Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley
EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, JULY 15, 2018
Proper 10B: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:1-13

Today we’re celebrating the Sacrament of Baptism for Naya and Marilyn and Charles. And one person asked me last week why we do this nowadays at a Sunday morning service instead of privately, at the convenience of families and friends—which used to be the custom for Episcopalians and Roman Catholics and, I think, a good many others.
The short answer is that the current edition of our Book of Common Prayer wants it this way. And this change was based on the sense that Baptism is an important event for the whole congregation, not just for the people being baptized today. It’s important to all of us because of what it tells us about our relationship to God and to one another—about the great gift Baptism gives us in sacramental form.
There are two great sacraments that shape all of Christian life: Baptism in which we’re given new birth and the Holy Communion in which we’re fed again and again with God’s own life. In the ancient church Baptism was a very big event, held only a few times a year and particularly at the Easter Vigil. But it would be hard to schedule it that way in our world, where our calendars are crowded with so many different demands. So the people who shaped our present Book of Common Prayer settled for any Sunday morning that would work! And this way it puts all of us who witness it today back in mind of who we are as people of faith and what it means to have been born again through Baptism.

So I focus this sermon today on two questions about Baptism: What is it about? What does it lead to? And by providence or good luck (it’s always hard to tell the difference) our reading today from Ephesians goes a long way to answer both those questions.
You may be thinking, “Funny, I don’t remember anything about Baptism in that reading.” And you’d be right. It’s not mentioned at all. But it gives us an account of Christian faith that explains Baptism very well.
So, first, what is Baptism about? Our passage from Ephesians puts it this way: God “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will . . .” God did it only because he wanted to!
God “destined us for adoption as God’s children.” We were already God’s children by virtue of our creation. What does it mean to be adopted on top of that? It can’t mean that we are loved more than we were. Ephesians tells us, God “destined” us for this adoption. The love has been there all along. God has always wanted to draw us close in this way.
So Baptism doesn’t cause God to love us. It is, rather, the physical and spiritual touch of that love. The water of baptism is like the water of the womb that each of us floated in in order to be born into the human family. Baptism says to us as we emerge from this “bath,” “Here you are! You are one of us, one of family that has been chosen by God’s own love.”
Some Christians, at times, have thought that God doesn’t love the unbaptized. But that can’t be true. Our text says that God’s love brought us to this point, this adoption. God loved us long before any of us was baptized and doesn’t need Baptism to love us still.
So Baptism is about being a part both of God’s created family and of God’s adoptive family. God says to each person through this sacrament, “I made you from the beginning as my child, and with this water I make you twice my child—my child of deliberate, individual choice. With this water, I assure you of my love: I mark you as beloved.” And that’s what Baptism is about.

And what does it lead to? What difference, really, does it make to a human life? As to the details, there is, for each of us, a whole lifetime of answers to that question. But perhaps the most fundamental one is that it gives us this individual, personal assurance of God’s love. In Baptism, God touches each of us. There is no way that you can say to yourself, “Oh, that love-note was meant for someone else.” No, it was meant for you. To live in the remembrance of this loving touch can give us courage and hope and the power to love even in our most difficult times.
God, after all, doesn’t promise that there will be no troubles in life. What God does promise is to stand with us through them. That’s what our reading from Ephesians means by the phrase “through the blood of Jesus.” It’s not blood offered to God. It’s blood that God shed in God’s selfless determination to draw as close as possible to us in love—even to the point of sharing not just our life, but our death, not just our joys, but our sufferings.
And there’s also a dimension in Baptism that reaches beyond each of as an individual. That’s why Ephesians also speaks of God’s “plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth.” Baptism, by touching us with God’s love, points us forward on a journey together, a journey toward the kind of world that God longs for, a world where we shall be united both with God and with one another—and with a world of beings greater and more wonderful that we can yet imagine, “things in heaven and things on earth.” It is a world of trust, hope, and love—and if its full realization lies beyond anything we can imagine in this life, its beginnings lie right here in this moment when we are touched by this water, the sign of God’s love for us.
“This,” as the last verse we read from Ephesians puts it, “is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of [God’s] glory.” Maybe it’s too vast a goal for us to imagine. But we can still move step by step toward it in our lives. Baptism marks us as God’s beloved and points us in this direction.

Our passage from Ephesians is beautiful and right on target. But I have to admit that I find the language a bit high-flown and hard to follow. I found myself longing for some better image to sum all this up for you. And, indeed, one came to me. It is a passage from the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon—that amazing little book of love poetry that lies right in the middle of the Bible like a key to the whole thing. One of the lovers says to the other:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave. (Song 8:6)
In Baptism, God sets you as a seal on God’s own heart, God’s own arm. And this love of God’s is stronger than any challenge you will ever face.