The Heart of Baptism

Matthew 3:13-17


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

January 13, 2008

Baptism is a ritual, a sacred act, that comes to us from Jewish tradition. When John, the Baptist, baptized people, including Jesus, in the shallows of the Jordan River, he was being a Jew, and calling people to be transformed by the Jewish God, the powerful, radiating, presence of the God of heaven, as now on earth.

We should not have to make the additional point, but given the “hyper-Christianity-ness” of some of America’s present political culture, it is accurate to note that John the Baptist was not baptizing Christians, not baptizing them into Christianity, even when he baptized the man, the Son of God, we know as Christ.

Of course the later disciples of the Way of Jesus, the Christ, were called to go out and baptize people in his name, even though Jesus himself seemed never to have done this—baptize with water people in his own name himself: a profound truth, in that Christ’s baptism is in fire and spirit and that is more than we are ever ready for!

Now given how crucial interfaith dialogue is to our working for the kingdom, the reign, the coming-on, of God, let us note that in the scripture story today we are in a hybrid situation: two traditions, Judaism and Christianity, with shared rituals, even with one coming out of the other. “Hybrid” awareness saves gas, especially the “gas” that comes out of so many so-called Bible Christians today! By the way, two of the more interesting Christian ministers I’ve become aware of since coming to this multi-cultural pot were born as Jews. Rev. Solomon at the hugely successful McLean Bible Church and the Episcopal woman priest that serves, I believe, in Arlington, who conducted so well the funeral for Lee and Ken Fisher’s young daughter-in-law some months ago. They are hybrid people. For those of us who know what a New York City Jew looks and sounds like, nothing could have been wilder, to me, in widening my hybrid view of life than to hear and see in Arlington that lovely woman Episcopal priest in her white collar, her priestly robes, and her not-so-Episcopal hairdo and her order-me-some-more-bagels-from-Zabar’s-on-the-upper-West-side voice! We live in a new world of dubbed sound tracks, which was what the wild and rustic John the Baptist was doing: taking this Jewish ritual and Isaiah’s prophecy and using it to voice over, to bring about, a new self and a new, more Godly, world.

Now this morning our “Call to Worship” lifts up two helpful parts of this important story for Christians. And as you have heard me preach, and will, Christianity can be grasped as a powerful religious truth built on powerful reversals, dynamic paradoxes, that reveal a greater truth—where we thought we saw only conflict or contradiction. When we have an expanded heart we can go beyond wanting narrow purity, and where our minds are no longer confused by seeming ambiguities we can be resolved into a greater, more inclusive truth. This we experience as nothing less than a revelation from God—because we surely could not have puzzled our way out ourselves.

And while I’m pushing (preaching) this introductory idea of our faith as a “hybrid vehicle,” let me note the “plethora of hybridity” that surrounds us but that we keep out of awareness. Race is one. “Race” is a social science idea that falsely claims a purity that biology does not support. Nothing could be better for our one-eyed view of reality—no matter what you think of his politics—than Barack Obama, truly an icon of hybrid reality, a reality for which we humans have, heretofore, only had dirty words, from “half-breed” to “muggle.”

My own stepson from my first marriage was such a person, a black, so-called, father, a white, Jewish mother. From 1965 to 1980 what were his black mother and I to call him? What did his classmates name him? And how, now, can he think of himself in new ways!

And as we travel this journey of having the old renewed in this mixed up way, let me note the hybrid nature of our gender and our sexuality. In the hybrid world, in God’s expanding inclusivity, we do not have to be real men or just women, nor are we really only heterosexual or only homosexual. We know this: phobic of our own dreams though we may be, that is one reason the “more light,” “open and affirming” missional mentality of this church is so crucial, and one reason I am so proud to be ordained in the UCC which makes it easier to say that long series of nouns, lesbian, gay, trans-gender, trans-sexual. My installation service here as your pastor and preacher and teacher was officiated by a crazy-glorious mix of so-called races, of so-called sexual orientations, and of so-called established gender identity.

This church is not your grandfather’s Buick!

But baptism goes deeper than where it came from, Jewish and even other traditions of ritual water-cleansing. It goes to the core of our human identity, and to the deeply mixed-up purity and sinfulness of our human nature.

