Baptism sermon
The
patient is tearful and crying constantly.
She
appears to be depressed.
The
patient refused autopsy.
The
patient has no previous history of suicides.
She
has been depressed since she started seeing me in 1983.
Between
you and me, we ought to be able to get this lady pregnant.
Well,
we probably know what those doctors meant, but they just didn’t seem to make
sense. And we often do some funny
things in church really. You’ve brought
Charley to have water put on his head.
You’ve promised to resist the devil.
Carlie has promised to submit to Christ. We might know what me mean when we do these things, but anyone
coming in might be a bit perplexed. So
why do we bother?
It’s
all about remembering who we are. On my
hand I have a golden band of metal. It
makes me remember not just that I like pretty shiny metal, but it helps me
remember that I am Guy who is married to Ruth.
Wearing the ring doesn’t create the marriage, and it doesn’t guarantee
its quality, but it helps me remember who I am.
When
I think of the way we live today, I think of two pictures. The first is being an astronaut. If you were to go up in space you would be
floating around. You would have a
feeling of being absolutely weightless.
Nothing you held would stay in the same place. It’s called living in zero gravity. A lot of people seem to feel like that today. They don’t have any particular story that
tells them who they are. They don’t
have any particular answer as to why they are here in the first place. They just float around. David Beckham said this about his new child
Brooklyn: “Posh and I definitely want
to have Brooklyn christened. We just
don’t know into what religion.” People
are uncertain about the very reasons they exist.
The
second picture is this. Tent coming out
of peg. Peg it down.
When
we do things like getting baptised it’s like we are being pegged to the
ground. We remember why we are
here. Each of these things tell us a bit about where we have come from,
what matters. They make us stand firm
when the wind gets strong. They are
pegs that can be trusted. They aren’t imitations.
And
how do we know they can be trusted?
Because they are all about the only person who has faced the death of a
friend, felt its pain, and then whacked that death on the head. Jesus is Lord of life and death. Dying is the one thing that is still common
to everyone, and the Jesus we trust in today is the one who has defeated
it. When we remember who he is, then we
remember who we are too. As you take
part in this meditation, you can begin to feel rooted in history, you can begin
to know all these things we remember tell you who you are. They tell you that God has given our lives a
story and a meaning that will never fade, and that makes perfect sense.