Sermon - A New Message

Preached on January 11, 2008, Baptism of our Lord, at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 9:1-7

Dedicated to aid workers in Gaza, as the territory is under siege; and always to the glory of God.

“Did you receive the Holy Spirit?”[1] This is Paul’s question to these twelve people he finds when he gets to Ephesus who have already been baptized. Did you receive the Holy Spirit? This is a strange passage for us in the Congregationalist tradition, because Paul kind of sounds like he’s a Pentecostal preacher in a traveling tent revival. Did you receive the Holy Spirit?

But this is long before Christianity separated into different styles and denominations. He asks them because he wants to know if they understand that Christ meant for baptism to be much more than a means of membership in a group. What he means is that God will dwell with us, that God will be active in our very being and shown to others by our lives. The Holy Spirit is the spiritual presence of God with us, as close as our breath. I mean that literally, about our breath, but we’ll get to that later.

Paul says “did you receive the Holy Spirit?” And his face must have just fallen when they reply “No, we have not even heard that there was a Holy Spirit.”

Tom Steagald, a minister down in North Carolina, writes that this reminds him all too well of times in his own church when he has found that life-long Christians are sometimes just as stumped as those Ephesians about the basics of Christian faith. He wonders “who was preaching to them before I got here?” and his opinion of his predecessors becomes pretty low.[2]

If Paul was having similar thoughts, he doesn’t show it. He just calmly takes a step back to learn where they are coming from: “into what then were you baptized?” he says, which is his a way of asking “how did you understand your baptism? What did it mean? What was it for?”

Those are good questions for us on this day, on which we celebrate the baptism of young Aiden, and remember our own baptism, the sacrament by which everyone comes into the family of the Christian church. When we dedicated the new Atrium, we each added a bit of water to the fountain, and we blessed it, and now it reminds us of our baptism every time we enter the doors of the church. So our question today is “into what were we baptized? What did it mean? What was it for?”

The twelve Ephesians said that they were baptized into John’s baptism. That’s John the Baptist, who stood out in the Jordan river proclaiming a baptism of repentance. Repent means to turn around, to turn away from whatever it is that has become the center of our lives and return to God who is our true center, our true home. In our search for a life that we can live with, we turn to all kinds of things that are substitutes for God, and they are hollow centers. Sometimes these empty centers are obvious and widely recognized. But we also need to talk about the hollow centers of entertainment diversion, success, and security. When they become the center, many things begin to act like drugs to distract us and dull our attention to caring for ourselves, for our relationships, and for our neighbors. For substance abuse, there are recovery groups and the support of culture to turn around. In contrast, our culture praises entertainers, the ambitious, and the successful above all others, even as these pursuits just lead us farther and farther away from our true center in God.

John the Baptist called for repentance, to turn away from all of that, which is why people could only hear him out in the wilderness, where he could be heard above the noise of our distractions. So what is wrong with the baptism of repentance? Why does Paul think that the twelve Ephesians need more than John’s baptism? Because repentance is important as a first step. As John himself says “I baptize you with water, but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”[3]

Here’s the basic difference. John called people to repent because God was coming. Jesus announced that the kingdom of God is here. He preached a new message. But just like those twelve that Paul met, we often get stuck in the old message. Too often, we think that Christianity is about showing our faith in God, being baptized for repentance, acting nice, and then waiting for the kingdom of God to come and change things. We’ve done our part, now let’s wait for God to shower us with blessings and ease our pain. Our faith too often treats God like a divine ATM. We put in the right code and wait for the goods to be dispensed.

Jesus said that God is here, the kingdom of God is among you, God’s Holy Spirit is in you. You can live in the kingdom of God right now. It won’t change your circumstances like magic - faith is not a makeover reality show. Our baptism is to put us into God’s kingdom right now. Instead of fasting like John had done, waiting for God to do something, Jesus feasted, because he wasn’t trying to earn God’s response, he was celebrating God’s grace already given. When will we give up trying to earn God’s grace and start celebrating that we already have it? Jesus lived and feasted in the kingdom of God with his disciples, with the poor and ill and hungry, and notorious sinners like the tax collectors, those Jews who took jobs with the empire, who were protected by Roman soldiers, and got rich by collecting and pocketing more than the amount that was due to Rome. The tax collectors had thought they could center their lives on great wealth and the security of the Roman army, but finally realized that all these were empty centers.

