Acts 19.4 "Paul said, 'John preached a baptism of radical life-change so the people would be ready to receive the One coming after him, who turned out to be Jesus.'" The Message.
As I was reading this, the very first thought I had was the idea that baptism led to radical life-change. Sometimes I wonder if many of us think of baptism as something you just do to become a part of the body of Christ without really thinking about what it means to be baptized. What it means to make the vows that we do before God and one another. This is where I am feeling the Spirit leading me for this Sunday. As I was working on that, I came across a story from Barbara Brown Taylor from a sermon she titled, "The River of Life" which was in her book. I want to share the first part of the sermon with you.
"I just finished a book called the The Patron Saint of Liars by a young author named Ann Patchett. It is a story of Rose Clinton and her daughter Cecilia, who live at Saint Elizabeth's Home for Unwed Mothers in Habit Kentucky. Rose is the cook and Cecilia is the darling of the place, petted and mothered by all the young women who will give their own babies up for adoption. One May day when she was fifteen years old, Cecilia meets one of the new girls who has come to Saint Elizabeth's. Her name is Lorraine. She is skinny, with a head of red curls, and she is about to have a nervous breakdown while she waits to be interviewed by Mother Corinne, the nun in charge. Cecilia decides to help her out by giving her some advice.
"The guy who got you pregnant," she tells Lorraine. "Don't day he's dead. Everybody does that. It makes Mother Corinne crazy."
Lorraine sits on her hands, and is quiet for a minute. "I was going to say that," she says. "So what do I tell her?"
"I don't know," Cecilia says. "Tell her the truth. Or tell her you don't remember."
"What did you tell her?" Lorraine asks and Cecilia is speechless. "I sat there, absolutely frozen," she wrote later. "I felt like I had just been mistaken for some escaped mass murderer. I felt like I was going to be sick, but that would only have proved her assumptions. No one had ever, ever mistaken me for one of them, not even as a joke. The lobby felt small and airless. I thought I was going to pass out. (32-33)"
Being mistaken for one of them. Baptism is about that we are one of them. We are sinners though it is often easier to sit around and judge them for their sins without treating our own sins that needed Jesus to forgive. Whenever we feel so superior to someone else, I would recommend looking in a mirror and seeing the sinner staring back at you and me. John the Baptist was surrounded by people like you and I seeking to become clean, to have hope, and to have a new beginning in the forgiveness of our sins. Only Jesus offers us the river of life.
Barbara Brown Taylor talks about this and ends the sermon with these words:
"All of us who have gone before them (into the baptismal waters of forgiveness of our sins) have done the same thing as those we see around us. Whether we were carried in our mother's arms or arrived under our own steam, we got into the river of life with Jesus and all his flawed kin. There is not a chance we will be mistaken for one of them. Because we are them, thanks be to God, as they are us: Christ's own forever (36)."
Thank you God for your mercy, your love, and for your Son. Wash us clean and help us remember that we are one in you.
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