Lent 2
1 March 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
LIVING OUR BAPTISM #3: TURNING AND WASHING
Isaiah 1.16-18. Mark 1.1-8
What does it mean to be baptized? That is the question we are seeking to answer this Lenten season guided by the theme of Living Our Baptism.
The first meaning of Baptism we considered last week is that of hearing and believing deep within your soul that you are the “Beloved, Precious Child of God, Beautiful to Behold.”
In light of our being God’s Beloved Children, it has been said that God loves us just the way we are, but loves us much too much to keep us the way we are – in particular, the way we are in ways that bring harm to ourselves and to others. So today we explore two more meanings of Baptism: Turning and Washing. You may also know them as: Repentance and Forgiveness. These were the elemental meanings of the baptism John the Baptist performed. And they are important to us in the living of our own Baptism.
John was calling individuals and the whole people of God to turn to God and to be baptized as a sign of this turning and a sign of God’s flowing forgiveness. “Jesus came preaching,” Scripture says. And what did he preach? That the kingdom of God was coming near, coming near in justice and joy, healing, reconciliation and peace. We could enter this kingdom and it could enter us, but the entering requires repentance, a Turning.
The Greek word for “repent” is metanoia – it is a change in one’s mind, being given a new mind, or as Marcus Borg put it, “to go beyond the mind you have.”1 The great Hebrew word
which both John and Jesus had in mind was shuv, to turn around, to turn to God, or return to God. Every turning to God is in the deepest sense a re-turning to God, to the One who made us, the One who loved us from the first. We have come from Love, and God is ever calling us to return to Love.
If you’ve been damaged by judgmental religion at some point in your life, the word “repent” may give you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach or bring some scalding sense of shame. But it need not. Think of repentance like this: You know how easy it is to make a few bad choices and before you even realize it your whole life is headed in the wrong direction. And when we do start to realize it, we’re often not sure what to do next. We can begin by putting an end to the denial as soon as possible, then stop going in the direction we thought would get us what we wanted and turn around. This is the turning both Jesus and John had in mind when they called people to “Repent!”
Sometimes the turning happens when we’ve hit rock bottom with our compulsions and addictions, with our self-defeating, self-sabotaging behaviors. The Recovery Movement talks about “the gift of desperation.” We become desperate enough to reach out for help. We are given the grace of turning.
Sometimes we turn because of some life-changing, life-rearranging encounter with beauty or truth or goodness or love like: the birth of a baby or a magnificent work of art or a sudden epiphany of seeing and understanding what you’ve never really seen or understood before. Something profound happens and we realize what we’re missing, how pale and meaningless our life has become.
Of course, you don’t have to wait until rock bottom happens or the profound strikes you. Turning anywhere along the wrong road is a gift. However it happens, this turning and returning can bring life and joy and purpose to the living of our days. And the Turning needed can vary by degrees.
This year I am praying my way through Mike Ruffin’s helpful guide book Prayer 365. The prayer for this past Wednesday was entitled “Turning”: Lord, you know and we know that we need to repent, to turn. In some ways we need to make a 180 degree turn because we’re just plain going the wrong way and the only solution is to turn completely around and head in the opposite direction. So help us, Lord, to turn our backs on what needs to be turned away from and to turn our faces toward the better way you have for us. But in some ways we need to make a smaller turn, maybe 90 degrees or 45 or 10 or 3 or 1 degree – perhaps just the very slightest turn but an important turn nonetheless. So help us, Lord, to make those small turns, those small adjustments, those slight turnings away from self and toward you and toward others, that just might make the difference between a tolerable or even a good life and an abundant one. Amen.2
This is the turning Jesus had in mind when he said, “Here comes the gospel! It is the best news you’ve ever heard! Turn and believe.” It is the very beauty of the love of God that turns us to God. Paul said, “Do you not know it is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance? (Romans 2:4). It’s not our repentance that leads to God’s kindness, but the gracious kindness of God that draws us into turning our lives around.
And with the beauty of turning toward the light and love of God comes also the experience of Washing.
