The Unfinished Journey: Acts 19:1-7
Baptism of the Lord Sunday
While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples. 2 He said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They replied, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” 3 Then he said, “Into what then were you baptized?” They answered, “Into John’s baptism.” 4 Paul said, “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus.” 5 On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 When Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied— 7 altogether there were about twelve of them. (NRSV)
I had a meeting Wednesday afternoon that
ran rather long and I finally left the office thinking that would be the
tensest part of my day. I was quite
wrong.
“Did you see?” said my friends on social media when I got
home. “Did you see what happened?” After a rally where the president encouraged supporters
to march on the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. and “take back our
country,” a throng of people pushed through the ill-equipped Capitol police and
invaded the building, smashing doors and windows, looting offices, and causing
senators to evacuate to safe and undisclosed locations. The world watched in horror as an
insurrection played out on the carpet of the Senate floor with men and women
taking over the dais for selfies while, outside, people attacked media
crews and police officers as well as set up a crossbeam with a noose on the
lawn, chanting for the execution of the vice president. In the chaos, five people were killed.[1] And this was all on a day when the United
States hit 359,784 deaths from COVID-19.[2]
I have spent the last three days trying to figure out what
to say to that, how to find God in the midst of such reckless disregard for
life and such weaponized fear. I don’t
know that I’ve yet figured it out, to be perfectly honest, not least because
there are still quite a few swear words that I opted not to write in to this
sermon. I want to simply acknowledge
that I am angry that it got this far; that I am brokenhearted at being unsurprised;
that I am disappointed in this nation that so often believes itself better.
But here in this pulpit, there is only room for saying, “I
am not sure what to say” if I follow it with “and God is here, anyway.”
Today, in the Church calendar, is the celebration of the
baptism of Jesus when God in the form of a dove said, “This is My Son, in Whom
I am well pleased.” We who come to our
own baptisms thousands of years later, we who live in a country that enabled such
hostility by a crowd of people who speak of president and savior in the same
breath—are we also children in whom God is well pleased? If it is true, the later promise from this beloved
Son that God will be with us to the end of the age, where is God this week?
“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became
believers?” Paul asks these disciples in Ephesus. Let us contextualize this question a
bit: these verses come from the book of
Acts, long title Acts of the Apostles, which is the sequel to the gospel of
Luke that weaves the story of how the Church came to be. Acts is where we get the famed story of
Pentecost when flames danced on people’s heads but didn’t consume them, somewhat
like the burning bush of Exodus. This is
the promise of the Spirit—to be always present with those baptized, the living personification
of Christ’s assurance that He would send another after His ascension, that
there would never be a time when we are facing the world alone. When Paul asks whether these people know the
Spirit, he is asking about the Advocate, Companion, Guide, Presence. It is a gift, and the ever-pastoral and
ornery Paul wants to be sure that these disciples have it.
Paul,
who got into a tangle with Peter about the direction of the Church because
there has never, ever, ever been a Christianity in complete harmony with
itself, had a lot to prove as a church planter who hadn’t met Jesus before His
death and resurrection. The book of Acts
is also where we get a great many narratives of Paul travelling all over the
Mediterranean after having been knocked off his high horse—literally and
figuratively—by a Jesus Who asked why Paul was persecuting these fledgling new
Christians. This man who wrote so much
of our New Testament did not have all the answers right away; he had his own
growth because we humans are always unfinished beings.
So
we come to this nineteenth chapter in which Paul, having left Galatia and come
to Ephesus, finds this group of disciples.
In our divided nation, the easiest thing to fixate on here
is Paul’s addition of the Spirit as though it is an admonishment: “You’re doing
it wrong.” We do so love to correct each
other, to fill in the missing information that we just so happen to have, what
a gift our enlightenment is. But we are
missing the point if we see only a moment of Paul proving himself over and
above Peter, or Apollos, or John. “John baptized with the baptism of
repentance,” Paul says, “telling the people to believe in the one who was to
come after him, that is, in Jesus.”
Paul does not tell the disciples, “You had the wrong end of
the stick, let me fix that for you.”
Paul does not tell the disciples, “John was a kook who ate locusts in
the desert and I know better.” Rather, Paul
tells the disciples, “John was doing good work, but it was incomplete. There was another.”
