January 13, 2008

The Water of Life

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 29
Isaiah 42:5–9
Matthew 3:13–17

It seems to me that a simple and proper definition
is that a sacrament is an outward sign by which the Lord
seals on our consciences the promises of his goodwill
towards us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith;
and by which we in turn bear witness to our piety toward him
in the presence of the Lord and of his angels and before human beings.

John Calvin
Institutes

I had a little concern for this morning—that there might be some linguists, etymologists, or various kinds of wordsmiths out there in the congregation who might have some anxiety over the subject matter for our reflection this morning, the title of the sermon being “The Water of Life.”

Those who are of an etymological bent might know that for a Scotsman to be speaking of the water of life has a particular meaning. The Scots Gaelic translation of “water of life”—aqua vitae in Latin—is uisge beatha. Uisge, “water,” and beatha, “life.” That is the root of the English word whisky.

So those who might be in the know, I can assure you, could be slightly concerned about a Scotsman on “the water of life.” However I also can assure you that this is not a Sunday-morning discourse on a Saturday-night topic. The water of life for us today is not the spirit distilled from malted barley but the water in the baptismal font.

Today is Baptism Sunday, the second Sunday of the month, when at Fourth Church we welcome the newest members of our community by the Sacrament of Baptism. And today more especially is the day in the Christian year when we remember that Jesus was baptized by John in the River Jordan. The baptism of our Lord is remembered at this time of year because it’s one of the three traditional texts for the season around Epiphany. The texts tell of the revelation of the divinity of Jesus: first to the Magi, the wise men as they kneel at the manger; then secondly the story of the first miracle in John, the first sign, the changing of water into wine at the wedding at Cana; and this the third Epiphany text, when the voice of the Lord says, as Jesus rises out of the water, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

When we think about baptism, naturally we reflect on water. And when we do that we really are reaching into some of the very basic building blocks of life, some of the most elemental things to reflect on.

Water, of course, is itself the giver of life. Without water there is no life. And water is an important player, an important symbol, in scripture’s story of God’s relationship to God’s people and their relationship to God. You may have picked up on that in the prayer over the water in the baptismal font this morning. We remember the Spirit of God hovering over the water at creation; we remember the cleansing of the flood and the new covenant, the new relationship, that God has with God’s people through Noah. The place of water in the Exodus: that the children of Israel in Moses’ time are delivered, are brought into liberation and new life, by coming through the waters of the Red Sea. And then for us, ultimately, the story of Jesus being baptized by John in the Jordan, the proclamation of our salvation in that.

You’ll find it in other places in scripture. The poets of scripture often use metaphors of water. The prophet Amos, for example: “Let justice roll down like waters.” The psalmist, as we read this morning, imagining the Lord “ enthroned over the flood.”

Water has continued to fascinate writers and reflectors on the spiritual life. Water in the life of faith is a common metaphor. Famously it was used in a poem not about faith but about loss of faith. This is the famous poem, “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, in which the Victorian poet, hearing the tide at the English Channel recede, reflects on how that speaks to the poet about a life in which faith is now lost:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating

Arnold uses the metaphor of the sea to pick up on the zeitgeist of that late-Victorian-era, post-Darwinian questioning in which it seemed all too easy to lose traditional concepts of faith. Modern American poet Denise Levertov is an extraordinary poet, and she picks up on this theme of Arnold’s and almost responds to his poem in a poem of hope called “The Tide”:

Faith’s a tide, it seems, ebbs and flows responsive to action and inaction. Remain in stasis, blown sand stings your face, anemones shrivel in rock pools no wave renews. Clear the littered beach, clear the lines of a forming poem, the waters flood inward. Dull stones again fulfill their glowing destinies, and emptiness is a cup, and holds the ocean.

See how Levertov has turned Arnold’s theme and used it as one to celebrate the fullness of a life of faith. And so water is one of the things that connects us in our baptism with Jesus being baptized by John.

Now scholars and theologians have sometimes struggled to understand why Jesus would be baptized by John, for John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance, and if Jesus was sinless, why would he undergo baptism? In our telling today in Matthew, this tension is made explicit. “John”, says Matthew, “would have prevented him,” would have preferred not to have baptized Jesus. But Jesus says it should happen. The English New Testament scholar and Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright can be helpful to us in this. Wright says, “If Jesus is to fulfill God’s plan, this is how he must do it. By humbly identifying himself with God’s people.”

And that means to be baptized as we all are. “By humbly identifying himself with God’s people, by taking their place, sharing their penitence, living their life, and ultimately dying their death.” And here is another deeper connection of our own baptism with the baptism that Jesus undergoes. Jesus’ baptism and the recognition by God of the Sonship of Jesus is itself a proclamation of death and the promise of resurrection.

Frederick Buechner is often very helpful to us when we are thinking of words that we use in church like sacrament or baptism. Frederick Buechner says this: “A sacrament is when something holy happens”. When something holy happens: think of the layers of meaning of what happened early in the service this morning as we baptized Sebastian and David. It is a celebration of new life for the families and for us as a community of faith. It is a family gathering of sorts. It certainly was this morning with cousins being baptized. It is a naming ceremony, a public recognition of the individual child. (It is often a photo opportunity, even if that drives our ushers crazy.) But also “something holy happens”: “God Is Here!” as we sang in our opening hymn. Something holy happens because in the symbol of the water of baptism is the gift of life, the gift of God’s renewing love, which we call grace.

I spoke recently with a person who was inquiring about membership, an adult who had not been baptized as a child, This person found the concept of baptism complex, difficult, and perhaps a little scary, because there seemed to be a part of it that is about surrender, about giving up control. I told this person that was a very good theology of baptism. We talk in baptism about “dying to self”; there is death in this. Frederick Beuchner again discusses this in the context of how we do baptism. Sometimes we sprinkle, like I did this morning, and sometimes there’s what he calls “dunking,” full-immersion baptism. He says that dunking is a better symbol, because you go right under and “going under,” he writes, “symbolizes the end of everything about your life that is less than human. And coming up again, coming back out of the water, symbolizes the beginning anew of something strange and new and hopeful. You can breathe again.”

Baptism happens only once in one’s life. Baptism happens only once, but the implications of our baptism are with us for life. Baptism is the sign of welcome into the membership of this community and Christ’s church. The children we baptized this morning are members of the church. William Sloane Coffin describes what it is to become a member of a church. In one of his sermons he says, “In joining a church you leave home and hometown to join a larger world. The whole world is your new neighbor and all who dwell there in black white yellow red—stuffed and starving, mighty and lowly—all become your sisters and brothers in Jesus.”

We exhibited that this morning in the baptisms. You out there, the new family for these children, promised to guide and nurture them in their journey of faith. New brothers and sisters in Jesus. In Galatians, Paul talks about what this means. He says that through our baptism there is no longer difference; “there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female,” he says, “because all are one in Christ Jesus.”

To recognize that radical equality is to live a life rooted in being baptized.

I’ve given you on the front of your bulletin Calvin’s definition of a sacrament from the Institutes. It’s a classic Reformed statement. It begins with God’s gift to us and evokes a response, a living response from us. That’s why I said what I said about the children, that in baptism scripture is fulfilled. “We love because God loved us first.”

To recognize and to respond to that love is to live into our baptism—to live for justice and to proclaim, in the extraordinary words of Desmond Tutu, written in the darkest time of apartheid in South Africa, to proclaim to the world that

Goodness is stronger than evil,
love is stronger than fear,
light is stronger than darkness
and life stronger than death.

That is the real water of life. Thanks be to God. Amen.