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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Baptized with the Spirit

A sermon based upon Luke  3: 15-22
By Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
Baptism of Jesus Sunday,  Year C, January  13, 2013.


“He will Baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”  (Luke 3.16).

Today’s text from Luke invites us to look at Baptism---even to consider again and perhaps and hopefully to renew the spirit of our own baptism into the Christian faith.  

If you have been baptized for a long time, Luke wants you to gain a very unique perspective about your baptism and what it is supposed to mean.  If you’ve been baptized recently and you are still ‘wet behind the ears,’ Luke wants to teach you something more about what that Baptism means---most importantly, that this baptism is certainly more than just about the water.

WHAT WATER BAPTISM CANNOT DO
I think I told you once this pastoral story about teaching on baptism to a church in Greensboro.   It’s worth telling again.  I was trying to make this very point, that baptism is more than about how much water we are baptized into, whether there is enough water to immerse us or only enough to sprinkle on our head.  I’m a Baptist, and I like water, but it’s still not about the water.  

I went on to tell how early Baptist in England relearned the biblical method of adult baptism from the Anabaptist, or Amish, living in Amsterdam, not because wanted to us more water, but because they wanted to try to get back to the biblical ideal, which was not about ‘water’, but about adults giving their whole lives to Jesus, and not just having baptism be a ritual in their infancy.  Early Baptists were not so much against the practice of infant Baptism, as they were for having ‘true Christians’ at church.  They hoped that getting back to the biblical forms would be followed by having people who were truly faithful because they meant what they did.

Again, I reiterated.  It wasn’t the wrongness of infant baptism, nor was it about lack of the right amount of water, but the major point was about having real, adult, Christians who truly lived their whole lives for God.  They wanted to get back to this ancient practice in hopes of having Christians who really practiced their faith.  It wasn’t about the method of baptism as much as the mode of living.   It wasn’t about the water as much as it was about the witness. 

Then, after this historical review, I told them how we only baptize practice adult baptism by immersion as Baptists, but this does not mean we are against infant baptism or other methods that other denominations use.  We only practice it the way we feel is biblical and is best for our witness.  It is still the faith and fire of God in the heart that matters most, not the water.

Hearing me say that we ‘only practice adult baptism’ a little 80 year old lady raised her hand.   She told the group, “I became a member of this church after I was married.   I grew up Methodist.  I was baptized as an infant.  Does this mean I need to be re-baptized to be a member of this church?” 

The question was directed to me, as her pastor, but as a teacher, trying to teach what is most important, I decided to pass the question on to the group.  Most of them were older folks, and most of them had grown up Baptist.  Just about every one of them thought ‘baptism’ should be done only by immersion.  If she was anyone else, like someone outside the church, they would have probably told her she needed to get re-baptized, right there on the spot.  These weren’t normally shy people at saying what they believe.  So I put the question directly to them to give them the opportunity to say what they wanted to say.  Do you know what they said?  Nothing!    That’s when I spoke up again.  “O.K.” Do you mean by your silence that you want me to ask her to be re-baptized?  Is this what you want me to do?   They still didn’t say anything.

Then I told them.  “If you want her to be re-baptized, you’ll have to do it.”  Because it is just what I told you.  Now, right here and now you have a true example of what I’m trying to say.  It’s not about the water.  It’s not about what age you are when you were baptized, nor about how much water is used, but it’s about who you are after you are baptized.  It is about how much fire there is in you for God.  If you have the ‘fire’ of Jesus’ baptism in you, you don’t need more water.  We need to let it burn.  Right?  Amen? Let the light shine, don’t put it out!  That’s how I answered.  And amazingly, they all said: Amen.  Thanks to that honest Methodist woman, we taught a Baptist church the gospel ‘truth’ about baptism.  Wow!

This is the very same kind of message John was trying to convince the crowd when he told them, “I only baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”  Even John’s baptism by water didn’t cut the mustard.   You had to have more than water to immerse you, sprinkle you or poured upon you to be filled with the Spirit of God.  You needed fire.   So, with this introduction, let’s look closer at what John’s words might have meant then and should mean to us now.

BAPTISM AS A HOT TOPIC
But he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and Fire.”   No pun intended, but this sounds like a very hot topic---both to speak about the baptism of the holy Spirit and to make a comparison with fire.  What could John be saying about Jesus, about the Spirit, and about the fire that is supposed to be ‘burning’ in us?

