Sermon: Remember Your Baptism

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Remember Your Baptism

By Charles Rush

January 30, 2005

you stay around Christ Church long enough with your children, they may well go through the 'double dip'. The first time, when they are wee babies, we baptize them with just a wee bit of water, and make the sign of the cross on their foreheads. But if they stay around through Confirmation when they are in 8th grade, we also line them up in the spring, march them into the pool, and dunk them into the water. You may ask why we splash them twice. The answer is because the parents at Christ Church, by and large, are half as sure about their children as other churches.

The tradition has grown on me over the years, giving our Confirmands a full immersion in the chilling water of spring. Essentially, they come to the end of Confirmation and they stand before their families, before their neighbors, and they are saying that even though they don't have all the answers, even though they may have some questions about God and some criticisms about the way that God designed the world, they are going to step out and claim for themselves the faith of their parents, of their church, and they are starting out as very young adults on that road.

It is actually quite a moving thing. And knowing what we know is in store for them, it is appropriate that they start out with a bracing, sobering, shivering cold dunk. By the time they are thirteen or fourteen, all of them need it.

I remember one of my first years here, a father came up to me and said, "Reverend, I notice that you held my son under just a little longer than the others this year." Knowing this young man, it may well have been true. So I said, "Did I hold him down too long?" And the father said, "Actually, not long enough."

Every year my Confirmands complain about the cold water and I explain that it is an old building and there just wasn't any heat. Imagine my surprise when I was down stairs in the basement with our plumber fixing a boiler last year, and I asked him what this one valve went to and he said, 'that heats the water for the baptistery.' I thought about our long tradition. I thought about the comfort of the warm caressing waters. I thought about all my former Confirmands, now in college that would cry foul at warm water, I closed my eyes in prayer and saw the faces of all 10 classes of Confirmands one by one come before me. I said 'Amen', opened my eyes, and said, "Take out the pipe permanently." We need that cold water…

In our text this morning, Jesus says, "I will give you living water… and you will never thirst." Such a powerful image.

There are two images of water in the Bible, one of Chaos and one of Cosmos. The image of Chaos, we were reminded of dramatically lately when the Tsunami hit in Southeast Asia.

This Tsunami resulted from an earthquake that lifted the plates under the sea 30 feet on the fault line, telephone pole size. And it moved all that water. We know how much water weighs. Every summer you take a few buckets for your kids at the beach. A full bucket about breaks your arm. This moved billions of buckets of water smashing into shore, but perhaps more dramatically, the rip tide pulled it all out with a force that just swallowed up men, women and children in its wake. It is a power you can't swim against.

The Sea has such a power of destruction that the ancient Babylonians thought it was ruled by a demonic monster Tiamat that is often depicted like a great dragon. You can easily imagine this great dragon thrashing about when you look at the radar image of a hurricane raging across the Atlantic in the early fall.

Likewise, the Greeks believed that the sea was ruled by the God Poseidon, the god the Romans called Neptune. After Zeus divided the universe in half, an upper half and a lower half, he allowed the lower half to be ruled over by Hades, a sinister god who allowed all manner of devilishness to control that which is below: Caves, the night, the sea. And Poseidon, the god of the sea answers to Hades. So wise sailors, before they set sail would give an offering to Poseidon to appease him. Wise sailors, as soon as they reached shore safely made straight to the Temple to make and oblation of thanksgiving to Poseidon.

The sea can easily become overwhelming. My son tells me that when you surf even the medium size waves in Hawaii in the winter, the fifteen to twenty footers, what you don't see after the surfers wipe out is how far down the waves push you. They push you down, you are disoriented, and it takes a full 25 seconds to get back to the surface. That is a long time, especially if another one is crashing on top of you again.

The sea is like that. A good friend of mine who took the opportunity given to him to sail around the world solo a few years ago, described being up on the western side of Greenland with the swells dropping 25 and then 40 feet, bobbing and weaving as the day turned towards night, a keen eye on ice floes that could gouge the boat at any time. You know I understand the challenge but 'no thanks, not the kid'. My number 1 rule for sailing without land in sight is: only in 78 degree water. No, he went all through the night on red alert and made it to the other side.

