Sermons Preached at Church of the Redeemer

Sermon on the Baptism of Our Lord: January 9, 2005

God’s “No” to Dragons 

I have a young friend who goes to a school where he and his classmates study dragons.  No, it is not Hogwarts.  This is a local school, and dragons are only some of what they study.  What they learn is that dragons are a very personal matter.  Everybody on the planet has at least one, and no two are exactly alike.  For example, Alice’s dragon may be math, or grammar, while Robert’s could be social interaction at recess.  No distinction of value is drawn, you see, between a child who struggles with adverbs and one who struggles with shyness.  The message from the adults who came up with this is clear, true and (I think) very comforting.  The message is:  Everyone, my dears, has dragons.  They may change their colors and shapes over the course of a lifetime. One may be defeated, but another will come to the fore.  No matter how old and wise and virtuous you become, there will always be a few dragons around just for you, in the back seat of your car or curled up at the foot of your bed, dragons that change into temper, or malice, or fear, springing to life in the midst of an ordinary day.  

It is for the sake of Olivia’s dragons that we baptize her today.  She is so small, she does not even know, yet, what her dragons are, though her parents, Linda and Scott, and her godparents, Julie and Anthony, may already have some intuitions along those lines.  We baptize her, not to erase or annihilate her dragons, but to draw a line beyond which they cannot cross.  We pass on to her family, and to her, God’s own declaration that, while her dragons may harass her, and tempt her and even (God forbid) torment her as she grows, they will never possess her.  They will not define her.  They will not enter into the throne room of her spirit, or ever take away the crown of life that God bestows upon her this day.  It is a bold declaration, but the dragons cringe as we make it, because they know the tremendous secret that makes it true.  

The secret is this:  even God has a dragon. In Scripture, he is called “Satan,” and is spoken of as a fallen angel, but he is also a composite of all the dragons that beset everyone.  Long ago God decided not only to create everything that is, but to enter into a special relationship with all that he created.  He did this because he knew that a creation made with a measure of freedom would sooner or later sprout dragons.  He also knew that dragons could not be taken on from the outside without fundamentally detracting from the freedom of what he had made; among other things, this would have reduced human beings to robots, and the world to an enormous, perfect but ultimately uninteresting machine.  So, God decided to take the dragons on from the inside, to enter into space and time, to become contingent on things he himself had made, even if this meant putting aside his glory.  

The baptism of Jesus, that we celebrate today, is about this secret.  Can you hear it?  John says, “What are you doing, Lord?  I should rather baptize you!  How can you kneel in the water at my feet?”   And Jesus, son of man and Son of God, answers, “Shhh!  Not too loud.  This is the only way to catch a dragon, especially the Big One. Let me fulfill all righteousness; for here is the secret:  in the moment that God kneels, all the dragons pounce on him, and that is when they’ll find out who they’re dealing with.”  So Jesus begins his ministry with the humility that marks his life; if you read the gospels, you will find that from here on out he is always taking on dragons, one at a time, on their own turf: the envy and pride of the Pharisees, the illness and vice of the crowds, even the ambition, fear and faithlessness of his best friends, all culminating on Calvary, where he takes on the last dragon, which is death.  And that is where the secret goes public:  for even though he inhabits the creation, he is still its Lord, and in his rising from the dead, he sends the dragons fleeing into the darkness, establishes a boundary beyond which they cannot cross, a limit to the damage they are allowed to do, a country freed from the consequences of sin and death.  It is into that country that we today transfer the citizenship of Olivia Winslow Cruz McGoldrick, from this day forward, a child of God and an heir to the Kingdom bought with his own blood.  

I know this might all sound like a fairy tale, but there is all the evidence in the world that it is true.  Countless lives have found genuine freedom here—not just as an idea but in fact.  They have discovered that old sins that once beset them have been turned into their opposite:  they have seen their fear turn into courage, their lust into love, their hatred into a passion for the mercy of Christ.  And they have seen that even the dragons that remain wind up on a leash, whose other end is firmly in the hand of God.  So, Scott and Linda, Julie and Anthony, help her as she grows, understand the things over which she stumbles.  Help her by your own very personal witness see how God has decreed a limit there.  Help her yield her sin again and again into His hands.  And the rest of you, my friends, today make good on your own baptismal vows in one simple way, because a dragon or two may have followed you into church this morning.  They can be very small; they can cling to your socks or hide in your pockets.  For Olivia’s sake, this morning, bring them to the altar of God, receive the Body and Blood as food for the road, and your faith as weapons against them.  Do so in all confidence that God in Christ has reduced Hell to a sideshow, and by joining himself to you in body, soul and spirit, has given you a love and a life that no bluster of smoke and scales can ever take away.   

Amen.