Renewed By Water

Today’s text talks about the patriarch Abram — he hasn’t yet be renamed Abraham — and we’re looking at a time nearly 2,000 years before Christ. Abram asks God a question. He does so because God said the land was to be given to Abram and his descendants. Remember that at this point in the Bible’s story, God’s salvation was seen tangibly in two things: offspring and land. God promised these things so Abram wants to know if he can be sure about God’s promise. How can he know that God’s salvation is reliable? That’s the point of this text.

Notice a couple of things as we read it. First, Abram doesn’t do much. In fact, he is asleep and in the dark for most of the story. Second, God does something that no self-respecting deity would ever be thought of as doing. In that ancient time, when two parties wanted to ratify an agreement or covenant, they cut animals in two pieces. Then the parties to the agreement would pass between the animal halves.[1] This symbolized what would happen to persons who broke the agreement. The fate of the animals cut in two would become their fate.

Using this symbolism God made a covenant with Abram. Who was likely to break a covenant between Abram and God? Abram, of course. But did the patriarch walk between the animal pieces? No, he was asleep. But God, in the symbol of a smoking fire pot, did walk between the cut animals. In other words, God brought upon himself the curse of a broken covenant. That’s how much God wanted to be in covenant with Abram. Let’s read it in Genesis 15.

Then he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”

If an alarm clock or clock radio goes off in the middle of the day when we are wide awake, it doesn’t sound very loud. But at three o’clock in the morning, an alarm clock can sound like a brass band marching inside your head. It’s even worse when you can’t get the stupid thing turned off. Your mind is gasping for consciousness and it feels like you’re going to wake up everyone in the neighborhood. Then you knock the lamp or a glass of water off the bed stand and your day is off to a really bad start.

Merrie and I are normally both very early risers although usually at different times. She has her clock radio and I have mine. The only time we bother each other very much is when the other person doesn’t turn the alarm off in an orderly way or hits the snooze button one too many times. But awhile back we had three clock radios in our bedroom. Don’t ask us to explain why there were three — there just were. Two alarms are bad enough, but three created total chaos. To make matters worse, we didn’t know how to operate the third one. Its alarm was set for about 3:15am — that’s when I get up on Sunday mornings but not that early the rest of the week. And we didn’t know how to change the alarm on the third clock radio or turn it off. The buttons we thought should work didn’t. It just blared at us like a demonic machine from the “Twilight Zone” — for those of you old enough to remember that show.

So after a couple of days with this stupid third alarm clock, we got smart. We unplugged it the night before. But this clock radio had a battery for emergency back-up. So at 3:15am it goes off as usual and we’re scrambling around, pushing buttons, knocking things over, and thinking — well, thinking is not quite right because our minds were not really awake — that this must be the end of the world.

Now maybe you don’t have three alarms including a clock radio from hell. But I think you can relate to the confusing, panicky, “what-in-the-world-is-going-on” feeling when alarms call us out of sleep in the dark, early morning hours. That feeling has something to do with baptism. So keep it in mind and we’ll come back to it in a moment.

The story of Abram asleep in mysterious darkness when God made a covenant with him is not literally about baptism, of course. But baptism is the Christian understanding of covenant. So Abram’s story has something to teach us about baptism and there really is just one, simple, but amazing point: we belong to God. Baptism means that in life and in death we belong to God.

Abram wanted to know if he could trust God’s salvation. God responds to that concern in two ways. First, God speaks and promises Abram that his descendants will live in the land. Second, God acts in the ritual of covenant making by taking upon himself the curse of a broken covenant. What was Abram’s role? He got a few things ready but mostly he was asleep. Not only was he sleeping but he was surrounded with deep, mysterious darkness. In other words, Abram’s role was complete unconsciousness. What was God’s role? In word and deed, God commits to Abram. In other words, God binds himself in covenant even though Abram is unconscious and able to offer nothing in return. This is pure grace and costly grace. For if the covenant is broken, God brings the suffering of that upon himself.

