I imagine that once upon a time, celebrating the Baptism of Our Lord and talking about baptism was easy. In Luther’s day, for instance, baptism was a wonderful thing to talk about that Luther could, and did, go on for hours about. He *loved* to talk about baptism - about how it’s God’s gift to us, how it’s the promise of God’s everlasting covenant with us, how it is forgiveness and salvation tied in with something as everyday as water, how it strengthens us in our doubts, and how it is the greatest weapon against the devil that God has ever given us. In a time when everybody was baptized - and I mean everybody - and when everybody went to church, baptism was a simple topic to preach on.
And all of what Luther said is still true, but it’s no longer quite so easy to talk about baptism. We live in a time when not everyone is baptized, even if their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were. We live in a time when those who *are* baptized as children don’t necessarily go to church anymore. We live in a time when baptism is no longer a given - we can no longer assume that everyone is baptized, that everyone wants to be, or that everyone who is is a life-long church-goer. And the particular thing that makes talking about baptism hard - emotionally hard, I mean - is that these people who aren’t baptized or who are baptized but don’t go to church - are people that we love. They’re not strangers out there. They are our children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. Our family. Our dear friends. And so when it comes time to talk about baptism, we feel anxiety and sorrow and maybe even a sense of failure that those whom we love dearly aren’t baptized or aren’t part of the church anymore. We worry that we have failed them somehow, and we particularly worry that since they have turned away from God, God will turn away from them. And so, even though we want to hear all the wonderful things about baptism, we nevertheless feel uncomfortable and even sad thinking of those who aren’t here.
When it comes to those we love who have been baptized but don’t go to church anymore, we can find comfort in the proclamation that baptism is always and entirely God’s act, and not our own. Sure, our hands pour the water and our voice says the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” but it is God who makes the water holy, and God who uses the words and the water to bring us into God’s covenant. And because it is God who is doing all of this, we can be confident that baptism is always proper and always effective, as it were. For instance, the reason that I say “our hands” and “our voice” is because baptism is not something reserved only for pastors to perform. No doubt you’ve heard this before, but I will remind you: you, too, can perform baptisms in an emergency. You, too, can take some water from a tap, wash someone’s head with it, make the sign of the cross on their forehead, and say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” There are many stories within our tradition of mothers or grandmothers or aunts secretly baptizing little babies in their families when they suspected the babies wouldn’t be baptized, either because it was forbidden in their country or they were worried the family wouldn’t do it. I don’t advise secrecy, of course, but in an emergency, anyone can baptize. And that is because baptism is God’s work. It is not our work. It has nothing to do with the worthiness or holiness or “Christian-ness” of the person doing the baptism. That’s why baptism in one denomination is now accepted in another. That didn’t used to be the case in the Catholic church, and it may not be the case in other denominations, but in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, we accept baptism no matter who did it or where it was done. I once had to look up whether baptism in the Mormon church was considered acceptable in the Lutheran church, and, since they use water and those words, yes - it is. Baptism, no matter who does it, is God’s work, and therefore brings us into God’s covenant and establishes God’s relationship with us, forever.
Forever. This is another comfort for us. Baptism is forever. There’s no taking it back. There’s no rejecting it. There’s no revoking it. Baptism is God’s act, and in baptism, God makes us brothers and sisters with Christ, and children of God forever. God makes us God’s beloved forever, and that means God will never take that back. You know, I was baptized at Shepherd of the Hills by Pastor Ted Becker, and I always joke with him that you should be careful who you baptize, because you never know how they’ll turn out - look at me, after all! And we laugh, but it is true. When we baptize babies, as we do in the oldest Christian denominations, we do it because it’s a sign of trust in God’s promise that God will love us forever, no matter what. We believe that God encourages us to baptize babies, and that is truly remarkable. Because God knows how we’re going to turn out, and God baptizes us anyway. God knows whether we will grow up to be people who go to church, or people who play golf Sunday morning. God knows whether we will be faithful church members, or whether we will jump from congregation to congregation. God knows whether we will say our prayers every night or turn away from prayer altogether. God knows whether we will stay with the church or reject it outright, and God baptizes us anyway.