In the ancient biblical mind, and true to our own experience, there is something about sin and its effects that leaves a stain on our hearts and our conscience. Have you ever been involved in a conversation that started out alright but then turned ugly in the way people were talked about, and you remained silent? and you felt like you wanted to just go home and take a hot shower? When we’ve harmed another, when we’ve done something wrong or betrayed our highest values with our silence, we feel stained.
I know people who have been violated, abused at the hands of another and though what happened was no fault of their own, they still felt stained. And what they wanted to do was escape to the shower and let the water try to make them clean. The violation had left a stain.
It may be that the topic of sin also makes us cringe or run for cover! And perhaps with good reason. It has often become a toxic, shaming word. John Bradshaw in his important book
Healing the Shame That Binds You3 has helped us understand how words like sin and guilt have been linked with what he calls “toxic shame,” a shame that can cripple and bind us.
There is a difference between healthy guilt and toxic shame. Healthy guilt says, “You’ve made a mistake.” “You’ve done something wrong.” Toxic shame says, “You are a mistake.” “There is something wrong with you.” Healthy guilt is the pain we feel when we’ve injured another, when we have not lived up to our highest and truest values. Healthy guilt helps us recognize our mistakes, then repair them and make amends. Toxic shame immobilizes you because you believe no repair can be made because the whole problem is you, unrepairable you. False guilt is what we are made to feel by others. It is imposed on us from the outside by culture, family or religion when we have done no wrong.
Toxic shame, false guilt, sick religion: these things can make it hard to talk honestly about sin. But we need to acknowledge the things we’ve done to injure ourselves or others or our relationships.
And this honest acknowledgment of our sin must be accompanied by an affirmation of God’s grace that runs deeper than our sin. Such grace is found in the experience of baptism as well as in the daily remembrance of our baptism. Baptism carries the meaning of being washed, being made clean. Whether it is the stain of our own sin or the toxic shame or false guilt that has been forced upon us by others – we cannot wash it off ourselves.
Lady Macbeth, looking at her murderous hands stained with blood guilt, cries out: “Out [darned] spot, (or something like that) out I say . . . Here’s the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.4
What can wash away the stain of our sin? We certainly cannot do it ourselves. But God can and God will.
God, through the prophet Isaiah, sounds the call to turn, to repent: Wash yourself. Make yourselves clean. Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Correct oppression. Defend the fatherless. Plead for the widow.
And then because God knows we cannot do this on our own, God offers the grace-filled invitation: Come now, says the Lord, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall be like washed wool.
On the day after baptizing Jesus, John saw Jesus approaching and said: Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. (John 1.29). Here is sin not as a catalogue of individual sins but rather as a power that can overtake our lives. As Reinhold Niebuhr taught: grace is not only pardon, it is power too.5 What we cannot do for ourselves Christ has done for us.
So whatever it is that injures, estranges, keeps you in hiding – know this: In the waters of Baptism God has washed, is washing, will wash it away, making you clean! Baptism helps us experience the washing away of toxic shame, of both healthy guilt and unhealthy, and the washing away of our sins – all of them, not some.
In the Baptist form of Baptism, which is full immersion in water, you don’t get a little wet. You get all wet – as a way of knowing and feeling in your body that God forgives not some of your sins, but all of them! Of course, it’s not the water that does the washing. It is God in God’s tender mercies that cleanses us from head to toe. In Baptism God loves us with water.
It happened almost thirty years ago, but I’ve never forgotten the moment. It was a few days before his baptism. I took a young boy with his mother up to the church baptistry to familiarize him with the place. And it was there, he looked down into the baptismal pool and asked me, “Where do all the sins go?”
Blown away by his profoundly innocent question, even feeling myself choking up a bit, I’m not sure what I told him that day. But today I would say to him or anyone else who asks me: “Where do all the sins go?” I would say: “They are drowned, washed away, in the waters of God’s love.”
We all need to know deep down that kind of cleansing, that kind of release from our past, washed away in the waters of God’s love. So Beloved, Precious Child of God, Beautiful to Behold: Come on in, the water’s fine!6
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- Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian, HarperOne, 2011, 15.
- Michael Ruffin, Prayer 365, Nurturing Faith, 2012, 113-114
- John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You, Health Communications, 1988.
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, scene 1.38.
- Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964, 107-124.
- A memorable line from the movie, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” 2000