So too with baptism. Centuries ago John Calvin, the father of Presbyterianism, said that baptism means “we are not our own, but the Lord’s.” The crucial factor in the Christian life, he said, is that “we are consecrated and dedicated to God.… We may think, speak, meditate, or do everything only with a view to [the divine] glory.” In other words, we are not at the mercy of societal values and cultural trends swirling and changing around us. Instead, we are at the mercy of a gracious God who claims us in the clear, cleansing waters of baptism.[2]

Last week I also mentioned one woman I’ll never forget. When the baptismal waters ran down her forehead, a visible transformation took place in her. This was no longer a cute, little thing we do in church. This was real. This was powerful. Maybe for the first time in her sad life she knew who she really was. She was a child of God and God was forever committed to her. She belonged to God and baptism was the sign of that transformation. You could literally see the change.

But what about children and infants? Are they transformed as well by baptism? Yes. That’s why Abram’s story is important. Baptism is not what we do. It is what God does. Abram was unconscious. God entered into covenant with him anyway. In the covenant ceremony with the animal pieces, destruction is announced for those who break the covenant.[3] God cannot break his pledge. We do. But God takes on the suffering. This is a remarkable anticipation of the grace of the cross. God bears the suffering that comes from our sin. Does baptism transform? Yes, because baptism is not about our experience. It is about God’s grace.

This is why Presbyterians do not teach or practice rebaptism. Now I say this realizing that some of you may have been baptized more than once and I don’t want to insult what happened or why it was done. I’m just emphasizing Presbyterian teaching. Rebaptism implies that something has to happen to us outwardly or visibly, that we have to feel something to correspond with spiritual truth. Typically someone will have a dramatic experience with Jesus Christ and he or she will say, “I was baptized as a child but that didn’t mean anything; now I know what it means and I want to be really baptized.”

Ah, my friend, your baptism as a child means more than you or I can ever know or understand until we get to heaven. And when we come to those dramatic moments of encountering Christ in a new way, God is smiling on us, and saying, “see, I have been preparing you for this moment ever since you were baptized long ago, whether it was ten years, fifteen, twenty, or eighty years ago. I have been preparing you since that moment when I committed myself to you for all eternity.” Abram was unconscious and helpless when God made covenant with him. Who is more helpless than a little baby? But before God we all are just as helpless. And the power and the truth of baptism is that God moves towards us. God commits himself to us. God binds himself eternally to us, and gives us the sign of baptism as a sacrament of that transformation and renewal.

So what about alarm clocks at 3:15 in the morning? Alarm clocks call and jar us out of unconsciousness and create confusion. Where am I? Who am I? What’s going on? Why can’t I stop that noise?

But baptism is a different kind of wake up call. Baptism awakens us from life’s mystery to a sense of clarity. Baptism awakens us to clarity about who we are — we are children of God. Baptism awakens us to clarity about to whose we are — in life and in death we belong to God. Baptism awakens us to clarity about how we should live— we are to live renewed always by the Spirit. Baptism marks God’s commitment to us and everything that happens in our Christian lives is the outworking of baptism’s renewal.

In a few minutes we are going to ordain and install elders and deacons to help lead this church. As we do that we will all renew our baptismal vows. For as elders and deacons lead us, they fulfill the promise of their baptism. As we live and serve, we fulfill our baptisms. We baptize once. But from then on God renews us to be faithful servants for Jesus Christ.

That’s the way to wake up in the morning, to wake up with that kind of clarity and to know that in life and in death, we belong to God.

[1] Jeremiah 34.18-20: “And those who transgressed my covenant and did not keep the terms of the covenant that they made before me, I will make like the calf when they cut it in two and passed between its parts: the officials of Judah, the officials of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf shall be handed over to their enemies and to those who seek their lives. Their corpses shall become food for the birds of the air and the wild animals of the earth.”

[2] Philip W. Butin, “The Waters of Baptism,” Presbyterians Today (June 1995): 24.

[3] Claus Westermann, Genesis 12-36: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1985) 228.