I belong to a very exclusive club, so exclusive that you cannot buy your way into it; there is no initiation fee to belong. You either belong to it or you don’t, and if you do, you are special! Now, the club that I am talking about is euphemistically known as “Preachers’ Kids.” Preachers’ kids belong to the club by virtue of birth or adoption, with the reality that the only way that you can actually belong is if your mother or your father is a minister or a pastor. It is an exclusive group of some very odd human beings – of which I am one!
Every now and again, PKs like to get together and have a club meeting, just to compare notes. Even as a child, I used to associate in the village with other preachers’ kids. For example, the local Baptist minister would come over on a Sunday afternoon and drop his son Nigel off to play with me. My father was the Congregational Minister. I don’t know why, but I guess that they thought that we would get up to less trouble if we just played together.
One of the things we did was play GI Joes. Do you remember those? In England they were called Action Men. Action Men were basically figurines that had moving parts that you would dress up. Frankly, they were just dolls for boys. But, we would play with these Action Men and dress them up, but then, and this I think is central to being a PK, we decided that the GI Joes that we had should be baptized. And so, Nigel baptized his GI Joe by dunking him in a bowl of water. As a Congregationalist, I just sprinkled water on the head of my GI Joe. Then, we had this big argument about which of the GI Joes was cleaner as a result of the act of Baptism.
You could see it can’t you, boys mimicking their fathers or their mothers, and that is what we were doing. It was only natural. It was interesting that later on in life it was my mother upon my ordination who reminded me that I started off very early in this business with my friend Nigel baptizing GI Joes, but now it would hopefully be living human beings - real babies! It is fascinating, because unbeknownst to us, we were mimicking something that was actually central to our faith. Baptism, from the very beginning of The New Testament, was the one sign that you belonged to the Christian Church. It was the one symbol that differentiated Christians from non-Christians.
Why? Well, Peter 1, in our passage today gives us an idea why: Baptism mimics the ministry and the life of Jesus. Peter summarizes this, and I love what a great writer, A. M. Hunter, used to describe what is basically the resume or the CV of Jesus: “Jesus suffered and we are made righteous before God. Jesus is put to death; we are saved from our sins. God saves; we are baptized in water. Jesus was resurrected; we must do good. Jesus ascended into heaven and all things are subject to Him.”
That is a summary of everything Peter was saying. In other words, that baptism was an outward expression of the death and the resurrection of Jesus. It also throws in a reference to Noah, and Noah being saved from the flood. Baptism is being used as a symbol of Noah being saved by God through the water. In other words, baptism saves, baptism is a symbol of salvation, but again the salvation that we find in Christ Jesus. Baptism is mimicking the life of Jesus. It is portraying the life of Jesus. But then, Peter says something very interesting, because I think there was some confusion. The confusion was, well does it mean then if we are baptized, we are saved? Does it mean that once we are baptized we are forever cleaned?
No! No, no! Peter says it is not by the dirt of the body being cleaned away, but it is by the pledge of a good conscience. This is what I want to emphasize this morning. It is a pledge of good conscience before God that truly shows that we are a Christian. Baptism is our pledge to have a good conscience before God. What better thing to reflect on in Lent than having a good conscience? What does it mean? When I ask you, “Where is your conscience? What does your conscience mean? Does everyone have one? Why is being a Christian different?” What do I mean? Let me try and answer those questions for you this morning.
A conscience means something profound. It means the differentiation in our mind and in our hearts between right and wrong. The Old Testament does not have a reference to conscience. You can’t find the word anywhere, yet, it is implied. It is implied that humanity and human beings have a conscience. Look at the very earliest stories: Adam and Eve for example. Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the tree, the Tree of Good and Evil. Once they have eaten that fruit, we are told that they felt shame. They knew in their hearts that they had been disobedient. They knew that they had done something wrong. Innately, they had a conscience, and they were shamed in their conscience. It is the same with the next story in The Old Testament in Genesis: Cain and Abel. Cain, as we know, is responsible for the death of Abel. But then, it is like a voice comes from Abel’s blood to Cain telling him that he has done wrong. Cain, we are told, became a vagabond. He fled! He couldn’t stand the guilt of what he had done to Abel, and ran away. Is that not conscience? Is there not something within Cain that is telling him that he has done something wrong? This is before the laws of Moses. This is before any of the laws of Deuteronomy or of Leviticus or of Numbers. This is right at the very beginning of human beings, of humanity, as recorded in the Scriptures. So what we have here is a conscience. We have the existence of something that made Adam and Eve and Cain feel guilty.
