L.D. 26, Colossians 2:6-15 "The Tenses of Baptism" Scott Hoezee

Martin Gardner's novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm, tells a story that, although it is itself fictional, has altogether too many real-life parallels. In the story we meet Peter Fromm, a young, Midwesterner who feels called to the ministry and so enrolls in the University of Chicago's Divinity School in the late-1930s. But soon after his arrival at seminary, Peter detects from his professors a systematic dismantling of the very Christian faith Peter had come to seminary to learn more about. The novel's narrator is one of Peter's seminary professors, a liberal theologian who took annual delight in pricking the balloon of faith that each of his fresh-faced students brought to the divinity school every September.

In describing Peter Fromm's own faith, this professor claimed that when he arrived, Peter held to a "primitive Christianity indistinguishable from the childlike, apostolic faith described in the Book of Acts." It fell to this professor, then, to make Peter grow up. And so he began to expound the teachings of Enlightenment modernism, battering students like Peter with new terminology about redaction and form criticism, demythologization, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and a welter of other scholarly tools that had long been wielded to chop up the Bible into so many disparate chunks and pieces.

When one day the professor casually noted that of course Jesus' resurrection from the dead was not a physical event in history, Peter objected loudly and wondered how anyone who believed that could be the pastor of a congregation where folks did believe in the raising of Jesus' body. "Isn't that dishonest?" Peter asked. The professor assured him that it was a harmless form of dishonesty, something pastors needed to live with even as they slowly on tried to help the congregation to see Easter's "real" meaning.

Over time, Peter became so confused that he finally had a complete mental and spiritual collapse. A few years after entering seminary, Peter was trying to preach an Easter sermon when he was convulsed with mirthless laughter that quickly disintegrated into an all-out psychological episode that ended only when a burly church usher whacked Peter upside the head with a brass candlestick! Peter Fromm was honest. He could not proclaim a faith that had been gutted. He could not accept the liberal notion that even if all the creeds are wrong, there is enough good philosophy scattered in the Bible to prop up Christianity after all. So on that Easter Sunday, Peter could not deal with the bleak spectacle of proclaiming a lifeless message to a dying world. What was the sense?

As I said, this is a fictional story but it plays itself out in the real world. Every fall freshman students arrive in religion classes at various colleges, universities, or divinity schools only to face professors who are convinced that their main task is not to flesh out the faith of these undergraduates. Instead they seek to make them exchange the faith they carried with them to college for something quite different.

The apostle Paul knew all about this already in those earliest days of the church. That is why he warned the Colossian Christians to not let anyone displace the centrality of Christ by presenting some world-wise alternative philosophy. For our purposes this morning, it will also be vital for us to see that when it's all said and done, Paul roots this in baptism. Where a person stands on baptism may well make the difference between being firmly rooted in Christ alone and being wide open to all kinds of other teachings out there.

The Catechism reminds us of the double-washing in baptism. The blood of Jesus washes away the filth of our sins. The Spirit of Jesus washes over us to then further renew us. If our hearts are like a ghetto building covered over by the spraypainted graffiti of sin, baptism doesn't merely clean off the graffitti so that the walls are blank. Baptism first wipes us clean of all the ugly stuff but then writes a whole new story on our hearts--it's the story of grace, of renewal, of becoming more and more like Jesus from now on.

It all flows from baptism. But how? When a baby or an adult has water placed on his or her head, what are we to imagine is happening? Let's spend some time talking about what some have called "the tenses of baptism." In grammar and in terms of how we view our own lives, we think of past, present, and future. Baptism means something in each of those tenses, too. If we can grasp these baptismal tenses, we may understand why Paul locates everything we are as Christians as coming through this sacrament.

We'll begin with the past tense. Not surprisingly, baptism's past tense leads us directly to the cross. Paul is very clear that Jesus, although human like the rest of us, was also the earthly location of the fullness of God. Jesus was what Søren Kierkegaard once called "the Incognito God." Jesus was God in disguise, God under wraps, the glorious God of the galaxies hidden in plain sight, rubbing shoulders with people in the marketplace, sitting down at lunchtime to enjoy a tuna sandwich and a refreshing glass of water.

