Text: Luke 3:1-22

I haven’t been at Evergreen for a baptism. I’m looking forward to the day when that’s something that I get to participate in with you. So I don’t know how you’ve celebrated that or what kind of weight gets put on the practice of baptism in this congregation. 

In the wider church it seems like it has less of an emphasis, or at least it’s not practiced as automatically for young people as it might have been even when I was baptized at 17.  But the times that I have been honored to be a part of people’s choice to be baptized – people of all ages from 16 to 50-something – it has been a joyful moment of mutual claiming:a person claiming a community and the way of Jesus, the community claiming someone as theirs, God’s blessing and claiming of that person as beloved and delightful.

The way Mennonites have traditionally talked about baptism is that it is “It is an outward, visible sign of an inner, spiritual transformation.” (Minister’s Manual) Other believer’s churches use this language as well, which is very different from the way understanding of baptism itself as conveying

transformation or salvation, as in the Catholic church in which it is a sacrament.

For Jesus, when he came to be baptized, with the crowds who were coming to John the Baptist for this reason, it was indeed an outward sign to mark a moment of transition for himself. For Jesus, for those with whom he was baptized and for those of us who have chosen baptism at some point in our own lives there are three particular things that each in their own way have both inner and outer signs. 

Baptism is a personal experience, but has practical and political implications and consequences – or it should!

Baptism is personal. Those of us in the believer’s baptism tradition come to baptism out of that internal feeling of readiness. Of feeling invited into relationship with Jesus. Called to make a commitment. An intimate connection between myself and God. 

That intimacy is there in this story, maybe more than in any other account of Jesus’ baptism. Here, the Holy Spirit descends not while Jesus is in the midst of baptism but when Jesus is in a moment of prayer.

While Jesus was baptized along with others in the crowd who came out to see John, the moment of blessing is very private. Jesus will indeed head into a very public ministry but in Luke’s Gospel, the blessing and voice from God seems to just be for him – so personal and delighted and tender: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.” 

Those words are so parental, they remind me of how my mom sometimes, in her tender moments, will remind me that Amy means beloved. That I received my name as a mark of my belonging and belovedness in my family. And in the words I use when I bless children and their families I will often address the child directly to say, “God loves you, your family loves you and this family of faith loves you and delights in you.”

In the Mennonite tradition we don’t baptize babies because we understand that the love and delight that God shows to them throughout their life is an invitation. Each of us is called to respond to that through our baptism.

But baptism isn’t just a personal decision between an individual and God. Though I do think for many people it stops there – at the relationship with God – without considering our calling to relationship with others in the world. Or with creation itself. Baptism has consequences for how we live practically. Or at least it’s a commitment to hands-on, practical actions. 

John’s criticism of all those who came to him was quite harsh. His warnings when he preached repentance were dire! Like fire and judgment dire! But the people were not detracted. They were clamoring to John: What should we do? Tell us what to do? They were looking for direction about how to practically respond to John’s call of repentance.

The CEB translation, instead of translating the Greek metanoia to repentance reads (accurately, I think) “changing their hearts and minds.” The people what to know – how do we make the change? And actually, what he tells them is pretty reasonable! And super specific.

To the soldiers, for example. We might have preferred for John to ask them not to kill people any more but what he says is, don’t harass people or use

your position to cheat them. Don’t use unreasonable influence.

To tax collectors he say, only collect what’s fair.  Don’t extort people beyond what’s owed.

For the whole crowd he says, when you have an extra coat, give it to someone who needs it. He’s asking for literally the least they can do. When you have more than you need, share with someone who doesn’t have enough. Granted, the quantity and value of possessions of a first century follower of John might differ from ours in that they may be unlikely to have two coats but I have one for rain and one for snow and one for work in the garden. And maybe that actually is too many coats.

John is telling people to be decent humans. And maybe that actually is harder than we’d like to think when we consider the quantity and value of the material goods we possess. I have been very impressed by the recent surge of mutual aid within and across communities. Whether that’s fundraising for medical needs or sharing furniture or baby items or tools through neighborhood buy-nothing groups. 

On the one hand, the need to rely on these kinds of efforts – especially when it comes to paying for basic health care or housing – doesn’t say anything good about our social safety nets. On the other hand it’s good to be able to be interconnected and to be able to rely on community to care for each other, from the people next door, to displaced Gazan families. And it impowers those of us who have more resources than we need to free ourselves of them.

In the Mennonite church I think we are actually pretty well practiced at this kind of practical working out of the Gospel. We are do-ers whose work in aid and development and peacemaking are world renowned. That whole alphabet soup of Mennonite acronyms tells the story: MCA, MCC, MDS, CPT and MMN. 

We’re a little less practiced in the political consequences of baptism. But baptism is political. Jesus was baptized in a particular time and place under particular leadership – layers of occupation, governors, kings (tetrarchs to be very specific), religious elites. All those names that tangle the tongue and maybe make us glaze: Tiberius, Pilate Herod (Antipas, not “The Great”), Philip (his brother) Annas, Caiaphas.  

Those guys hold the power. They sit in the centers of governance – whether Roman or Judean or religious. Jesus is choosing the wilderness. Jesus is choosing to place his allegiance in a different kind of power and a different kind of leadership: Healing, preaching peace, feeding people, connecting unlikely folks together, offering new life and new way of life. 

Jesus’ connection is not with the political elites but with the God who created and calls him beloved, and with the common folks around him.

The invitation to us is the same: choosing baptism or remembering the baptisms that we chose (in my case 30) years ago is checking a box not for Harris or Trump or Ferguson or Reichert. I know we all make meaningful and thoughtful choices in those cases as well. But our primary allegiance is in the water of the wilderness with Jesus and the crowd. 

Next week we celebrate 500 years since the very first Anabaptism baptism – a baptism that rejected the violent politics of the state and claimed a way of peace in the name of Jesus. That rejected the system of dominance and instead claimed a way of liberation and community. Rejected the idea that only the elite could interpret and determine the will of God and claimed the idea that together through the Holy Spirit, all people have access to the Word of God.

While it feels new for Mennonites to embrace the political implications of our baptisms, the immediate momentum of Mennonite Action shows that we have been primed by our theological grounding for this moment. I have heard from other Christian colleague a kind of amazement at how Mennonite are represented in the current movement for Palestinian liberation in a way that other Christian groups are not.

Because for centuries we have known that when we choose a baptism in the way of Jesus, we choose a just peace for all of creation. While for many years many of our ancestors chose to be the quiet in the land, we’re emerging as a prophetic voice in the tradition of John and Jesus and their ancestors – and our own first Anabaptist forebears – by being involved in our civic and political system: activating our communities, organizing, visiting our reps, writing letters, carrying signs.

We do this out of allegiance not to those leaders but to the realm of God, empowered by the Holy Spirit as followers of Jesus into and through the waters of baptism.

I don’t actually know who in this room has been baptized. I suspect it’s a good number. And it’s surely true that followers of Jesus can and do all of those things I’ve talked about without baptism. And it’s true that many non-Christians are good humans who can and do work for peace and justice and the goodness of all creation.

But it’s also true that by choosing baptism, we choose a step on the way of every turning toward the one who was called beloved. Let this also be an invitation to all who also beloved of God – which is everyone! – that the waters of baptism are waiting to welcome and bless each one into a community that is personal, that is practical and that is political. And that we follow this baptism way together.
—