“Baptism Makes a Difference in Our Lives”

January 8, 2006

Scripture Reading:  Mark 1:4-11

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

There was a 92 year old priest who was venerated by everybody in town for his holiness.  He was also a member of the Rotary Club.  Ever time the club met, he would be there, always on time and always seated in his favorite spot in a corner of the room.

One day the priest disappeared.  It was as if he had vanished into thin air.  The townsfolk searched all over and could find no trace of him.  But the following month, when the Rotary Club met, he was there as usual sitting in his corner. 

“Father,” everyone cried, “where have you been?”

“I just served a thirty day sentence in prison.”

“In prison?” they cried.  “Father, you couldn’t hurt a fly.   What happened?”

“It is a long story,” said the priest, “But briefly, this is what happened.  I bought myself a train ticket to go into the city.  I was standing on the platform waiting for the train to arrive when this stunningly beautiful girl appears on the arm of a policeman.  She looked at me, turned to the cop and said, ’He did it.  I’m certain he’s the one who did it!’  Well to tell you the truth, I was so flattered I pleaded guilty.” 

Who are we?  Much of the time we think we are what other people say we are.  This is good if it is flattering, as the 92 year old priest decided it was no matter what the beautiful women was accusing him of.  If we get an A in math and the teacher says we are smart in math, then we think we are smart in math.  If people say you look like Tom Cruise, then you think you are good looking.  If you have a Porsche and people say you are rich, then you think you are rich.  If you have an old Chevy and you live in the sub Sahara and people think you are rich, then you are rich. 

Thinking you are who and what other people think you are is fine as long as the comments about who you are good ones.  Compliments go a long way.  Getting an A in math is great.  Looking like Tom Cruise is great.  Being rich is great.  After 92 years the monk enjoyed basking in the fantasy of whatever the beautiful woman was accusing him of.  It was great. 

But, it can work the other way too.  If people think we are not good in some way, if we are inferior in some way, bad in some way, then it can be devastating to us.    Prejudice, whatever kind of prejudice, is devastating.  This month is black history on and next week is Martin Luther King Jr holiday.  They of all people, are aware of the devastating effects of prejudice on our self image.     

Who here has blue eyes?  Who here has brown eyes?  Right after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 a teacher in a small town in Iowa divided her third grade class into blue eyed and brown eyed groups.  She then gave a daring lesson in discrimination.  She told the class that they were going to a little experiment.  They were going to “pretend” for the day that blue-eyed people were better than brown-eyed people.  They all agreed.  The teacher laid out the ground rules.  It started with the blue-eyed people were smarter than the brown-eyed people.  A boy raised his hand,

“My Dad isn’t stupid.”  The teacher replied,

“Is your Dad brown eyed?” 

“Yeah.”

“One day you came to school and you told us that he kicked you.”

“He did.”

“Do you think a blue-eyed father would kick his son?  My Dad’s blue-eyed and he never kicked me.  Ray’s dad is blue-eyed, he’s never kicked him.  Rex’s dad is blue-eyed, he’s never kicked him.  This is a fact.  Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.  Are you brown-eyed or blue?...The blue-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess, the brown-eyed people have to stay in.” 

So the day went.  Soon enough the blue-eye children were teasing the brown-eye children.  At the end of the day the brown-eyed children described how they felt.  “It seemed like we were down on the bottom, everything bad was happening to us.”  “The way they treated you, you felt like you didn’t even want to try to do anything.  “It seemed like Mrs. Elliott (the teacher) was taking our best friends away from us.”  The brown-eye children couldn’t concentrate.  They did marked worse academically that day.  One brown-eye boy who was terrific in math was so demoralized that he got many wrong on his multiplication test. 

Prejudice doesn’t only happen between races, and the color of our skin.  Prejudice, what other people say we are, can happen with a lot of things.  It can happen to women, it can happen between religious faiths, it can happen to fat people, short people, people who are not athletic, divorced people,  people with mental illness…poor people, people of certain ethnic backgrounds (practically any ethnic background), people of different sexual orientations, older people, younger people, on and on the list goes.  In fact I bet everyone here in one way or another has experienced some form of prejudice, pre-judging, against them in their life.  Take a moment to think what that might have be, or may still be, and jot it down on the top of your bulletin.  What is one way that society, or some people, have said that you are not good enough for one reason or another. 

