Sermons

Leadership and Baptism

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  January 11, 2004                                 Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

I experienced my first Boars Head and Yule Log Festival yesterday afternoon. It is quite the event, and I would encourage those who are able to take advantage of this afternoon’s heat wave to be present. The music and costuming and pageantry are quite wonderful, exceeded only, in my mind, by the sheer degree of human commitment and participation. Many people have contributed to this weekend’s events – thanks to all of them and thanks especially to Peter DuBois for his creative vision, in this and so many things.

Secondly, no doubt that you or someone you love is facing cancer. We will have the important opportunity next Sunday following the 10:30 service of worship to learn more about current issues and insights from two Third Church physicians, Jennifer Griggs and Jane Liesveld. Please attend as you are able, and do invite friends and colleagues who might benefit from this conversation. You may register for that luncheon in the church office.

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Faster, it seems, than a Britney Spears marriage, the year 2003 has come and gone. And so Happy New Year to you all. I hope that whatever was redemptive about 2003 in your own life may be cherished, and whatever was less so may in fact be redeemed, and that 2004 will be for you healthy and blessed and filled with joy.

One of the poignant moments at the close of every year is the necrology. Annual Christmas letters remember loved ones now passed. TV shows and magazines offer a list of celebrities and politicians and others who have died in the past twelve months. The list provides not only a review of the past year, but a kind of archaeological bellwether for our culture and history.

Along with celebrities like Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn and Johnny Cash and Gregory Peck, there was another list. Madame Chaing Kai-Shek, Strom Thurmond, Idi Amin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Paul Simon. All wore at one time in their life, for good or for ill, the label “leader.” And all were, at one time in their life, again, for good or for ill, followed.

Leadership is a hot commodity. Colleges add leadership courses to their curriculum. Barnes and Noble and Borders add whole sections on leadership and the titles jump off the shelves. We look to historic figures to get a professional edge, to gain some strategic leg-up on things.

Leadership is a hot commodity, and it is also an important theological theme, and a core element of the biblical story. When you think about it a certain way, the Bible came into being to inspire followers. But in another cut of the same question, it also came into being to inspire leaders. And one insight is that those two are not mutually exclusive, but rather completely complementary.

In three different ways, the lectionary over the next three weeks will help us think about these things: leadership. Leadership and giftedness. Leadership and power. And today, on a liturgical day when we encounter the story of the baptism of Jesus, leadership and baptism.

We will make the claim today and in the next several weeks, that we are all leaders. And we will make it in a counter-cultural way, that this leadership looks different than the kind of socially sanctioned leadership that leaves people in the dust or values the winners and overlooks the losers. Rather, our leadership will look different. Based not on great figures from history – military or political or business or athletic – but rather on Jesus.

To say it succinctly, because we are baptized, we are all leaders. And because we are baptized, we are all given gifts to lead. And because we are given gifts to lead, we ARE to lead, in the places where life takes us, in the church, in the world.

And if it begins liturgically in every new calendar year with the baptism of Jesus, so it begins with baptism.

We get Luke’s version of it this year. It is a spare version. It is really as much about John the Baptist as it is about Jesus. John’s pre-Atkins diet of locusts and wild honey and his wardrobe of wild-animal skins are what we remember, but what we should remember even more is his own leadership. It was successful. He had followers. We would seek him out these days to launch new Presbyterian congregations, perhaps to those disaffected generations for whom organized religion has little to say.

John’s message was not an easy one, though it was fundamentally biblical: repent, change your ways, take that u-turn you know you need to take in order to live the life you seek, the life God intends you to lead.

John was a kind of window, and the strength of his leadership was in the fact that he knew that. Even as the crowds of followers grew, he knew that his vocation was to point elsewhere, away from his own success and glory. That’s worth remembering, by the way, for ourselves and those whose leadership we would follow. People wondered whether John was the messiah. “I baptize you with water,” he said, “but one is coming who is more powerful than I. I am not worthy even to untie his shoes. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” And then follows talk about wheat and chaff and unquenchable fire.

Oh. And yet the people kept showing up. They knew in their hearts that the message had an authentic ring to it, and further, they knew that the transformation so needed in their own lives and in the life of their community could happen only through this promise. They would try every other way, follow every other kind of leader. And still John’s words rang in their ears, and they kept showing up.

