Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
There are at least four solid sermons in this morning’s gospel reading. You’ll be glad to know I am only preaching one of them.
Last Sunday was an anniversary remembered only by Christians in the Anabaptist tradition. It was on that date, January 5th, 1527, that Felix Manz was executed by drowning in Zurich. His crime was re-baptizing adults. He is considered the first Anabaptist martyr.
This week we consider baptism, as the liturgical calendar turns to the baptism of Jesus. It is one of only two sacraments recognized in Protestant Christianity, and like communion, resulted in early and permanent divisions within the Reformation.
We start with Pre-Rabbinic Judaism. Like some continuing movements in modern Judaism, it followed a purity code. Any number of things could make an individual ritually unclean, including menstruation or touching a dead body. Immersion in a ritual bath called a mikveh was required in order to restore a state of purity. Purity was especially important in a Temple-based system.
Immersion to cleanse a state of sinfulness was an innovation of John the Baptizer. Followers of Jesus would come to interpret John as a forerunner to Jesus, a latter-day Elijah, for tradition said Elijah would return to announce the arrival of the Messiah.
The gospels report that John and Jesus are cousins, that some of the disciples are drawn from the community surrounding John, and that Jesus himself was baptized by John, as we heard in Luke’s account.
We have no way of verifying the historicity of these various claims, though both John the Baptizer and Jesus are historic figures, both executed as a threat to the ruling class. The two movements were in competition with one another as well as other popular movements of the time. Connections between the two movements opens a world of possibilities best explored in Bible study.
What we can say is that Jesus does not baptize during his active ministry. He announces the Kingdom of God, heals and teaches and feeds. People are made clean through his word. If immersion baptism and the closed repentance community is a fitting symbol for John’s movement, the radically open table fellowship seems fitting for the Way of Jesus.
The postscript at the end of the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, known as the Great Commission and instructing people to baptize using a Trinitarian formula, is most certainly a fabrication. But there can be little doubt that the followers of Jesus adopted baptism early in the movement. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter preaches baptism, and Philip baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch. Paul baptizes entire households, possibly the origin of infant baptism, which was the norm by the early 16th century, the reason Felix Manz was killed.
The Zurich reformers, including Huldrych Zwingli, advocated for what we today call “believer’s baptism.” But Zwingli wanted to move Protestant reforms at a pace civil authorities and the public could accept, while radicals like Manz insisted on what they considered scriptural regardless of the backlash. Sounds a lot like some activists today.
Further, the radicals believed that infant baptisms were invalid, hence the re-baptizing that was prohibited and punished. The legitimacy of certain baptisms was the source of huge controversy a thousand years earlier, during the time of Saint Augustine. The norm in Christianity became that we would recognize baptisms performed in the proper way, with water and a Trinitarian formula, regardless of the sect.
That is so much still the norm that even the Roman church and the United Church of Christ, pretty far apart in how we understand clergy and sacrament, have an agreement to recognize one another’s baptisms.
Infant baptism, “believer’s baptism,” and re-baptism are still in play at times, so it is worth asking why we even do it.
Now, if you’ve been in those pews more than a couple of weeks, you know that I believe in a God that is good. I also believe in science. The Garden of Eden story is ancient myth, a story humans made up to make sense of the world. We can’t be sure how seriously the ancients took some of these stories. But let’s think through this theologically before we think through it scientifically.
God who is good and the only source of all has created humans who are limited, but is also the source of an evil known as the Adversary or Satan. Satan has to come from God or there has to be some power independent of God. Satan convinces the first female human to violate an arbitrary rule, and God punishes the entire species. Humans inherit a state of sinfulness. Let’s save a full definition of sin for another Sunday, but a short definition might be any action that goes against collective and individual thriving.
Humankind is then traditionally understood to be under God’s judgment until the Christ event. After Jesus, the only way to be cleansed of this original sin is through baptism. And if you are not cleansed of this original sin, you will suffer eternal torment in hell, which by the way can only exist as God’s will. Never mind all of the nonsense about purgatory and limbo.
Now, just to be clear, that God would not be good.
Of course, humans are not descended from two humans created by a deity in a magic garden. We evolved from primates in the way that this holy and beautiful planet explodes with life.
Needless to say, I don’t believe in original sin. I am more inclined to the original blessing taught by the heretical former Catholic priest Matthew Fox. The good news for me is that while Reform Christianity doesn’t think much of humans generally, it hasn’t really centered original sin.
So we do not need to baptize babies, or even adults for that matter, in order to to save people from a hell they may or may not deserve. Original sin is about as real as the Thetan souls Scientologists are trying to clear in their space opera religion.
Like Zwingli, I baptize babies because it is cultural and because some folks may be anxious about the souls of infant family members, whether that is real or not, and I am a pastor, so a harmless rite that makes people feel better is okay.
Again, if God is good, there can be no punishment for an act of theologically-imperfect kindness. Think of Jesus healing the withered hand on the Sabbath… And when we do theology in the United Church of Christ, we understand that infant baptism is provisional until it is confirmed, confirmation being our equivalent of “Believer’s Baptism.”
If you were baptized as an infant and never confirmed, I’d be more than happy to form an adult confirmation class.
Like the Anabaptists, like the un-related but Anabaptist-inspired Baptist movement in Protestantism, I actually prefer adult baptism, and I’d actually prefer being a dunker rather than a sprinkler. It is more dramatic.
Because ritual is meant to create a time outside of the mundane, a thin space and time where we notice the sacred, not create it, for the sacred is always there.
For the adult convert, the ritual of washing off the mistakes of the past can be powerful, as powerful as the addict saying their name, admitting their addiction, and receiving their white chip.
In fact, while I have shaken off some of the more hateful aspects and bad theology of my childhood faith, I think there is something to be said for an old-fashioned altar call, for creating a space where individuals can respond with their heart, for we can spend way too much time in our heads.
Were I to have my way, we’d sing “Just As I Am” at the end of the service, inviting folks to come forward and commit to renewed lives, to journeying with us on this ship of sinners and saints.
No sacrament changes whether or not you are loved by God, whether you are entitled to God’s love. No sacrament changes your essential nature. Baptism, like communion, only transforms if you are open to transformation.
Water dries. No one behind you in the grocery line will know that you were baptized last week. But you will know. The community that journeys with you on the way of Jesus will know. The Holy Mystery that shows up in our lives, whether we are paying attention or not, will know, inviting us into thriving and grace, this day and always. Amen.