Baptism: Do You Confess Jesus Christ...

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were Romans 4:13-25 and Mark 8:27-38:

When we talk about the membership vows to join the United Methodist Church, which are prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness, I always mention the fact that the order is important, at least for the first ones. Prayer isn’t just accidentally first, but it’s there because of its priority. And then presence is important because we need to be in and around and with the body of Christ, not to just be a part of it, but also in order to get from and give to the church what we need to grow and mature in our faith. And so, as we look at the baptismal vows through Lent in preparation for celebrating Easter which will include baptizing people into the church and doing a reaffirmation of baptismal vows, I wonder about the placement of the questions, or why they are asked in the order in which they are asked. So far we’ve looked at the first two question, and they are, and remember I ask them on behalf of the whole church, “do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness and reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin?” and so that question has to deal with turning from the brokenness of the world, which is not just in ourselves but also in the culture and societies in which we live. And the second question is somewhat similar, but also different and that is “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” Which means not only recognizing that evil, injustice and oppression are in the world, that brokenness of the first question, but also accepting God’s assistance to actually do something about it. First, we renounce it and then we say we’ll work against it to do God’s will in the world. But do you notice anything about those questions and Jesus? They actually don’t say anything about Jesus or even the church at all? It’s not until the third question, which we look at today, and that question is “Do you confess Jesus Christ as your savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations and races?” This is the first time we ask about Jesus, who seems kinda important right? So, is this the right place for it?

When the Methodist movement began to spread and grow quite rapidly in England, someone wrote to John Wesley and asked him what it was the Methodist’s were supposed to do. That is what are the marks of a Methodist, or more directly, what are the rules of Methodism. And so, he created what were called the general rules, and there were three. The first is to do no harm, the second is to do good and the third was, he said, to attend upon all the ordinances of God, which got shorted much later to stay in love with God. And so, if we look at those rule, the whole Jesus things also comes last. And you can certainly do no harm and do good without believing in God right? But, I will be bold enough to say, you can’t love God without also doing the first two. And so, is that order correct then, a call to living out the faith which could then lead people to faith? Or do we need to make the profession first to understand what comes out of it? And one more piece to throw into this conversation is that Jesus does not begin his ministry by saying believe in me, make a profession of faith first, instead he begins it by saying “repent, for the Kingdom of God has come near.” For him the first action is repentance, which is also the first question. And so perhaps the order makes complete sense, renounce evil and repent, then seek to resist evil, injustice and oppression, and then make a profession of faith.

And we see this even more in Jesus’ ministry in the passage we heard from today. The disciples have been traveling with Jesus for a while now. They’ve been receiving teachings from him, and have already seen a number of pretty spectacular miracles take place, including healings and the feeding of multitudes. But there is no proclamation of who Jesus is by the disciples up to this point. In Mark’s gospel lots of others have made statements about who Jesus is, but not the disciples. And notice how Jesus first phrases the question.

He first asks who others say that he is. Only once they have run through possibilities that others are throwing around, and then he says “but who do you say that I am?” who do you say that I am? That’s really the heart of this question, and of Mark’s gospel, and of baptism is this proclamation of faith. It doesn’t matter what others have told you. It doesn’t matter how strong or weak others faith is. And it doesn’t matter what we have been taught or heard, not what our parents, our friends, or minister have said, but who do you say that Jesus is? No one is born a Christian, it comes with this profession of faith, confirmed in the waters of baptism, but the choice has to be our own. We cannot live through someone else’s faith. We have to either choose or reject it ourselves, and so we have to answer this question, who do you say Jesus is? “Do you confess Jesus as your savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord?” This is not just a statement of faith, it’s also a pledge of allegiance. To whom are we going to follow, to whom are we going to obey, to whom are we going to turn over the entirety of our lives? What it also says is that we cannot save ourselves, and that’s a huge step for many people to make. That’s the argument that Paul is making about Abraham, that he is not saved, he is not deemed righteous because of his actions, because of what he does. He is deemed righteous because of his faith. We are saved because of our faith in Christ, and in turning ourselves over to him, or loving the Lord our God with all that we are, and out of that loving our neighbor.

And so, if you are going to do that, if you’re going to make that proclamation, if you’re signing on the signature line of the contract, you should know what you are signing up for. In Luke Jesus says that you better know the cost of discipleship before you take on the task. Or as we heard this morning, anyone who wants to follow Jesus needs to be willing to pick up their cross and follow, to lose their life in order to save it. And so, in that understanding the first two questions also make sense in being asked first. Because it sort of matches what Jesus says about gaining the things of the world, because those first two questions are really about the ways of the world. Are you going to reject the kingdoms of this world in order to accept and work for the Kingdom of God? Are you going to reject the ways that the world says we should live, in violence and retribution, fighting and quarrelling, in hating and loathing others? Or will you live in peace and forgiveness, in love and grace, in turning the other cheek and praying for your enemies? Those are pretty stark contrasts, but that is the way of discipleship, the way of the cross, and why it’s so darn hard.

But what this question, and the question we answered last week, also tell us is that we do not do this work alone. First, we have God with us, and the Spirit moving and working in us and around us, to help. But then we also have the church. We need each other to do this work. John Wesley said that there is no religion but social religion; that is, we need community to be Christians, to be the body of Christ, which we will explore in more detail in the final two questions. And yet this question has a particular view of the church as well because what is says is that it is the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations and races. That means that we are not the gatekeepers to the church, as much as we might want to be. Christ is the gatekeeper, and guess what? The gates are removed because through Christ’s actions all are brought in, and we can even see this in his ministry too, like in his interactions with the Roman soldier, or the Syrophoenician woman and the Samaritan women. Those who had been excluded are included. In another portion of Romans Paul says, “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.” He makes similar claims in his other letters. And so, all the arguments we have been having recently about who can be included or not, are not only not new, they are also wrong. And I will also mention that with the increasing push for Christian nationalism, which says that to be Christian, let alone American, you must first be white, and second accede to a particular interpretation of Christianity, and if you aren’t either of those things then bad things can and should be done to you, is not just not Christian it begins to fall into those other categories we’ve been talking about. But here another truth as old as the church is that those who draw the widest circles always win. Maybe not that day, but in the end, they win, because it is Christ who opened the doors for the church and it is Christ who judges, not us, and that’s a good thing in my opinion. It removes all that pressure of having to be the judge.

Jesus was sent to save, to redeem, to offer God’s grace, and to gives a call to to pick up our cross and follow him. To do that is not just a vocal assent, but a call to a way of life. A call to repentance. A call to resistance. A call to love. A call to forgiveness. A call to allegiance. A call to trust. A call to follow. These questions we are asking are not independent of each other, but just like the 3 rules of Methodism, they build and play off of each other. So, on behalf of the whole church, I ask you: “Do you confess Jesus as your savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations and races?” I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.