First United Methodist Church of Reno

¹But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. ²When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

³For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. ⁴Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you, I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life. ⁵Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; ⁶I will say to the north, “Give them up,” and to the south, “Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth—⁷everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

¹⁵As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, ¹⁶John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” ….

²¹Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, ²²and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

A long, long time ago I became convinced that I do my best thinking when I’m close to water. My most lasting inspirations come when I’m near the ocean – in it, over it, or under it! But even watering the azaleas out in front of our house, taking a shower, or with my arms up to my elbows in soapy dish water, water seems to have been a channel of great gifts to me all of my life. This might seem a long way from the imagery of Jesus baptized by his cousin in the waters of the Jordan River, but it isn’t. Water is water wherever it is. It may be more, or less, polluted; our experiences of water may be separated by centuries or by thousands of miles; and water even tastes differently from place to place, but the fact is that water from the faucet today – where we work or where we make our home – is the same H₂0, regardless of the time, the place, or the event. Like everything in excess, though, too much water can wreak terrible havoc upon creation (as we’ve witnessed in the tsunami that swept into the west coast of Thailand^³ and Hurricane Katrina that hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast^⁴). And yet without water nothing can live – neither plants nor animals, not us, not even the world that we’ve come to call our home.

So I thought that it would be a marvelous way to remember our baptisms this morning if we were to take time to contemplate the wonder of water in our lives – that’s why we’ve got the variety of images of water being projected on the screen here this morning (Thank you Doug Cleveland for pulling them together for us…and Amy Herzog for running the power-point projector!).^⁵ We are water’s children: from the haunting metaphorical image of the Book of Genesis where the spirit of God sweeps across the face of the water, to the scientist’s observation that all life began in water, to our own hidden first nine mysterious months suspended in the amniotic sea of our mother’s womb. Water is the giver of life. So we can identify with the psalmist who’s pictured one aspect of the intimate relationship with our Creator as like being led “beside still waters.”^⁶ The presence and power of this same Creator has also been compared to a “fountain of living water.”^⁷ The psalmists have long portrayed God as one who “visits” the earth to “water it,” “softening it with showers” – in truth “the river of God” itself “is full of water.”^⁸ So, too, the prophet pleads with us to “…let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”^⁹ Even within the last chapters of our Bible we are offered the assurance that we will be guided “to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.”^¹⁰

Never really a sea-faring people, to the ancient Israelites the creatures that lived in water were powerful and mysterious, because they lived where human beings could not.^¹¹ But they were fishermen. That early symbol for a Christian, the fish, came about because the word, in Greek, ichthus, was an acronym for “Jesus-Christ -God’s-Son-Savior.”^¹² It wasn’t (at least not initially) for the sake of a secret code that the persecuted Christians used to communicate with each other. That came later – as their numbers grew and the persecution, then, intensified. Throughout early Christianity the symbol of the fish, leaping through the waters of the sea, was a metaphor for the gift of life itself – divine and human life alike – full of spirit and energy, a mystery of life that even transcended human possibility.

Water’s mystical attraction is everywhere. I’ve experienced the magnetic fascination of watching water from both ends of a boat: leaning far out over the bowsprit as we sailed from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, I watched the dolphin leap and glide through the waves that our bow made, and then standing at the far stern of a huge ocean liner as the water boiled and churned away in our wake. How many of you have experienced the serenity of camping or just sitting by a swift, bubbling mountain stream? Even the frightening experience of a flood speaks of a formidable power; and yet that same imagery is summarized by the psalmist’s comparing God’s strength to waters carrying the mountains into the midst of the sea. That psalm that begins this way:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult….^¹³

…ends with a voice of reassurance saying to each of us: “Be still, and know that I am God!”^¹⁴ All of this, I submit, attests to the presence and power of water in our lives; it all ought to remind us of the consummate drama of the Christian life embodied in our baptisms.

There’s also that unforgettable moment in Arthur Penn’s account of the life of Helen Keller, in the Miracle Worker, in which the seven-year-old Helen makes an astonishing, even primal breakthrough. A child who at nineteen months of age suddenly lost both her sight and her hearing, becoming lost in that senseless void, Helen finally connects language to sensible objects.^¹⁵ With her extraordinary twenty-six-year-old teacher, Annie Sullivan, faithfully and dramatically encouraging her student through sign language, Helen finally recognizes a reality in her life well enough to give it expression in a single, almost magical, word: “Water!” From that moment on Helen became as a person newly born into the world, because her whole life began to open up and pour out astonishingly all around her. Her early experience at that well in Tuscumbia, Alabama, was surely a kind of baptism into the world of graced humanity. Helen, in fact, becomes a new creation and (as is well known) would later become a pioneer herself in her work with and for persons with disabilities – especially those who were visually impaired.

At Jesus’ baptism he too leaves his former (and mysteriously hidden) way of life and begins a new creation. He’s invited us to leave behind our old self-centered identity and narrow understandings of reality as well. His message, simply put, is that each of us is of supreme importance in the great scheme of creation. Jesus conveys this message by healing the sick, advocating on the side of the oppressed, and proclaiming that those most impoverished in our world are a blessing. He urges the rest of us – that great crowd of his disciples – not to pass judgment on other people, but to be compassionate as he is compassionate. He tells us this by suggesting that each of us needs to remove whatever’s blocking the clarity of our own vision, and not continue to stumble around in the darkness as if we were one blind soul following another.

In other words, Jesus invites us to discover what is true about ourselves and to face that truth in all of its bitterness as well as all of its beauty. In a very real sense, then, you and I have got to learn how to be baptized again and again and again. We’ve got to repeatedly descend into the deep waters that are our very souls in order to hear what the Spirit of God is whispering to us all: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.”^¹⁶

1The poet of Isaiah 43 makes the concept of our salvation real without overloading us with heavily theological vocabulary: God, who is not only our Creator, but our Savior, knows our names (v. 1), reclaims us (vv. 3-4, which is what this use of the word “ransom” means), and with shepherd-like reassurance gathers us all together (vv. 5-6) – it’s what’s happening at this very moment. But what’s even more extraordinary, according to the poet, this same God also gives us God’s own name and reminds us that we were created to be just such a blessing to each other and to others – the entire family of humanity. So as you may feel moved to remember your own baptisms this morning, hear yourself named, blessed, and called beloved.

2Along with an account of the actual baptism of Jesus, these passages from Luke combine his own summary of John, the Baptizer’s, preaching about the coming Messiah – complete with his apocalyptic imagery of a final cosmic battle between good and evil. Unfortunately, such imagery as this has led many fundamentalist Christians to support making literal warfare against “unbelievers” – making Christians just as bad as any of the Muslim “jihadists” who want to wipe us out, too, ironically for the very same reason.

5What was being projected onto the screen were images of lakes, streams, oceans, sweating bodies, marine life, water games, even glasses of water – all to remind us of the gift that water is for us.

11Job, who came to curse the day that he was born because of his suffering, said: “Let those curse it who curse the Sea, those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan” – that culture’s name for a “sea monster” that they knew only as a creature to fear.

12A transliteration that might look like this: Ieso Christos Theos Uios Soter – where that word in Greek, again, ichthus, literally means “fish.”

15I, like many people, have mistakenly believed that Helen Keller was blind and deaf at birth. Her story is even more dramatic than that. See http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=1&TopicID=129 for the American Foundation for the Blind’s website on “the rest of the story.”

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

January 7, 2007