And yet shockingly, in the deepest mystery there is, this same Son of God eventually wound up brutally impaled on a cross and sunk into the earth like some grim scarecrow. The Romans liked crucifixion because it had the dual advantage of not only making someone suffer and then finally die, it was also such a public way to do it. A naked man hanging on a cross was like a giant roadside billboard declaring to all who passed by, "This is how Rome deals with evildoers! So watch your step or you could be next!"

So the one in whose heart was concealed the majesty of the divine was hoisted up as a wicked man and killed. It made no sense initially. In fact, it shattered the faith of the disciples. The gospels are honest in showing us that within days of Jesus' death, the whole band of disciples was falling apart with each man or woman returning to whatever he or she had been doing before Jesus arrived, wishing they hadn't wasted three years pinning their hopes on a man who, as it turned out, had been a literal dead-end cause.

Even so, out of this initially senseless, inexplicable event, the New Testament will eventually become unanimous in saying that somehow, the death of God's only and beloved Son made the universe turn the corner from darkness into light. Because in the end, the only thing that could kill the one in whom the fullness of divinity was housed was something more gruesome than Roman whips and nails. What killed God's Son was when the full weight of everything that had ever, or would ever, go wrong with this cosmos got laid squarely on his shoulders. Jesus died not just for the sins of the world but because of them.

Baptism's past tense connects us to that redeeming event. As Paul writes in verse 14, every human being had a "written code" against him or her. As one commentator put it, this was a kind of spiritual I.O.U. Things went terribly wrong in the world God made. Terrible things were done. Hurtful things were said. And we are all complicit in that. We are all caught up in a vast web of bad goings-on. So we accumulated debt, in a spiritual sense. Like some high-interest cash advance you get from your credit card, the debt keeps getting worse every day until it gets to the point that you have to declare bankruptcy because you know you'll never pay it off. God knew we were stuck in the spiral of bad debt. So he stamped "Cancelled" across our I.O.U. and he did so with the ink of Jesus' blood.

Baptism connects us to that one-time, saving event on the cross. When Paul says we get buried with Christ through our baptisms, he means it. He is saying that by the Holy Spirit of God, we do not just learn about what happened to Jesus, we get personally identified with Jesus' death and with all its saving benefits. We really were there.

That's baptism's past tense. But before considering the present tense, I want to move to the future. The future tense of baptism points us forward to an ever-increasing renewal of our lives. Baptism sets us on a path that will help us to become more and more like Christ. Ultimately, this future tense points forward to the glory of God's kingdom. But even short of eternal life, baptism charts our future in the sense of showing us what the real goal of our lives must now be: the goal of being like Jesus. Baptism tells us something else about the future, too: Jesus will never leave us. We will never be alone. It is no coincidence that the same Great Commission that tells the disciples to baptize people concludes with that wonderful promise, "Surely, I am with you always, even until the end of the age." That's the future tense of baptism, assuring us that we will never be on our own.

But the past tense and the future tense of baptism may be the easy part. It's the present tense that has long given Christian thinkers fits. What, if anything, happens at the moment of baptism? Many times it seems as though we don't ponder if something happens through baptism as the water is applied. If anything, our tendency is to see this as just a symbol, a visible display of something that was already true for this infant or for this adult even well before the pastor started drizzling water.

And in one sense that's right. If I have to meet with a couple whose baby died of SIDS before we were able to baptize the child, you can be well assured that I will tell these grieiving parents that baptism is not some piece of magic that is required in order for their baby to be in the Lord's hands. I will emphasize the biblical teaching that God's covenant love extended to that child the moment he or she had been conceived by Christian parents. An infant's status is not in limbo until that moment when the water hits his or her head. The same is true for an adult. If George already made an adult profession of faith before the Elders but gets killed in a car accident on his way to church on the day of his baptism, no one is going to say, "Too bad about George--he was so close to getting saved but, as it turns out, he just won't make it into the kingdom after all."

Of course not! At the same time, however, I'm not going to go along with you if you say to me, "Well, if the baby who died of SIDS and George who died in the pre-baptism car accident were all set anyway, why don't we just get rid of baptism seeing as it doesn't do anything?" I would not agree with that, nor would I respond by saying, "You're right: baptism doesn't do a blessed thing, but it's still helpful as a kind of reminder." That can't be all that baptism is. How could baptism be just a reminder when we all know that an infant at the font isn't being reminded of anything because she neither knows what's happening nor will she ever recall it later. If I asked for a show of hands, I'd wager that less than 5% of the baptized people in this room could remember their baptism.

