River Road Church Baptist

January 11, 2004

Dr. Cecil E. Sherman

“Baptism”

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

The name on the sign in front of this church reads, ‘River Road Church, Baptist.’ Baptist is a noun that grew out of the verb ‘to baptize.’ And baptism is the right of initiation into this company. The way we baptize and the time we baptize, believer’s baptism, have named us. We’re supposed to be Baptists. It’s interesting to me that we rarely talk about baptism. You can come to this church for a long time and hardly hear it mentioned. Most of you give slight attention to the idea of baptism when you make a decision about joining this church if I read you right. Baptism is today’s text. I’m going to follow the text and see what baptism meant to John and Jesus—then building on those ideas, see what it might mean for us.

I want to talk to you briefly about John’s baptism. We don’t know for certain where John the Baptist came up with his idea for a baptism of repentance. Commentators speculate, but by their own admission they don’t know, they’re guessing. It may be linked to the idea that Jews baptized proselytes, people who were not Jews, but wanted to be spiritual Jews and they baptized them as a right of initiation. That’s possible. It may have grown up as a right of initiation to some of the spiritual communities that dotted Palestine in the time of Jesus and before. But what John did was new. He’s always identified as John the Baptist; John the baptizer. One of the new things he did was baptize Jews. Now, it was understandable that proselytes coming into Judaism should be dipped, cleansed, before they made their way into the company. But Jews, well, they didn’t need it. They were already children of Abraham and had no need of such. But John said that it was needful and the people he baptized were Jews. They went out to the Jordan River in the Judean wilderness. John didn’t set up at the corner of Broad and Pump. John set up shop in a remote, distant place. If you wanted to deal with John, you had to go looking for him. Interestingly, great crowds of people did.

What John did was call out from Judaism a community. The community was one serious about morality. Baptism was a purifying. They were asking God to forgive them their shortcomings. Now, their asking didn’t make them forgiven. But they were asking forgiveness. One of the scriptures that was read was “The chaff will be burned up.” Take the wheat, throw it up in the air, the wind blows the chaff away, the good stuff falls back down—we’re getting rid of the bad stuff, the worthless stuff. They were serious about morality.

Another part of John’s discommunity he called out, they were people who were ready to help the helpless. If you read the text, people were stricken with this man’s preaching. It had punch. What did he want them to do? You got two coats, keep one, give one of them to somebody who doesn’t have any. Tax collectors – stop fleecing people; don’t take any more than you’re supposed to. It is a moral reformation. Soldiers – you’ve got the power, stop using it in a way that abuses little people. The community John called out had an elevated morality - purifying, asking forgiveness for the past and having a care for people who were helpless. But there’s another dimension in it that probably is more important than the first two. It was forward looking. “I baptize with water but somebody’s going to baptize with something that is more powerful.” It’s pitching; it’s forward. Somebody is coming. Me, I’m not worthy to untie his shoes. I baptize with water, it’s almost as if he says, anybody can do that. He’ll baptize with something much, much more powerful. He’ll baptize with Spirit and with fire. So he calls out this community. They are concerned about their own godliness. They have a care about other people and they’re looking forward to God breaking in. That’s what John did.

Jesus identified with these people. He subjected himself to their baptism. Interestingly, the early church seemed to be concerned less that John the Baptist be too big and a rival to Jesus. Only Mark tells us John baptized Jesus. If you followed the text straight through and there was a break, Barbara read from 15-18, skipped 19,20, picked up again read 21, 22. In those two verses skipped, Luke has Herod imprison John. Luke has John in prison before Jesus is baptized. Probably, he didn’t say John didn’t baptize him, but he didn’t say he did. Why would Jesus submit himself to a baptism of repentance? I’ll speculate here…Jesus was baptized so he could identify with a community of people who believed in the possibility –God’s about to break through. That’s a longer sentence than I like to speak. Jesus was baptized so he could identify with a community. A community who believed in the possibility – God is about to break through. Did he need baptism to be forgiven? It’s a witness of the church that was not needed, but he needed to join those people. He identified with them. Baptism is still an identity. When you’re baptized, you’re connected with a group of people. It is partly a witness on your part, who I am, and it is partly, I want to be in this group. Jesus did that almost certainly. Some of the followers of John became backbone people in the Jesus movement; he must increase, I must decrease. John had no confusion about who he was in relation to Jesus and this is the witness of the church.

Now, about Jesus’ baptism…here’s what comes out of it. Pay attention to verses 21 and 22. The church learned who Jesus was in his baptism. “This is my son.” That’s the big idea in choosing this text at this time in the church year. “This is my son.” The first 400 years of the church there were controversies one after another about the nature of Jesus, who is Jesus? How is Jesus connected to God? Is Jesus fully, really human? And all of that pounded out. At the same time, we were pounding out what the canon would be. What books would be the New Testament? They were very intent to bear witness to whom Jesus is. There’s just one idea in the Christian religion, just one that is absolutely essential. It’s the Christological question, who is Jesus? If you get that right everything else can fall out, the rest is secondary. That’s the big idea. Jesus Christ is Lord—God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Phillip says, “Show us the father.” The answer of John is – Jesus said, ‘Have you been with me this long and you’ve not figured it out? If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father.’ That was a part of a liturgy we read a moment ago. It’s all about Jesus – who is Jesus?

