A sermon on Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 by Nathan Nettleton

Baptism is something that you could perhaps reasonably expect Baptists to be united about, but I know that in this particular Baptist church, at least, the question of Baptism has been somewhat divisive. I know of at least one person who left this church because she wanted to be baptised and the pastor wouldn’t do it. And I know of other people who have felt a lot of pressure applied to them to get baptised when they didn’t feel that they were ready. So I am aware that for some people here, this topic may be a hot potato.

Please feel free to relax. I have no intention of putting any pressure on anybody, or trying to send anybody on a guilt trip. What I want us to do is explore something of what Jesus’ baptism meant, and how that relates to us, and then when we’ve finished we are going to share together in a sacrament of renewing baptismal vows for those of us who have been baptised. Those of you who haven’t been baptised should not feel excluded from any of this. I for one do not think that your Christian faith or experience is any less real because you haven’t been baptised. I hope you will join in the spirit and prayers of the sacrament later, but for obvious reasons you can’t fully participate in renewing something you haven’t done.

It may seem like a strange place to start, but I want to begin by looking at a couple of things in our readings that seem to suggest that baptism is rather unimportant. Firstly you will note that John the Baptiser says to the people, “All I do is baptise you with water. The one who comes after me will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire and he’ll sort out the wheat from the chaff.” “All I do is baptise you with water.” John is clearly saying that what he does, in baptising people is rather less important in the scheme of things than what Jesus does.

Then in our reading from Acts, Luke says that when the apostles heard that there were a newly converted bunch of Christians in a place called Samaria, a couple of them went down to lay hands on them and pray that they would receive the Holy Spirit, because as it says, “they had only been baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus, and hadn’t received the Holy Spirit yet.” And sure enough when Peter and John prayed for them the Holy Spirit filled them and they went on from there.

So why is Luke playing down the importance of baptism? Why does he say, “they’d only been baptised, they hadn’t yet received the Spirit, they still needed something that would really change them,”? Let’s discuss this for a moment. What is Luke saying? He’s clearly saying that baptism is not enough, but not enough for what??? What do you think??? What is he saying that baptism cannot accomplish??? Perhaps you know people about whom this could have been written. Why do they get baptised if they have not received the Spirit of God???

It’s fairly clear then, that baptism is an external act that does not necessarily do anything to you on the inside. You can go through the liturgical motions without any transforming power. I don’t think John was suffering from an inferiority complex when he said that he only baptised with water – he was recognising the extent of his power. He could offer you the baptism of water that symbolised your repentance, but he couldn’t ensure that the repentance happened. Whether or not the cleansing fire of the Holy Spirit burns up your inner refuse and purifies your heart is a matter for you and God, no baptism or baptiser or any other religious ritual can bring that about. So John was saying I can baptise you OK but it is Jesus who is going to sort out the wheat from the chaff. It is Jesus who is going to determine whether you’re fair dinkum or whether your just going through the motions for public show. It is Jesus who can do what John cannot do – touch your heart and fill you with the Holy Spirit.

But having said that baptism is very much secondary to what takes place inside you, it is clear that it is not done away with. Even Jesus felt that it was important to get himself baptised. And again this baptism is very clearly linked with the receiving of the Holy Spirit. We are told that when Jesus had been baptised, the Holy Spirit descended upon him, and a voice from heaven was heard affirming Jesus as God’s son. And I am particularly interested in the very next thing that is said. It says that then Jesus began his work and that he was about thirty years old.

There is not only a clear link between baptism and the impact of the Holy Spirit, but there is a clear link between Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his public work. There is a dramatic change in lifestyle for Jesus from this moment on. We have only one incident in Jesus life recorded between his birth and his baptism at age thirty. He wasn’t causing any great stir or making the headlines. But within a chapter of Luke’s account from this point on, there are crowds following him, he has been attacked by the powers of evil and there has been an attempt to publicly execute him in Nazareth. It’s all happening.

