A sermon on Acts 19:1-7 & Mark 1:4-11 by Nathan Nettleton

Each year on this first Sunday after the close of the Christmas season, we hear the story of the baptism of Jesus at the hands of John. It invites us to reflect not only on what baptism meant for Jesus, but on what it means for us. Are they the same thing? And one of our readings tonight questions any easy equation between them, because we heard from Acts how the Apostle Paul found some believers who had only been baptised by John, and he suggested that there was therefore something important lacking in their baptism.

This won’t be the only time we think about these things in the coming months, because Rita is intending to ask us to baptise her during Pascha this year, which means there will be a number of preparatory steps during which we will gather in front of the icon of the baptism of our Lord over here to reflect with her on what this all means. And as I was thinking about that, and particularly about how we relate those steps to the unfolding of the church year, I was struck by a couple of connections that I hadn’t spotted before. Just two nights ago, we gathered here for the Feast of Epiphany and one of the themes of the stories was the giving of gifts, and here the story of the baptism brings up the picture of another gift given to Jesus, the gift of the Holy Spirit. And I noticed too that as we end the Advent-Christmas cycle, we do so with this image of baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit, and when we end the Lent-Pascha cycle we will do so with the Sundays of Pentecost and Trinity where the image of being baptised in the Holy Spirit is again a major focus. It seems that whether we start with the stories of the birth of Jesus or with the stories of his death and resurrection, it is still the Holy Spirit who immediately leads us forward into the living out of the new life that those stories have immersed us in.

So what’s happening here in these stories today? Clearly the story from Mark’s gospel and the story from the Acts of the Apostles are both pointing to two different conceptions of what baptism is and should be. The Apostle Paul wants the believers who have only been baptised with John’s baptism to be baptised again in the name of Jesus so that they might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. And this would apparently have been no surprise to John himself, because as we heard, he was under no illusions that his baptism was the be all and end all. “I have baptised you with water; but the one who is coming after me will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.”

So is this difference just some technical theological thing for religious experts to split hairs over, or does it have real-life implications for us as followers of Jesus? I think we will see that it matters.

In Acts, we heard Paul say, “John baptised with the baptism of repentance”, and Mark’s gospel agrees, saying that “John the baptiser appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance.” No immediate contrast there, because Jesus also calls us to repentance. But perhaps the issue is that that is as far as John’s baptism goes. Repentance is all about turning around, turning away from the path we have previously been on. But a baptism focussed only on repentance doesn’t give us much idea of what path we are turning to. It might be very clear what we are turning from, but in favour of what? And hasn’t the church got itself stuck exactly there all too often in its history? In the eyes of others we have often been seen as those who are against things, those who don’t do this and don’t do that. The Australian term “wowser” seems to sum it up. People who are always renouncing things, repenting of things, abstaining from things, turning their backs on things. Dour, sullen, disapproving. We’ve seldom been widely seen as people who are excited about anything or celebrating anything or laughing and dancing about anything.

Perhaps this is no surprise from the man who wore camels hair and ate locusts and proclaimed repentance. Although it is not as apparent in this gospel as in Matthew and Luke, John’s preaching was full of threats of an angry God who would come with a winnowing fork in hand to sort out the good from the bad and send the bad to eternal fire. Jenny and I both got emails this past week from a mob called the Army of God telling us that we were going to hell and taking you all with us because our church was found on a list of gay-friendly churches. That’s a bit like the Spirit of John. God will separate everyone, divide them up into the acceptable and the unacceptable, the saved and the unsaved, the blessed and the damned. But if you go and look at the Army of God’s website, and I don’t recommend it, you will see just where that can lead you if it is not over-written by the message of the one who comes after and baptises with the Holy Spirit. Their website turns out to be a song of praise to some convicted murderers who have murdered doctors who provided abortions. The Army of God hold them up as heroes and so seems to incite others to follow in their footsteps. However passionately you believe that abortion should be stopped, the only time Jesus ever quoted “an eye for and eye and a life for a life” it was to overturn it in favour of “do not resist an evildoer” and “turn the other cheek”.