The most important religious category that needs to be re-soaked in the troubled waters of our God in our life is “the saint” or “the sinner.”

The handle I am offering is that our religion can be grasped as a great truth about reversals and opposites. It reaches a revolutionary height when it comes to morality and ethics. Are we saints—as the Puritans called each other? Are we sinners—as so much religion and bad parenting says we are?
And if we do what John the Baptist called us to do, repent, turn around, go from sinner to saint, from once-lost to now-found, do we stay that way? Do we become pure-bred saints once and for all? Now we like the idea—rooted in Christian reversals—that the high and mighty, like the Pharisees and the Roman rulers, are really the bad guys, and we like the idea that the meek and lowly are the good guys, that the rich are really poor, etc. And while our brains seem to need such two sides, such opposites, such a dualism from our sports teams (nobody puts on the uniform of the other team), to our two party system, to our journalistic habit of presenting all stories as a conflict of two sides, while our brains seem to need a world defined by two eyes and two hemispheres of brain matter, our hearts demand unity.

And baptism is, at its deepest, a ritual about our hearts. Jesus was not baptized on his head as we so often do. He was immersed, suffused, with a body of water and his one body. Actually the white dove of the Holy Spirit and the blessing voice of God following his baptism are where and when his head, his eyes, his ears, got involved in his baptism.

But if we go to the heart of this sacramental experience, we go to the human heart, to God’s presence to and for our hearts.

Sadly and wrongly when over the centuries Christianity has tried to solve the problems of life divided, of two sides, of dualism, when it has tried to get to the inevitable place of needing one final heart-felt truth, it has said that the truth about our hearts is that we are bad, we are sinners, we are not saints, and without God’s Deus ex machine action we’d be stuck there, as if that were the sum total of Christianity.

Fortunately, old and new voices in Christianity resolve the heart of the matter and the matter of the heart in another way. From old Celtic Christian voices re-voiced today by writers like Phillip Newell and John O’Donohue to feminist theologians, early on, such as my old acquaintance, Carter Haywood, they have plumbed the depths to say the hybrid heart can be redeemed and the redeemed heart, the renewed heart, the transformed heart, can be re-redeemed, re-renewed, re-transformed day by day, and one day at a time, into one sacred heart.

The ancient Hebrews were an earthy and embodied group who were not so much prone to expressing great philosophical ideas from their heads, as to expressing the truths and agonies of the human heart and then perceiving and receiving God as the one being with whom and in whom we have the relationship that keeps our hearts whole.

Of course our Protestant Christian sacrament of baptism carries many layers of meaning. We feel God blesses the birth of a child, that God blesses the rebirth of an adult. We believe that God cleanses, washes away, our sin, and we imagine, declare, and affirm that in baptism we take on both Christ’s death and Christ’s resurrection and more. Only recently, however, did I discover that in Celtic Christian traditions the body’s heart is also baptized. In our mind-body-spirit adult education program we have been hearing a bit of the contemporary, even medical, reclaiming of the human heart—body and spirit—as the center of health and life. This truth was/is deeply valued by Hebrew, as well as Celtic, tradition and faith. The very “nephesh,” spirit and air, of God seeps into our blood, our hearts, in as basic a way as oxygen mixes with blood.

So listen to these Celtic Christian words about the heart of baptism and the gestures of the priest not only touching water to the head but a hand to the heart:

In the Christian tradition one of the most beautiful sacraments is baptism. It includes a special anointing of the baby’s heart. Baptism comes from the Jewish tradition. For the Jewish people, the heart is the center of all the emotions. The heart is anointed as a main organ of the baby’s health but also as the place where all its feelings will nest. The prayer intends that the new child will never become trapped, caught, or entangled in false inner networks of negativity, resentment, or destruction toward itself. The blessings also intend that the child will have a fluency of feeling in its life, that its feelings may flow freely and carry its soul out to the world and gather from the world delight and peace.

May we recall that we never need be trapped, caught, or entangled in false inner networks of negativity, resentment, or destruction towards ourselves.

May we be fluent in our feelings, carrying our soul out into the world, gathering in the world’s delight, beauty and peace, and giving it back, from whom all blessings flow.

Amen.