Sermon – January 10, 2010: Baptism
Sermon for Sunday, January 10, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Baptism
Psalm 29; Acts of the Apostles 8: 14-17; Luke 3 :15-17, 21-22
In Jesus’ day there was a pool in Jerusalem believed to have healing powers. It
wouldn’t cure people’s ailments all the time. It was only at the right time, when a ripple
wrinkled the surface of the pool, that those seeking a miracle had their chance. The
movement visible on the surface of the water was apprehended as evidence that the spirit
of God was present.
The Grateful Dead did a song linking disturbed water with spiritual opportunity–it
went “ripple in clear water, where there is no pebble tossed, nor wind to blow; reach out
your hand if your cup be empty, if your cup be full, may it be again-let it be known there is a
fountain that was not made by the hands of men.” The idea of an invisible power which
beckons to one and offers blessing had obvious appeal to that late-sixties/seventies
consciousness, which rejected materialism. It sounds quasi-mystical, and that pop culture
fondness for mystery and veiled meaning is with us still, but grown-ups often shake their
heads at it, and suspect it lacks substance.
This morning’s texts, which have to do with unseen power gaining substance,
challenge a couple of our usual ways of thinking about things. We have two powerful and
seemingly well-justified prejudices which our scriptures don’t share. We really believe, and
even have religious reasons for believing, that human welfare is the most important thing in
the cosmos. Generally speaking that’s what the Bible tells us, but it makes it difficult for us
to share the psalmist’s enthusiasm for a deity who revels in, and is revealed in, the violence
of storm and flood.
We are offended by natural disasters, and naturally enough, since they bring human
misery. On the other hand, a bad conscience about environmental carelessness and regret
at poisoning ourselves and other creatures has encouraged us to tell ourselves that nature
itself is benign, that it is only human greed and shortsightedness which deforms it in
destructive ways. This doesn’t really jibe with our reasonable fear of tornadoes, landslides,
earthquakes and floods, and we smooth over the inconsistency by calling natural disasters
“acts of God.” That implies that nature is only nurturing, but that sometimes the architect
behind the routine harmony of nature gets bored with its serenity and whips up dramas
which accidentally, as it were, create headaches for the creatures of the world.
Psalms like psalm 29, you may say, are responsible for deeming violence in the
natural world “acts of God,” and there’s something to that. But the psalmist is not
complaining, and the psalmist is not focusing either on the inconvenience or the danger of
floods and flashes of fire. This is because the psalmist doesn’t assume that the natural
world itself is friendly to people, and the psalmist doesn’t take it for granted that there is
nothing more important in the cosmos than human peace and prosperity.
So what could be more important than the happiness of creatures like you and me?
God is more important. We, in fact, only enter the psalm as those creatures who go to the
Temple and shout “Glory!” because we are in awe of the power and majesty of our God.
God’s greatness and mastery of everything is of such delight to the psalmist that the
necessary hazards associated with dramatic natural phenomena don’t occur to him. He’s not
thinking of thundering and tumults and lightning strikes as menaces to mortals. He’s
conceiving them as intimations of the boundless energy and force of the Almighty. He’s
also happy to picture them as evidence of God’s domination of the powers of nature, which
the psalmist already eyes less positively than is our current instinct. The Old Testament
understands that nature is wondrous and harmonious and happy in its own sphere, but it
also believes nature uncooperative or hostile in its relations with human beings.
Consistent with our bad conscience about our own relationship with the natural world,
it’s our fault and not nature’s that it is at odds with us. The curses pronounced on Adam and
Eve–which I read as a comment on the human condition–are that nature will not easily
support us now that we have relinquished Eden. Humans are distanced from nature by an
uneasy admixture of super nature, in distinguishing right and wrong, which are moral
categories not applicable to the natural world. Now that we’re not all of a piece with the
workings of soil and season, there are thorns and thistles and weary hours of work to coax
our food from the earth.