The truth of baptism's present tense lies somewhere in between being a mere symbolic gesture and being a magic act. When a person is baptized, whether as an ignorant infant or a fully aware adult, the Holy Spirit of God does something . Baptism leaves a mark on that person's soul. Just about every person here this morning in a certain age range can roll up his or her left sleeve to reveal a vaccination mark on the upper arm. The vaccines they once gave every child against polio and smallpox must have been a pretty hefty set of needle pricks because the marks never go away but just grow as you grow the way someone's initials carved onto a tree trunk get larger as the tree grows. From the looks of my own scar, I'm quite glad I can't remember getting it! But the mark tells me I did.

Whether you can remember your baptism or not, your soul bears its mark. It wouldn't be there if your baptism had been skipped. And here's another thing we have to believe: neither can that mark be removed. We enter here mysteries whose depths we cannot plumb but the indelible nature of baptism, the promise that God loves us and will never leave us, is what has caused me in the past to suggest hope for parents and grandparents of kids who have wandered from the faith. Because if the present tense of baptism is going to mean anything, we need to hold onto the idea that it may mean that God will not leave even those prodigals who claim they want to leave God.

All of this stems from baptism. In its past, present, and future tenses, baptism marks us and seals us for salvation in Christ because baptism catches us up in that great gospel rhythm of dying and rising, of letting all that is bad in us get drowned so that God can raise up in its place all that is lovely and good.

This, then, brings us back full circle to where we began today. Because even as many of us were baptized as little children, so the faith to which we still hold is, and in the eyes of many, a naive, child-like thing. There are lots of people who are quite ready to treat us like Peter Fromm--as people who need to grow up and leave behind such simplistic ideas. Instead we are told that mature and intelligent people of the twenty-first century must do without holding to miracles like resurrections from the dead in favor of tapping into our own inner god, empowering us to lead fulfilled lives. Still others tell us that it is merely quaint to believe that there is only one redemption. All paths lead to a new world, we're told.

If we think baptism connects us to something, that's fine for us but let's not be too quick to discount other ways. In this great big world, bursting with variety and with devout people from many traditions, only a silly child could think that God acted decisively just once on a hill far away and long ago. How dare we say that the fullness of God came down to earth just once? Maybe God is fully present all around us right now, too, in the trees, the sky, the soft murmurs whispered into your ear by a lover. Maybe it's all God.

These days it seems that everything is permitted, religiously speaking, except being specific. The more fuzzy, diffuse, and wide-ranging a theology is, the better the world likes it. But then, why wouldn't it? Because something as broad as the sky above makes no particular claims on anyone. If we can absorb God the same way as (and with as little effort as) we absorb fluoride through the city's drinking water, why would anyone need to get very serious about pondering God? Just let God happen to you, man!

But if it turns out that the fullness of God is not as diffuse as the air we breathe, if it turns out that there was a cosmos-shattering event that took place when the fullness of God in bodily form got murdered but then later raised back to life: if it turns out that the redemptive work of God is that specific, then maybe the equally very specific act of baptism really is the gateway by which we get caught up in a whole new world.

In this stirring passage Paul tells us that because of our baptisms, and through the miracle of baptism, we received the fullness of the same God whose fullness had all along filled up Christ Jesus the Lord. For many of us here today, that means that we had it all way back already when we were children! As we grow up and learn more, we do mature, of course, we do deepen our knowledge of and appreciation for the faith and for the wider theological scholarship that bolsters that faith. In that sense we don't stay children forever.

But if it is true that at baptism we received the fullness of God already when we were children, then we have a very good reason not to be moved by the philosophical and pop ideas of the age, especially those that tell us we must put away the childish faith of old in order to be mature, with-it, postmodern people. In that sense, we are quite content to stay children. Because as children, when we one day meet God face to face, we alone will be the ones who will be able to look at that galactic God of might and yet say to him, "It's good to be home, dear Father." That's a child talking! Because in the end, as the prophet said, "A little child will lead." Amen.