Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 14, 2024 (The Baptism of Jesus)
Scripture: Mark 1:1-11
I have a confession to make. I have to confess that on Thursday afternoon I
wrote a sermon for today, and when it was three quarters written, I said to
Elaine that what I had written was boring and I couldn’t figure out how to end
it. Baptism itself is endlessly exciting, but talking about it isn’t
necessarily. And this got me thinking about baptism, and what is baptism, and I
remembered my Worship Foundations class at AST, and how, in the week when we
were going to be talking about sacraments, our professor began the class by
reading a passage from a novel to us. And so I thought that is what I might do
this morning, instead of the boring sermon that I wrote on Thursday.
The novel is Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, and it written from the perspective of an elderly retired Congregationalist minister who, nearing his own death, is telling his life’s story to his son. I will also mention that not only is the narrator a minister, but his father was as well. The part that I am going to read to you comes from close to the beginning of the novel, when he is talking about his childhood.
“We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behaviour considerably. Once, we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymous lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we were always pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play as we were. It occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll’s dress – there was only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a moment in it and would have to have been unswaddled as soon as they were christened in any case. I myself moistened their brows, repeating the full Trinitarian formula.
“Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks, one and then another. We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal. So finally I asked my father in the most offhand way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to, say, baptize it. He replied that the Sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect. That wasn’t really an answer to my question. We did respect the Sacraments, but we thought the whole world of those cats. I got his meaning, though, and I did no more baptizing until I was ordained.
“Two or three of that litter were taken home by the girls and made into fairly respectable house cats. Louisa took a yellow one. She still had it when we were married. The others lived out their feral lives, indistinguishable from their kind, whether pagan or Christian no one could ever tell. She called her cat Sparkle, for the white patch on its forehead. It disappeared finally. I suspect it got caught stealing rabbits, a sin to which it was much given, Christian cat that we knew it to be, stiff-jointed as it was by that time. One of the boys said she should have named it Sprinkle. He was a Baptist, a firm believer in total immersion, which those cats should have been grateful I was not. He told us no effect at all could be achieved by our methods, and we could not prove him wrong. Our Soapy mut be a distant relative.
“I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. I don’t wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out. Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position. It’s a thing people expect of you.”[1]
I love this passage now, even more than I did the first time I heard it, almost 9 years ago, and not just for the humour in the image of those children by the creek with the kittens and the mama cat desperate to retrieve her babies. I love how it describes baptism as a blessing, baptism as the power of acknowledging the sacredness that is already present.
I don’t think that baptism is either a beginning or an ending – instead I see baptism as a pivot-point, or as a moment of turning. One of the biblical scholars I listened to this week talked about how baptism is a turning towards God, who is always turned towards us.[2] Baptism doesn’t make God love us more – God’s love is always there, but instead, with our baptism, we turn towards and acknowledge that ever-present love.
We read about this with Jesus’s baptism. This happens right at the very beginning of his ministry – he is turning towards God and accepting the calling that had always been there. And the same is true with our baptism – whether you were baptized as a baby or as an adult, at your baptism, promises were made by you or by your parents or guardians, turning your life towards God.
If you were with us last week, either in-person or online, we talked about all of the different ways that God communicates with us, and baptism is one of those ways. At each and every baptism, we turn towards God, and God says, just as God said at Jesus’s baptism, “You are my child, my beloved. With you I am well pleased.”
May each one of us know in our hearts, that this is true. Amen.
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