One of the requirements of seminary is that after your first year, you have to spend a summer doing Clinical Pastoral Education. This is a fancy way of saying Chaplaincy. So after only one year of seminary education, prospective pastors spend two months as a chaplain, most often in a hospital setting. My chaplaincy was in a trauma hospital in downtown Philadelphia, and I was responsible for pastoral care for the Medical/Respiratory Intensive Care Unit and for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. That summer alone, I was involved with six deaths - four adults who died from cardiac/respiratory issues while in the hospital, and two babies who died just before or after being born.
And I remember one death in particular, because I knowingly did something that was doctrinally wrong, something that the church did not allow. I baptized a baby who had already died. You see, Lutheran Church doctrine - all Christian churches, in fact, except for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - restricts baptism only to the living. We don’t baptize the dead. And I knew this. I had taken the course on theology, and on Lutheran Confessions, and I knew this rule. But I had spent several months visiting the mother, who was on bed rest in the hospital, and who was anticipating the live birth of her baby girl. And when her baby was stillborn, she was absolutely devastated. She was heartbroken and she reached out for the comfort of God and asked me to baptize her baby. She wanted to be sure that God loved her baby. She wanted the certainty of this centuries-old ritual to assure her that her baby was one of God’s beloved children.
And I thought about what her relationship with God would be like if I told her that I couldn’t baptize her baby, and I thought about how she was turning to God in her moment of need and what would happen if her need was deemed insufficient, and I asked myself whether I could stand in front of God at the pearly gates at the end of my life and face the question, “Why didn’t you baptize that baby?”
So, I baptized her dead baby. This poor mom held her baby’s body in her arms, and we prayed, and I took some water and made the sign of the cross on this baby’s forehead, and I said, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” I wasn’t yet ordained, we weren’t in a church, the water was from a hospital sink tap, and I was “breaking” church doctrine. I told this mother that God embraced her baby as one of God’s children. And this mother and I cried, and she kissed her baby, and then the nurse took the baby down to the hospital morgue. And the mother was discharged from the hospital, and that’s the last I saw of her.
But when I returned to seminary after the summer, I wrote a paper about it for my Lutheran theology professor. I wrote about how baptizing dead babies is doctrinally wrong, but pastorally correct. I wrote that baptism is a concrete moment in which we are assured that God’s love for us is irrevocable and unconditional, and that this woman needed proof that God’s love would never change or be taken away, and that even though I was doctrinally incorrect, I would have done it again.
And my professor wrote back to me, and I’ll never forget what he wrote. He wrote, “Yes, you were doctrinally wrong. You were theologically wrong. You will make a great pastor.”
Baptism is one of the oldest sacraments in the Christian church, although it’s possible that Communion is older than baptism, and because it is so old, there are so many different interpretations of what it means and what the rules are around it. The church has fractured over arguments about adult baptism versus infant baptism, about baptism with water versus baptism of the Spirit, about baptism for repentance versus baptism for covenant. And while each church denomination may have one church doctrine about baptism, but there are thousands of personal theologies about what baptism means. We have such diversity because we have no certainty. We will never truly know why Jesus was baptized, or even what baptism meant to him. We know that it’s important - the first thing that the Gospel of Mark tells us about Jesus is that he was baptized by John. We know that John was baptizing with water, and for the forgiveness of sins, but we don’t know why Jesus had to be baptized that way. We know that it is one of the very few stories about Jesus that is in all four Gospels, but we don’t have any stories about Jesus baptizing his own disciples. We know, because of Paul’s letters, that baptism was one of the earliest practices of the Church, but we don’t know exactly how it was carried out. There is actually much more we don’t know about the earliest understandings of baptism than we do. All we know for certain is that baptism involves water, and God, and that in baptism, we are brought into a special relationship with the one who created the world.
