Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 8, 2006
Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
There is surely no area of Christian doctrine about which utter nonsense has not been written and believed by many, many people. Maybe it’s the Catholic insistence that the body of Christ is somehow present in the elements of the Eucharist not symbolically or spiritually but physically. Maybe it’s the medieval doctrine, so wide-spread among us as virtually to have swallowed up the entire Christian faith itself, that God could not forgive human sin without the bloody sacrifice of the Son of God in the person of Jesus. Maybe it’s the absurd contention made by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, albeit in slightly different form, that the church is infallible in its doctrinal teachings. Maybe it’s the contention, so alien to Jesus himself, that belief in Jesus is the one and only way to God. Maybe it’s the notion, so much more Islamic than Christian, that holy scripture is the literal, divinely revealed words of God. Or maybe it’s the idea, still prevalent in many Christian circles, that Christian baptism is necessary to keep a person’s soul, anyone’s soul, from spending eternity in hell. It’s this last one that I want to take a closer look at this morning.
As many of you already know, I don’t believe that baptism is necessary for forgiveness or even that forgiveness is primarily what baptism is all about. And not just me, but mainline Protestantism generally does not believe that about baptism. There is of course some minimal Biblical warrant for that view. For example, in Chapter 2 of Acts, after Peter has preached his Pentecost sermon to the people of Jerusalem and people ask him what they should do, Peter says: "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven...." Acts 2:38. One could conclude from that line that baptism is require for forgiveness of sin. But of course we can’t read that line, or any other Biblical line, in isolation. In the Gospels Jesus never baptizes anyone, yet he got himself in trouble for telling people that their sins were forgiven. See for example Mark 2:1-12. Moreover, if we truly believe in God’s grace, it’s pretty hard to see how some human act such as one person baptizing another is required for God to do what God will do, namely, to save every person.
Yet the church taught for centuries, and some parts of the church still teach, that without Christian baptism the soul is damned. Why? I suspect it was more a political matter than a truly theological one. If baptism is required for forgiveness, and if the church controls baptism, the church has immense power over the people who need salvation, which of course is all of us. It’s also a matter I think of cultural imperialism. The Christian church was the official church of empire from the 4th century on. Imperial thinking doesn’t tolerate difference. It demands uniformity. For an imperial church such as the Christian church became, there could be no other path to God than through the church. The only way was the church’s way, and one entered the church’s way through baptism. Thus, if you weren’t baptized you weren’t in the church, and if you weren’t in the church, you weren’t saved.
Be that as it may, we mainline Protestant types believe today that the function of baptism is not the forgiveness of sin but rather inclusion in the Christian Church, the Body of Christ. We share that with our tradition, without however the tradition’s imperialistic claim of exclusivism. A person is made a part of the church by baptism; and once it’s done, it’s done. Forgiveness isn’t a once for all thing, but admission into the family of Christ is. So while we partake of the other Sacrament of the church, Holy Communion, over and over again, we don’t rebaptize. We don’t need to. When you’re baptized, you’re baptized. End of story.
So you may well ask: If we don’t rebaptize, and if we don’t need to rebaptize, why do we renew our baptismal vows? Or maybe you’d rather put it: Why does Sorenson do a renewal of baptismal vows service every year on Baptism of Christ Sunday? My answer to that question has to do with the nature of the Christian life. It’s common among us today to think that the Christian life is about belief, about believing "the right things," especially the right things about Jesus. Yet it seems to me that that is not what the Christian life, what being a Christian, is primarily about. Rather, the Christian life is about a commitment we make to live our spiritual lives within the Christian tradition, within the Christian story. Being a Christian is about making a decision to trust our lives to the God we see and know in and through Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. When we make that commitment, that decision, we can reap all the spiritual benefits that God offers us through this great Christian faith of ours-hope, peace, joy, courage, and so many others. Perhaps most of all when we truly undertake to live our lives according to that decision, that commitment, we find that our lives have meaning and purpose. Filled with the love of God, we take that love into the world that God so loves, seeking to make that love real in a world that so consistently rejects it and opts instead for the ways of hatred and war. When we make that decision, that commitment, our lives take on the meaning of being God’s witnesses in the world, the meaning of being the bearers of God’s love for all people and for all creation. All of that isn’t a matter of believing facts as much as it is making a commitment and living according to that commitment.
And that commitment is not a once for all thing. Douglas John Hall, the Canadian theologian who, with John Buchanan, the editor of the journal The Christian Century, I can call my "mentor from afar," puts it this way: "[Faith] is not a once-for-all accomplishment....It is an ongoing response to God, to the world, to life. It is therefore a matter of decision-taken not once, but over and over again...." It is a commitment that needs our constant attention, indeed our constant recommitment. It is a decision that we make not once but again and again every day for so long as we walk the Christian path.
And so while baptism is a once for all thing, faith is not. Baptism involves vows that we take ourselves or that others take on our behalf if we are baptized as children that express that commitment, that decision, to live as Christians, following as best we are able the path that Christ lays out for us. Baptism starts us on that Christian path. Reaffirmation of those baptismal vows re-expresses our Christian decision, our Christian commitment. If we were baptized as children and have never made our own statement of that commitment, reaffirming the vows someone else took on our behalf is a powerful way expressing our own decision, our own commitment to live as disciples of Christ. It’s not the only way to do that, and by itself it is not an adequate way to do it, because we don’t do it but once a year. It is however a particularly powerful public, symbolic way of making or affirming our Christian decision, our Christian commitment.
So I invite all of you who are baptized to come forward in a few minutes, be sprinkled again with symbolic water, and affirm or reaffirm your baptism. If you have not been baptized, I invite you to come forward anyway. For you it won’t be a reaffirmation of baptism, but it can still be a blessing that reminds you of God’s love for you and all people and strengthens you in your own faith journey, wherever you may be on that journey. May our little ritual here be a blessing for all of us and strengthen us as we seek to live as disciples of Christ. Amen.