I CHOSE YOU
Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; John 15:9-17
May 14, 2006
By Rev. Dr. Jeanne Knepper

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Scott quote the words of our prayer of dedication to me, the part where it says, “generous to your world and all of our brothers and sisters within it,� but I know it’s a lot. And he’s not the only one. I remember that Carol told me she cut it out and put it on her desk, a reminder for her encounters with co-workers who aren’t always easy to live with.

Life would be a lot easier, if we could chose our family or co-workers, if we could chose our neighbors the way we chose our friends. But the reality is, we often live with, or work with, or live near, people who are difficult. People we wouldn’t chose. People who are confused or crusty or self-centered or cruel. People caught up in troubles, in addictions, in life-long patterns of dysfunction. People to whom we try to be generous, not because they are nice, not because we’re going to get thanked, not because it “pays� to be nice, but because it is a part of who we are as people of faith. It is our calling, to recognize that all the people we meet, even the difficult ones, are beloved children of God, brother and sister to you and to me.

This is part of what baptism means to me. This simple water ritual makes clear the almost unbelievable reality, that the one who is at the center of everything that is, the one we call God, Creator, Father or Mother, that this one loves me, and you, and everyone of us, not in some generic way, not like I might say, “Oh yes, I love ice cream,� but with a very specific love: loving us by name, like this very carton of Tillamook French vanilla or that specific dish of Alpenrose Tin Roof Sundae, loving us in particular, as Jeanne and Leanna and Betty and Dick and David and Mariah and Anthony and Brett. Before we were born, before God called us into being, God loved us, in all our individuality, in all our particularity of color and size and race and ability and orientation and preference and, and, . . . anything. This is what we celebrate in baptism, that the one who is God claims us before anything else, claims us not because of what we do or because of who we have become, but because it is God’s nature to love and claim us.

I am sometimes asked, by people who have experienced some hard times and some turning around in life, if I will rebaptize them. Yes, they say, “I was baptized as a child, but I messed my life up so bad and now I’m trying to get it on track. I need forgiveness for how I’ve messed up.� And then I explain, as gently as I can, that I don’t rebaptize people, not for any reason. To do so, you see, would suggest that we can do something to remove ourselves from God’s claim and care, and we can’t. God claims us, regardless. We can’t make it happen; we can’t do anything to make it go away. It just is: we are beloved children of a God who loves. Period. Now, I say, we can remember that we are beloved; we can reaffirm that being children of God empowers us in so many ways; we can reclaim and we can reawaken ourselves to God’s love. But we can never separate ourselves from God’s love. Even the ritual of baptism doesn’t make God love us; doesn’t make us children of God. It just recognizes that this is who we are, every one of us, just because we are.

Gayle Felton is a United Methodist scholar of baptism. When she did research on baptism for the United Methodist church, she found something surprising: there are no historical Methodist papers published that argue against the baptism of infants. None. Because, you see, baptism is not a mark of our grasp of things, of our beliefs, of our actions. We do not earn baptism. It is a recognition of God’s gift of grace that is given to every one, equally and without regard to merit or class or status.

Sometimes, we act as though we don’t really believe that what we think here, in church, in our faith, has much bearing on how things are in the world. But, I want to tell you that this idea, that baptism recognizes our essential connectedness and our essential equality before God—this is a powerful, an oppression rattling idea. How powerful? Did you know that in 1667, the legislature of the colony of Virginia passed a law stipulating that the legal status of a slave was not altered by baptism? Now why did they pass that law? Well, of course, because the moral status of baptism denies all possibility of slavery: in Christ, Paul wrote, there is no male or female, no Jew or Greek, no slave or free. As Christians, we are equally loved by God; we are called to understand ourselves as essentially equal, in all that it means to be truly human, to be truly children of God.

The early church signified this equality in the ritual of baptism, as the ones who were to be baptized removed their clothing, removed all markers of earthly rank, and then were wrapped in identical white robes as they came out of the water. This reality was not lost to later American slaves who were also Christian, as they sang of the robe of equality: “When I get to heaven I’m gonna put on my robe and walk—walk freely, walk easily, walk equally—walk all over God’s heaven.� Time and again, their equal status as baptized Christians empowered slaves to resist the oppression of slavery, even as it has empowered blacks in South Africa to resist apartheid and empowered women to resist discrimination and now still empowers gay men, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered people to resist any use of religion to diminish their lives.

Heather Murray Elkins has written:
Baptism is an enactment of liberation, effected by water and the Spirit. We are freed of our damaging debt to a Market mind-set, liberated from the tyranny of social location and inherited roles. In place of constricting labels, the community announces us as beloved of God, and pronounces our name.

When we truly get it about the radical grace of God and the radical equality that is ours because of God’s grace, we are ready for the third step, that our baptism equips and empowers us to resist evil and oppression wherever they occur. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it this way: “Oppression is not only evil; it is blasphemous, because it makes a child of God doubt that s/he is a child of God.�

Baptism sets us free of tyrannies; it empowers us to resist oppression; it calls us to recreate our social, economic and political structures to enhance the radical equality that is ours by birthright. WE cannot truly claim the role of children of God and not pay attention to the structures around us, for those structures are hurting some of our brothers and sisters, are hurting some who are in this room with us. WE are called to grow more and more into the image of Christ and to work to shape our communities, our cities, our nations, our world, into the realm of God.

We do not do this suddenly or alone. It is in community that we begin to understand the radical grace, radical equality, and radical power that comes with understanding that we are all of us children of God. It is in community that we grow into the likeness of Christ; that we come to glimpse what the realm of God might be like, thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven. We spend our lives growing into our baptism, as we hear in this proclamation, distributed by the Reconciling Ministries Network:

Baptism is not over and done with
When the pastor pours water on our infant foreheads.
The truth is we are being baptized
By everything that happens to us in life.

We are baptized by trials and difficulties:
In their turbulent waters
WE are purified of all that is false and useless.

We are baptized by suffering:
In its murky waters
We grow in humility and compassion.
We are baptized by joy:
In its gurgling waters
WE experience the goodness of life.

We are baptized by love:
In its singing waters
We blossom like flowers in the sun.

To be baptized is to be Christened,
Which means to be made like Christ.
The sacrament, however, only begins this.
It is like the planting of a seed.
It will take a lifetime for the seed to grow and ripen,
For the image of Christ to be formed in us.
But, formed it shall be!

And so I say, to my neighbor, to my colleague in the faith, to my fellow citizen and fellow traveler on this planet: I will take no person as enemy. You, whoever you are, you are my brother; you are my sister. We may not understand each other. We may often irritate each other. But I cannot trust God’s love for me if I do not believe that God also loves you also, and just as open-heartedly, just as irrevocably as the love I claim. And, I trust that God’s love and God’s grace can live between us, finding openings for grace to flow like water, tumbling down all the walls we have built between us and opening our hearts to one another. Thank God.

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