I don’t know if you remember the horrible shooting in Charleston last year, where a man walked into a church Bible study and sat with everybody for an hour, and then pulled out a gun and shot everyone there, including three pastors (two of whom graduated from a Lutheran seminary) and a number of church members. Nine people died that day. Dylann Storm Roof, age 21, was later arrested for those murders, and people were outraged that he could sit with these church people and then shoot them in cold blood. What is little-known about Dylann, though, is that he was a member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in South Carolina. He was a baptized Lutheran. He is, actually, a baptized Lutheran. That can never be taken away from him. God baptized him, and he is God’s child forever. The depth of God’s love for us is that God baptized Dylann, knowing what he would do as an adult, and God nevertheless made a commitment to Dylann forever. No matter what. Dylann will always be God’s child, a brother of Jesus Christ. It seems shocking to us––unacceptable––but this is the depth of God’s grace and forgiveness through Christ. That no matter what we do as Christians, God will continue to call us and continue to bring us back to God, whether that happens while we’re still alive or after we die. God will continue to call those you love and continue to bring them back. They may leave God, but God will never leave them. Their baptism cannot be taken away from them, no matter what.
But what about those we love who aren’t baptized? One of the worst developments in the Christian religion, and the most unbiblical, is this idea that Christians have a monopoly on God, and that God cares only about Christians. For many reasons, and I won’t go into them here but you can ask me later if you’re interested, Christians have to come to believe that because we are God’s chosen people, that means we are God’s only people. We have come to believe that God separates us from the rest of the world and that God’s saving relationship is with us and only us. Now, there *is* Scripture to back some of this up. The Gospel of John has a lot of it, and some of the letters of the New Testament. *But* there is also Scripture that tells a different story. Our Bible is incredibly complex, and incredibly deep, and so there are contradictions when we take everything at face value. But God is deeper than our interpretations of Scripture, deeper even than the Bible itself, and God is deeper than our idea that God’s commitment is only to Christians. And we know this, it’s just that sometimes we forget. Or prefer to forget. But, remember Noah? God made a covenant with Noah - the rainbow became a sign of “the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” (Gen 8:16) God is committed to creation as a whole - God is no longer going to separate out some people from others, and destine some for saving and others for death. Remember Abraham? God made a covenant with Abraham that all of his descendants - those who descended from Isaac *and* those who descended from Ishmael - would be blessed by God. God said to him, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” God made an everlasting promise with all the families of the earth before there was ever such a thing as Christians.
God brings Christians into a particular relationship with God through baptism, and that is what we celebrate today. But God is not trapped by that. Just because Christians can only come to God through water and the Word doesn’t mean that God cannot love and call others. The relationship God has with those who are not baptized, and the covenant that God makes with them is not the same relationship or the same covenant God makes with us. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It just means that we must trust God a little more, and have faith that God truly is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.
This doesn’t make our own baptism meaningless. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t encourage others to be baptized or to baptize their children. Baptism is and will always be the way God brings Christians into God’s family. As followers of Christ, we do as Christ did, and we turn to baptism to hear that we are God’s beloved children. We cling to our baptism as proof that we really do belong to God, and to help us to follow Jesus, and receive to the strength of his Spirit. We look to our baptism as that which marks us as Christians and makes us brothers and sisters with one another in this particular community of faith. We rely on our baptism to make us worthy to receive the Lord’s Supper. And we turn to our baptism in the face of death––of ourselves and of others––because we know that, through baptism, God promises us new life. Baptism is, for Christians, the way to God, or rather, the way that God establishes and keeps an everlasting relationship with us. We trust that God relates to others in their own ways, but we know that God offers us the wonderful, life-giving, everlasting gift of baptism, through which the Holy Spirit comes on us, like it did with Jesus, and we hear the words that cannot be unspoken, that we, too, are God’s beloved, with whom God is well pleased. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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