Baptism: Cosmic and Particular Identity

1 Epiphany B  January 8, 2012

Genesis 1:1-5   Ps. 29

Acts 9:1-7   Mark 1:4-11

Lectionary Link 

  Did you ever really wonder about the meaning of Baptism?  Historically, the church has argued about baptism a lot.  Should a person be immersed?  Sprinkled?  Stand in water to the waist and have water poured down one’s head?  Should authentic baptism only be done in the Jordan River?  Should it be done in any river or natural body of water?  Should baptism be preceded by forty days of fasting with some salt sprinkled on the candidates and some exorcisms performed?  Should only adults who can fully and rationally choose baptism be the legitimate candidates for baptism?  Is baptism only a public testimony of a personal profession of faith?  Is baptism a supernatural infusion of God’s grace whereby one is made a Christian once and for all?  Can one lose baptismal grace?  We are told that the Emperor Constantine did not become baptized until his death bed because he was sure that he was going to have some post-baptismal sins, and some in the early church were very concerned about post-baptismal sins.

  What is baptism for us today?  A cute little rite of passage for baby and family with an opportunity to make little baby boys don white dresses so that the pictures can be brought out later to make their faces red?

  There is some meaning of baptism found in all of the baptismal practices of Christians.  I guess today, I am more interested in what baptism means to me and to you and to our lives as a community who call ourselves the body of Christ.

  Might I suggest that baptism is very much a belief about our creation by God and the type of good stuff of which our human lives and the life of the world are made?  In the creation, we are told that God looked at all that had been created and God said, “It is good.”

   I believe that baptism is a public rite of celebration that affirms that the creation of the life of the baptized, is good, very good.  And it is good and filled with dignity. . Even while we don’t attain full goodness at any moment of our lives,  baptism is the invitation to actualize our full human potential.

  And what might that potential be?  I would liken the human life to be lived on a continuum between particular experience and cosmic experience.  We are very much made of dust in that we have a body and each body has a location in time and space.  And there are detailed descriptions of the particulars of our existence; our families, languages, cultures, societies and countries.  Yet we are made of mysterious stuff that we call spirit and so we have godly-potential.  We have cosmic potential.  So we live our lives in the dynamic between the particulars of our physical location and our cosmic spiritual locations.  And we need both to live up to our human potential.  In our baptism, we celebrate our cosmic potential because if we are only determined by our material, physical and historical circumstances, then we may find ourselves trapped; trapped by the imperfections that we find in us and around us.  We can get so burdened by the imperfections in us and around us that we can believe that we are negatively determined toward death, entropy and despair.

  But the experience of hope and joy and the sublime cannot allow such imperfection to define our destiny in an absolute sense.  So, we have our cosmic side, our cosmic identity, our birthright, not just into flesh and blood families, but our birthright as children of God.  And

that is what is celebrated in our baptism.  We celebrate our cosmic birthright so that we might rise above mere material determination.   And how often do we need to rise above mere material determination.  The experience of pain and losses of all kinds shout out to us to be what is powerful to determine our lives and our fate and that is where we need to turn to our cosmic destiny so that we do not get buried in the despair of any particular state of imperfection.

  At the baptism of Jesus, the heavenly dove descended and the heavenly voice declared, “You are my Son, the beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  Isn’t that what God said after creation.  “With you I am well pleased.”

  Mozart got more than the average or above average share of cosmic musical ability at an age that baffles our ability to understand, so we declare him a musical genius.  Jesus of Nazareth was so much overwhelmed with the realization and actualization of the cosmic dimension in his life, we have had no other human language to use except to say that Jesus was extra-human, supra-human, even divinized.

   He was divinized more than any other human being, yet we undertake baptism too, because Jesus did not keep likeness to God or divinization to himself; he shared it fully.  He told his friends and disciples to go and baptize.  And as God abided in Jesus, Jesus promised to abide with his friends until we could not longer speak of time in the way that we do.

  We baptize, not because we will ever be as cosmic as Jesus was, but because the risen and cosmic Christ is shared with us to awaken the cosmic dimensions of our own souls.

  And we need to experience our cosmic dimension to help us to rise above our mere material existence and to have our vale of tears touched with the sublime of love, friendship, joy, beauty and insights that move and inspire us to keep on keeping on, because in the end our lives will be determined by love, faith, hope and resurrection and not by demise, loss, despair and death.

  And so we baptize and have been baptized into our cosmic identities as son and daughters of God and our lives are changed if we can but hear the whisper of God behind the scenes of our lives say, “You are my beloved child; you are good, you are no mistake, you are wonderfully put together, and I am pleased with you.”

  We baptize in order to be a baptismal community to baptize others.  Why?  Because the people of this world need to discover their cosmic identities as sons and daughters of God.  This is the way to world peace; to rise to our cosmic identity beyond our oft pitiful worlds of material determination.

    Today you and I are invited to live in this dynamic between our particular identity and our cosmic identity.  We need a balance of both; we cannot be purely spiritual or cosmic beings; if we try, we become world denying, dreamy, cosmic space cadets.  And take the “s” out of cosmic and we become “comic space cadets” living in escapism.

  But if we deny the cosmic and live only a reductionist material existence then we will live solely at the whim of happenstance.  If we’re lucky, all is well.  If were unlucky, all is ill.  We need our experience of the cosmic to help us rise above the particulars of our happenstance so that we can tap into a source of wisdom that helps us have the creative freedom to choose our particular futures with wisdom.

  Baptism invites us to our cosmic identity as sons and daughters of God, so that we can not just survive our particular circumstance but live with some inspired actions.  Jesus was baptized and his true cosmic identity was known.  You and I have been baptized and we are part of a baptismal community to share the knowledge of the cosmic family of God with this world.  In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.