The sea is an abiding symbol of chaos, of menace and threat in the ancient world. As the philosopher David Hume once noted about huge northern storms in Scotland, they show a cold indifference towards those in their path. Like the untamed Mississippi river when I was a child, you would see whole trees after the swollen spring storms, parts of houses just floating down stream with everything else…

And water is also the symbol of replenishment. It is fundamentally our life source. There is that lovely line from an Irish blessing that says "May the rain fall gentle on your fields." I never fully grasped that line until I traded pulpits in the highlands of Scotland. They have a rain in the British Isles that we don't have in the States. Our rain always comes in droplets. With some regularity, they have a rain that is like you are in the middle of the cloud itself. It is a misting. As the Irish say, "it is a soft day". And the most amazing result. We used to walk in the evening down to the soccer fields. They took so much rain and the grass repaired itself so well that there were no brown spots on the field, not even in front of the goals. And they cut the grass down like a putting green. Scotland is so lush and beautiful but the locals say that the soil is so poor that it would shrivel up and everything would die in a month but for the fact that it rains 300 days out of the year gently.

Water is very peaceful isn't it? When we made a trip down to the rain forest in Belize that sound of the rain in the afternoon defines the day. There just aren't any people and the rain falls hard every day for an hour or so and there is nothing to do but just stop and take in the deafening peace infusing sound of the rain on the leaves of the huge jungle flora. You can feel your pulse slowing as you listen to it… Maybe a short siesta is in order. It is like the world around you is going through Nature's delicate rinse cycle for fine lingerie. And an hour later, it just stops and the ground soaks the surface moisture up in no time and we go on.

Brooks have that even peaceful sound. My brother and sister-in-law own a camp in Brevard, North Carolina. I love to visit them, especially at Thanksgiving; we have the whole camp to our family. Most rational people stay up at their house, but not me. I make Kate stay in one of the Cabin's, no insulation, no heat, and lotta blankets. This cabin is right over the edge of a brook that is running down the side of the Mountain with that cold, fresh, trout stream water. I'll put up with the cold to hear the water gurgling all night. I sleep a different sleep, a deeper sleep. And if my vision comes to pass in the future, one day, I'll have water going right under my house like Frank Lloyd Wright.

Water also is peaceful for us like nothing else quite. And it is replenishing. We drink all day long. Remember being thirsty, really thirsty. Where were you? What were you doing? Remember finally taking that long, cool drink. How about your friends as kids that drank so much cold water they got a headache… brain freeze. My dog is a German short haired pointer and they will run until they die. I love when she runs herself almost faint in the summer and finally jumps into a pond of water and just wades around in circles, lapping up as much as she can. Water is replenishing. It is in everything we eat. It is the basis of the life force that we all participate in...

And water is cleansing. There is nothing in this world quite as viscerally wonderful following a two day hot and dirty hike as falling in a cool mountain pond of water and rinsing off. I remember traveling in college, dusty and dirty after many days on the rough road in Turkey, being able to take just a razor into the great bath house in Istanbul, a huge maze of heated marble slabs that wend around and down, around and down. You just sit near a spigot with a bowl in your hand, steam rising all around and you lather up and pour hot steaming water over your head. There is nothing quite as wonderful as shaving off 5 days of scrubby beard, getting a massage and then taking off the final layer of grime. In the bath houses, they wrap you tight in towels and lay you down with a cup of tea, so clean you squeak.

Everywhere in the Middle East, you find fountains in the center of the village, usually right across from the Mosque or the Synagogue. In both of the other faiths that spring from Abraham and Sarah, cleaning up, washing is part of going to worship. It is a sign of respect for the Almighty and a basic spiritual discipline that regardless of how corrupt or hypocritical we are, we want to scrub up our souls before we address the Almighty. Of course, in the Middle East, there is dust literally everywhere, especially on the road. So you get to this fountain, and people stop, wash first their feet, then their heads and faces and their hands. And then they go inside to pray.

In Christianity, the symbolism of washing is a major part of baptism. The earliest Christians emphasized this because of the profundity of change that happened in their lives. Many of our earliest Christians were converts from Roman religion. They were soldiers who had lived lives of violence and cruelty and wanton destruction. Then they heard about the life of peace and love that Jesus offered and they made a dramatic change and left the Army and repented of their former ways and took a new and different path. Others were prostitutes and had internalized all of the low self-esteem and degradation that prostitutes routinely endure from then until now, the anger and self-loathing and nobodiness. Then they heard the message from Jesus that God loved them and they were important and that there was nothing that God could not forgive and redeem. They were profoundly changed by that and left behind a former life, made a commitment to follow after God in the way of Jesus. They needed a dramatic symbol to mark that change and the earliest Christian baptisms were dramatic.

