Baptism of the Lord “The Water’s Fine” Pastor Paul Grossman

​Matthew 3:13-17 CEB
At that time Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan River so that John would baptize him.  John tried to stop him and said, “I need to be baptized by you, yet you come to me?”

Jesus answered, “Allow me to be baptized now. This is necessary to fulfill all righteousness.”

So John agreed to baptize Jesus.  When Jesus was baptized, he immediately came up out of the water. Heaven was opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God coming down like a dove and resting on him.  A voice from heaven said, “This is my Son whom I dearly love; I find happiness in him.”

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​There is a scene that springs to mind for me from the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? when Delmar, played by Tim Blake Nelson, gets baptized during the midst of a riverside service.  In the scene, Delmar rushes into the water to be baptized by the preacher and comes back exclaiming to his two partners in crime, Everett (played by George Clooney) and Pete (played by John Turturro) that all his sins, including a robbery, have been washed away.  At the end of the scene, he invites his friends to be baptized too saying, “Come on in boys, the water is fine!”   The scene from this movie echoes the one we see with John at the river Jordan, where he exclaims “‘I baptize you with water for repentance’” (Matthew 3:11a NRSV).  Both depict baptism as an act of repentance, a washing away of sin, a turning from our old lives.  To this day, many of us still see baptism this way.  In fact, this may be what was on John’s mind when he tried to stop Jesus from being baptized by him, for why would a man without sin need to be baptized in the waters of the Jordan?  How could you wash anything away from one already as pure as the driven snow?  Except, when Jesus asks John to baptize him, he tells him, “‘Allow me to be baptized now. This is necessary to fulfill all righteousness.’”  Righteousness is that pesky word that does not imply turning away like repentance, but rather a turning toward and entering into relationship.  Jesus reminds us that baptism is about community, joining something larger than yourself, the kin-dom of the living God.
Once, a few years ago, I was part of a Bible study where we were discussing the book of Hebrews, on this particular Sunday we focused on Hebrews 5:11 - 6:3.  In these verses, the author of Hebrews complains that “by this time you ought to be teachers, [but] you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the oracles of God [for] You need milk, not solid food”  (Hebrews 5:12 NRSV).  The author calls their audience a bunch of babies because they cannot even grasp the foundational things like “instruction about baptisms,” so the author cannot even begin to talk about more mature concepts like righteousness (Hebrews 6:2 NRSV).  I mention all of this because as soon as we read the author’s complaints about his own audience’s immaturity, the group there that morning started arguing about baptism too.  What type of baptism counts?  How much water should be used?  Should we be baptized as infants or as believers later on down the road?  We were so consumed by arguments about the method of baptism that we neglected to think about the reason behind it.  Unfortunately, this is not uncommon as we as Christians have been arguing about baptism for two thousand years, and I certainly won’t venture to say that I have the definitive answers for what it should look like for all those methods have meaning and value, but I can venture to share what I see as the reason for baptism.
First of all, water has always had a special quality for the human race.  We have feared and revered its potential for destruction and renewal.  Just enough can help crops to grow and nourish our bodies.  Not enough and too much can both spell doom for a people and the land.  While water is simply Dihydrogen monoxide, H2O, this chemical compound in its liquid form has captured a special place in our imagination as an element that can radically change a person’s life. So many of our stories, both ancient and modern, involve people going into the water one way and coming out fundamentally changed.  That is what baptism means after all, “death and rebirth through the medium of water.”   This act isn’t even original to John or even Christians, as the Jewish people have been ritualistically cleansing themselves in deep pools for millennia.  So, why would Jesus insist on being baptized?  Why is it necessary “‘to fulfill all righteousness?’”  It’s just water after all.  
Except, righteousness means relationship, and God desires a relationship with all of us.  Tell me, how many times in a relationship have you done something because it matters more to the other person than for yourself?  For instance, when you were young and in love with someone, was there ever a moment when you got really interested in a certain subject or hobby because the person you had a crush on was interested in it too?  Normally, you could care less about it otherwise, but because your partner was really into cars, football, hunting, dancing, or romantic comedies, you kind of, sort of got into them too.  How about those of us who have raised and interacted with children?  How many times did you try to get as excited on the subject of trains or dinosaurs, etc. as your kids were?  Why did you do that?  Perhaps it was because of love?  You cared so much about this other person that you decided to share what they considered special and valuable, and so it brings the two of you closer.  God does the same with us.  In United Methodist theology, we would call it the ordinary means of grace.
God takes these ordinary elements like water or the bread and juice of communion and makes them something more.  God makes them the avenue by which to communicate God’s continual care for us.  Why does Christ get baptized?  Jesus goes into the water to say to us I want to be in relation with you.  Water is special to you, so it's special to me.  I want to be with you because I love you.  I want you to see me become part of this human community with all of you and invite you to do the same.  Will the water alone transform you?  Not really, but the grace of God will.  You see that’s the thing.  John wasn’t forcing people to get baptized.  Delmar isn’t tricked into being baptized.  As a professor of literature once put it, “if characters reformed every time they got wet, no book would ever have it rain,” for the “thing about baptism is, you have to be ready to receive it.”   When we go into the water, we signal to God our inward reality, as we say to the divine, “I am ready.”  It is a signal that we are ready to be transformed.
You know that’s the thing, often John is described in Matthew 3 as calling people to repentance, but the Greek there tells a different story.  The Greek word translated as repentance is metanoia, which suggests “transformation and turning rather than simple repentance for sins.”   We do not simply turn away, we are invited through this baptism, through this ordinary means of grace to turn towards something.  This turning is toward righteousness, towards relationship, not only with God but with each other.  Jesus gets baptized to turn us away from isolation, to turn us away from stubborn self-reliance; to turn us away from all-consuming selfishness.  That’s the thing, sin wants you to be alone.  It wants you isolated.  It wants you all by yourself because if you can only see yourself there is no space in your heart for another, no space for God let alone another human being.  What’s the opposite of all that?  What do we turn toward to get away from isolation?
That’s why the United Methodist Church says community is the necessary requirement for baptism.  We are not being cleansed of sin but being restored from the loneliness of sin into the togetherness of the kin-dom.  Baptism is a corporate act.  Once you go through that water and are transformed by that grace, you are never alone again.  There is now a connection between you and this family of God around you.  You may have noticed today that I have been using a different word than normal.  We often speak about the kingdom, in other words, the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven.  In recent years, Christian theologians and other disciples have realized that when you throw a word around long enough, it can start to lose its impact.  Kingdom reminds us of who the King of kings is, but in it, we can lose a sense of our connection to neighbor, to this importance of righteousness being relationship, so the kingdom has become the kin-dom.  This idea of kin-dom reminds us that religion is not a private affair but a corporate reality.  If righteousness is simply repenting from sin, you can do that alone, but if it is turning toward a new reality of a closer relationship with God and with neighbor, no one can be a Christian and be alone.
As we journey through this ordinary time between the end of Christmas and the beginning of Lent, we will look to various scriptures across the New Testament to get a primer on what living in this kin-dom of God looks like.  We will get an introduction to how startling it is to turn these kingdom values, these kin-dom values, from extraordinary to ordinary, to part of our everyday transformation into the disciples of Christ.  Baptism is our start, this water inaugurates us into nothing less than a new way of living in community with God and with each other, so come on in, the water’s fine!  Amen.