Baptism of Christ, January 13, 2019, "Becoming toast"

C Baptism of Christ BFC 2019

Galatians 3:26-28; Luke 3:1-6, 21-23a

January 13, 2019

Remember answering machines?  Before Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, day was when individuals and families would reveal a piece of their identity with a fun, pithy, or just plain entertaining message on their answering machine.    Some of my best friends from the church I served in New Hampshire, a senior couple, would record a new, original poem from the husband Grant, for every season.  My sense of humor, twisted and sick, in a former time of course, had me threatening to kill a small, beagle puppy unless people left a message (whining of the puppy).  Yes, I know.  Jesus saved me. 

My all-time favorite answering machine messages came from a family that had a deep-thinking teenage son.  Every so often he would have some profound, philosophical thought that was funny at first but really made you think as your day went on.  Causing the listener to ponder, one of those messages really stood out to me.  After the fourth ring, one would hear:  “Once bread has become toast, it cannot be bread again.”

I laughed and laughed the first time I heard that message.  After a while, I realized how, in one turn of phrase, this teenage boy had summed up what believer’s baptism means in the Christian tradition.  For once we know we are loved and cherished and that God is active in our lives, we cannot possibly be the same again.  Our world, or at least the perspective on our world, must change.  The transformation does not have to be an earth-shattering moment with doves, wind, and fire.  The transformation can be a way of slowly burning or becoming into being—an evolution that leads to a new way of existence.  But it is a transformation. 

We have treated baptism as a cosmetic, like roll-on or spray can deodorant, instead of as a commitment.[1]  Episcopal priest, Grant Gallup writes, “Baptism will wash the world itself into the Wetback Liberation Movement, wherein we are all swimming to the Other Side of Jordan. . . . Your Baptism means that you are committed to God's brand of justice, it means you've accepted appointment as an agent and an asset to revolutionary change, and it means you've accepted immersion in, solidarity with, all the changes necessary to create a truly human future.”  Water no longer becomes a privatized commodity and instead is understood as a sister or brother, sibling or cousin in our movement to restore the world of Creator.[2]

In pointing to the pivotal moments which led her to ordained ministry, author, pastor, and teacher, Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor writes of her Grandma Lucy, who ran a boarding house in College Park, Georgia.  Taylor continues:

           Grandma Lucy was known both for her considerable shrewd business 

           sense and her bad temper, a combination that earned her a fair 

           measure of respect in the community.  In her later years she was an                       awesome presence, especially to a child.  Having lost both legs to a 

           case of diabetes she refused to treat, she presided from a stainless steel                   wheelchair, her two wooden legs propped in front of her like buttresses.  

          She wore black aviator sunglasses to shield her failing eyes from the 

          light, which gave her face all the openness of a vault.  In old 

          photographs, she looks most like a handicapped bomber pilot.

But with her three grandchildren, this woman was as gentle as a breeze.  She loved us like nothing else in the world and we knew it.  Whenever we came to visit, there were closetsful of wrapped presents, one for each day of the week; trips to town for new dresses with net petticoats, and favorite desserts for dinner; baby chicks from the feed store and long afternoons on the porch swing in her arms.  But her best gifts were her baths.  When my night came she treated me like long lost royalty, filling the tub with suds and then beckoning me in, where she washed each of my limbs in turn and polished my skin with her great, soft sponge.  After she had dried me off, I lay down for the next part of the ritual.  First, she anointed me with Jergen’s Lotion, starting with my neck and finishing up with the soles of my feet.  Then she reached for her dusting powder—Evening in Paris—and tickled me all lover with the pale, blue puff.  When she was done, I knew I was precious.  I was absolutely convinced I was loved, and nothing that has happened since, not even her death, has shaken that conviction.

Can there be any doubt that what Grandma Lucy was doing to her granddaughter was baptizing her time and time again, taking a little girl who hears all kinds of messages in her world about how she is second class, how she is supposed to look or act like a lady, how she is a privatized commodity, how her body is an object for male gaze and not a subject of her own pleasure, and Grandma Lucy saying counter-culturally to her, “You are nothing but precious in the sight of God?”

