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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