Sermon Title: "Named In Baptism"
Date: January 10, 2010
Minister: Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Last Wednesday at our staff meeting, our music director asked if I always plan a baptism on the Sunday the church celebrates the baptism of Jesus.  I told her no, it just happened that way, but it sure is nice when it does.  Ruby’s mother and I exchanged many phone calls over the months as we tried to find the right Sunday for the family and this church.

And even better than that, at this evening’s meeting of the confirmation class, guess what our topic is:  baptism!  So if the high schoolers pay attention to the sermon today, they’ll get an A on tonight’s test.  Just kidding!  But listen anyway.

In this church, we frequently baptize infants, sometimes children aged seven or eight, teenagers about to be confirmed if they weren’t baptized as infants, and sometimes adults. 

Today’s lesson, the baptism of Jesus as an adult, is recognized as the beginning of his ministry.  As with all adult—or believers’—baptisms, it signifies forgiveness of sin and newness of life.  In Jesus’ time, as recorded in the Gospels, those baptized into the Christian faith were adults.

But scholars believe by the end of the first century of the Christian church, infants and children were also being baptized.  References in the book of Acts to the baptism of “households” may be understood to include young children.  Their use of the term “household” at the time specifically included young children.  Furthermore, certain indications of early Christian writers suggest that infant baptism began early in the New Testament period.  Polycarp, wrote at his martyrdom in the middle of the second century, “Eighty-and-six years have I been [Christ’s] slave.”  This implies his reception into the church, and consequently his baptism, as an infant around 69 or 70 A.D., about forty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.

We are fortunate as Protestants that we celebrate just two sacraments that are easy to remember and seen here frequently:  baptism and communion.  And neither of them, I believe, have strayed too far in language or meaning from their institution by Jesus. 

Christian baptism for infants is first a celebration by the church that God loves a child quite apart from anything the child ever has to do to merit or earn that love. 

God’s order of events is this:  a child is not loved because he or she is worthy; rather, the child’s life has worth precisely because the child is loved.  Jesus did not wait for people to be worthy for him to love.  He went out on his own to meet, heal and love persons from every walk of life.  He stretched out his arms to the estranged, the downtrodden, the forgotten, the ugly, the hated; and he loved them just the way they were.

So too it is with baptism.  God takes the initiative in coming to us.  We are God’s from the moment our human life is conceived in some deep, dark corner of our mother’s womb.  We cannot really say we began to be God’s at some later point.  The very reason we do not view baptism as a dedication of a child is that the child is already God’s.  Baptism does not make the child God’s, but rather recognizes that he or she already is.  We come here to celebrate and give thanks for that.

If God first takes the initiative, the second act is our response.  Baptism, as a sacrament of the church, takes place in a service of worship at the church in which the parents are associated.  The parents pledge themselves to faithfully raise the child in a loving home atmosphere and in the Christian faith.

As a congregation, we are invited to participate in this sacrament each time it is celebrated.  As the people of God, you pledge your support to the child and to the parents:  to pray with and for the child, and to set before these children at all times examples of wholesome Christian living, so that the children of our church may experience the Gospel they hear preached in this place acted out in our lives.

You not only pledge this for yourselves on behalf of children baptized here, but you symbolically represent the congregations of all the other churches those children may grow in and where they will be nurtured in the Christian faith in the future.  Baptism then is not an isolated event occurring at Bay Shore Community Congregational Church on this January morning, but it is a rite which will follow every child baptized here wherever they may go.  I realize that the act performed at  Pilgrim Congregational Church in Los Angeles, where I was baptized at four months of age, still influences what and who I am today.  But even though I have been raised in this denomination all my life, I was not baptized as a “Congregationalist.”  I commonly but mistakedly hear people say, “I was baptized a Methodist . . . I was baptized a Presbyterian . . .I was baptized a Catholic.”  They may have been baptized in a Methodist, Presbyterian or Catholic church, but they were baptized as Christians.  Baptism has nothing to do with denominations, and everything to do with being a Christian.

In Jesus’ parting words to his disciples, just before he ascended into heaven, the Risen Christ pointed them toward the future with a mission:

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them

in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” 

      --Matthew 28:19

The fact that we are still performing the same sacrament in the same words of Jesus over nineteen centuries later confirms that his disciples of old, and we too, have been faithful to that Great Commission.

If baptism comes loaded with such a richness of meaning based on its historical roots, each act we participated in this morning has meaning too.

THE WATER OF BAPTISM represents the promise of cleansing or forgiveness.  While I believe no infant is guilty of sin, the water is symbolic of the cleansing one received when immersed in the river as an adult as baptism was first practiced.  Like Christ, in a symbolic way, we die and are resurrected to a new existence.  Our old self dies, and in the water of baptism, a new, cleansed self is born.

A CHILD BEING HANDED TO THE MINISTER represents the tender love of God as if the child were being taken into God’s own arms, and as a sign that a child is being taken into the love and care of the church.

LAYING OF THE MINISTER’S HAND on the child’s forehead symbolizes the gift of the Holy Spirit, actively working in us.  Mentioned in our middle and last hymns today, the Gloria and Doxology, the Holy Spirit reminds us that at all times and in all places in our lives, God will be present with us as God’s purposes are worked out through us.

SAYING THE FIRST AND MIDDLE NAME signifies each person is called by God.  While you’ve doubtless heard this sacrament referred to as “Christening,” it is actually this one portion, and means that a child has been given a Christian name.  In the old days, before public birth certificates issued by the county, it was the church’s baptismal records that served as proof of birth and parentage.  Even secular society refers to your first and middle names as being your “Christian” names, and to your last name as your surname.

At the end of his account of the birth of Christ, Luke writes:  “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” (2:21)  But several decades later at his baptism, Jesus was given another name by his Heavenly Father:  “You are my Son, the Beloved…”  (3:22)

THE VOWS SPOKEN by parents, godparents and congregation are our response to God and our acceptance to lead newly baptized children into the way of Christ.

Why baptize infants?  There is little chance that Ruby, baptized here today, will remember what was done on her behalf.  But that is just it!  Her parents wanted her to take part in this sacrament, so all of us spoke and acted on her behalf.  We promised we would raise her as God would have us do.  We promised that we would nurture her in the Christian faith.

As children grow, they will hear about and see pictures and videos of their baptism, just as the children who came up for Children’s Time will likely ask about their own baptisms on the way home from church or at lunch today.  Parents:  be prepared!  That is one of the reasons I always schedule baptisms while the children are still present in the sanctuary. 

Not everyone is baptized as an infant.  Some parents were not active in a church at that time in their child’s life.  Others want the child to be old enough to remember, or have children make their own decision.  Adults are baptized because it wasn’t made available to them earlier or it didn’t matter until now.  The first person I ever baptized as a new minister in 1973 was not an infant, as I expected, but a 92-year-old woman in a nursing home!

For those who were baptized as young children, what I refer to as the second half of baptism comes later in confirmation.  When our children enter 9th and 10th grade, when they are able to make up their own minds about church membership and participation, they—a dozen of which I will meet with this evening—will have the opportunity to say, “Yes, I believe what my parents did for me when I was too young to speak for myself.  Now I want to respond on my own by being confirmed—by learning more about my faith and by joining the church as a member.”  Just as baptism is entrance into the Christian faith, confirmation is the entrance into church membership.

I believe it is through what we have witnessed and participated in this morning—and every time the baptismal font is set in our midst –that we experience the wondrous and everlasting love of the God who welcomes us with open arms into this kingdom, and I believe, will do so in the next.  It is the same God who, in Christ, said to his disciples, and promises us still:

“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

--Matthew 28:20b