For me, the prejudice I have noticed most in my life is being a woman minister.  I remember at my first church, the South Portland Congregational Church, I was the assistant minister there.  I was the first woman minister they ever had.  I remember a deacons committee meeting.  Up until that point they had never had a woman deacon assisting in communion – take the trays down and pass them around the congregation.  Only men had been allowed to do that in their church.  Someone at the meeting brought up the fact that it was sort of silly for them to still abide by that tradition since now they had a woman minister actually celebrating communion.   People kind of limply agreed.  One woman then chimed in that she never wanted to do it herself because she thought that she would trip on her high heels if she was passing it out.  I remember sitting there and how strange that conversation was.    

After you have noted how in your life you have experienced prejudice against yourself, think of what the brown-eyed children said.  Did you ever feel like when you were down on the bottom everything bad was happening to you?  Or did you every feel like you didn’t even want to try?  Or did you feel like someone was taking away your best friends.  Did you get so demoralized that you couldn’t concentrate or do anything right.

Who are we?  Who are we really?  This is why our baptism is so important.  Baptism tells us that we are not what other people think of us, good or bad.  Rather our baptism is a sign that we are God’s and who God wants us to be.  We are not primarily black or white, male or female, divorced or single, gay or straight, American or Cuban, blue-eyed or brown-eyed.  When Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan by John a voice came from heaven and said, “This is my beloved son…”  Likewise, when we are baptized we are declared a child of God who is loved. 

In the time of Noah there was a great flood.  Noah built an ark and took the animals into the ark.  Then he waited out the terrible storm many days.  Finally when the whole earth was consumed by the waters and the ark was bounced around lost on the endless waves Noah sent out a dove to find dry land.  The dove returned with a freshly plucked branch in its beak.  Likewise, when we are lost in the flood waters of prejudice, when we are drowning in what everyone else is telling us who we are, God sends a dove down to us as he did at the baptism of Jesus as a sign that we can find safe harbor and alight on the mountain of God. 

Remember Ruby Bridges?  She was the six year old Afroamerican girl who in 1960 the judge in New Orleans ordered be sent to William Frantz Elementary School which was up until then segregated and only white children had been allowed in.  Ruby Bridges was a brown-eyed girl.  At the age of only six, this little girl had to walk through a crowd of people screaming horrible things to her, everyday she went to school.  There was no one else in the whole school building, because all the white children refused to go to school with her.  None the less, this little girl arrived at school every day and seemed calmed and cheerful as her teacher Miss Hurley taught her alone, the only student in the building.  One day Miss Hurley saw Ruby walk in front of the crowd and stop and turn to them and say something.  When she asked what she had said, she said she hadn’t said anything.  But the teacher said, “You did Ruby, I saw you moving your lips.”  Then Ruby replied, “I wasn’t talking.  I was praying.   I was praying for them.”  Every morning, Ruby had stopped a few blocks away from school to say prayer for the people who hated her.  This morning she forgot until she was already in the middle of the angry mob.  This is the prayer she said every day:

            Please, God, try to forgive those people.

            Because even if they say those bad things,

            They don’t know what they’re doing.

            So You could forgive them,

            Just like You did those folks a long time ago

            When they said terrible things about You. 

Who here remembers their baptism?  (If someone raises their hand, ask them what they remember about it.)  Many of us do not remember our baptism.  After all many of us were only very young children, infants.  Because we baptize infants here the power of the sacrament can be lost in a tendency to get sentimental, and giggly over the thing.  It is as if Noah received the branch from the dove and thought it was pretty and put it in a pretty vase in his cabin.  It is as if Noah forgot all about the situation he was in and never realized that the dove had the olive branch in his beak not because it was pretty and cute, but because dry land was found!  They were saved from the deluge at last!

Ruby remembered her baptism.  She remembered that who she was was not what all the screaming people in the crowd were telling her she was.  Ruby remembered that she was a child of God.  Because she was anchored in her faith and in her baptism, Ruby was able to pray for her enemies and ask forgiveness.  That is a really hard thing to do.  Let’s all try that right now.  Lets, all think about that time when we were the victims of some prejudice.  Think about how it made you feel.  Then remember that you are a child of God.  Say the prayer Ruby said for them, whoever they are.  Repeat after me:

Please, God, try to forgive those people.