And this is perhaps the most important thing about baptism. That it is not about us or about what we believe about it. It is about God. Baptism is God’s work. When Jesus was baptized, all we are told for certain is that the heavens opened and God said, “You are my beloved Son.” We don’t know John’s words, we don’t know Jesus’ words, we only know God’s words. We don’t know John’s exact actions, we don’t know Jesus’ exact actions, we only know God’s actions. All we know is what God does, which means that what God does is the only thing that is significant.
Our actions in baptism are, it turns out, of no account. When baptism is God’s work, it means that our own involvement in it is fairly insignificant. Our doctrines and our theologies, as correct as we try to make them, pale in significance when compared to the work of God. Who baptizes us, or how, or when is insignificant. Whether we are baptized by a pastor or a lay person, whether we are baptized as an infant or an adult, whether we are baptized at home or in a church or at the local river, these things are insignificant because baptism is God’s work, not ours.
What we do after we are baptized is also insignificant, because nothing can take away what God has already done in baptism. We cannot lose our baptism - we cannot alienate God - we cannot break the bond that God formed with us when we were baptized. Our actions after baptism are never strong enough to change God’s actions during baptism. We are simply not powerful enough to break God’s promise to us. We cannot undo what God has already done. To think that we have somehow made ourselves unworthy to come before God is to doubt God’s ability to hold on to the covenant that God promised to hold on to. It is, in fact, to think that somehow our wrongdoing is stronger than God’s good. To think that we do is stronger than what God does.
So what is it exactly that God does in baptism? “You are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” In baptism, God makes us God’s children. God makes us part of God’s family, by making us sisters and brothers of Jesus. Through baptism, through the very tangible medium that is water, God establishes our familial relationship with God in a way that can’t be undone. God forgives us, now and always, and promises us the grace and salvation that our brother Jesus effected for us. By bringing us into God’s family, God is permanently establishing that we do not need to earn God’s love to be there, and that we can’t lose it. Through baptism, God makes us worthy to stand in the presence of God, without shame or fear.
You’ve probably noticed by now that every Sunday, I drag the (kind of) heavy baptismal font so that it sits right in the aisle on your way to communion. You have to go around it to get up to the altar, and you have to go around it to get back to your seat and out the door at the end of the service. In fact, if you stand at the doors and look up the aisle, you will see that there is a straight line going from the doors through the baptismal font to the altar.
I do this on purpose. You see, I know that sometimes people don’t feel worthy to come up for communion. Maybe you’ve had a bad week, or you got in an argument with someone close to you, or you behaved in a way that you regret. And so when it’s time to go up to communion, you feel not quite good enough to take in the body and blood of Christ. But the baptismal font is placed right there in your way to remind you that, because of baptism, because of God’s gift of forgiveness and grace to you in baptism, God has made you worthy to come up to communion. That no matter what you’ve done this week, God has already made things right in your baptism so that you are forgiven and made holy enough to receive Christ’s body and blood. When you come up to communion, you come through your baptism. (And, by the way, feel free to dip your fingers in that water and make the sign of the cross on your forehead, as a reminder to yourself of your baptism. That’s what it’s there for.)
And when you have received communion, and go back to your seat, and then back out into the world, you go through your baptism. God sanctifies you and sends you out into the world to serve and love the world through your baptism. You can’t get to Christ and you can’t get back out into the world without going through your baptism.
One the one hand, the story of the Baptism of Our Lord - the festival we celebrate today - is theologically and doctrinally confusing because it tells us so little about what baptism is and why Jesus was baptized. But on the other hand, there could not be a more simple story. God acts in baptism. God acted in Jesus’ baptism and God acted in yours. God redeemed you, brought you into the family of Jesus Christ, and continues to make you holy and worthy of being God’s child. The next time you are having a moment when you find yourself theologically or doctrinally incorrect, or when you doubt your goodness, or question whether or not you are worthy of standing before God, find some water - any water, from the tap, from a pond, even a handful of melted snow. Use it to trace the sign of the cross on your forehead, and remember that your baptism, whether it happened when you were an infant or an adult, was and continues to be a work of God. God’s promise to you in baptism, that you are one of God’s children and full of grace, cannot be revoked and stands forever. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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