Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.
For many of our Christian brothers and sisters, the Church has always been in the business of proclaiming rules and righteousness. This is not the Good News – not the Gospel. Robert Farrar Capon, an Episcopal priest and theologian, taught me a long time ago that the Good News is that Jesus came to find the lost and raise the dead. Period. He did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the correctible; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take their stand on a death he can use instead of on a life he cannot. The Church, then, should be in the business of proclaiming mystery and grace.
Today on Trinity Sunday, we celebrate one of the deepest of those mysteries – the mystery of the Trinity. I have good news for you today, pun intended, and that news is that I'm not going to wear you out with a long systematic theological explication of this mystery; I'm only going to give you a very short experiential theological understanding of the Trinity so we can get on with celebrating another mystery – the mystery of Baptism, the experience of going through the waters of Baptism along with my grandson, Jackson, and my daughter, Jennifer.
First, the Trinity. While we may be able to grasp intellectually the idea of the Trinity, an experiential understanding of it is more elusive. The idea that there are three persons but only one substance is just too weird. For four thousand years, more or less, people (and not just Christians) have recognized the experience of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. That experience is given to us in the first three verses of the Book of Genesis. In the words of the holy translation by Robert Alter, "When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light." It took another couple of thousand years before the Evangelist John gave expression to the experience of God the Son, when he wrote, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."
The closest I can come to combining these experiences into an expression of the Trinity is to examine my own experience. And each of you can do the same. For example, I am, at the same time, a father and a son and a husband. (Now Becky might call that role as a husband a ghost, but probably not a holy ghost.) Many of you are fathers and sons and husbands, and many of the rest of you are mothers and daughters and wives. You already know from that experience that it is the same person who performs each of these functions, but it is also three very different people and they do very different things.
'nuff said directly about the Trinity, so let's go on to Baptism. But as you will see, Baptism is inextricably intertwined with the Trinity. Baptism is no less mysterious and we compound the mystery by baptizing in the name of mystery, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, because Baptism is a Trinitarian action. In the very first chapter of Mark's Gospel, John the Baptist tells us, "I baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
For way too long many of us have thought of Baptism as something we do by which we purchase forgiveness of sin, by which we purchase salvation. You've heard the question; you've probably been asked the question, "Have you been saved?" If you answer, "Yes," then the next question is likely to be "When?" If you then answer, "I was saved at the creation of the world," or "I was saved when Jesus died on the cross," or even "I was saved when I was baptized as a baby," the reply is likely to be, "Oh that doesn't count. You need to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior as an adult, confess your sins, repent of them and be baptized by immersion before it counts." With respect, that is simply wrong.
Baptism is a sacrament, not a transaction, not a deal we make to hoodwink God into giving us a salvation that He otherwise wouldn't have. In Baptism, we celebrate, we sacramentalize, that which we already have. In the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacrament is described as the "outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace." This means that all sacraments are subsequent to the act of God. We receive the grace first, we celebrate it later.
As far as Jesus is concerned, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the most obvious proof, everything we do is subsequent to the act of God. In the far country the prodigal realizes he is in trouble. He is starving, so he cooks up this plan to go home and apologize to his father in the hope that his father will turn him into a hired hand. He knows he is dead as a son, but hopes that he can at least get a job and eat. As he comes down the road with his eyes cast down to his feet, his father runs out to greet him and embraces him before he can even say a word. He had been lost and has been found; he had been dead and has been brought back to life; he is guilty but he is forgiven. And it is only then that he can truly confess.
All real confession is subsequent to forgiveness. All true repentance is subsequent to forgiveness. Only when, like the prodigal, we are finally confronted with the unqualified gift of someone who died, in advance, to forgive us, no matter what, can we see that we have nothing to do with getting ourselves forgiven. Neither confession nor baptism is a transaction, a negotiation in order to secure forgiveness; they are the after-the-last gasp of a corpse that finally can afford to admit it's dead and then accept resurrection. Forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all our lives; we confess only to wake ourselves up to what we already have.
Every confession a Christian makes bears witness to this, because every confession, public or private, and every absolution, specific or general, is made and given subsequent to the one baptism we receive for the forgiveness of sins. We are forgiven in baptism not only for sins committed before baptism but for a whole lifetime of sins yet to come. We are forgiven before, during and after our sins. And we are forgiven for one reason only: because Jesus died for our sins and rose for our justification. And that happened before our baptism and we had nothing to do with it.
The sheer brilliance of the retention of infant baptism by a large portion of the church catholic is manifest most of all in the fact that babies can do absolutely nothing to earn, to accept or to believe in forgiveness; the church, in baptizing them, simply declares that they have it. We are not forgiven because we made ourselves forgivable, because we said or did the correct things or even because we had faith; we are forgiven solely because there is a Forgiver who wills to forgive. And our one baptism for the forgiveness of sins remains the life-long sacrament, the premier sign of that fact. No subsequent forgiveness – no Eucharist, no confession – is ever anything more than an additional sign of what baptism sacramentalizes. Nothing new is ever done, either by us or by God, to achieve anything. It was all done, once and for all, by the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world – by the one God in the Person of the Word incarnate in Jesus.
We may be unable, as the prodigal was, to believe it until we finally see it; but the God who does it, just like the father who forgave the prodigal, never once had anything else in mind.
Amen.