One of the great tragedies of this past Wednesday—and there
are so many that I have not yet been able to sort them all—is that there was no
grace, no flexibility in it whatsoever.
Despite the fact that many of those rioting carried crosses marked “Jesus
Saves” or draped themselves in a Christian flag, the entire endeavor lacked any
recognition that we who are not God don’t always have all the answers, that
sometimes there is new information that throws our entire worldview for a loop,
that there are days when all we can say is, “I don’t know but God is here.” The mob that screamed its rage and panic at
the elected officials ratifying the democratic structure of this nation had
decided that their understanding of who America is and can ever include is the
only one that is valid, full stop. Any
other representation or interpretation was painted as sinister, sly, and
dangerous.
Such a singular mindset of “only what I know” is not only
grievous, it is inherently unfaithful. When
Paul says to the disciples, “There is more to the story,” they do not respond,
“We were told what to believe by John and that’s all we need to know.” Margaret Wheatley, in an article called “Willing
to Be Disturbed,” writes that, “We live in a complex world, we often don’t know
what’s going on, and we won’t be able to understand its complexity unless we
spend more time in not knowing. It is
very difficult to give up our certainties—our positions, our beliefs, our explanations. These help define us; they lie at the heart
of our personal identity. Yet I believe we will succeed in changing this world
only if we can think and work together in new ways. Curiosity is what we need.
We don’t have to let go of what we believe, but we do need to be curious about
what someone else believes.”[3]
There are moral limits to that curiosity, guided by the
great commandments that Jesus of Whom Paul speaks gave to His own disciples to
love God, neighbor, self. If Paul had
baptized these disciples without their consent, taking away their agency, that
would not be an acceptable use of the Spirit that gives us curiosity. If Paul had dismissed these disciples as not
worthy of baptism for whatever reason as though they were less creations of God
than he, that would not be an acceptable use of the Spirit that gives us
curiosity. But for him to ask them, and
them to respond in curiosity, resulted in a new understanding and, eventually,
in speaking in tongues and prophesying—which is not bad for a day’s work.
I do not mean to draw the black and white distinction that those
who stormed the capitol on Wednesday were irredeemable people while I am a fine
Christian. I wish it were that easy,
honestly, and that I could tell you that “these people”—whoever “these people”
are—have the wrong end of the stick, are kooks, and I know better. But it is not that easy. People are never that easy. Were their actions on Wednesday reprehensible? Yes.
Should they be held accountable?
Yes. But are they as people to be
written off forever? No; I do not get to
dismiss another human being, and neither do you. That is not ours. We are complicated beings not least because
we are always learning, always understanding things in new ways, always finding
different angles from which to see our world. We are always finding new ways to be curious,
which makes us terrifically difficult to categorize as entirely good or
entirely bad, entirely faithful or entirely faithless. What I do mean to do is underscore that John
baptized these disciples with an incomplete picture and Paul, Paul who had been
blinded in order to see it, added information to who they were becoming because
they were all still walking the unfinished journey of faith.
“John baptized with the baptism of repentance.” How do we know that John didn’t simply have
the wrong end of the stick? Because it
was John who baptized Jesus, which is a pretty good endorsement. In the first chapter of Mark, we get the
story of John crying in the wilderness that another is coming after him, One
Who is greater, One Who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. John knew that he was not the end-all
or be-all of what the life of faith looked like; he knew there was more
that he did not yet know. The third
chapter of Matthew elaborates on the story and tells us that Jesus came to be
baptized in the Jordan and John asked why. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come
to me? You know so much more, clearly.”[4]
So when Paul tells these disciples, “You have incomplete
information,” he is not slamming them or John, not invalidating the life of
faith they had had up to that point. He
is adding what John himself knew would have to be added, calling them to a new
level of faith.
