Sermon: Remembering Who We Are

Matthew 3:13-17

Remembering Who We Are

James Sledge                                                            January 12, 2020 – Baptism of the Lord

It’s an old joke, one I’m sure I’ve told before, so if you’ve heard it, please bear with me. A group of pastors are meeting for lunch. As I assume happens with other professions, such lunches often include a fair amount of talking shop. There is some complaining and venting, some idea sharing. “What are y’all doing for Lent this year?” and other such discussions.

At this particular lunch, one of the pastors shared that they were having a problem with bats at the church she served. They had discovered a huge colony in the steeple and needed to get them out. She wondered if any of the other pastors had experience with this sort of thing. She didn’t want to hurt the bats but they were starting to make a pretty big mess.

One colleague shared the name of a local pest removal company. Another suggested an ultrasonic pest repeller, but the pastor said they’d already tried one of those with no success.

Finally another pastor said, “We had the same problem a few years ago and decided to enroll them all in confirmation class. When it was over, we never saw them again.”

For those of you from other religious traditions, confirmation is step two in a two-step process for becoming a full-fledged member of a Presbyterian church. Step one is baptism, something that typically happens when a child is still an infant. Confirmation, which includes making a public profession of faith, is the confirming of those baptismal vows, claiming the faith of one’s parents or guardians as one’s own.

Unfortunately, confirmation has a long history of becoming a graduation from church. Children are baptized, attend Sunday School as children, do confirmation as teens, and pretty much disappear after that. For much of the 20^th century, they often returned to church when they married and had children of their own, but that pattern has largely broken down. By the latter part of the 20^th century, many of those who graduated never came back.

I sometimes wonder if we in the church didn’t set ourselves up for this. In a variety of ways, we portrayed Christian faith as a status that one attains. Some evangelicals talk about being born again or saved. But what comes after that? We Presbyterians have rarely used the language of “born again” or being “saved,” but we still tended to treat Christianity as a status. In many congregations, Sunday School is seen as something for children. Presumably that means you are done at some point. You’ve finished, graduated, gotten your Christianity pin.

Some parents skip a step and just make infant baptism the graduation. They “get the baby done,” often at the urging of grandparents. And then they never go near church again.

Theologically speaking, Presbyterians do infant baptisms because we understand God to be the primary actor in baptism. God claims us as God’s own in the waters. God’s love is there all along. It does not wait for us to acknowledge God or Jesus. And so we baptize the children of those who have promised to be disciples themselves and raise a child to know of God’s love in Jesus.  

When the child gets older, she or he will decide whether or not to respond to God’s love in Jesus. Just as most parents love their children unconditionally from the moment of birth, long before they know how the child will turn out, so God claims children in the waters of baptism, hoping that the child will grow to love God back through a life of discipleship.

Of course this theology of baptism wasn’t really needed when the Jesus movement first began, nearly 2000 years ago. Christian faith was a new thing. No one had grown up in it, and so being claimed by God in the waters of baptism and deciding to follow Jesus happened together. Baptism and a public profession of one’s faith marked the start of a new life as a child of God and a disciple of Jesus. This was much more than a graduation or a achieving a status. It was the beginning of an entirely new way of living.

Perhaps that is why for the church had a big celebration to mark Jesus’ baptism while Christmas was scarcely noticed. Some of us are in a post-Christmas letdown, but for the early centuries of the faith, today was the day to celebrate the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and the beginning of new life as his disciples.

Don’t get me wrong, Christmas is wonderful, and surely most of you enjoyed the special music and worship. It is great to celebrate the amazing love of God that would become fully human and vulnerable as a new born babe. But the baby Jesus does not ask much of us. We can ooh and aah over him for a bit and then move on.

January is here. Christmas is over and things go back to how they were before Christmas. We celebrated the birth of the Prince of Peace, and then Iran and the US threaten each other with the horrors of war.

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The opening statement of the baptism service outlined in the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship invites all those gathered to “remember with joy our own baptism, as we celebrate this sacrament.” Of course many of us were baptized as infants. We can’t remember it. But that is not the sort of remembering the liturgy has in mind. It is asking us to remember the meaning of our baptism. It is asking us to remember who we are.

In the Disney movie, The Lion King, young Simba is called to remember who he is. For those who’ve never seen it, Simba had run away as a cub into a kind of self-imposed exile. He thought he was to blame for the death of his father, Mufasa, something actually done by Scar, Simba’s evil uncle. Scar then takes over Mufasa’s kingdom, leading it into ruin.

At a critical point in the movie, Simba experiences a vision of his late father who says to him, "You have forgotten who you are, and so you have forgotten me... Remember who you are."  This remembering is not a remembering of something that happened. It is remembering his true identity. Only then will he be able to restore the kingdom to peace and harmony.

Remember who you are. In his baptism, Jesus is confronted with who he is. “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” His awareness of this identity drives Jesus into a time of testing where he must hone what it means to be the beloved Son of God, a Messiah who will not be the expected conquering hero nor seek to aggrandize himself. When Jesus remembers who he is, he casts his lot with the weak and lowly, he rejects the way of empire and violence, and he gives himself for others, even to the point of death.

Remember who you are. In our baptisms, whether as infants or adults, we are given new identities as beloved daughters and sons of God. It is an identity that, when fully lived out, looks very much like Jesus. It is especially concerned with the weak and lowly, rejects the way of empire and violence, and gives itself for others. But we so often forget who we are.

If only all those who profess to be a Christian might have a vision of Jesus speaking to them. "You have forgotten who you are, and so you have forgotten me... Remember who you are." Remember that in the waters, God has claimed you as a beloved and cherished child, has joined you to Jesus and called you to a Christ-shaped life. Remember.

Oh, how different the world might be if we all remembered who we are.