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Baptism: Dying to the False Self

Sermon by Peter Terpenning

January 13, 2008 
Romans 6:3-4, Matthew 3:13-17

  One of my favorite movies is The King of  Hearts which I am going to use as an illustration of Baptism today. A British Soldier in WWII is part of an attack on a French Village held by the Germans. The Germans leave an empty village but wire it with explosives to blow up the village once the British move in. The soldier is sent to investigate, along with some Carrier Pigeons to send messages back to the high command and finds that the only inhabitants around are the people of the insane asylum who have left the asylum and play acting village life in this mysteriously empty village. They accept the soldier as the long lost “King of Hearts” and adopt him as part of their false, quite absurd village life. But they are just sane enough acting that for awhile the soldier is taken in. He gradually figures out what has happened, but realizes that the crazy and fantasy world of the mentally disabled is much saner than the world of war, violence and true insanity that he is part of. When the British move in and the Germans return and begin to kill each other again, the soldier does the only sane thing, he takes off his uniform, leaving the military behind, and saves his pigeons in their cage and goes stark naked and rings the bell of the insane asylum, hoping to be admitted.
  He is my symbol today of baptism because Baptism is our Christian symbol for rebirth, for the new beginning; the decision to leave ordinary, human life behind and set out on a spiritual journey. St. Francis did much the same thing when he left his privileged life as a noble behind, and supposedly set out naked to begin his life of poverty. Since our scripture today is about Jesus’ baptism, it seemed a good time to explore what this sacrament. Sacraments, according to Marcus Borg, are “finite, physical, visible mediators of the sacred”. Baptism is described in our Baptism service as an “outward and visible sign of an inward change”. What is going on with Baptism? I know many of us are baptized, as we say, as Methodist, Catholic, Congregational. Kathleen Norris noted that at the time of the huge Tsunami in Indonesia, much of the discussion in Christian chat rooms on the internet had to do with whether the victims were all going to hell because the weren’t baptized. Norris does not think, and I agree with her, that Baptism should be used as a threat. She notes it is a “blessing not a bludgeon, a sacrament, not a weapon of mass destruction”.
  Baptism is not about believing the right things about what Baptism means either. It is a process of taking on a new kind of life. Some scriptures refer to it as being born again: to die to the old life and be born to the new. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up my cross and follow me”. In his book, The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg notes that for the early church the cross was a symbol for death. Taking up your cross had not yet acquired the later meanings of small sufferings and inconveniences we associate with it now. To take up the cross didn’t mean to bear the pain of diabetes or something, it meant death as doled out by the Romans through crucifixion. The gospel of Luke adds the words, take up your cross “daily”; to make sure we know it is a metaphor for death. Baptism means to go under the water and drown, and die, and come up out of the water to begin a new life.
  Paul in Romans 6 writes, “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” This is the best explanation of baptism in the Bible, I think. Baptism symbolized here an internal transformation of dying to an old way of living and birth to a new way of living. Frederick Buechner refers to it as learning to live from the inside out, instead of from the outside in. It is not transformation of belief, but transformation of our whole lives.
  We are born close to God, but then begin a process of socialization through which we learn the values of our families and cultures. Many spiritual disciplines call this the taking on of the false self. This is Marcus Borg’s term in his discussion of being born again. A book called Discovering Awareness, by Bud Wonsiewicz, give an excellent analysis of this process. As we grow up we learn what our culture and families value and construct our sense of self and self-worth based on how well we fit in to these values. Borg calls them “achievement, appearance and affluence”. We come to believe we have value and self worth according to how well we reflect what those around us have valued. We seek success in making money, or academics, for that is what is valued. We measure our self worth by how hard working we are, or how good looking, or how affluent, or how good at music, or how religious we are. When we become fearful or angry or violent it is because some aspect of our false self or ego is threatened. The song “Carefully Taught” from the musical South Pacific expresses it well, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear…you’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made and people whose skin is a different shade…to got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught”. To come to ourselves, as in the story of the Prodigal Son, we begin to get rid of the false self or ego, and reconnect with the True Self, which is based in God. Our true identity and self worth is not based on our success in fitting into the cultures and values we have learned, but in returning to the values of God.
  This can be a dramatic experience, such as happened to Paul of Tarsus on the Damascus road, where he was struck blind and heard Jesus calling him to a new life, or it can be a gradual process as described by Martin Luther who called us to “daily dying and rising with Christ”. My experience is that even if it starts dramatically, it continues gradually all through your life; being born again daily. All religions speak of this experience. One meaning for the world Islam is “surrender”. Mohammed said we have to “die before we die”. Buddhism speaks of letting go of self, to die to the ego and Taoism teaches, “If you want to become full, let yourself be empty, if you want to be reborn, let yourself die.” (Tao Te Ching) This process of dying to the false self is a universal spiritual experience. Jesus and his way at baptism, rather than being an exclusive sacrament for identifying Christians, is a symbol of a Universal way of dying to the ego and being born again.
  This leads us back to the King of Hearts standing naked at the gates of a new, saner life. It is the Prodigal Son coming to himself and returning to the loving father, it is the Bent Woman who has nothing left to lose and comes to Jesus, it is the Blind man who is the only one who can really see Jesus, it is Lazarus, raised from the dead to new life in Jesus. Baptism is our symbol of the Spiritual journey. It is marked by compassion, fearlessness and love.