Rooted in Baptism

Is anybody else bad about leaving the tag on? Over the years, I have had my share of Minnie Pearl moments. No sooner than I would get a new outfit I’d be out the door with the tag dangling right along with me for the day. I’d get back home and mom would laugh and rip off the tag saying “where you going Minnie Pearl?”

Tags tell the story of where something is from. They have a way of marking something. Have you ever tagged something as your own by putting your name on it? I love in the Toy Story movies Buzz and Woody have such pride that they each have Andy’s name on them. Andy’s name is a sign that they are loved and in the life of a toy and in our own lives, to be known and loved is to be fully alive.

Methodists celebrate baptism as the permanent tag or mark of God’s grace upon our lives. We consider baptism to be one of two sacraments (which is a fancy way of saying an outward sign of an inward grace). Just as we use bread and juice as symbols of the grace at work in Holy Communion, we use water as a symbol of the grace of God at work in baptism.

Some people make baptism all about the water. Whether you sprinkle, pour, slide or dive, the grace of God is still the same. Water, whatever the amount, is a symbol of both life and death and thus when we are baptized we are sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ as a symbol of dying to our old self and being born anew into the life of Christ and into the family of God. The laying on of hands and the prayer is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. We baptize by water and the spirit.

I recently read a story of a baptism in a font that hadn’t been used in a while. They had to clean it out and came across a few spiders and even a scorpion. The day came and the pastor had the lady under the water and out of the corner of his eye saw something fuzzy. Initially he thought it was a spider and was panicking on the inside and trying to remain calm, but then looked and to his horror saw that it was her wig that had come clean off and was floating in the font beside him. Maybe your baptism didn’t have a floating wig. Maybe you were lucky if you had a hair on your head or you just had a few drops. It doesn’t matter. The floating wig makes me think of what gets left behind in our baptism. When we are claimed as beloved child of God, everything else falls away.

In our text today, Jesus gets in line with everyone else and is baptized and given a new name. At Jesus’s baptism, he identifies with all of us. We all are bound together in the waters of our baptism. Jesus joins them and gets in line with them. And in that line and fresh up from the water, Jesus receives his new name and identity as Beloved. In our baptism, we join him and remember that we are God’s beloved as well. Being given a new name, is a powerful thing. Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Memorial in D.C was once asked why it was that her remarkable work seemed to have such a strong grip, such a deep emotional impact. She replied, “It’s the names. The names are the memorial. No edifice or structure can bring people to mind as powerfully as their names.”

Beloved, precious, child of God, and beautiful to behold.

Baptism, like Andy’s toys, is when God marks us and calls us beloved. Eric Peterson tells the story of seeing a woman rub her face against a young foal not long after it was born. When asking her what she she was doing, she said, “Imprinting. Seeing that the word wasn’t registering for me, she continued: ​“If, in the first hours of its life, a horse is exposed to you, where it gets your smell, and hears your voice, it’s much easier to train as it grows up. From now on I’m like a surrogate mother to that horse, and it will respond to my voice, and trust me to lead it. We’ve bonded.”

Baptism is this beautiful moment in which we are imprinted with God’s grace and welcomed into God’s family. Laceye Warner says “In baptism, we acknowledge God’s action in our lives. Though we are responding to God’s grace (as an infant the parents respond on their behalf, as an adult they respond on their own) the primary focus of baptism is God’s invitation and forgiveness. United Methodists do not re-baptize since God’s action is faithful and unchanging.”

Jan Richardson tells the story of a woman named Fayette who made her way into a Methodist church in Nashville. Fayette lived with mental illness and lupus and without a home. She joined the new member class. The conversation was about baptism—“this holy moment when we are named by God’s grace with such power it won’t come undone,” as the pastor put it—especially grabbed Fayette’s imagination. Janet tells of how, during the class, Fayette would ask again and again, “And when I’m baptized, I am…?” “The class learned to respond, ‘Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ she’d say, and then we could go back to our discussion.”

The day of Fayette’s baptism came. This is how the pastor describes it:

Fayette went under, came up spluttering, and cried, ‘And now I am…?’ And they all sang, ‘Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ she shouted as she danced all around the fellowship hall.

Two months later, the pastor received a phone call.

Fayette had been beaten and was at the county hospital. The pastor went and could see her from a distance, pacing back and forth. When she got to the door, she heard Fayette saying, ‘I am beloved….’ Fayette turned, saw her, and said, ‘I am beloved, precious child of God, and….’ Catching sight of herself in the mirror—hair sticking up, blood and tears streaking her face, dress torn, dirty, and rebuttoned askew, she started again, ‘I am beloved, precious child of God, and…’ She looked in the mirror again and declared, ‘…and God is still working on me. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll be so beautiful I’ll take your breath away!’”

Jan says the story of Fayette—beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold—haunts me, blesses me and challenges me to ask what it means that—like her, with her—I have been named by God’s grace with such power that it won’t come undone.” John Wesley calls it being infused with God’s grace.

The world may try to wring you out of your baptismal waters and call you by a different name, but no matter what your belovedness is always there.

Methodists believe that the grace of God doesn’t diminish with time and isn’t dependent upon us but is infinite and abundant. Bishop Ken Carder said “Neither our identity as children of God and members of Christ’s community nor God’s forgiving and reconciling action in Jesus Christ are age related.” Will Willimon in talking about his own infant baptism in the living room of his grandmother’s house said “becoming Christian is something done to us and for us before it is anything done by us. As an infant, I was a passive recipient. Someone had to hold me, administer the water, tell the story of what Jesus had done and the promise of what he would do. Somebody had to model for me the life of faith. It was all gift, all grace… I am the product of a human family with all the goodness and badness of most any family…yet, as my baptism signified, I was also a gift of God. Heaven was mixed up in who I was and was to become.”

Did you catch that when Willimon talked about someone modeling faith for him?Baptism, as an initiation into the family of God, is a communal act meant to be shared and witnessed. Each time you are present at a baptism, you take vows. You as members make a promise that says “With God’s help we will proclaim the good news and live according to the example of Christ. We will surround these persons with a community of love and forgiveness, that they may grow in their trust of God, and be found faithful in their service to others. We will pray for them, that they may be true disciples who walk in the way that leads to life.”

When you take these vows, you also renew your covenant to participate in the ministries of the church by your prayers, your presence, your gifts, and your service.

In other words, baptism claims us as God’s own and calls us to respond to God’s grace by serving and watching over one another in love. That we might fully live into our baptism? Not lives that are dry and been wrung-out but lives that are marked by God as beautiful, beloved, precious to behold.

Laceye Warner talks about how one day her daughter Clare chose to remember her baptism one Sunday after church. Laceye was talking to someone after church and out of the corner of her eye saw Clare sneaking to the font after church. Before Laceye or the pastor could get to her, Clare had made a stool and had the top off the font and was splashing her hands in the water. The pastor asked curiously “what are you doing Clare?” to which she responded, “I remember my baptism...Would you like to remember your baptism too? Remember God loves you!” Laceye watched as the pastor received most of the baptismal remembrance soaking her hair and alb along with several other adults and children. After gasps, and a profound silence, there were smiles, squeals, and water all around.”

Today and all days may we remember we are a child of God, and may we run from here leaving the tag on, marked and claimed as God’s own.

Beautiful, beloved, precious to behold.