Too, nature includes not only the harmony of creatures all receiving their food from
God’s hand. It also has wilderness, and wildness. One of the images of disaster common
in the Old Testament are towns which have been abandoned by human society and have
become the haunts of jackals, with crumbling buildings being overgrown by weeds.
So the image of God flexing divine muscles by making hills skip like rams and
stripping the leaves off of trees is not contrary to a positive, “Mother Earth” concept. That
concept really isn’t there in the way we have it. Neither is the celebration of divine
boomings and blowings and floodings dampened by fear on behalf of mortals, because
the immortal God is good, and this is not a poem or song about dangers, but about power.
The invisible God, of whom it is forbidden to make an image, and whose existence only
can be intuited by the human spirit, becomes manifest in whatever in nature is stupendous
(we still speak this way about beautiful sunsets), and God’s people are glad to have that
forceful, fleeting reinforcement of their faith in God’s existence.
It is human nature to be uneasy with counting on the invisible. Just as a pool of
water which ripples reveals the presence of an otherwise unseen force, there are outward
signs of spiritual or emotional energy within persons. This is important to the New
Testament community for the same reason that the psalmist loves demonstrative nature. It
supports the presence of an invisible spiritual reality.
We are not a charismatic church. That is to say, we neither encourage nor expect
outward signs of spiritual enthusiasm–people speaking in tongues or throwing up their arms
or fainting. Some varieties of Christianity focus on that, and understandably so, since there
is a Biblical bias that such demonstrations of something going on within one’s soul are useful
to reassure one about God’s being there.
There is what I believe is a louder Biblical voice which wants to put this kind of
ecstatic religion in perspective. The apostle Paul has found charismatic gifts more
problematic than positive, and links them in the letters to the Corinthian church with pride and
presumption. Paul’s test for authentic connectedness to the God revealed in Jesus Christ is
the love people demonstrate for others. All Christian churches which experience the Holy
Spirit in quiet and subtle ways have the burden of believing that love shows their faith.
In the book of Acts a basic Christian belief is highlighted by the existence of a group
of Samaritans who have been baptized in the name of Christ but not with the Holy Spirit.
We assume this resulted from an incomplete grasp of true Christianity, or from some other
inadvertent mistake, because the apostles are glad to make up the difference by delivering
the real baptism. This shows us what the early conception of true baptism is, and that is a
baptism bestowing the gift of the Holy Spirit upon the person baptized. Here the
emphasis is not on charismatic gifts but on the physical presence of the apostles laying their
hands on the Samaritans. That is the outward sign which supports faith.
This same eagerness for an apparently undeniable–on the premise that “seeing is
believing”–transformation informs all the accounts of Jesus’ own baptism. We are told that
following Jesus’ baptism, while he is praying, the spirit descends upon him bodily in a form
like a dove. There’s also a spoken affirmation from heaven, to underline the significance of
the event, which becomes the model for all disciples ever after. We are to understand our
baptism not only as a profession of faith, and not only as a repudiation of sin, and not only,
as some people do, as a cleansing of our spirits–but as being informed by the spirit of
God, so that we live ever after not only counting on our own power, but on that invisible
might discerned in the powers of nature or the life-enhancing energy of love.
Most of you have been baptized, and if baptized in this tradition, at an age of
reason, then perhaps the memory of your baptism remains. Whatever it felt like, it matters
whether you believe that God, in giving you faith, provided God’s own spirit to speak to
your heart and strengthen your life in Christ. We understand faithful people’s desire to see
God made evident, in varying ways. It is our privilege as God’s people to be given
opportunities, over and over, to live by faith–to show in our willingness to forgive and to
accept forgiveness, to care for and provide help, to be brave in adversity and faithful
through times of trial– that a power demonstrably not arising from ourselves or our
circumstances can be present to the world, to mend, and make new, and witness to the
reality of a God whose image we do not make, but who makes us show forth God’s reality
by who it is we are given the strength to be.
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