            Because even if they say those bad things,

            They don’t know what they’re doing.

            So You could forgive them,

            Just like You did those folks a long time ago

            When they said terrible things about You. 

How did that feel?...

Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoon once said, “I was born on the stage of life.  They took one look at me and said ‘Not right for the part.’”  Through our baptism we can confidently say, “I was born on the stage of life.  God looked at me and said ‘Right, very right for the part.’” 

Now this is more than just a feel good thing.  It was hard, a little hard and maybe a lot hard to say that prayer that Ruby did, for those people that have been mean to us.  I found it was hard.  I had to dig deep into my baptism and stand on it like a rock before I was able to say the prayer with out getting tight in my stomach.

It is more than just a feel good thing in another way.   At the baptism of Jesus a voice said, “This is my beloved son…”  Jesus baptism marked the beginning of his ministry for the dominion of God through service and even suffering for all human kind.  Each day of your life is not about what other people think you should do rather it is about what God thinks you should do.  Every day you should ask yourself, how am I to fulfill God’s purpose today?  Each week you should ask yourself, how am I to fulfill God’s purpose this week?  Each month, how am I to fulfill God’s purpose.  Each year, how…  And for your whole life. 

We need to be absolutely clear about what our baptism so many years ago,  means for us each and every day.  No matter what our limitations, no matter how useless we might feel we must never ever assume that because of our limitations God will not use us.  Whoever we are, and however fragmented and partial our abilities might be, God can use us.  Even a little six year old girl, God used Ruby as a light for all the world.  Her mother says, “Our Ruby taught us all a lot.  She became someone who helped change our country.  She was part of history, just like generals and president are part of history.  They’re leaders, and so was Ruby…”

This, by the way, is also true about churches.  Christians constantly grumble about their local church or denomination.  Often we long for something that seems more informed, more sophisticated, more pure, more sound, more biblical, for us at BBC we often long for a bigger church with more programs, whatever.  The grass is always greener on the other side.  But, God has never had a perfect church with which to work.  Yet, God goes on keeping his promises with us, God goes on staying in covenant with us, God goes on cherishing us as God’s children, and God goes on and will go on in the future doing God’s work though us, even here in our little local church. 

Let me tell you an incredible story I read about in Newsweek.  There was a Pakistani immigrant named Khan who drove a cab in Washington.  His mother’s dying words were, “One day, son, you’re going to be somebody – like a king!”  Given that he was a cab driver at the time, and completely broke, his mother’s wish would have been laughable to anyone who heard it at the time.  Yet, Khan believed what she said.  Crazy, yes.  Faith filled, yes.  Khan said he knew that God had something special in mind for him.  Fifteen years ago he had had a dream where 6 numbers appeared: 2, 4, 6, 17, 25, and 31.  Every year he bet on the megabucks using these numbers and lost.  Then the jackpot rose to 55 million.  Khan’s lucky numbers finally came through! 

That is incredible enough in and of itself.  But, then with his winnings in his pocket he decided to return to the town in Pakistan that he came from Batagram in the Himalayas and run for mayor.  Three days after he was elected, October 8, 2005 the earthquake of 7.6 on the Richter scale slammed into the mountains.  The city was ruined and the hospital destroyed.  Since that day Khan has been using his millions to provide shelter and health care.  Yes, it does appear that God did have a plan for Khan. 

I tell you this story because it is strikingly obvious.  We may even think that it is obvious what God’s plan for Ruby was.  But, God has a plan exactly like that for us.  We might not be able to see it as clearly.   Yet, it is there, it is surely there.  It is our job to keep looking for it.  It is our baptism that compels us to look for it. 

Ruby’s story is one of my favorite stories.  The following quote is one of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther King Jr.

Everybody can be great.  Because anybody can serve.  You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.  You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.  You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve.  You don’t’ have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve.  You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace.  And a soul generated by love.

Who are you?  Who are you really?  The answer is in your baptism.  You are a child of God’s, you are beloved, and God has a plan and purpose for your life no matter with a heart full of grace.