Baptism Is Our Road Map

Lectionary reflections for the First Sunday after Epiphany (C)

by Katie Sherrod

This Gospel reading has captivated me since I was a small child in the Roman Catholic church. I loved the idea of Baptism, of being included in the Body of Christ, of having the fire of the Holy Spirit residing in me, not just on the pages of a book.

Lucky Jesus, I thought. At his baptism, his father proclaims to the entire world in a very dramatic way that "Thou are my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased."

Wow. What child wouldn't want that?

Of course Jesus was a boy, a son, and that gave him a head start on all girls, even Mary, his mom. Still, in my heart of hearts as a little girl in the late 1950s and early 60s, I knew God liked girls as much as he liked boys, in spite of what the world and my own church was telling me.

Of course Jesus was a boy, a son, and that gave him a head start on all girls, even Mary, his mom. Still, in my heart of hearts as a little girl in the late 1950s and early 60s, I knew God liked girls as much as he liked boys, in spite of what the world and my own church was telling me.

I could read in my little white missal the Baptismal words, and they didn't have different words for boys and girls. There were no asterisks anywhere in the service. I discovered the same thing in the Book of Common Prayer when, as an adult, I was received into the Episcopal Church. My baptism names me as a child of God and a member of the Body of Christ.

Yet I spent my entire childhood trying to reconcile those words with the words of the church and the world -- words telling me all the things I couldn't do or be simply because I was female. Always, at some level, I knew that was hogwash.

The gift of my baptism was resonating in my soul.

It is the same message of the Gospel reading. God's delight in his chosen, his son, is extended to all of us in Baptism with the gift of the Spirit.

Jesus' public ministry begins with the Spirit's fire given him in his baptism. He goes from the river into the wilderness, and when he emerges, he begins with a holy boldness to speak a radical truth, to live out a radical inclusion in a world that defined itself by who was "in" and who was decidedly not.

Our world hasn't changed all that much. But neither has the Baptismal promise.

We Christians exist in the tension between worlds that constantly seek to name some people as "other" and a Baptismal promise that seals us all by the Holy Spirit and marks us as Christ's own forever.

The irony is that much of the world depends on scripture to help it define "the other." Krister Stendahl, in a 1972 lecture at Union Theological Seminary on "The Bible for the Church on the Move," [reported by Sue Spencer in 2003 for The Witherspoon Society] said, ". . . one of the reasons that things have gone wrong in the Church is [our] image of Scripture. We think of it 'as that which clinches for all times the fact that the Word of God is the Word of God, is the Word of God. Because the Bible tells me so. And there is . . . no confusion and no risk.'"

The world used the church's interpretation of scripture to defend slavery, to defend the oppression of women, and to demonize homosexuals.

Vexing questions arose: Could eunuchs be baptized and accepted? Could a gentile? When these arose, the leaders did not ask, 'What does the Bible say?' They had no 'Bible' as such and so their tendency was to ask, 'What hinders?' They encountered the surprises of grace and learned the mood of 'Why not?'"

But equally challenging issues assailed the Early Church. Stendahl, in his 1972 address, "explored the elan -- the spirit -- that carried the Early Church through the sticky wickets of that era," writes Sue Spencer. "The Swedish theologian saw the apostles venturing into the Graeco-Roman world unencumbered by set procedures, sacred writings or a proud history. Vexing questions arose: Could eunuchs be baptized and accepted? Could a gentile? When these arose, the leaders did not ask, 'What does the Bible say?' They had no 'Bible' as such and so their tendency was to ask, 'What hinders?' They encountered the surprises of grace and learned the mood of 'Why not?'"

Then Stendahl addressed the 1972 audience directly, but he could just as well have been speaking to us: "But, dear friends, if you are so sure about all these things or if you have worked your way into such a theology so that you would rather believe in 'the Book' than in God . . . the leap of faith is a leap into 'the Book.' . . . It has all settled down. . . the apostolic faith dies. . . the need for the Spirit ceases because one knows. And the only thing one might use the Spirit for is to argue for one's being right."

I believe Stendahl points us to a way out of the current controversy in the Episcopal Church, one pointed to in the readings. The way out lies in our Baptism, the sacrament that defines our relationship to God -- we are his own forever through the gift of the Spirit. There are no "asterisks."

Our Baptism invites us all to grow, with its promise and gift of the Holy Spirit. If we start from that promise, that we all -- women and men, straight or gay -- are God's own forever, that the Spirit is as present today as She was then, we might find ourselves addressing problems in the open way Stendahl posits for the Early Church.

We begin by being open to the Spirit. We look for reasons to include people instead of looking for ways to exclude them. We look at the issues facing us as "surprises of grace," instead of problems. We look at one another as brothers and sisters in Christ instead of frightening "others."

The road map is right there in our Baptism.

 

Katie Sherrod is editor of Ruach, the journal of the Episcopal Women's Caucus. She is a freelance writer and television producer based in Fort Worth, Texas, and a contributing editor to The Witness.