This sermon was preached for the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, Sunday, January 12, 2025 for the baptism of Lillian Bee. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 43:1-7, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22, and Psalm 29.
Have you ever held yourself under water, completely submerged? I used to do it all the time as a kid in the pool. Go ahead and close your eyes right now. Remember or imagine how it feels to be totally immersed, your entire body surrounded by clear, clean water, floating freely. I remember imagining that was what it must have felt like in the womb as a little baby. Suspended, enveloped, surrounded by nothing but my mother’s love.
Baptism has its roots in the Jewish practice of mikvah, the ritual immersion that restores someone to a state of ritual purity. When a Jewish person does a mikvah, they completely submerge themselves in living water and say special prayers. Jeanne Suk Gersen, writing about her first mikvah as a convert to Judaism in the New Yorker, used this line that really stuck with me. It also resonated with what I had seen and heard in a dear friend’s own first mikvah. Suk Gersen wrote this about curling into a ball underwater and praying the mikvah prayer: “Suspended there, I felt gently but fully held.”
Gently but fully held. Baptism is a moment of rebirth. To be reborn, we first return to the water of the womb. We return to the state of being gently and fully held, surrounded by nothing but love. Restored to union with God and to what God originally intended for us: belonging and belovedness.
John the Baptist took the Jewish immersion practice of restoring ritual purity and made it about restoring moral purity. He urged his followers to repent and live a new life, beginning from baptism. His followers were baptized in the Jordan River, connecting them to the moment when their ancestors passed through the waters of the Jordan to the promised land.
When Jesus came to be baptized by John in the Jordan, John’s first response was that Jesus didn’t need to be baptized. In fact, it should be Jesus baptizing John! Jesus was already morally pure, already one with God. But Jesus wasn’t seeking baptism for himself - he did it for all of us. God became incarnate to live as one of us and to show us the way. God comes to bind us to God. To heal the breach between humans and the divine. God becomes the child of Mary, a human woman, so that we all may become children of God. Baptism, then, is the moment of adoption, of belonging.
The words God says to Jesus after his baptism, are the words God says to all of us as we emerge from the waters of baptism. “You are my child, the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased.”
While the Jewish purity ritual is done again and again, Christians are only baptized once. But at others’ baptisms, at certain moments in the year, we return to the font to remember and renew our commitment to the values, beliefs, and way of being at the core of our faith. That’s why, Kim and Will, you having Lily Bee baptized here with us today is such a gift to all of us. A beautiful opportunity for each of us to remember and recommit. Every time we come to the font, we are to hear these words again, spoken right to us. “You, you are my Son, my Daughter, my child. Beloved, beloved, beloved. With you I am well-pleased.”
Just like adoptions are often made official well after a child is truly loved and has already been living as a part of a family, much of what’s made real to us in baptism is already true. As our prayer book states sacraments are an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. Baptism is not for God, it’s for us, so that we can know and trust and believe in our belovedness and our belonging. Baptism is a sign that we can see and feel and taste and touch and smell and remember - water, oil, flame. This morning, I’ll mark Lily Bee’s forehead with chrism oil. Its scent will linger on her all day. But the mark of the cross lasts forever. No one can take it away. No one can take her belonging, her belovedness away.
We may not remember being in the womb, but our body does. Somehow, mysteriously, Lily’s body will remember this day, too. She’ll remember the feeling of being gently and fully held. Maybe her body will even remember the cool splash of water and the chrism smell.
And it’ll be our job from here to remind her heart and mind: Lily, you are loved. Lily, you belong. That’s what Lily’s parents and godparents, and all of us, are pledging to do today. No matter what in the world will try to convince her otherwise - all the powers of evil they renounce on her behalf today - Kim, Will, Amanda, and Andy, you will be there to remind her that she was made in God’s image and she was made for love. And all of us - we promise, too. We pledge to do all in our power to help them.
There are so many layers of belonging we affirm today. Lily Bee belongs to these parents and they belong to her. God, she is so lucky in the parents she got! Today, Kim and Will pledge to do their best to raise her to be strong, to seek her happiness, and to have faith in dark times. Lily Bee also belongs to her chosen family, to her godparents, Amanda and Andy, who have been like siblings to Kim and Will. And they belong to her.
Lily Bee belongs to all of creation. Named for her parents’ love of the natural world, she’ll be blessed by the waters that connect us all. She’ll be raised by two parents who understand and live out that last, newest promise in our baptismal covenant to care for creation, nature-lovers who will infuse her childhood with wonder and appreciation of plants and animals, forests and gardens.
Lily Bee belongs to the church. This church, here, St. Andrew’s, but also the wide communion of the faithful we represent today, including the saints who have gone before, who are present in some mysterious way. At St. Andrew’s church, we welcome everyone to God’s table simply because we believe Jesus, who broke bread with outcasts and sinners, would never turn anyone away. But in baptism, today, Lily gets her own permanent seat at the table - even if it’s just a highchair for now. Baptism gives her the right to sit at the table as a family member, a beloved daughter, not a guest. As she grows, Lily will get to decide what belonging to a church means in her life - and all of us here will show her what it means in ours.
But most of all, Lily Bee belongs to God. She is God’s daughter, with whom God is well-pleased. Even when human love will fail her - because it will, even when her heart will be broken - because it will be, even when these four people screw up - because all parents do screw up, God’s love will be there for her, unconditional and infallible. She is sealed as Christ’s own forever. Nothing can ever degrade that love.
Here’s the thing, Kim and Will, Amanda and Andy, if you want Lily Bee to believe in her own belovedness, in her essential belonging, you have to believe in your own. You have to live like you are beloved no matter what. She’ll come to know what love means through your devotion and loyalty. What faith means through your resilience and perseverance. What caring for creation looks like through your gardening and tending. What serving your neighbor looks like through your hospitality and generosity.
Someday she will claim these promises for herself. Someday, because of you, she’ll be old enough and strong enough to say no to evil and yes to love - and she’ll know which is which. She’ll know where to come to seek God and learn more about Jesus. And with parents like the two of you, she’ll for sure know how to build community and love on her neighbors. Until then, that’ll be your job to do for her. It’s a hard job, a confusing job, a job that’ll keep changing and growing and challenging you at every new stage.
But through it all, you will gently but fully hold her, just as God gently but fully holds you. You won’t do it alone.
Take a moment now and look around. You are not alone in this. None of us are alone in this.
So are you ready? Let’s do this.
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