            As we learned back in Verse 3:1, Luke pinpoints the date of this event as "the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius." Which would be 28-29 A.D. Which would make John and Jesus about 33. Which in their day was about the average life span of the poor. Which was about 80% of the population. And which were the people both John and Jesus belonged to. Jesus and John were not young men in the prime of their life. They were elders. And if they had not escaped the usual life of the poor, they also suffered from long hours of hard work, poor diets, and lack of sanitation.  Jesus' baptism is not about repentance. It is about his identity being publicly, ritually re-rooted into Creator. [3]

John the Baptist told the crowds they had abandoned God.  They had abandoned God by not remembering they were the people God delivered from Egypt.  They had abandoned God by not remembering that the land was God’s given to them for the benefit of the whole community.  Bread, and goods, and services were shared for the benefit of the whole community.  As Jesus related his Jewish tradition, all these gifts of God were meant to flow back and forth across the table in mutuality.  The Jordan River had once been the place the Children of God crossed to remember that God wanted them to be a free, liberated, promised, and mutual people.  

Rome wanted people to remember that they were a subject, beaten, and occupied people.  As long as one remembered that, everything would be just fine.  Caesar was the only actor in life’s play.  As long as one remembers that all bread, and goods, and taxes, and services flow upwards toward Caesar, the Roman peace will be kept.  

But once bread becomes toast it can never be toast again.

Through commercials, the wider culture, messages we receive every day, we are told that we are an audience, consumers, only being acted upon and enslaved to this way of being. Creator wills that we know ourselves to be subjects in God’s story.   No matter what Caesars calls us, we shall be known as the Children of God.

There is also a social dimension to baptism as related by the earliest baptismal creed we have in Paul’s letter to the communities in Galatia.  In Christ Jesus, there is neither Jew nor Greek, a designation relating ethnic and religious difference.  In Christ Jesus, there is neither slave nor free, a designation relating socio-economic and caste status.  In Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor free, a designation relating differences in sexuality and gender. 

The German theologian Dorothee Sollee quotes the 14^th Century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart to say that if God is really God, then God is that which is most communicable.  Sollee goes on to write that “God desperately desires to be shared—that is part of who God is.”  All bread, and goods, and services and love should be shared.

What a wonderful possibility that lays at our feet.  Sollee continues, “To embrace God means to embrace a process—a process of going forward, a process of infusing everything.  Only with our partnership can that love become incarnate in our world every day.  God dreams for us.”

Sollee believes, “Today, at this moment, God has an image and hope for what we are becoming.  We should not let God dream alone.”

I have told Lisa I think we are a baptism church.  There is something happening here where we have a whole bunch of people who have decided to be baptized.  I believe that is happening because the character of baptism lends itself to what is needed in a world where our identities are mixed and varied and unique. And . . .  because we also long for connection that allows for our diverse identity.  Many of us are looking for an identity that affirms our diverse, beautifully unique, journeys in a profound multicultural mix.  But we also long for connection that allows us retain our unique identity and reaches across the great divide to learn from each other, enjoy one another, and find solidarity with one another.  Our culture is trying to tell us who we are.  And baptism offers a path, a road, that is open to a creative and connected future.      

For once we know we are precious and loved, we can never, ever be bread again.  We are on fire.  We are becoming toast, set out into a world that needs to hear that good news.  Once baptism is done, we are truly becoming toast—set on fire by the idea that God wants us to be known as a free, liberated, and promised people, uniquely diverse and connected to begin the sometimes gritty, sometimes joyous inauguration into the revolution of love that heals, shares, and struggles across the great divide of religion, ethnicity, and culture; socioeconomic status and caste; gender and sexuality.  It is time to tell the world the same dream.  Amen.

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[1] Grant Mauricio Gallup, “Epiphany IC,” Homily Grits, January 6, 2007, https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits/msg00002.html.

[2] Ibid.

[3] David Ewart, “Year C, Epiphany 1, Baptism of the Lord, January 13, 2019,” Holy Textures, https://www.holytextures.com/2009/12/luke-3-15-17-21-22-year-c-epiphany-1-january-7-january-13-baptism-sermon.html.