I wonder if the tax collectors are a warning for our country? How is it that we can live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world and be so filled with unhappiness, discontent, and fear? I heard this week about a study of the way we breathe in America. Healthy breathing takes about six breaths per minute, and they are deep, from the abdomen, all the way into the lungs. Let’s try some healthy breathing for one minute, six deep breaths.
Breathe in (five seconds). Breathe out (five seconds)….

Six breaths in one minute. On average, Americans take 20 breaths per minute, so that must have felt way too slow to you. We are absolutely out of control. It turns out that fast breathing is shallow and we miss as much as 70% of the energy and strength we should be getting just from our breath. There is a whole world of energy right around us that we are missing because we are moving so quickly to the next thing, because we are reacting to our worries, because we are distracted by the hollow centers that we create in our lives.

So these tax collectors who have been ruining their lives in the quest for wealth and security are among the first to respond to Jesus and begin living in the kingdom of God right now. They receive the holy spirit, and they not only give up their positions of privilege and pay back those they have cheated, they become disciples, creating a new way of living and treating one another. In other words, they not only repent, they expand the kingdom of God to more people. That’s because they were found by the Holy Spirit and they began to breathe easier. Did you know that the Hebrew word for Spirit, “ruah,” also means wind and it means breath? Just like real breathing, the Holy Spirit is a great source of strength and energy that is available to us that we so often don’t even know.

We get caught at the point of John’s baptism. We realize that something is wrong with the world, wrong with our lives, and we want a change. So then we do our ritual, our deal making, and we wait for God to make a change. But that is not our baptism. Our baptism was into the Christian faith that is no longer waiting, but is already creating the kingdom of God right here in the midst of all that is wrong in the world. This baptism means that when we encounter anger, despair, fear, and hatred, we have something to offer, a strength that is as close as our breath, because God is ready to be at work in us right now. If something isn’t right in the world, then live differently. You won’t have to rely on your strength alone. That is the good news we share. That is the work that is done with feasting and laughter and the celebration that we are already living in the kingdom of God.

[1] Acts 19:2
[2] “Blogging Toward Sunday: Let’s Step Back.” January 5, 2009 on Theolog.org, a blog for The Christian Century.
[3] Mark 1:8

New Year's Resolutions

I have a problem with New Year’s resolutions. My problem is not with the goals. Most resolutions are important, worthy aims: to get out of debt, to be in better shape, to spend more time with family, to help others. These are some of the most popular resolutions, and they are all great. But our success rate with these resolutions is low, and that tells me that something is wrong. My problem is with the way we in which think about these New Year’s resolutions. Basically, we have the idea that there is something wrong with our lives, or perhaps many things wrong with our lives, and that we can change ourselves merely by the force of our willpower to STICK TO OUR RESOLUTIONS. We live with the myth of individual determination, and it’s a story that doesn’t work very well.

Christianity suggests a different path. For starters, Christian faith does not begin with the idea that there is something wrong with us. We begin in Genesis with the claim that God created us and called us good and blessed us. It was only later that things got off track, when we became unhealthy and separated from what God created us to be. Instead of seeking to change ourselves with our resolutions, as if we were rotten people, our faith calls us to return to our true selves. We begin this path by confessing can confronting the sin that has gotten in the way. Instead of resolutions to be more healthy, more kind, we simply seek to be closer to God.

When we do this, when we give our lives in faith to God, we give up trying to be in control of improving our lives. We give up the story of self-improvement and find ourselves in the story of God’s grace. Now the metaphor for our lives is one that Jesus and Paul used. We are like a grape vine, which produces its fruit not by an act of will-power to change what it is, but as the natural expression of its true self. Paul wrote that the fruits of the spirit of God are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s what we were created to grow, and growing fruit is better than making resolutions. It gets the focus off myself and onto God, which is where it has always belonged.