“I have baptised you with
water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit,” says John to those
who come to him for baptism.
Ritual washing of various sorts
was and is common to many faiths. The symbolism is easy to understand; water is
cleansing, refreshing, reviving. When the crowds came to John the Baptist in
the desert, they were already familiar with this sort of custom. Ritual baths
were part of the regular pattern of worship. They symbolised a new start, the forgiveness of sins, the
washing away of spiritual uncleanness. In some ways there wasn’t anything very
new in what John offered. What was new was the power of his preaching and the
sense of urgency in it. God’s kingdom was coming, he proclaimed, a kingdom of
justice and righteousness, and they needed to be prepared for it. John’s
baptism with water was a natural way of signalling their readiness to start a
new life in this new kingdom.
But John was clear. He was just
the forerunner, and he knew that there was more to come. Specifically, the
Messiah was on the way, God’s chosen one, and when he came, said John, he would
have another baptism to give them, not baptism in water, but baptism in the
Holy Spirit.
And that’s where the whole thing
might start to seem a bit mysterious. We’ve seen plenty of baptisms in water.
We have them often here. But what is
this baptism in the Holy Spirit about?
Some Christian denominations
would be very familiar with this concept.
Pentecostal and Charismatic churches take their name from that
experience on the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended on the
apostles, filling – baptising - them in the power of God. Go to services in a
Pentecostal or Charismatic church and you will find that, as standard, people
speak in tongues, share messages they believe have come from God, and worship
in exuberant, spontaneous ways. It can seem quite strange if you are not used
to it, and there’s always the risk that the emotions will overwhelm any real
substance. But for all that, it can also be very enriching to faith. I spent
quite a few years in my late teens worshipping in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches,
and while it’s not my style now, there was often a very enlivening sense of
reality about the faith I found there, a kind of electrifying seriousness, an
expectation that God was present with us. It was a very important part of my
spiritual journey, however much my theological understanding has changed along
the way.
My guess is that many people here
won’t have experienced that kind of worship, though, and maybe don’t want to
either.
Pentecostalism as it is practiced today stems back to revival
movements in the late 19th and 20th centuries, but
movements like these have been an almost constant part of the Church’s history,
rising up somewhere or other in every age. Methodism was born out of the
experience of John Wesley who was praying with others one evening when he found
his heart “was strangely warmed” as he put it. His faith came
alive for him. It made sense to him in a new way, took a hold of him, moved
him, changed him. It was that inner conviction, that sense of God’s presence,
which made his preaching so powerful. It reached ordinary working class people
in their thousands and not only transformed their lives but transformed society
as well. The passion of the Methodist movement fuelled all sorts of campaigns
for social justice, empowering those at the bottom of the heap, giving voice to
the poor at a time when they often felt ignored by the Established Church.
Going back before that, at the
Reformation, many new Christian groups that sprung up, full of enthusiasm,
liberated by the new-found permission they had to read the Bible for themselves
and organise their own churches in new ways.
The Quaker movement was born out
of a belief that within every person God’s Spirit could be at work. Everyone
had an “inner light” and the characteristic silence of Quaker meetings was
there so that the words of God could emerge from it. In the Middle Ages there
was an extraordinary flourishing of a whole variety of lay spiritual movements.
Writings like that of Julian of Norwich in the 14th century are
filled with an awareness of God’s Spirit. Francis of Assisi, at the end of the
12th Century found himself intoxicated by God, overflowing with joy
and love which transformed him from a wealthy playboy into a wandering
preacher. The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 3rd and 4th
centuries spoke of the need to “become all flame” – not just to go
through the motions of religion but to be open to being swept away by the love
of God. And of course before all of that there were those New Testament churches, like the one in our
second reading, where manifestations of the presence of the Holy Spirit were
expected when Christians gathered together. It was what gave them the strength
and the courage to endure persecution.
