I had a friend at Princeton who was absolutely brilliant.  I gave him the nickname of the Keuchman for reasons too complicated to elucidate here.  Now the Keuchman never got less than a ninety-nine on our frightful Hebrew and Greek exams.  He was A plus all the way in every course.  We were in a famously intense study group of several students that would shout out answers at each other until all hours of the early morning.  "Anselm!"  "Athanasius!"  "Council of Nicea, Council of Nicea!" Sometimes other students would stop by to join us but they would soon leave shaking their heads at the withering pressure and hyper antics of the room.  It was not easy to top the Keuchman.  I only saw him falter once, and our text from Romans this morning was the cause of it.
 
 The Keuchman did a children's sermon discussing this text and trying to explain to children how getting baptized was liking dying with Christ.  Somewhere in the midst of his attempts to explain this complicated metaphor, one of the children whose family was having a baptism the next week, plaintively cried out "But I do not want my little brother to die."  Trust me it is pretty hard to salvage a children's sermon after that.

 With all due respect to the Keuchman, I think I will take a crack at this text this morning.  There is a line in one of our memorial service prayers that refers to this passage saying that our baptism is made complete in our death.  Every once in a while following a service, someone will ask me about the meaning of the line.

The meaning is all about freedom.  We have baptized four lovely little ones this morning, celebrating four lives just begun, brimming with wide open opportunities.  We have no idea who they will grow to become, or what their achievements will be, or where they will live, or who they will love.  The permutations are dizzying.  The possibilities so vast as to offer a perfection to these new lives.  Who is going to stand up and tell me that each and everyone of these babies is not perfect?  Of course they are.  But will we say the same thing about these four, fifteen years from now when they are teenagers, or thirty years from now when they are adults living out in the world?

It is not quite as likely that they will be seen in the same perfect light.  They will make choices.  They will make mistakes.  As they grow they will become like each one of us.  Their lives will be a collage of wonderful moments, and sad circumstances, fine achievements, personal mistakes, and a lot of living that falls somewhere in the middle.  There will be times when these four will taste exhilarating freedom; when they learn to ride their first two wheeler bicycle and they go breezing down the street; the day they graduate from high school and fling that cap up into the air.  But their lives will also know burdens and limitations.  They will taste the failure of relationships and the weight of thirty year mortgages, and possibly the worry over children of their own one day.  Little ones, it will not always be a cakewalk.

But in our baptism of you today we are making you several very important promises.  First of all we are promising as a congregation this morning to love and support you throughout your lives.  We are promising to tell you about this day you were baptized and to tell you about your God.  We are promising to teach you in Sunday school classes, to feed you with Graham crackers and apple juice and the Word of God.  We are promising you that you have been claimed by this God.  There will not be one moment of your lives wherever they might lead you that God will not be close at hand loving you.
 
And all of those mortal limitations I talked about, the mistakes you will make, and even one day many, many years from now when your lives are done, Christ will lead you beyond all of it.  When we say you have died with Christ this morning we are making you the promise that you are children of the resurrection.  There is no harm that can come to you in this world that God in Christ cannot transform into healing and wholeness.  From scraped knees through all manner of mishaps and missteps through the wages of death itself, God is stronger than all of it combined.  And in God's strength you have been granted the world's greatest freedom, no matter what may come in your lives, you are promised eternal life in the arms of your creator God.

You will never get a better deal than this, little ones.  So live your lives boldly, take chances, taste joy, enjoy the ride, your destination is secure in God.  Even the Keuchman cannot promise you more than that.  Amen.