But it is not just that. All human beings have a moral sense. We are all born with an innate ability to distinguish between things. For example, we have the sense that helps us distinguish between sweet and sour. We are able to say what is sweet and what is sour. Sometimes we get confused, but for the most part we know what is what, because we have a sense in the tongue that enables us to tell. We have a sense between something that is discordant and lacks harmony and something that has great harmony. We are able to know when the choir sings a magnificent harmonious piece and we are able to enjoy it because we can appreciate harmony. Of course, because they are never discordant and never sing out of tune, we have no idea what that sounds like here at Eaton Memorial, but boy, we sure as heck know it when we listen to American Idol or something! We know where to hide when we hear something that is lacking in harmony! We know that.
I think our moral sense is like that. There is an innate sense in which all of humanity knows the difference between good and evil. Maybe it is not always inscribed in the law. Maybe it is not something that is put down on paper, but if you look at most cultures throughout the world, the sanctity of life and the prohibition against taking the life of another human being is basically there. Even the people who do not have the laws of Moses, even people who do not have The Ten Commandments, even those who have not grown up with a particular law that we find in religious literature, even so, there is still an innate sense of right and wrong that is within the human soul, and in the passage that I read from the Book of Romans, Paul says, “Even the Gentiles who don’t have the law have a law unto themselves, and they know the difference between right and wrong.” They know it, and it also means that they have no excuse. You can’t say that just because you haven’t read The Commandments, just because you don’t know the law, there is an excuse there for ignorance. As the law of our land says, “Ignorance of the law is not a defense” – and so it is in the Book of Romans!
It is more than a sense; it is a categorical imperative to follow our cultures. The philosopher, Immanuel Kant, said, “It is all very well to know the difference between right and wrong, but if you are not feeling the imperative to do the right, if you don’t feel it is categorically imperative to do the right, then you make a mockery of right and wrong.” For Kant, there is an ethical dimension, a moral dimension to the human life and existence and that is an imperative on our lives to do the thing that we think is right. For Kant, all of our citizens have this. The problem is that at times we find that we know in our hearts what is right and wrong, but it is not always our natural inclination to do what is right. In fact, it might be costly to do the right thing. It might be something that causes us difficulty. It can be as simple as a moral decision as to how we treat a colleague, or whether to tell the truth in our tax returns and therefore paying as we should for what we have received. It can be very simple, but we can’t run away from ourselves. Kant makes this point. Guilt, which is within the human soul and within the human heart, is there precisely because at times our natural inclination is to do things that protect ourselves when right might require sacrifice.
This is why the Cross is so important. That is why we need to have a greater sense of the power to do the right when our consciences let us know. I also think it is very difficult for people when the culture or a popular view suggests that you go one way, and yet deep down innately your conscience tells you something else. We often appeal to the populist idea that everyone does it, so therefore it must be right as an example of how to lead an ethical and moral life, but sometimes the popular route is the route to destruction. It is not always the population and the populace and the majority who are right. Lord knows, the history of many tyrannies throughout the ages have been a tyranny of the populist position at the expense of the vulnerable! The twentieth century was full of that!
No, the sense of right and wrong, the categorical imperative, is to do the right no matter even what the popular position might be. That is why one of my great heroes is Galileo Galilei. It seems strange to Christians to say that someone who was declared a heretic by the Church was a hero, but he was. Galileo, of course because of his heliocentric view, understood that the earth moves, and is not static with everything else moving around it. But in his time the popular conception, the popular view was that the earth stood still and everything else moved around it. Galileo said, “No, that is not what the evidence shows.” As a great physicist and mathematician he realized that was not the case. So he was put on trial. The Popes couldn’t make up their mind about him and were conflicted, but the members of the Inquisition were ready to have him banished and silenced. Members of the Jesuit community weren’t so sure, and thought that maybe Galileo should be treated a little more easily, but be that as it may, Galileo was asked to recant his views. Yet, in his conscience, in his heart, he knew what he had found was truthful, and he couldn’t deny that truth.