There is another way that Jesus’ baptism is linked to his public mission, but we need to look ahead a little to spot it. In our passage here, we have the Spirit touching Jesus at his baptism, and then in the next chapter, when Jesus gives his first sermon in Nazareth, the sermon that is usually described as Jesus giving his mission statement or setting out the program for his ministry, he begins with the words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.” The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. At my baptism the Spirit came down on me and anointed me to do certain things. I have a mission as one who has been baptised and anointed by the Spirit.

And this is not just Jesus’ mission. When Jesus departs after the resurrection, he tells his followers, “Now you go and preach good news to the poor, and freedom to the oppressed, and baptise them in my name.” Jesus is saying, “I was baptised, the Spirit of the Lord anointed me to this task. Now you have been baptised, the Spirit of the Lord has anointed you to this task.”

Some of you came to my ordination service last year. That was a special day for me. People laid hands on me and set me apart for a special ministry within the church. But the reality is that although a big fuss was made of it, that ordination was of much less significance than my baptism ten years earlier, or anybody else’s baptism. Because I was only ordained to a particular task within the wider mission that we are all ordained into when we are baptised. Baptism is the ordination ceremony of every follower of Jesus. And in case those of you who have not been baptised are feeling left out, or feeling that you have an easy way out, I’d like to point out that I had been working in the specific ministry that I was ordained to for nearly five years before the actual ceremony. If you are a follower of Jesus you have been called to take your place in Christ’s mission team whether or not you have been through your ordination ceremony of baptism.

That also gives you some idea as to why I’m not going to pressure anyone into being baptised. You wouldn’t go and get ordained without giving it a lot of serious thought and preparation. It’s a big decision. It’s a big commitment. You wouldn’t get married without very seriously weighing up the options either, because in a wedding you get up before God and a whole lot of people who are going to be around for a long time and you make promises and vows that you will commit yourself to this one person exclusively for the rest of your life. It’s not something to be done lightly. In baptism you get up before God and a whole lot of people who are going to be around for a long time and you make promises and vows that you will commit yourself to Christ and his mission in the world exclusively for the rest of your life. That is a big commitment, and a scary one because, just like you can’t know what a marriage partner will be like in 20 years time, you can’t know where the mission of Christ will take you. The only assurance you have is that wherever it is, God will be with you, and that you need not be afraid because God loves you and will ensure that nothing can destroy you.

Because you are baptised into the mission of Christ, you have also signed on as a member of God’s mission team, the church. That does not mean that you have to be a committed member of a particular local congregation, there are other legitimate ways outside of the organised church that you can be involved with God’s people in God’s mission. For most of us though it will mean a commitment to the mission of a particular local congregation. The church is nothing if it is not a community of mission. A congregation with no involvement in the mission of God beyond its own doors has no right to call itself a church. Certainly the church has a mission within its own doors too, but it cannot stop there if we are the community that have followed Jesus through baptism and into mission. We have been anointed by the Spirit of God to announce and embody good news of freedom and hope.

Each congregation will embody that mission in a different way and that’s good. One of the tasks we have ahead of us here is to define our style and our focus in that mission. Having done that each of us, and each newcomer, can make an informed decision as to whether this is the right church for us or not. Aligning yourself with one particular community of mission rather than another is not a matter of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, it is a matter of individual style and appropriate matching of your gifts and needs to the needs and gifts of a community.

What is a matter of faithfulness is whether you commit yourself to the mission of Christ in the world or not. If you have followed Christ in baptism, you have been ordained to that mission, and you have committed yourself to God’s people, and you can expect us to hold you accountable to the promises you made. Of course I recognise that there are people, like we talked about before for whom baptism was an external ritual that made no connection with any internal reality. If that’s you then that is unfortunate because you were ordained to a task you were not willing to commit yourself to. But, like the Samaritan believers in the story before, it can happen the other way around. You can open yourself now to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit and begin to live out the call to which you were baptised. All of us need to do that again and again, no matter how real our baptism was. All of us need to repeatedly remind ourselves of who we are following and whose mission we have been baptised into.