The second idea in the baptism of Jesus – Jesus received the approval and blessing of his father – ‘With you I am pleased.’ We talked about the identity of Jesus, how did he come to know who he was? Here he is at the very beginning of his ministry—he’s left home, he’s out in the wilderness, he identifies with John’s movement and God appears to him. And God says, “You’re on the right track, you’re doing the right thing,” at the transfiguration that would be confirmed. Intimations of the cross – you’re doing it right, you’ve got it right. Some of us have Jesus so divine until he never needed any encouragement about his identity and energy about his work. But Gethsemane says that’s not so. As he had Gethsemane we have our own Gethsemane times when God comes near and life is struggle and sometimes God comes near enough to whisper, “With you I am pleased.” Any time we get intimations of that it’s a good day. Everybody needs that. Children need to be blessed by their father and since all of us are children in relation to our heavenly father sometimes when we come to church we’re listening. Listening for God’s blessing, God approval.

The Spirit came and Jesus was finally empowered. The Spirit of God came over him and became the engine that fueled him for the next three years. The Spirit of God – how does the baptism of Jesus inform by baptism? Baptism revealed who Jesus was. My baptism is supposed to reveal who I am. But you know that baptism is more about something that’s hard to get hold of than sprinkling water, pouring water, or dipping people. All religious symbols can be made counterfeit. Can somebody be baptized on the outside and not changed on the inside? Well, it happens all the time. All symbols can be made counterfeit.

I was a 17-year-old freshman in college, and to pay for my meals I worked in the girls’ dining hall. That was an education for me. It was before I went into the service, it was during the very close of World War II and there was a girl there who took a diamond from a guy who was an officer down at Fort Hood – some 40, 50 miles from Waco. That guy would get off from time to time and come up and squire her around. She wore the diamond when he was there, took it off and would be glad to go out with you the in between times. I was kind of a simple guy. I thought if you took one of those things it meant something, but now I’m into what’s here and what’s here can be different. The poor sucker at Hood didn’t know any different I guess. Taking a diamond and doing that is a small sin compared to standing in a sacred place and saying a vow and one person means it and the other doesn’t. That’s when down the way somebody gets hurt. Well, we promised didn’t we? And the promise meant to one side this and the other side that. And the symbol to one had great integrity and to the other had little integrity. That might be why courtships ought to extend for a while, generally. It helps you figure out. Well, at least it gives you a clue. However, in courtships, some people don’t have a lot of sense and maybe clues don’t do any good to people who don’t have any sense, so extend your courtship and stay dumb. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The object is to make the symbol and what’s inside get together. For you see, unless the inside is present, the outside is false.

Now, we’ve argued long and loud about baptism and how we do it and all. But really, baptism is a thing about Spirit more than how. I’m as Baptist as you are. Sometimes I’m even baa-ptist. But you know, I’ve seen some people who weren’t baptized as I was, who had a very good dose of Spirit it seemed to me. Well this text is telling us – John’s putting you under water, but there is somebody coming who’s going to lay hands on you in a different place and in a different way and that’s more important than this. The church needs to hold on to that idea. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but we’ve got a good baptism policy. We’re looking for people who have the spirit right because that’s the most important thing. So you see, baptism is a witness to fundamental loyalties, to truth, to faithfulness, to abiding devotion. It’s the inside stuff. What does this mean to baptism in our company? Well, I’ve been anticipating that. I think that baptism in our country, in our company needs to say three things. It needs to say again; my faith is locked on, anchored in, fixed upon Jesus. This is my song, this is the way we know God, that’s the bottom line in the faith. We talked about that earlier.

Second idea – we need as much integrity in our symbols as we can hope to get in a human condition. Integrity and symbols – the whole Baptist idea emerged trying to restore integrity to symbols that had become meaningless. Now we’ve gone nearly 400 years. We have some saints and we have some ain’ts. We have lots of people who call themselves Baptists, but faith doesn’t order life. Now we need to do our best to restore integrity to our symbols. That’s important; otherwise, finally over an extended period of time our symbols come to be meaningless.

Last idea – what does it mean ‘for the Spirit to come upon us?’ I don’t think it automatically comes at baptism, though it may. But if we are to be baptized with the Spirit of God, can we talk about that? A lot of unbalanced people have possessed the idea of being filled with the Holy Spirit. We need to talk about these ideas and try to fill them with Bible content. If Jesus was filled with the Spirit of God and we believe he was, then when we are filled with the Spirit, we act like Jesus. He told the truth; always. He cut through phoniness, always. He had a heart for people who were at the margins, always. He believed in what people could become, always. Now when I’m that way, am I Spirit filled?

One time Paul was trying to tell the Philippians how they ought to be. He said, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things.” He said, “Be this way and you have evidence that the Spirit of God has possessed you.” That’s what I call being filled with the Spirit. When we live up to our baptism, we’re moving toward being like Jesus who was Spirit filled and as I become like him, I become Spirit filled, as do you.

CES; lmk, mt