I think it is fair enough to say that maybe this is in the realm of speculation, but when he was put on trial he was asked to recant his view that the earth moved. He declared “e pur se muove – and yet it moves”! No matter what your own opinion might be, his conscience couldn’t allow him to say something that he felt was untrue. You have to respect people who are like that. It is not easy to do that, it is not easy to do the right thing even when your heart and your soul and your conscience is telling you it needs to be done. Christ sometimes moves our conscience, he informs our conscience. You see, The New Testament is clear: We are sinful human beings; we make mistakes; we distort the truth; we are not perfect; we get it wrong. There isn’t one of us in this place who hasn’t at some point in our life done something wrong or that we regret, or there is a distortion even of our own consciences. We are fallen and imperfect human beings. We live in a fallen and imperfect world.
So, what is the answer? How is a Christian different from just a person who has a sense of what is right and what is wrong? Well, for the writer of Peter 1, it is the pledge of a good conscience before God. It is the understanding that our baptism is a pledge of a good conscience, not based always on what we do, but on what Christ has done and Christ has done for us. He took that brokenness, that distortion and that sin and he brought it on himself. Therefore he, because of his resurrection, is a source of strength for us. That is why I have never believed that Christian ethics boils down to the phrase “What would Jesus do?” It is for a number of reasons, the first being we are not Jesus. The second, that we keep Jesus at arm’s length. We look at Jesus and then we extrapolate by correlation what we should do. But that is too distant, that is too far away. The New Testament talks about the presence of Christ in Christ’s Holy Spirit working within our own consciences. It is not “What would Jesus do?” but it is “What should we do with Jesus guiding us?” That is the test. The test is the power of God’s Spirit working within our lives. Don’t make decisions alone, and as Christians we should be thinking to have the presence and the power of Christ in our lives as baptized people guiding us to a higher conscience.
A friend of mine tells a story – and I remember these days – when he had a car, and the car had one of those little voices within it. It was a Chrysler, I think. They were very popular in the 80s. A voice would tell you what to do. It would say, “Your trunk is open.” It was always a very deep melodious voice – a James Earl Jones kind of voice – that would say “Your door is ajar” or “Your lights are on.” It was a glorious car, really. He had one of these. Marial had one of those actually, and she used to enjoy getting up in the morning and listening to what she called “Her Little Man” speak to her. She just loved the deep voice! Well, my friend had this, but it drove him nuts after a while, because it would come on at inopportune times and tell him that his seat belt wasn’t done up properly and all kinds of things. It wasn’t a GPS system; it was much more basic than that. So he decided to disengage the voice. He found a wire under the dash, which his garage helped him find by the way, and he undid the wire. He didn’t miss the voice at all, until one day he ran out of gas, because the voice would have told him, “You are running out low on fuel.” But because he had disconnected it, he ran out of gas it. He didn’t realize what was happening. He reconnected the little man again. He knew he couldn’t disconnect him and do the right thing.
Lent is about listening to the voice of God in our conscience. It is not about switching it off; it is about turning it on. It is about having a good conscience, and desiring to live with Christ to do the right thing. We live in a complex world, there are complex moral and ethical decisions to be made. Oftentimes, we are unsure what we should do. All Christ expects of us is just simply to have a conscience that is in tune with his will and purpose. But how on earth do you have that informed conscience if it is not a conscience that is in touch with the source? That is where prayer comes in. The reason that we have prayer is that the Risen Christ can speak to our consciences, can move our consciences, and form our consciences. Christianity isn’t simply some hardnosed religion about always fulfilling the law. It is much more than that! It is living and it is a vibrant relationship with a God who actually exists and cares and is with us. God speaks to us through our consciences.
This Lent, make the pledge of your baptism, have it make a difference in your life, and ask yourself whether there is room in your conscience for Christ to touch it directly, for that in many ways is what it means to be a Christian. Amen.