And even that moment was incomplete. Dean Frank Crouch of Moravian Theological
Seminary reminds us that, “Ultimately our life in Christ is not just about any
particular event(s) that might have taken place in the early (or later) days of
our faith. Those moments — if and when
they happen — are gifts from God to be treasured, but they constitute starting
points, not ending points. After Paul
laid on his hands and they spoke in tongues and prophesied, they were not,
therefore, finished. Although this
assigned pericope ends here, the believers’ stories do not….One transformed
life leads to the transformation of other lives which leads to the
transformation of other lives, all centered around the questions, ‘Did you
receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?’ and ‘How are you continuing
to live in the power of the Spirit today?’”[5]
On this Sunday of the Church year that remembers the
baptism of Christ Himself, we are called to remember that the identifier “Christian”
is a choice, one that we make every day from the point of our baptism—whatever
that may have been—forward. When those who
waved crosses and nooses shouting of salvation and violence in the same breath
stormed up the Capitol steps, they were making the choice to abandon all that
it means to be Christian. That is not
living in the power of the Spirit, nor is it honoring the baptism of
repentance. When we as a nation turn
away from the years of stoked hatred that have led up to such an event with its
white nationalism embedded in every act of vandalism and every threat, we are
not living in the power of the Spirit or honoring the baptism of repentance.
So how can we do so?
How can we, too, become the baptized in whom God is well pleased? I cannot promise a Paul to come by and lay
hands on you (especially during a pandemic) such that you will speak in tongues
at the gift of the Spirit. But I can
encourage you live into the choice of being Christian. Take stock of yourself after this week. What
is causing you joy? Anger? Fear?
Frustration? Hope? With what do you agree or disagree? Is it your faith that supports that? Your place in your life? Your identification with or against the
people on the news? Where are you
finding the Spirit that dwells with you and gives you the strength to live in a
world still finding its way as you are still finding your way?
After personal inventory is interpersonal. If you haven’t already, start talking with
others—not in faceless chat rooms on the internet but with people you know and
who know you. Ask your spouse, if you
have one, how they are reacting to this week and why. Ask your cousin on Facebook or your neighbor
that you always chat with when you get the mail or your best friend on your
weekly phone conversation or whomever you have in your life. Ask, especially, the people who are not like
you: who are younger if you are older,
or have children if you do not, or are single if you are married, or who grew
up in cities if you grew up in a rural place, or who go to a different church
or no church at all. Ask what it means
to them to be living in the power of the Spirit, honoring the baptism of
repentance, responding to the tension of the nation this week.
Ask out of a genuine desire to know. Asking out of a desire to change someone
else, to be the one who knows better, to be able to say, “Oh, you only have
John’s baptism, let me correct you,” will not be helpful to either of you.
And then, in the ongoing life of a faith that continually asks
us to live in the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of humans, engage the
structure. Write to our congress and
senate representatives and let them know what you see as the important next
step, whatever that is that you see.
Learn about how we got to a place like this, because I promise you this
was not something that started Wednesday morning. Question the spaces of faith you inhabit and
the leaders there—yes, including me—about what kind of Christian is welcome
there, what kind of Christian is developed there, and whether people are
asking, “How are you continuing to live in the power of the Spirit today?”
Where is God in this week?
In the outrage, in the demand that we be better than this. In the determination of the senators who did
their job anyway. In the repentance of
some who have recognized that they acted wrongly and have apologized, and in
the justice of over seventy arrests that say this is not something we will
tolerate. In the courage of admitting,
“I didn’t know that” or “I don’t know how to respond to that,” “that isn’t
something that makes sense to me.” And
in the gentle tongues of fire that lick our souls but do not consume them,
calling us to remember who we have promised to be as people who choose
“Christian.”
In The United Methodist Church, our baptismal vows are set liturgy shared by all baptized in water and the Spirit into this faith. It is fitting, I think, for this Sunday to be a day of recommitting ourselves to those vows—and, for those who have not been baptized, to consider these vows and how you can live into them in your own life.
At the end of these vows, I encourage you to take some water and either cross yourself or lay a hand on your head, remembering who and Whose you are on this day and every day.
On behalf of the whole
Church, I ask you:
Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness,
reject the evil powers of this world,
and repent of your sin? If so, say,
“I do.”
I do.
Do you accept the freedom
and power God gives you
to resist evil, injustice, and oppression
in whatever forms they present themselves?
I do.
Do you confess Jesus
Christ as your Savior,
put your whole trust in his grace,
and promise to serve him as your Lord,
in union with the Church
which Christ has opened
to people of all ages, nations, and races?
I do.
According to the grace
given to you,
will you remain faithful members of Christ's holy Church
and serve as Christ's representatives in the world?
I will.[6]
May the Holy Spirit in all Her patience and wildness continue to work through you that you may be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. Remember your baptism, and be thankful. "The God of all grace, who has called us to eternal glory in Christ, establish you and strengthen you that you may live in grace and peace."
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