Sunday: The 13th Sunday after Pentecost
Reading: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23; Baptism
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

My baptism was a forgettable little affair thrown in to fulfill a prerequisite in a Presbyterian confirmation service. But I've been to some baptisms. Visiting friends in Sighisoara, Romania we were fortunate to attend a baptism and surprised when the parents stayed home to prepare the party and left the godparents to handle the baptism. Or, Simon Robert shared a font with William Penn, albeit some 365 years apart. And my brother John Warren was baptized in a beautiful mountain lake-total immersion. These baptisms, very different, all fit into a very strong tradition. In a world distinguished by individualism and subjectivity, strong traditions can tie us together, give the world meaning, and empower us to live lives for the sake of the world.

Baptism is a great tradition of the church, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. And this tradition goes way back. The Didache, a church manual written only decades after the Gospel of Mark, says:
"Baptize as follows: after first explaining all these points... ‘Baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit', in running water. But if you have not running water, baptize in other water, and if you cannot in cold, then in warm. But if you have neither, pour water on the head... Before the baptism, let the baptizer and the candidate for baptism fast, as well as any as are able." [1] I have the enormous privilege this morning of baptizing my son Connor John following those (well, many of those) instructions.

One of the glories of Anglicanism is that we engage tradition very thoughtfully. Consider our space. The cool granite font, big enough to bathe or drown my naked boy, greets you when you arrive. When this building was built, the much smaller font was back there, away in the baptistery, perfect for small Saturday occasions. But after the wider Church looked more deeply at documents like the Didache, we realized that baptisms should take place at a main liturgy on Sunday and that we should signify the initiatory aspect of baptism by putting the font right at the entrance to the Church. Baptism is how we enter God's family and the font welcomes us each Sunday. It is why, like the Notre Dame football team slapping the "Play like a champion today" sign, so many of us walk by, dip our fingers in, and remember that we are baptized. It reminds us who we are and whose we are.

I am glad that on this important day for Connor John, the reading assigned is from the Gospel of Mark. Mark has a wonderful way of not allowing easy assumptions to lie undisturbed. On the day we join a 2000-year-old tradition, we read Mark's Jesus defending his disciples for ignoring tradition. See, the disciples had been eating without washing their hands. Long before the invention of Purell, not washing one's hands broke a tradition of the elders "intended to serve as a ‘fence around the law' ... protecting [it] from careless or inadvertent violations." [2] Mark was written right around the time of the destruction of the temple, a volatile time and a hard time to live faithfully as a Jew. The scribes and Pharisees were trying to hold everything together. But when the scribes point out the disciples' infraction, Jesus screams back, "This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines." What the scribes and Pharisees couldn't see, in the words of my great teacher Donald Juel, is that honoring God "is a matter of the heart not the digestive system." Jesus wants to take away the fence, to let people get right up against God.

I pray that today's baptism will allow Connor John and the rest of us gathering around the font to see God's love. But, I want us to be aware with Mark's Jesus that traditions can also mask the divine. After the portion of the Didache I quoted earlier comes this line: "Let no one eat or drink of your thanksgiving [meal] save those who have been baptized in the name of the Lord, since the Lord has said concerning this, ‘Do not give what is holy to dogs.'" That is a tradition we at SPR think is wrong, merely a human precept. If we followed it, we would be honoring God with our lips but not in our hearts. In Mark, Jesus feeds 5,000 and he feeds 4,000 and even allows Judas at the last supper. All are welcome at the table, Didache tradition or not. The Pharisees and scribes might storm in here and say, "People are eating at the table without being baptized? Why do you not live according to the tradition of the elders?" Well we are going to feed everybody. We're about traditions that help us honor God in our hearts.

Being baptized into the Church will someday give Connor the opportunity to go to Penuel and wrestle with all of this. All of us, this great cloud of witnesses, will accompany him on that journey. But two people are particularly charged to help Connor live for the sake of the world: his sponsors. Now one of my little godparent manuals suggested that we pick folks safely ensconced inside the Church. We picked two people that understand that honoring God means loving all that is true and noble, just and pure, lovable and gracious, excellent and admirable. Ben Dziedzic and I have hiked through God's creation together and he is committed to educating the rich and poor of Philadelphia. He is a sometime Roman Catholic with deep Quaker sensibilities. Sarah introduced me to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Junot Diaz' The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and she works with the oppressed on Broad Street. Her mother was born Episcopalian and her father Jewish. That makes her, well, one who studiously avoids wickedness, deceit, and licentiousness. Ben and Sarah are not ranting Richard Dawkins atheists-Erin and I are godparents to their son Elliot. But they are people who read Emerson seriously when he compares the gentle falling snow favorably to Church tradition. "The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow." [3] And they know Johnny Cash isn't just singing when they hear that he prefers the dim, quiet starlight on the plains to the light that sifts down through tinted window panes. [4] Would the author of the Gospel of Mark, the one who said parables are told that we might not understand, want anything less?

Today, with Ben and Sarah, we jump into tradition with both feet, humbly convinced that in Baptism God claims Connor. It doesn't make God love him any more; it just gives Connor and the rest of us vision of it. Connor was born the first time, on January 7th in a tub of water. Today he is born again out of the womb of the Church. My prayer is that it will tie Connor together with a great band of people, that it will give Connor's ever expanding world meaning, that making God's unconditional love forcefully known in his life will empower him to live a life for the sake of the world.

[1] Didache as found in E.C. Whitaker Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press: 2003), 1-2.

[2] Lamar Williamson, Jr. Mark (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1983), 133-136.

[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address is widely available on the internet.
[4] Johnny Cash, "Oh, Bury Me Not (Introduction: A Cowboy's Prayer)" is on his American Recordings album.