So if Paul is suggesting that the problem with John’s baptism was that it was only a baptism of repentance, a baptism “from” something, then he seems to imply that the important difference about a baptism in the name of Jesus is that it it a baptism “into” something new, into the life of Jesus, the life of the Spirit. And that new life seems to be something that even John knew he didn’t yet have a handle on. John knew that it would have something to do with the Holy Spirit. He says that himself. But what it is that the Holy Spirit opens up and carries us into was as yet beyond what he could see or imagine. But its mention here in the Acts of the Apostles gives us the clue, because the alternative name for the Acts of the Apostles would surely be the Acts of the Holy Spirit and its whole narrative is primarily focussed on breaking down all the barriers of insiders and outsiders so as to progressively include into the life of the Holy Spirit more and more of those who were previously assumed to have been separated out and excluded. John sees God with a winnowing fork, separating, separating. But Jesus and the Holy Spirit set about revealing the agenda of God not as separating but as gathering, gathering, gathering, healing, restoring and reconciling.

Of course, when I say it like that, it all sounds lovely and fluffy and all very attractive and nice. But when lived out in the real world, it quickly comes into confrontation with those whose passion is separating and condemning and so it brings down the wrath of the self-styled armies of God. John probably didn’t imagine what that would mean for Jesus, but Jesus himself did. Later in Mark’s gospel as the storm clouds of murderous opposition are darkening, he acknowledges the two images of baptism when he asks a couple of over-ambitious disciples, “can you too endure the baptism I am about to undergo?” Here then is the baptism of the one who comes after, the baptism with the Holy Spirit into the deep waters of hostility and suffering and death. The words Jesus heard from heaven in the waters of the Jordan include an allusion to the words of Isaiah 42:1, “Here is my servant who I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him”, and that passage comes from one of the servant songs where Isaiah reveals an image of God’s servant as one who suffers the world’s violence without reciprocating it and who redeems us by absorbing the hatred and hostility in his own body so that we might be set free from it.

There was no hint of that understanding in the violent angry imagery of the emails that Jenny and I received last week. Of course it is easy for me to point the finger at this self-styled army of God, but they are not unusual, just a bit more extreme and open about the implications of their thinking. Most of the world’s history is actually on their side. War and punishment and social control and the identification and elimination of enemies have always been justified on the grounds that we are doing God’s will and purging the earth of the evils that threaten God’s good creation and order. That’s precisely why Jesus roused such vehement  opposition. His teaching and practice directly undermined the basic structures of society. His baptism into a new life that is structured around gathering and welcoming and reconciling and forgiving could not be tolerated. When the world constantly justifies itself by defining itself against those who are designated as unacceptable and despicable, the offering of a welcoming embrace and an honoured place at the table for the unacceptable and despicable is a scandal that cannot be tolerated. Witness the experience of Pastor Matt Glover who was crucified by his church last year for his embrace of the way of Jesus over the way of John in relation to how we treat homosexual people.

What we are baptised into is a wonderfully exciting life where the Holy Spirit is blowing away so many of our stale old assumptions about who God does and doesn’t love and accept and gift the Holy Spirit to. And when we repent of our addictions to identifying and rejecting the unworthy, and are washed clean of our participation in such scapegoating and hate-mongering, we will be carried by the Holy Spirit who-knows-where as she continues her re-creation of the world in the name of Jesus. And I say “we” because this is always a “we”. That’s the point. The Spirit is gathering us together and moulding us into one body to live out this new culture of love and mercy. I was just talking with Lauren the other day about her own sense, which she couldn’t yet put words to, of needing to join with others to make this journey into the life of God. She rightly intuited that trying to go it alone is both too lonely to succeed and actually contrary to the point anyway, since the point is the reconciliation of all in one body. And the same idea come through in Alison’s beautiful piece in the faith column of today’s Age newspaper where she writes of lonely years of searching and feeling like prayer did nothing until she found her way into a community where the mysteries of sacred silence were embraced together. This is a shared life. None of us can do it alone. We are in this together, not because we all like each other, not because we are all like each other — a homogenous group of natural friendships, not even because we need to pool our resources, but because the reconciliation of those who might otherwise avoid one another or even hate one another is the name of the game, and because this shared life of reconciliation is the life we have been baptised into, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.