: (1) that we will love and nurture his unique spirit, (2) that we will work to build a better world for him to grow up in, and (3) that we will teach him God’s Word for him so that, no matter who he grows up to become, he will always know that God loves him.  That doesn’t sound oppressive to me.  Especially since, embedded right into our baptismal promises to him, we promised that, when he’s a teenager, Benjamin will have the choice to either confirm or reject this faith.  But at least when the time for his confirmation comes, he’ll know what he’s confirming or rejecting.

How and when a church baptizes people says a lot about their theology—about how we see God, humanity, faith and grace—which is why how and when baptism happens is still a big deal to a lot of people.

First, let me be quick to say that, in the UCC, we baptize people at any age.  It doesn’t matter to us if you are five weeks old or 15 years old, 35 or 85.  If you have not been baptized and you would like to be, we’ll baptize you.  So if there’s anyone here today who desires to be baptized, or to confirm your baptism, please see me after worship and we’ll set that up.

That said, our theology of baptism is that, even if you are an adult getting baptized, the same thing happens to you as just happened to Benjamin, which is that you do nothing and God’s unconditional love showers upon you.  All you have to do is sit back, relax, and receive the free gift of God’s love for you.  For us, baptism is like getting a tan.  You don’t tan yourself.  It’s the sun that tans you.  For us, it is God who acts in baptism, not the “baptizee.”  Benjamin did not have to recite the Apostle’s Creed or publicly tell us when he met Jesus to earn his baptism, earn God’s acceptance.  In fact, we believe that Benjamin just did meet Jesus, as he rested in my arms and bathed in this congregation’s and his parents’ and godparents’ promises to help him “grow into a relationship with Jesus as his friend and savior.”  We used formal liturgical language, but basically what we just said was, “Benjamin, meet Jesus; Jesus, meet Benjamin.”  His relationship with Jesus will now grow through the body of the risen Christ that is us, Sixth Avenue UCC.

When we baptize a teenager or a senior citizen, we use exactly the same liturgy because they, too, are just beginning to grow in a relationship with Jesus as their friend and savior.  You don’t need to earn your baptism by having your life in perfect shape; you don’t need to figure it all out intellectually to qualify.  Baptism is just the beginning of the journey.  No matter if you’re a baby, a teen or a senior, you are still a child of God.  So if you’re a grownup, we will make the same baptismal promises to you that we just made to Benjamin.  Won’t that feel good, to have a whole congregation of people promise to love you and nurture you and teach you God’s Word for you so that wherever you go or whoever you become (next week, or next year, or ten years from now, or on your deathbed) you will always know inside of you that God loves you?

It reminds me of a time when I was in seminary.  My ethics class was discussing ordin-ation as the fulfillment of the promise that “baptism marks the beginning of our growth into full Christian faith and ministry,” whatever your ministry might be.  A conservative student was arguing against gay ordination.  The professor said, “If you don’t want to ordain them, don’t baptize them.”  The guy got all flustered and blurted out, “But how are we gonna know when they’re babies if they’ll turn out gay or lesbian?”  “Exactly!” the professor replied.

The central issue is not gay ordination or women’s ordination or illegal alien ordination —those are ethical questions on the periphery of our faith—but the answers all begin in our theology of baptism.  Do we believe that we earn God’s love through a baptism that’s a reward for reciting a church’s doctrines or submitting to its rules?  Or do we believe that our salvation is a free gift of God’s grace, given to us just as we are, helpless as babies?

When I was in second grade, I had a neighborhood friend named Jon who was in fourth grade and the son of a conservative preacher in town.  We would often walk home from school together, even though he was so much my senior, I being 7 and he being 9.  One day, as we were walking home, Jon told me that on Sunday he had stood up in front of his church and told them that he’d met Jesus and so they baptized him and he achieved the blessed assurance, he said, that he was going to heaven when he died.  He then went on to say that I was going to hell because I had been baptized as a baby before I could talk and earn my salvation by testifying.