And then Jesus showed up. Again, Luke’s version is rather lean. It does what the other gospels do differently, connect the baptism of Jesus with the baptisms of others gathered at the River Jordan that day. “When all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized…”

The theological question of Jesus’ humanity and divinity is answered in part with this episode. Jesus’ humanity, his need for baptism, connected him with all the other people around him. No V.I.P. treatment whatsoever. We will need to remember that, certainly as we begin to approach Lent.

And then the divine things happen. The heavens open, a dove descends, a voice booms out. Jesus is identified as God’s beloved, God’s Son. He is set apart by baptism, with a name, as we are. “What is the Christian name of this child,” we ask, and even here, the pattern and rhythm of naming and water and blessing happens. Even as Jesus is connected to God uniquely and powerfully, we too experience such a connection.

There is so much we could say about baptism this morning. I sat with the youth group in December talking about these things. The honesty of their questions far outshines anything we adults could articulate. Questions about worthiness and acceptance, about why one church does it one way and another church another way. To be able to assure a young person that their baptism “stuck,” even though they were a little baby and don’t remember it, is to be able to assure all of us, myself included, that our baptism “stuck,” regardless of our memory of it.

And, further, that in the face of every force that would evaluate us, tell us we are not good enough, insist on another set of credentials, that baptism, the naming of our names before God and the cleansing experience of water, is all that we need and all that matters.

I haven’t spoken very directly on the topic of ordination in the Presbyterian Church and issues of human sexuality. I presume that we’ve presumed some common ground in this church family. Here is a particular moment, though, when it might be helpful to think about these things.

I believe that the church’s teaching on issues of human sexuality are simply wrong, and need corrected. I further believe that our practice of ordination, whereby a group of people is categorically denied the opportunity to be considered for church leadership, is equally wrong. We can save the strategic discussion of church politics for another day – it is simply consuming too much of our time and energy and diverting our mission from the needs of the world.

But I would make the case for this not in spite of the Bible, as is so often suggested, but because of it, and in part because of this morning’s gospel account. People were baptized, we are told, and it seems to me that baptism, the holy act of being named and owned by God, is the only credential for leadership ever needed. Anything else seems to argue against our reliance on God’s grace, a slope that is entirely too slippery for us to navigate.

Put another way, our ordination practices should grow out of our baptism practices. We have never lifted ordained office in a hierarchy above other forms of service. That would deny our Reformed roots.

To put it negatively, if we are not going to ordain lesbian and gay sisters and brothers, we should be honest and not baptize them either. And if we would make that tragic choice, we would make baptism into simply another humanly contrived credentialing exercise, rather than the God-given, grace-filled sacrament that it is.

To put it positively, we are welcomed into the family by our baptism. Baptism is the only qualification we need to be a leader in this church, in the church. Everything else, including ordination, is gravy, icing on the ecclesiastical cake, whether we are a singer in the choir or a teacher in the Sunday school or an usher or coffee-pourer or a minister, even.

And it would seem to me that the leadership of all of us, all of us, is needed now in the church and in the world, not because we are so wonderfully capable, but because God has made us so.

Our theological forbear John Calvin once said that “all pious women and men throughout life, whenever they are troubled by a consciousness of their faults, may venture to remind themselves of their baptism, that from it they may be confirmed in assurance of that sole and perpetual cleansing which we have in Christ’s blood.” I would say amen to brother Calvin. And I would also say that we should venture to our baptism, a lovely phrase, not only when we are troubled by our faults, but also when we need a little encouragement to do what it is that we are called to do, to be the leader we are called to be.

One more name to remember from the list of those who died in 2003. A celebrity of sorts. A saint to be sure. Absolutely baptized. The Reverend Fred McFeely Rogers, Mister Rogers. “The thing I remember best about successful people," Mister Rogers wrote, “is their obvious delight in what they’re doing…and it seems to have little to do with worldly success. They just love what they’re doing, and they love it in front of others.”

Venture to your baptism. Delight in it. Lean on it and rely on it. Be led by it and lead from it. And know that you are God’s beloved. Thanks be to God. Amen.