In Bodily Form

Sermon for the Baptism of the Lord RCL 1/10/2010, Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17,21-22

Did you hear and pay attention to the Collect for this Feast Day? “Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made.”

My dear friends: on this day, the Church remembers this amazing event when our Lord Jesus was baptized and when the mystery of the Holy Trinity was first revealed to us. And on this day, we remember the covenant that was made at our own baptism and renew our commitment to our own covenant loyalty. By faith, we trust and we know that God is always faithful to the covenant. God can never be unfaithful to the covenant with us, despite outward appearances at times. The challenge to the covenant comes from our forgetfulness, from our ability to become distracted and disillusioned.

Also, today we welcome into the covenant of the baptized the newest member in our midst: Alexander Thomas Ekimoglou. The mystery of baptism is that it changes us. It truly does. You might not feel different after your baptism, if you remember it at all. But our feelings have nothing to do it, honestly. Baptism is our means of adoption into a new family: a holy family of grace.

When the Lord’s table is all prepared and the sacred elements are blessed and the words of institution are all spoken – when it is time for us all to receive the communion of the Lord, we hear the invitation to come and to receive: “The Gifts of God for the People of God.”

In the original Greek, the invitation is so simple, Τὰ Ἅγια τοῖς ἁγίοις.
Literally meaning, The Holy Things for the Holy People.

And on the surface, these words are absolute craziness. Not the ones concerning the sacred elements, the Body and Blood. They have been made holy by the words of Christ, through the teachings of the saints, and through the prayers of the faithful. This much is clearly right and true.

But to say that we are the holy people of God seems like lunacy! Maybe you’re different, I don’t know. But I know how messed up I am. I am all too aware of my shortcomings, my failures, my weakness. I know that, on my own, I am not very good at faithfully keeping my baptismal covenant. But there is hope. Sometimes faithfulness looks different than what we typically expect to see.

Erin and I recently watched the 2008 movie by Clint Eastwood called Gran Torino. The entire plot revolves around the tortured soul of the old curmudgeon played by Eastwood named Walt Kowalski. I loved it, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it. But be warned: only watch it if you can handle a continual barrage of foul language! It’s a story of redemption in the truest sense of that word.

Walt Kowalski is a Polish Catholic blue-collar worker who has spent his entire life working on the Ford production line in Detroit, except for the years he served with the Army during the Korean War. That experience of violence has scarred him and left him extremely pessimistic about human nature. Though he was certainly baptized and confirmed while young, Walt doesn’t have any time for the church. He finds it too divorced from the hard realities of actual life. He belittles the young priest by telling him that he is nothing but “an over-educated 27 year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life.” Walt has no patience for weakness of any kind. His is an ethic of survival: only the strong survive and street-smarts are the most important thing to learn. His wife has died and now he lives alone on his pension, drinking beer and smoking and working on his prized-possession, his 1972 Gran Torino.

Walt has no time even for his own children and grand-children, who he views as weak, selfish, spoiled Americans without any common sense. But Walt slowly grows close to his Asian neighbors, who are very different from him and yet who must work very hard to survive and who pick themselves up by their bootstraps, so to speak. When the teen-aged boy next door is beaten by the local violent gang, and when that boy’s sister is raped, Walt is pissed and he knows that he must take action. He goes to the gang’s house and entices the gang to shoot him out on the sidewalk, in the open, where the whole neighborhood can see. Walt is smarter than the gang. He sets a trap for them, one that causes the whole gang to be arrested and locked up. But the bait in the trap is his own life. Walt Kowalski offers his own life so that his teen-aged neighbors, the young man and woman, can have a chance to lead a normal life, a life with opportunity and peace.

At the end of the day, this is what our baptism is all about. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you know how to cross yourself or which prayers you have memorized or what kind of cross you wear around your neck or hang on your walls. Those things are all good and right, and if they are helpful for your soul, then by all means make use of them! But none of that matters if your heart has not been touched and transformed by the Holy Spirit so that you are willing and able to give yourself away on behalf of others! To offer your life on behalf of another.

The Lord has set the standard as clear as possible: “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And in the 1st Letter of John we read the same: “This is the proof of love, that Christ laid down his life for us, and we too ought to lay down our lives for one another…Our love must not be just words or mere talk, but something active and genuine.” (1 John 3:16&18).

I – the priest – I baptize you with water, but there is one present here who is more powerful than I, and he baptizes you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And that means that your heart becomes strangely warmed within you, that your heart is filled with love for others – even for those who look and talk and act entirely different from you.

Look at these promises that we make at Holy Baptism. There is no room for weakness here. It’s takes incredible strength to do these things: to resist evil, to tell other people about the love of God in Christ, to serve Christ in everyone around you, to strive for justice in society. These are the works of the strong, those who know with confidence who they are and who have the energy to get busy about their Lord’s work.

Let’s get beyond this common misperception that is held even by many, even by many within the household of God: Jesus has no desire at all to make us into nice people. To be nice has no place in the kingdom of God. To be patient, to be kind – yes. But there is no place for the weakness that is suggested by “being nice”. “Being nice” suggests a very tame kind of politeness that is very careful to observe all of the social norms in a given situation.

But to love other people, to actually love them, requires great strength and it means that you often have to be quite impolite in speaking the truth. I do not mean unkind, for there is never any reason to be unkind. But love, by its very nature, is impolite. Love is not nice: it demands too much, it requires too much.

In the final analysis, Walt Kowalski was able to love his neighbors, even though he was not nice at all and he did not quite understand them. But over time, he opened his heart to them, and he was willing to sacrifice for them so that they could be free. THAT is love. And that is the kind of strength we receive from the Holy Spirit. So may it be among us who are those baptized into the holy body of Christ. Amen.