Rosina Snow, preaching
Mark 1:4-11
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was a strong-willed person with many strong beliefs, and I don’t agree with them all, but much of the time he was really spot on. For instance, I really like what John Wesley said about baptism. He didn’t actually have a ton to say about it, as he did about other means of grace such as prayer, Scripture, and communion. He did not quibble much with the traditional Anglican beliefs about baptism, such as that it was an experience of divine intervention, or that it had the power to wash away original sin, even if it would not suffice to ward off sin forever.
But Wesley’s understanding of baptism was also influenced by his strong evangelical streak, and especially the idea of “new birth.” Wesley was highly preoccupied with the “new birth,” which is the idea that Christians must experience a powerful encounter with Christ later in life. The sacrament of baptism was a very good thing, but inner, spiritual renewal was crucial. He therefore saw two influences at play with baptism: there was the outward sign, which was the practice of the sacrament itself—the water, the proper words, the presence of pastor and community. But there was also the inward sign, which was the soul’s surrender to Christ and the Holy Spirit. For Wesley, it was possible to come into a “new birth” without the outward sign, but not without the inner sign. Therefore, it was possible for Christians who did not practice baptism to be saved into new life, if they were able to surrender to Christ and the Holy Spirit.
This distinction between the inner and outer signs of baptism can be very helpful for Christians living today because the current dominant worldview often privileges the intellect far above experience. Everything is intellectualized, reduced to a set a of isolated facts about the world, while intuition and experience are flatly dismissed. I’ll give an example that unfortunately many of us can relate to. Diet. Have you noticed that all the advice we get about how to be healthy and maintain a healthy weight is 100% intellectual? Eat X number of calories per day, burn X number of calories per day. Eat this proportion of carbohydrates, fat, and sugar. Meanwhile, our bodies have evolved over 3.8 billion years of evolution to be able to tell us what we need and how much we need—all through how we feel! So why am I going crazy trying to perfect some algorithm of the perfect number of calories in and calories out when my body is designed to tell me when I’m hungry, when I’m full, what nutrients I need, when I’m tired and that exercise feels good? It’s because we’ve been trained to privilege the intellect over experience, and at this point we have even forgotten how to listen to the what our experience is telling us.
We have not only been trained by the mainstream worldview to ignore our physical experience of life, but our spiritual experience of life as well. It is very easy to lose the inner, spiritual power that accompanies sacraments like communion and baptism, and this is a big problem for the Church. This may not be true for everyone, but it is true for many, and it is especially true for those who have been raised outside of the Church. All of the words we say, and the sacraments we perform just seem like words, like motions, for someone who is trained to consider only the surface facts of a matter. Ok, we all lined up and ate pieces of bread, now what? That person got dunked in water, so? Yes, there were words about renouncing sin and accepting Jesus, but what does that mean? Am I supposed to feel something right now?
So how do we overcome this? How do we reconnect with the inner sign of baptism, and help others do the same? Luckily, the Bible practically hits us over the head with the answer. Right from the beginning. In order to understand the full power of baptism, let’s go all the way back to the beginning.
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. First, there is nothing—a lack of form, a lack of light, a lack of movement. But then something changes! A wind, issuing forth from God, sweeps over the face of the earth. There is movement! Suddenly, what was stuck is unstuck. What was unchangeable changes. What was empty fills, and what was formless takes shape. There is light. There is life of all kinds. And from that point on, nothing ever stays the same, even until this very moment.
The Holy Spirit is very often associated with breath, or with wind. The funny thing about wind is that you cannot understand it intellectually. You can only understand it by feeling it. And what is it? It’s movement. It’s change. Movement and change are both concepts, but we only understand what those concepts are by feeling, by feeling the wind on our skin or through our hair. The Holy Spirit always brings movement and change. And not just change—as we know change can sometimes be bad—but change that brings forth newness and life. The wind from God heralds the unfurling of all life.
The wind from God is also the driving force of baptism. When John the Baptist baptizes Jesus, the Holy Spirit lands on Jesus and remains on him. From then on, Jesus baptizes, not with water, but with the Holy Spirit. When Paul meets the disciples in Ephesus, he only baptizes them once they know who the Holy Spirit is. The Holy Spirit lands on them, and only then do they receive the power of God.
Speaking of things that get privileged over other things, the Holy Spirit tends be relegated behind God and Jesus, often treated as a sort of sidekick or afterthought, even though God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus all form the same triune God. We ought not to do that, especially if we want to stay engaged or re-engage our spiritual aliveness within our Christian faith.
The science fiction author Octavia Butler, who wrote the Parable of the Sower, said that God is Change. When I think of that initial change from formless void to flourishing creation, that rings true. It is within moments of change—change toward life—that many feel God the strongest. Those first fresh, life-filled days of spring after a long winter. The first time that we are able to laugh again after a long depression. Healthy relationships in the wake of broken ones. Birth in the wake of death. Even for those who remain committed to a purely intellectual understanding of life, these moments of change can bring an unexpected swell of spirit.
And this brings home the power of baptism. When we are baptized, and have that inner encounter with the Holy Spirit, we share in the power of the first day of creation. We share in the power of the resurrection. The trick is to not lose that.
Unlike what many evangelicals seem to think today, Wesley did not think that the experience of the “new birth” meant an absolute, permanent spiritual fix. It was crucial, but Christians were to strive to be more like Jesus every day even after the new birth. Perfection could never be attained in life, but with vigilant practice Christians could grow into greater perfection over the course of their lives.
Because even after encounters with the Holy Spirit, we humans have a tendency to re-calcify if we don’t keep that spirit of change alive. And calcification may be a kind of sin. The best definition of sin that I’ve ever heard is, it is that which keeps us separate from God. If God is change toward life, and we calcify into patterns that obstruct or prevent that change, we are keeping ourselves separate from God.
We do this all the time. Recently, I was walking along a busy road, breathing in all sorts of fumes from passing cars, when I thought to myself, “Why do I just accept this? I’ve been breathing in exhaust my entire life, and I’ve never questioned whether it has to be this way! Why don’t I wonder if change is possible in this situation? Why don’t any of us? Maybe it is time to change!” That’s one example, but there are so many systems in our world that do not support life, that even destroy it. When we accept those systems, or assume that they can never change, we invite in calcification. But when we start to envision changes toward life, we invite in the Holy Spirit. We invite in Jesus. We re-engage with our baptism on an inner, experiential level. John the Baptist provided a baptism of repentance, to prepare the way for Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Quite literally, repentance means to turn around. Maybe it can also be understood to mean starting to move. Going from stagnancy to movement.
Baptism is not only words and water. It is, as John Wesley understood, a surrendering of the soul to the moving Holy Spirit of change. It is the gift of being able to participate with God as God creates new things and moves systems from calcification toward life. It is taking up the ministry of Jesus, which was all about this kind of change. It is the feeling of wind through your hair, the energy of bulbs breaking through thawing soil, it is every impulse within you that says “I can bring life and light to this place, even this place.” It is the dawn of new creation within you. It is the Christian life. Amen.