They go in upside down because if you put them right side up, then they'll fill full of water, and be useless to you except as a way of collecting dirty water. That's it. Now, if everything is upside down, and the dishwasher is full, how do you tell if it's clean or dirty on the inside?
Good question. Probably some of you have fancy dishwashers from the future, where it can sense if it's clean or dirty, and will sound some sort of klaxon if you try to remove a dirty dish, but for those of us with turn of the century dishwashers, you can't tell just by looking which dishes are clean, and which are dirty. The stock pots, the saucepans, the cups, the bowls, they're all upside down, and impossible to distinguish clean from dirty just by giving them a glance. The outside is always pristine.
That's the situation with humanity, you know. That's how we are as people, which is that we all look fine on the outside. The outside of the cup, the outside of the bowl, it always looks fantastic, clean as a whistle. And human beings, we're all hiding behind a thin veneer of respectability. We all look great from the outside, very few of us look genuinely terrifying, not many of us are immediately identifiable as a dreadful person, that sort of thing, so we've mastered the art of cleaning the outside of the cup, and of the bowl, and making sure that it's plenty presentable.
So, in order for you to see what is clean and what is dirty, you have to open the dishwasher, and pull out one of the cups, and look inside. If it's still marked and filthy, then you know for sure that this is a load of dishes that needs to be done. But you can only tell by looking.
But there's another snag, which is that sometimes, when you run your dishwasher, things dont' get clean. There are certain things that, like, never get clean. Eggs in a frying pan is a good one. If you fry or scramble eggs in a frying pan, there's a real slim chance that it'll come out clean, you know. But you try anyway, thinking that this will be the time in which things are different. This time, things will be clearly different, so not to worry. And when you run the dishwasher, the same thing happens as always, which is that the egg stubbornly clings to the pan, and you're left with egg slightly more baked on than before. So what do you do? You run it through the dishwasher again. Which doesn't change anything. Unless you do something different, that egg is going to be stuck on that pan forever.
So, you have a couple of choices, really. You could decide to just keep on running the pan through the dishwasher, and saying that the pan is just like that now. It's an egg pan, both made of eggs, and made for it. You can say that with cups, bowls, plates, whatever, that this cup is just like this now, and that's all there is to it.
Your other option is to do the only thing that will actually make that item clean, and that is to handwash it. Take the plate, or the cup, or the bowl, or the frying pan, or whatever, and clean it manually. Wash it clean by hand, because running it through the diswasher won't do anything after a while. This brings us to baptism, baptism in which we focus on Christ's baptism, as well as ours. Jesus, upon his baptism, goes down into the baptismal waters, echoing the Old Testament reading where he promises that when we go through the waters, he will be with us. This is good news, precisely because of what it represents. After all, what is handwashing if you're not willing to put your hands into the water to clean the vessels? If you're not willing to get your hands wet, then you may as well just use the dishwasher, but it won't clear off the problem. Christ descends into the depths to ensure our cleanliness, because he knows another dishwashing principle, which is that you can't clean something without making something else dirty.
Jesus descends into the depths of baptismal waters to take the sin that washes away from us onto himself. In the same way as your hands become stained by beets, or your washcloth becomes clogged with bits of egg and crumbs, the sin has to go somewhere. Just like food refuse, it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't disappear. It just has to be attached to something else, and that something else is Christ. Luther's small Catechism states that it isn't water that effects this amazing miracle of rebirth of the spirit, washing clean of sins, and generation of faith, but rather water in conjunction with the word of God. It's the same with doing dishes, which is that it's not water alone that effects any sort of cleanliness, it's water combined with soap, with a cloth, with scrubbing that removes the dirt. Water in conjunction with the word of God, that is spoken at baptism, and was also physically present in the waters of baptism, too. Our confidence stems from the fact that Christ has been in the waters, and emerges from the waters of his baptism with our sins clinging to him. Meanwhile, we are washed clean indeed.
How clean? Good question. Good question asking about the cleanliness of us as human beings. For you see, clean has different definitions. I can't find it right now, but there was an excellent commercial for the swiffer a number of years ago, in which a drill sergeant yells to his troops 'You call this clean enough?' Inspection got tough for those troops, I assure you. And there are different standards of cleanliness that abound in our world. Parents have different standards from their children for example, as we do for our children. When our boys wash their hands, we've been known to send them back as their hands aren't even slightly damp. When they brush their teeth, they're sometimes sent back due to the tooth brushing exercise lasting about five seconds total. When they go to clean their rooms, we have to remind them, however subtly, that cleaning their room is more than just tossing everything onto or under their beds. And pretty much all children are like this, you know. This is just how they do.
So too, do we have different standards of cleanliness from God. We look at ourselves, and say that we're good enough. In the same way that a child, when washing a cup or a bowl, would say 'eh, good enough,' even though there is still food clinging to it. They'd be tempted to say that it was good enough, close enough, clean enough for us to work with. And they'd be wrong. The grown adults would insist on cleaning it again, making sure that it was suitable for them to use to eat from. To paraphrase the scriptures, if the son makes you clean, you will be clean indeed.
How does baptism work? Not just as a physical washing of dirt from the body, but as a washing clean of our sins. Whose sins? All of ours. And the well known idea of having to clean the inside of the cup is even more important as we consider a fairly divisive issue, that of infant baptism. There are a great number of churches that don't baptize infants, that have you wait until you're a certain age before you can be baptized in their churches. In the Lutheran church, we baptize babies all the time (we have one coming up this week, actually). Why do we baptize babies? We do so because of what the Bible tells us baptism does, which is to wash away our sins, and to make us clean. Now, this applies to us as adults, as teenagers, as people whose sins are obvious, and are well known to them and to everyone else. But we believe that even babies need to be washed clean of their sins.
At this point, many of you may sputter and protest, and may claim that babies don't have any sins, and therefore have nothing to forgive. It does us little to talk at this point about whitewashed tombs, but it is still useful to talk about cleaning the inside of the cup. For you see, from the outside, the babies of this world look pristine, look perfect and tiny and wonderful, and seem to have zero problems whatsoever, just like a new mug just removed from its box. But if you were to get a mug for Christmas, as I'm prepared to believe that many of you did, what do you do with it as soon as you get it, and before you use it? You wash it. You wash it first, and after washing it, to get rid of anything that might be on it, then you can use it.
This is why we baptize babies, you know. Because they have a sinful inclination, which is why you don't need to teach them to lie, steal, to be selfish or rude, they have a natural proclivity towards such things. They have sins and marks and a sinful nature on them that you won't discover for years to come. Why do we baptize them, it is to have Christ wash them clean of their sins, of their sinful nature even, to ensure that they are clean as he would demand. Every time you wash a mug, or a cup, or a bowl, you are bringing it back to the state when it was at its cleanest. Not when you first got it, but right after when you first washed it. We as confessing Christians, every time we confess and are forgiven, spiritually we return not to the point of our birth, but the point of our baptism. Part of our insistance on remembering our baptism as often as we do, is to recall that our God is a God of precedence, and if he forgave us and washed us clean of all our sins once, he can and will do so again.
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