Baptism of the Lord
January 13, 2019 | Maurice Lee
Readings: Isaiah 43:1–7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14–17; Luke 3:15–17, 21–22
I’ll admit it: I have a certain sympathy for those crotchety, curmudgeonly Grinches who hate birthdays and who want nothing to do with yearly parties and celebrations. Different people have different reasons, of course, but the further I get in time from the day of my own birth, the more the years roll by, the more I understand feeling like: “Really? Again? Aren’t there better things to do than to blow out candles and sit around reminiscing?” Now, I’m not affirming that attitude. But I do think that even if we’re not birthday curmudgeons, it can seem to make a lot of sense to forget, or at least to downplay, beginnings. Right? Think of a toddler’s first step, or of a student’s first day of school, or of a couple’s first date. If we’re developing and maturing and changing in good and healthy ways, if our knowledge and our experience have grown and broadened as they should, then it would be ridiculous to use those early, those elementary, beginnings as points of reference or as standards of comparison for the present. That would be just backwards — unless we want to talk about how far we’ve come, how much progress we’ve made. And the Bible can sound like that too. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways” [1 Corinthians 13:11]. “Those who live on milk, being infants, are unskilled in the word of righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, whose faculties have been trained by practice. Therefore let us go on toward perfection, leaving behind the basic teaching about Christ, not laying again the foundation” [Hebrews 6:1]. “One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining toward what lies ahead, I press on to the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those who are mature be of the same mind” [Philippians 3:13–14]. So it shouldn’t be surprising that our short New Testament reading for today from Acts 8 — four verses, actually part of a fascinating and much bigger story — could be understood through that same sort of grid.
“As yet the [Holy] Spirit had not come upon any of them,” we’re told concerning these Samaritan disciples — you may recall that at the beginning of the book of Acts, Jesus had told the eleven that they would be his witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” [1:8], and so the gospel coming to the Samaritans here in chapter 8 was part of the fulfillment of that intention — “they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.” That word “only” is emphasized. Those Samaritans: they’d believed, they’d had faith, they’d been baptized — the standard beginning, the standard initiation, for Christians in the Bible — they had that under their belts, you might say; but there was still apparently something else, still another experience, still a new reality, still an extra gift, that they hadn’t yet gotten, that they hadn’t yet entered into. And who wouldn’t want that, to receive the Holy Spirit of God, whatever that amounted to? We’re not quite clear what the Spirit “coming upon” someone looked like here in Acts 8, but it was at least something obvious, something public, because a good deal of the rest of the story is about a guy named Simon seeing what had happened and wanting it for himself. But in any case, it’s manifestly positive, an excellent development, not something to be avoided.
So there are Christians who would want to talk about a “second blessing” or a “higher life” beyond the starting point, beyond the opening kickoff of faith and baptism and getting right with God. I mean, a fresh start, sins forgiven and guilt wiped out, saying “yes” to God, a future in the kingdom secured — these things are all great, all fantastic, indispensable, unskippable, they might say; but to stay there, to sit there, to imagine that that’s all there is to Christian life, to consider that the sum and substance, that would basically be a living death. It would be like leaving fruit on the counter to rot. There has to be more, they might say. There has to be progress. There has to be sanctification — growth in holiness. There has to be a next step. And, they might say, what we read about in Acts 8 is that next step in its essence. The Holy Spirit has to come down from heaven; the Spirit has to be given in an unprecedented and extraordinary way, a way that wasn’t true and didn’t happen at the beginning, at baptism. Christians can’t dwell on what’s old. They shouldn’t get stuck at the beginning. They have to move on to what’s new.
But is that really what our passage from Acts 8 implies? Was the fact that these Samaritan disciples were baptized — baptized in the past, in their past — really left behind, overshadowed and outdone and supplanted by something new, a different gift of God’s Holy Spirit? Was their being baptized somehow incomplete, inadequate, its potential untapped, until the Spirit, the “second blessing,” came in some amazing fashion? Did that first step, that first date, that new birth of their baptism pale into insignificance compared with the progress and the improvement that they were about to experience? That’s not what the text says, of course. There’s no suggestion that their being baptized into the name of Jesus, their being marked with the name of Jesus, became a ghost back in their past, the way the fog in the morning disappears when the sun gets high enough — even if, for many people, from the way they talk and act, that does seem to be pretty much what happens to their baptism.
We might recall some of the other ways in which baptism was thought about by Christians in the first century. Paul, for example, who again and again draws conclusions about how believers, how disciples, ought to be living now, what their Christian behaviors and attitudes are called to look like now, based on the fact, based on the knowledge, that they were baptized in the past. Romans 6: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” [6:3–4]. 1 Corinthians 6: “Wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” [6:9–11] — see, Paul thinks of baptism as being both in the name of Jesus and in God’s Spirit. Ephesians 5: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so that she may be without blemish” [5:25–27]. Titus 3: “God saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs of eternal life” [3:5–7]. Or John, who quotes Jesus describing new birth — birth into the kingdom of God, coming under the rule of God, receiving genuine life from God — as happening “by water and the Spirit” [3:5]. Or Matthew, who quotes Jesus’ commission to “make disciples of all nations” by “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” and “teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded” [28:19–20].
It’s everywhere. But wait: of course, there’s more. Think of our Gospel reading for today from Luke 3 — written by the same person who gave us the book of Acts — recalling Jesus’ own baptism. What Jesus heard there at the Jordan — what everyone heard, it would seem, according to Luke — that voice from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,” making public the deepest meaning of what was going on as John the Baptist dunked Jesus into the river and the Holy Spirit descended from heaven in the form of a dove, that word that came with the water: what Jesus heard, what Jesus knew, wasn’t a toddling first step, a tentative test date, destined only to be superseded and to be left behind by growth and progress and maturity, not even, eventually, by suffering and death. That public announcement of his identity, that public announcement of his mission, “You are my Son,” given at his baptism, that was more like a drop of dye working its way through the whole lump of dough, through the whole bottle of fluid: coloring everything, putting its stamp on every word, every deed, every moment after that. And, in fact, how Jesus grew — Luke tells us that he “increased in wisdom and in years” [2:52] — and how Jesus learned — Hebrews tells us that he “learned obedience through what he suffered” [5:8] — and all his experience with temptation and solitude and disciples and crowds and enemies, his saturation with the scriptures, his obsession with God’s kingdom, all of it made sense for Jesus, and makes sense for us, only in the light of that baptismal revelation.
Is there life after baptism? Ideally, yes. But is there life beyond or past or better than baptism? For Christians, for disciples of Jesus, frankly, no. Because the word, the revelation, that came with our baptism — and, note, this is true whether or not we can remember anything about the experience, whether or not we can recall getting wet or going under; if anything depended on our hanging onto our own experiences or our own feelings, it would be a disaster — the word of God that came with our baptism, the word that by the power of the Holy Spirit told us and tells us who we are and what we’re for, the word that says: “You don’t need to go looking for something new; you are new,” the word that opens to us the story and the promise of God’s kingdom — this word doesn’t get outmoded or superseded or obsolete. Of course, it’s possible to depart from it, to forget it, to repudiate it. But to go toward where we’re meant to go, to “make progress,” is to return to that word, to go back to that baptism, to be reached again by God’s mercy. Amen.