The Baptism of the Spirit comes
in a great variety of ways. It isn’t just about exuberant, happy-clappy
worship, or mystical phenomena. It’s seen
in our a basic attitudes to faith. It comes when our faith stops being just
something up here in our heads, and becomes something which affects the whole
of our lives, transforming us from the inside out.
Those movements I talked about,
across Christian history, were united by their discovery that there was more to
being a Christian than the earnest desire to do the right thing, or to worship
beautifully, or to have high flown theological ideas. It was about yielding to
God’s work, going where God led, growing as he wanted them to. It was seen in
faith that had something vital and
life-giving about it, that made such a difference to those who were caught up
in it that they couldn’t just walk away from it, that was filled with the
Spirit’s fruits – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
gentleness, faithfulness and self-control, as St Paul describes them in
Galatians 5.
John the Baptist points his
followers forward to the one who can give them this kind of life, because he
himself is filled with God’s Spirit. That’s why it matters that Jesus is
baptised by John. He doesn’t need the forgiveness of sins, but he does need to
go down into the same depths as everyone else, to be submerged in the same
river of life as we all are. By doing that he discovers, and so do we, that even
there in the depths he is the beloved son of God, and if he is beloved then so
can we be. In Christ, God immerses himself in the world, so that we can be
immersed in him, filled with the life-giving water of his Spirit.
The story of Jesus’ baptism
echoes the words from the beginning of the book of Genesis which we heard in
our first reading, probably deliberately. Here too there’s water, chaotic and
dark, and here too, the Spirit of God – the wind from God – the word for wind
and Spirit are the same –comes sweeping over the water, bringing order and life
out of it, which God declares to be good. In Christ, God is at work bringing to
birth a new creation. And he does it by identifying himself with us, becoming
as we are, becoming one of us.
This week we have seen vivid
reminders of the need for that new creation, for the work of the Spirit in our
lives and our world. There has been widespread horror at the massacre at the
offices of Charlie Hebdo and the deaths of others after that too. Many
have responded to this tragedy by identifying themselves with its victims,
affirming their own commitment to freedom of speech. “Je suis Charlie” has
been the cry - “I am Charlie”. It’s a recognition that the deaths of
those people in Paris affect us all, that we are with those who suffer. In a sense, that is exactly what is happening
when Jesus goes down into the waters of the River Jordan. He is declaring that
he is one of us, sharing our lives. In Christ, God says “Je suis Charlie” to
us too.
But God goes further than that.
It is one thing, after all, to identify with those who are victims; we all want
to be seen to be on the side of innocence, freedom, and courage. What God does
in Christ, though, is more than that. Paul
says in his second letter to the Corinthians that “For our sake God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin,
so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5.21) In Christ God doesn’t just share
the lives of the victims, but also shares the lives of the perpetrators. He
doesn’t just come alongside the innocent who suffer, but alongside the guilty
who cause their suffering. “Father forgive them, they do not know what they
are doing” Christ prays for those who nail him to the cross. That’s good
news for us all, because if he only came to share the lives of the innocent,
what good would that be to any of us? None of us is innocent, not entirely. The
roots of that massacre in Paris go back through history and spread across the
world. They grow from millennia of suspicion and warfare. They are fed by our
commonplace greed and apathy and the simple failure really to care for our
neighbour if he or she doesn’t look like us and think like us. Unless we have
the courage to accept that, nothing can change.
That’s why this week I don’t
think God just says “Je suis Charlie”. If God says “I am
Charlie”, he must also say in some sense “I am the terrorists,
and the people who radicalised them and all of those who created the climate in
which this kind of hatred grows, and those who looked the other way and
couldn’t be bothered to challenge it.” It is hard to hear and to say that, but it is
basic Christian belief. Christ doesn’t just come to share our suffering and
grief; he comes, though he is sinless, to share our sin and failure too; it is because
of this that we can know his forgiveness and hope. He drowns himself in our
lives, going down into their depths, so that we might find ourselves drowned in
his love, filled with his Spirit, overflowing with the new life the world so
desperately needs.
Amen
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