That night I was so scared I couldn’t sleep.  Not only was Jon a 4th Grader, which meant he knew just about everything, but his father was a preacher, while mine was only an electronics engineer.  Every night I knelt by my bedside with my parents and prayed:

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

But now that I knew I was going to hell because I had been baptized as a baby, I didn’t dare go to sleep because, if I died before I woke, I now knew the Lord would not take my soul to heaven.

I tossed and turned in fear until finally, about 2:00 in the morning, I crept through the dark to my parents’ room, felt my way over to my dad’s side of the bed and woke him up.  I was crying as he carried me back to my bedroom, tucked me in, sat on the side of my bed and asked me what was wrong.  I explained what Jon had told me.  My father, to his credit, said that there are two ways that people come to know Jesus.  Some just grow up knowing Jesus as their friend, the same way you grow up knowing your big sister, and they are baptized from the start.  Other people don’t meet Jesus until later in life, and when they meet Jesus and become his friend, they get baptized then.  But, either way, my dad said, Jesus is our friend, and he’s not going to hurt anybody, whether they’re baptized or not.

The friendship of Jesus is how we can tell if a church is following the gospel.  Do they preach a Jesus who loves us or hurts us?  Is their theology based on scaring people or loving people?  We make mistakes at Sixth Avenue, but we try to take Christ’s path of love, forgiveness and peace.  After high school, Jon married a Catholic girl named Mary and his father disowned him.  His father had no grace: he did not love who Jon grew up to be; his love was conditional on following his church’s rules and beliefs.  Jon and Mary are still married and we’re still in touch. After Jon was rejected by his father’s church for who he loved, Jon renounced the story he told at age 9.  He said he just copied all the other such stories he’d heard at his church to try to earn his father’s love.  After that, Jon started hanging out with other rejects from the church and in that communion he met the Jesus of the gospels, who invited sinners and tax collectors to his table.

Communing at Christ’s table keeps us on the path of the New Covenant that God makes with us through Jesus Christ—not a covenant of law and judgment, but a covenant of love and grace.  In the same way that we symbolically meet Jesus Christ in baptism, we confirm and renew our relationship with Christ as we get together and are fed by him.  Jesus invites everyone to his table, but then it’s up to us to decide if we’re willing to commune with people who are different from us.  Jesus invites Jon’s father to this table, too, but it’s up to him to decide if he is willing to eat with people who break his church’s rules but whom Jesus says God loves anyway.

Covenant is an important word to us in the UCC.  We define ourselves as not a creedal, but a covenantal church.  That means we don’t put restrictions on your access to this table.  You don’t have to believe a certain creed or tell a story about meeting Jesus in a certain way on a certain date at a certain time—although, if you do believe in the Apostles’ Creed or that you met Jesus on your 14^th birthday, you are welcome, too.  The point is, we don’t have a litmus test that defines if you’re in or you’re out.  We just share this simple covenant: “We promise to be this church together.”  That helps us understand our theology of baptism, because even if Benjamin were old enough to tell us his creed or his story, it wouldn’t matter because we don’t require a creed or a story—we just receive God’s grace like a bunch of babies.  :-)

Once we’ve accepted that grace, we’re so grateful that we want to give back.  As we give our offerings and pledges today, we participate in a tradition that goes all the way back to the ancient Hebrews, newly liberated from Pharaoh’s slavery, newly resettled in their homeland.  It was in absolute gratitude that they gave back the first fruits of the bounty that they believed God had first given them, giving their offerings to support the clergy and help the poor. And isn’t it interesting that, after they pledged to support the covenant for another year, they were instructed to celebrate the bounty of God not just with each other, but with any aliens living among them?

So, on this Covenant Sunday, let us celebrate, with members and non-members alike, our wonderful church flowing with milk and honey.  The bread of life that we receive here is a God who showers us with love and grace unconditionally.  That bread of life is a Christ who saves us each by welcoming us all.  That bread of life is a Holy Spirit who inspires us to take the love and acceptance we meet here out to feed a world hungry for love and acceptance. That’s our mission; that’s our pledge.

Pastor Dan Geslin
6^th Avenue UCC
Thanksgiving 2010