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.
***
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.
