Rodney Wallace Kennedy is lead pastor of First Baptist Church, Dayton, Ohio. Today's account of baptism comes from a sermon he preached on the Sunday celebrating the Baptism of Christ, January 9, 2011.
Baptism is not a cute ritual for babies or a free ticket to heaven for pre-adolescents. It is far more than that, and Baptists, of all people, ought to lead the way in making sure people know that baptism is the entrance into the valley of the shadow of death, the long walk into the light and the Promised Land. I asked you to remember your baptism this morning. Touch, feel, renew your vows. Baptism really is a big deal.
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Baptism is a journey of doing all that God requires. American Christians have a hangup: We claim a status instead of a calling; we claim rights instead of requirements and privileges instead of responsibilities. Some Christians think they are morally superior and go about the business of cramming their moralism down everyone else’s throat. Some Christians think they are emotionally superior and feel sorry for those who don’t carried away in worship. Some Christians think they are intellectually superior and delight in insulting the faith of those they deem ignorant. Some Christians think they are biblically superior and have been given special revelation. Some Christians think they are politically superior and we are in real trouble when a morally superior person is also afflicted with the illusion of politically superiority.
Will Campbell says, “Everyone has to have some they feel superior to.” Jesus bursts the illusion of superiority in his baptism. See Jesus, our Jesus, baptized with sinners, reprobates, and failures. I can’t help see Flannery O’Connor’s description of the swinging bridge to heaven populated by battalions of freaks and lunatics. What good news for all of us morally, culturally, economically, and politically inferior who carry insecurity with us from childhood like an old blanket without which we can sleep.
Baptism, then, is a one-word language for the whole of our life of faith. The water ritual isn’t repeated, but our baptism keeps happening. Some of us would be good people if there were someone there every day to baptize us, to figuratively immerse in the water again. Let your morning prayer be, “Thank God I am baptized. I am baptized.”
Rodney Wallace Kennedy, Sermons From Mind and Heart: Struggling to Preach Theologically (Wipf & Stock, 2011), pp.98-102.
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