“Baptism, Grace, and the Holy Spirit”

(Luke 3:15-22)

 Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Rev. Dr. J. Michael Solberg

              There are some stories that just hurt, no matter how far removed you are from the situation, no matter whether you know any of the people personally.  Even if they are just faces on the evening news or the front page of the paper, when these stories unfold they just hurt.

          A few years, I remember it still, I read of a couple who adopted a boy at about age nine.  The boy had never met his biological father, his mother was on crack, and he had been in and out of foster care for years, with no one being able to commit to caring for him long-term.

Through a second or third hand personal connection, a couple heard this boy’s story, and they hurt for him.  They hurt from the boy’s suffering, the neglect, the injustice of it all, the heartbreaking reality that there was not one person in the world who had ever truly loved this boy.  So this couple adopted him, and brought him into their home and their lives.

          Adoption in this kind of situation is always risky business.  A lot of things about your life, about you, your personality, your view of the world, your ability to trust and love, have been deeply shaped by the time you are nine years old and such things don’t change easily.  Our childhoods really do shape us.  This couple adopted the boy with their eyes open, with caution, but also with profound hope and pre-emptive love.

          Things went fairly well for a couple of years.  The boy was becoming more and more part of their lives, and they of his.  He was learning new healthy ways of interacting with people, growing in his ability to trust others, and to be trustworthy.  Maybe he was even learning to recognize and appreciate that undeserved, unearned commitment his new parents had for him – maybe he was learning to recognize their love.

          But this is not a happy tale.  As he hit adolescence the boy began to revert to his previous personality.  Distrust, self-centeredness, and destructive behavior became characteristic of his life.  At fourteen he pretty much left their home and was in and out of juvenile detention.  At sixteen he returned to his adoptive parents’ home to steal money for drugs.  They discovered him, tried to talk to him, get him to accept help.  He shot and killed both of them.  He was tried as an adult and will be in prison likely for the rest of his life.

          That story hurt when I first read it.  I had one of those physically painful emotional reactions.  The tragedy of it all starts, of course, with the boy’s biological parents, the difficult life they probably had, and the bad decisions they made.  Then of course is the suffering of the boy’s early life that he was never able to overcome, and the tragic way he responded to that suffering.

          But I think worst of all, really, is that here in this case anyway, the tremendous grace and pre-emptive love shown by the adoptive parents seemingly won no victory and conquered no evil.  Their love was not ultimately received with gratitude and thanksgiving or even quiet acceptance.   Their grace and love were mocked.  Their grace and love didn’t lead to new life for the boy, but to the end of their lives.

          Grace is dangerous.  Pre-emptive love is perilous.  There is always the chance that grace will be taken advantage of.  That mercy will be met with violence.  That the response to pre-emptive love will be fear and distrust and ultimately rejection and mockery.

          As Christians we are all too familiar with such rejection and mockery.  After all, we are part of the fallen humanity that met God’s love, mercy and pre-emptive grace with the public execution of the Son of God.

          But in order for grace to be grace, or for mercy to be mercy, or for pre-emptive love to be real love, then risk is unavoidable.  If the adoptive parents had taken that boy in and shown him “love” with only the utilitarian goal of seeing him make reasonable and sustained progress in loving them - well it wouldn’t really have been love to begin with.  In other words, if they had loved only to be loved in return, then I am not sure the word love really applies.

          And if God loves us with only the utilitarian goal of seeing us make reasonable and sustained progress in loving God, well it wouldn’t really be love to begin with.  If God loves only to be loved in return, then…well…that God wouldn’t be worth worshipping.

          The testimony of Scripture is clear and repetitive – God is like those parents who adopted that boy with profound love and pre-emptive grace, simply because he needed it.  God loves humanity that same way.  And of course, God’s love is not an emotion or a state of mind.  To say that God loves humanity is to say that God is steadfastly committed to the true flourishing of every human in relationship to God – and that love, that commitment, is real and persistent and eternal without regard to how humans respond.  That is what the Bible says love is all about – and God is love.

          And that pre-emptive grace and profound love is what baptism is all about.  As I have said many times, every person is a precious child of God.  And it is thus clear that God is not very picky about who God loves.  Hopefully the story of Jesus’ death is real enough to you that you see the connections to the story of the adopted boy I mentioned earlier.  We often call God our heavenly father, and God is our heavenly mother as well.  Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.  And whether we place ourselves with the powers that put him on the cross, the crowds who watched and did nothing, or the disciples who abandoned him and fled, we had our role to play in his death.  And we are still, all, precious children of God.

          Baptism is what gives this message, quite literally, weight.  Baptism is what makes this message visible.  This water is a sign, but it isn’t just a sign.  We call baptism a “sacrament,” which comes from the word for “mystery.”  The church has always taught that God mysteriously binds God’s love to this water, and as we are covered with its wetness, we are bathed with God’s love – precious, forgiven children, covered with God’s pre-emptive grace.

          If you may however be a little troubled at this point.  Troubled by the preacher who gives you the good stuff, but ignores the seemingly harsher reality of the Bible.  You remember the words of John the Baptist: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

          Yes, the wheat, the chaff, the threshing floor, the unquenchable fire.  It doesn’t sound like we are dealing here with precious, forgiven children, covered with the God’s pre-emptive grace.

          Ah yes, we really are shaped by the way the world thinks, wanting to divide humanity into wheat and chaff, good and bad, patriot and terrorist, us and them.  But the Biblical truth, you know this, is that there is wheat and chaff in all of us.  Yes, God wants to burn the chaff away, not to punish us, but to purify us, purify us, so that we can fully receive and fully flourish in God’s pre-emptive grace, and profound love.

          Now I know I am relentless about this, always fighting against individualism and lifting up the significance of the church, of us together.  But the Luke who wrote this gospel, the same Luke who wrote the Book of Acts, would be mad at me if I didn’t point out one of his great literary tricks.  Jesus will baptize us with the Holy Spirit and fire, right?  We wonder what that means – we don’t see any Holy Spirit and certainly no fire when we do baptisms around here.  But think about it, Holy Spirit and fire, Holy Spirit and fire…sound familiar?  The Book of Acts?  The day of Pentecost?  The birthday of the church, as we sometimes call it?  “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.”

          To be covered in the waters of baptism, to be covered with the pre-emptive grace of God, is to be brought into the people called “church,” to be shaped by the identity, the fellowship, the faith, and the service of a body of people who worship God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  How God does it, the love with which God does it, certainly is a mystery, but what God does in baptism is no mystery at all – God binds us together as church, to love and serve the God whom we worship.

          Here, with water, covered with its wetness, we are called into the church as we are bathed with God’s love – precious, forgiven children, covered with God’s pre-emptive grace.