First off, let’s talk about ‘fire’.  Fire is not a laughing matter.  I’m not making light of it.  Neither is John.   Fire is serious business.   Fire can do some wonderful things for us in life, but it can also hurt us, burn us, and even kill us.   The image of ‘fire’ is an attention getting word.  It means that something dangerous happens when people are ‘baptized in the Holy Spirit’.  But the question is, what kind of ‘danger’?

Now, let’s quickly join this word ‘fire’ to the idea of being ‘baptized in the Holy Spirit’.   That’s another ‘hot’ topic, isn’t it?  There are people of faith today, who claim that after you have been baptized with water, you need a second baptism, another baptism, and that this other baptism of fire is the baptism with the Holy Spirit.   They tell us, especially us Baptist and a lot of Methodist too, and they say that’s where this whole Pentecostal talk of “holy spirit baptism came from.  That is came out of the holiness movement in among Methodist in the early part of the 20th century when it began with the need and belief that God could do a ‘second work of grace’ in people.  This ‘second’ work of grace came to finally be called the baptism of the Holy Spirit---a second blessing---the final work of sanctification, of holy-making that could come and should come when a person gave their life fully to God.
Is this a ‘second blessing’ that John is also talking about?  What does John mean when he speaks of being baptized with the Holy Spirit?  I want to first talk about what it doesn’t mean.

I was first introduced to the Pentecostal movement when I was in High School.   We had a Bible club at North Iredell and in that club I got to be around students who had a different upbringing than I did.  But it was not one of the other students, but it was a visiting speaker who, after speaking to our club, invited me to a meeting at a home in the Fairview section of Statesville.  I asked him about what he would be talking about and he said it would be about the cross.  This is what he also what he spoke about in the meeting and I was ready to hear more.

When I arrived at the meeting, we all sit around in the living room and the speaker began to share.  As he ended another good talk, he asked us to bow our heads and pray with him.  In the middle of his prayer he cut loose speaking in a language I did not understand.  I knew my French was bad, but this wasn’t anything close to a real language.  I listened, but I also felt very uncomfortable.  Even at that young age, I knew the Bible’s teaching about ‘tongues’, and this guy did not go about it the right way.  He didn’t give us any kind of ‘interpretation’ at all. 
After the prayer was over, the speaker came to me and asked me how I enjoyed the service.   I didn’t want to tell him what I felt, so I asked a question: “What kind of language was that you were speaking?  Did you even know what you were saying?”   He said that he didn’t even know what language it was---he said it was angelic or something.   I told him that it sounded ‘demonic’ to me, and I left.

Today I kind of regret that I called that guy’s religious expression ‘demonic’, but he was older than me and I felt he was trying to drag me, as a teenager into something I did not need to get into.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t serious about following Jesus, but it was that I was serious, very serious, and all this gibberish didn’t sound serious enough.  It just seemed fake, synthetic, unnecessary, and for a serious, intelligible, and understandable witness to the world, it just sounded too strange and weird.  If it confused me, I knew it would confuse others.  And that is where I left it.  I put filed all this Pentecostal teaching about the Baptism of the Spirit as a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation of what it was supposed to really mean.

I remained as far away as possible from this kind of Holy Spirit talk until I ran into it again on the mission field; and it Germany of all places.  I thought all Germans were intellectual, academic and unemotional.  I figured they would not allow any such nonsense as this. 

But one day, the Church leader and myself were discussing having New Year’s prayer service with the Lutheran and Catholic pastor’s in our community.  There were less than 500 Christians in our town of nearly 50,000 and it was important for us to get together and to show and share our faith.  We getting to know each other and the Lutheran pastor looked at us and said, I don’t know much about Baptist.  What kind of Christians are you?  Before I could try to get a few German words out, the Church leader who was with me, and had some theological training came right out and said: “We Baptist are charismatic Christians.”   I thought I would fall out of my chair.  I couldn’t believe that this guy; this smart, intelligent, and well trained Baptist layman would say something like that.  Immediately, I gave my reply: “Well, he might be charismatic, but I’m not.  I hoped that the Lutheran preacher would not hold it against me.   He did let me speak in his big, cathedral-like church.