Converts studied for a year, reading scripture, working in study groups with a leader, growing in spiritual maturity. The week before Easter, they fasted and prayed for the whole week, only having limited foods. From Good Friday, through Holy Saturday, they had several different scripture readings and songs every few hours until the wee hours of Sunday morning on Easter.

They were led outside before dawn and they prayed in the darkness for the hour before the dawn. Then they were led into the baptismal pool. They were usually about chest deep and had stairs that went down into them. Often they were in the shape of a cross with a circle around it, much like the Celtic crosses that adorn our church. Before their baptism, they wore a simple tunic that looked like a night gown. As they stepped into the pool, they took off the tunic so that they were naked, just like they were in their physical birth, so they were naked in their spiritual rebirth.

The Priest would face them to the West looking back into the darkness of the life they were leaving behind, then they went down into the primal waters of sustenance and cleansing. Under water, they were turned around towards the East so that upon arising they could see the first light of a new dawn, the symbol of hope in the bible.

Upon coming out of the water, they were given a new robe of white linen that they put on. After they were all baptized they had the Lord's Supper together. Only at this Lord's Supper, instead of simply having bread and wine, as we do regularly, they also had honeycomb and fresh milk, symbols of the sweetness and joy of this life and the next in the Hebrew Scriptures.

I know some of you are thinking, Reverend, start a service like that and we just might boost attendance… I, too, the first time I heard about it, give me that old time religion… But the older I get, the more I'd like to see something like that for weightier spiritual reasons. We really do get to junctures in our lives where a dramatic change has taken place. Many of us really do go through bad relationships and compromised periods of our life that we would like to wash off. Listen to the journalist Pete Hamill or the radio host Don Imus, neither Christians, but both reformed drunks and that is the way they describe their lives, my drinking life, my sober life. And then there are the times of our lives that are profound spiritual changes, perhaps without great moral overtone, like losing a spouse at mid-life or having the children up and grown out of the house, pretty far away and you are like 'what do we do now'. And you know, with a little excitement perhaps, with a little fear perhaps, that this next chapter is going to be very different, different rules, different expectations, different needs.

It very much feels, spiritually, like you need a new birth, a new you that is about to emerge from the Chrysalis, a whole new avatar. We come to the waters for sustenance, for peace, for cleansing.

Some of you know that this is my vision for the rest of our building. I would like to finish the atrium off around this theme of water. Inside the atrium, right where the Labyrinth starts, I would like to place a wall of water that falls down a 6 foot sheet of glass and drops onto rocks in the basin creating the tranquil sound of water. You know that the word 'Sanctuary' literally means 'place of peace' and I would like to create that peace with water and promote tranquility.

Then last summer, I saw what we needed for the area right outside the atrium towards the memorial garden. When you are in the middle of the Labyrinth, there is nothing to focus your gaze on at the moment. We need a fountain to focus our gaze and I saw the shape of what we need at the Al Hambra in Granada, Spain. Built 1000 years ago by Muslim rulers in Spain, this fountain is in the shape of a Celtic cross with the circle around. It turns out that the four projections of the cross represent four virtues in Islam and in the original fountain; there are four canals that feed the fountain. When I saw it, I thought how wonderful if we could use a symbol inherent in our tradition that also picks up a motif with Islam, because in this era we really need to be making connections wherever we can.

Our fountain will lose the lions and keep with the simple stone from the building. It will probably be just tall enough that you can sit on the edge of it, capped off with flagstone. And the water inside, hopefully, will feature a few fish. I can see the children at Christ Church out feeding the fish after worship. And it will have an inner fountain in the middle that we can light from below, so that if you are walking the Labyrinth, when you get to the center, when you look up you will see a bubbling fountain of water, and stay in a moment of reflective peace. Because isn't that what we ought to be about, promoting ways to find some peace and to stay in that peace as well?

My brothers and sisters, may peace be with you, and remember that God is there to sustain you, to refresh you, to cleanse you as you go through the changes of your life. Amen.

At this time, I would like to invite you all to come forward to the baptismal font and fountain. Place your hands in he water. Touch your forehead or face with the water of life- remembering that you belong to God and are beloved.

Come, come to the water.

Come, you who are thirsty.

Come to the water.

For the mighty acts of God are known to us through water.

Water, the primordial pool of creation over which the Sprit hovered.

Water, that cleansed the whole earth for new beginnings, new growth.

Water that divided so slaves could walk to freedom on dry ground.

Water, our bath, our tomb, and our womb.

Water, by which we are adopted and daughters and sons of the Most High.

Come to the water and give thanks to God whose mighty acts are known through water.

Amen.