After we left the Lutheran’s office that day, I asked my German brother, “Bruder Richard, are you really a charismatic Christian?  You don’t act like one.  I’ve never heard you speak in tongues?”
He answered that he did indeed speak in tongues, but he did it silently and he did not do it for a show to others.  I was indeed very glad for that.

I came to learn while a missionary in Germany, to my surprise that there were indeed many Charismatic Baptists in Europe.  In fact, most Baptist over there have some kind of ‘charismatic’ experience, at least in the beginning.  What I also came to learn is that much of this was out of their need to express a faith that had been held down too long by the spiritual coldness and impersonal nature of the established European church.  In order to break free, some kind of emotional, spiritual, and charismatic experience would often happen.   Many Baptist wouldn’t show it, but they had been, in a very charismatic way, filled with the Holy Spirit.  It was part of who they were.
If you recall, when the past head of Southern Baptist International Mission Board, Jerry Rankin was active, a controversy came up about his association with some very charismatic Baptists who often prayed with a special kind of ‘prayer’ language and may have practiced it himself.  The more traditional and fundamentalist leaders of our convention were not too happy when they realized that the now head of our mission agency had been close to such experiences.  They wanted to say, like I did when I was young, that this was not spiritual, but demonic.   They wanted to express their opposition to this ‘charismatic’ way of God being a work in the world.  Most of us would probably agree.   Any kind of discussion of the Spirit could end up being a ‘hot topic’.  (http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=22683).
 
THE MEANING OF SPIRIT BAPTISM
When I was pastor in this association back in the 80’s, I preached a series of revival services at Courtney Baptist.  The pastor and his wife were very nice, but there was something very interesting about their relationship.  He was the pastor of that church, but she was also a preacher, a woman preacher and a Pentecostal preacher.  Even more interesting was that she was fun and full of life—so much more than her husband, the pastor. 

I’m telling you about this because I want you to know something I came to like about her and about Pentecostalism---they don’t have God all figured out---but neither do I, nor do you.   I’m still skeptical about the charismatic and displays of emotion of some, but I have come to better understand it, and I like the fact that Pentecostals desire to be baptized, not just with water, but with the Spirit and with fire.  But what does this mean for us?  Better yet, what should it mean? 

If Luke is trying to tell us something in this text, the Baptism of the Spirit is not just what Jesus will do for us, when he comes, but we can already see, right here in this text, that this very ‘fire’ was right here, in the very, deep, meaningful, fulfilling, and affirming spiritual experience Jesus had during his own baptism.   Here, Luke moves right from talking about the coming baptism to show us how the Spirit baptizes Jesus with very personal, warm, affirming and special kind of fire.  If we would just stop, I believe a lot of spiritual confusion clear-up a little.  So let’s look one last time at our text.  Do you see what happens to Jesus when the Spirit baptizes him?  When the Spirit comes down, this is when God calls his name and calls him his “beloved child”.  

In his commentary on Mark, N.T. Wright tells of a famous movie-maker who had a huge legal conflict with his long time mentor and guide.  The younger man simply couldn’t handle criticism, and ended up rejecting the person who helped him so much.  When it was all over, a close friends summed up the real problem.  ‘It was all about an ungenerous father,’ he explained, ‘ and a son looking for affirmation and love.’   Wright goes on to comment, ‘It happens all the time, in families, buisinesses, all over.   Many children grow up in our world who have never had a father say to them (either in words, in looks, or in hugs), ‘You are my dear child’, let alone, ‘I’m pleased with you.”  In the Western world, even those fathers who think this is in their hearts are often too tongue-tied or embarrassed to tell their children how delighted they are with them.  Many, alas, go by the completely opposite direction route: angry voices, bitter rejection, the slamming of doors”  (From N.T. Wright’s Mark for Everyone, WJK, 2004, p. 4).

Why does this lack of blessing have to happen in our world, when the God of all gods, the Lord of all lords, and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has said to us at our own baptism: “You are my dear, precious child.  I’m delighted in you!”   The whole gospel can be summed up in this one truth.   Say it to yourself slowly, over and over.   When you finally get it into your heart, you too will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.  God knows you by name.  Can’t you hear God calling you, loving you, pleased with you?  Watch out!  When you come to realize what this means---its fire!  Fire that can fire up you heart and warm up your soul because you know that having this kind of unconditional love within us is all that matters.   Amen.

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