Baptism with the Holy Spirit

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:22:17 -0800

The moon and the stars shined so intensely that the cold wet sand at the water's edge reflected their brightness from the ground underfoot. Every night after work I had been drawn to the beach between the world's largest ocean and the vast continent of North America. At first, I had been captivated by the brilliant colors of the sunset beyond the smoggy borders of Santa Monica Bay in Southern California. In those late days of summer I had swum with dolphins just beyond the breaking waves. But as the sun set earlier and earlier, I was working later and later.

I began running at night over the damp sand. On that night the waves generated by a winter storm offshore crashed with thunder on the deserted beach. Sprinting through the shallow waters after each wave shot quickly up the sloping sand, I found a peace absent from my busy working day. The moonlight distorted everything, taking away all color from the scene, and replacing it with odd shadows that made distances and shapes uncertain. Far ahead of me, the waves tossed around a large redwood log, which was drifting slowly out to sea.

This was not unusual and I ran past... Then I looked more closely and stopped. That object which at first looked so much like ordinary flotsam and jetsam tossed up by the sea began to look more like a human form. The shocking realization asserted itself to me that I was watching a man being drawn by strong currents out to the deep sea.

I rushed into the whitewash, past the breaking waves and hauled him in. Wearing an old blue windbreaker jacket with one sleeve missing, several cast-off flannel shirts and t-shirts, he was heavy. His breath stank of cheap wine and he was bleeding from cuts he received as he rolled in the sand beneath the waves. Eventually he spoke in a broken drunken alphabet that I could not understand. I will never know what mix of accident and intention brought him so close to death. But from those few hours we spent together, I understand something of the darkness that afflicted his soul.

This man I dragged out of the Santa Monica Bay inhabited a prison of despair. He lived in darkness as a slave to his addictions. He once had a family, a home and hope but when I met him he had nothing. All of us know darkness. We know darkness that is not a color but the total absence of any possibility of color.

In that night I experienced a kind of midwinter baptism. Today when the church celebrates the baptism of Jesus, it is worth considering the ways in which that experience both differs from official baptisms in church and what it shares in common with them.

1. Let’s begin by considering Luke’s view of what the church means to accomplish in baptism. Last year during our weekly services we carefully read through the Gospel of Mark. It culminated in that wonderful performance that we had by Michael Reardon in October. That marathon presentation of Mark gave us a wonderful sense for the whole. It is especially easy to do this because Mark is the shortest and most succinct gospel.

The four gospels each have their own distinct character. This year in church we will be hearing from Luke. One thing that makes Luke unique is that he provides a second volume with a kind of sequel to the gospel. In the Acts of the Apostles he describes what happened in the first days and years after Jesus died. During this time Jesus’ followers became the church through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

One way to describe Luke’s message in these two books is to say that these propose two pictures of how God’s kingdom is coming into the world. I think that these days it is more politically correct to call this God’s realm, and since I like to try new things and it has a nice ring to it I’ll use this word instead of kingdom. The idea behind God’s realm is that God is doing something radically different in Jesus. God is replacing the evil age in which power and cruelty dominate, with a new world of love, abundance and justice.

So in the book of Luke Jesus not only announces that this realm is coming, but his work actually brings it about. The realm of God is immediately present in Jesus’ ministry. We see it in the stories that Jesus tells, in the way that he overthrows religious conventions of his day, in the compassion he shows to the suffering, the lonely, and the outcasts. We see God’s realm in the friends who gather to him.

Luke tells how John the Baptist says that a prophet is coming who, “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Lk. 3). Luke calls Jesus “the Beloved” and one pretty much gets the sense that the action of God’s realm is focused in his person and work.

What does the sequel to this gospel, that is the Book of Acts, have to say? We get a taste for it in what we just heard. Its short I can quickly repeat most of it. “Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit… Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8).

So in Acts that spirit for teaching, healing and bringing into being God’s realm, that spirit which was once concentrated in Jesus is now shared by the whole church. It’s true all the way to our time. Through our participation in the church, we too receive the gift of the Holy Spirit that so deeply empowered Jesus. We lay hands on people in the way that Peter and John did, we share in that same spirit.

Mystical experiences like the kind I had on that beach in Santa Monica assure us of God’s love and give us power as God’s sons and daughters. The life of the Holy One is constantly expanding – from Jesus’ lonely work in Galilee to the center of Jewish life in Jerusalem and then as described in Acts on to Rome and the heart of the gentile empire. The Samaritans receiving the spirit is just a few stops on the way to our reception of it.

This is very hard for our society, and even us, to understand. We are the church shopping generation. We get disgusted with the frailties and foibles of the person in the next pew and move on. If we perceive a church as too liberal or too conservative we look for one that matches our political orientation. We have a consumerist approach to church and look for the place that will meet our needs. We ask, “What do I get out of it?” People around us in increasing numbers simply reject what they call “institutional religion” altogether and describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”

Even our well-meaning worries about “growing the church” may be misguided when we follow this business model of trying to “market ourselves” to “potential customers” without much thought or conversation about what the church is for.

We forget that we are both the experience of God’s realm in the world through our love, and the sign that God is doing something radical to change things. It is in this sense that my mystical experience at the beach was not a baptism. Baptism is the way we mark people as citizens in this realm. Baptism is when we begin to tell the good news of God’s coming realm to the world.

2. Although that moment at the beach was not strictly speaking a baptism, it happened to me in a context. During those years after college I participated in the life of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Santa Monica. I heard the good news. I experienced the healing power of Christ. I received Christ’s body. I was part of that body. That night as I pulled a homeless man out of the water, he pulled me out of something too. He pulled me out of a whole way of life that it is hard for me to even remember. I received the spirit that night. I didn’t know it at the time but it led to a transformed life.

Within the year I had left my job. In two years I was at seminary where my primary ministry was to homeless people in Boston. Everywhere we went in that city we would recognize friends because we spent so much time with homeless people who were in every public place but almost totally invisible to everyone else. On this week of that year I preached my first sermon to them at a service following the weekly supper our Episcopal Church provided for them. In that small chapel, one man slept through the whole thing and at least two others were experiencing what seemed like vivid hallucinations. Afterwards a woman thanked me for something that I didn’t say. This still happens all the time.

In Luke sometimes the spirit precipitates a baptism, sometimes it comes on at baptism, other times it comes later.

Amidst all of the loneliness and pain of the world, the church this week celebrates the Epiphany, the coming of Christ’s light into the world, his baptism in the spirit. At these dark times, the arctic days of our lives, we still see God's light through the cracks around the door of our heart and in the church. God never leaves us in total darkness. During Epiphany, we celebrate the action of God, who at times in our life will fling upon that door so widely that we may be overcome by that glorious light. During Epiphany we give thanks for the spirit in God’s church.

The moon and the stars shined so intensely in the cold wet sand... and two figures stumbling out of the pounding surf collapsed on the edge of a great continent. We all have felt the darkness of despair, those moments in our lives when God's activity has been invisible to us. We have all made efforts to reach out to those in darkness around us. But at that moment, in the cold wind by the seashore I experienced the spirit. The door to God's world opened and I beheld the light.
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“Let us Celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.” from “Lute Music” by Kenneth Rexroth
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© Malcolm C. Young, 2010 Isa. 42:1-9 not 43:1-7
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon B3, Q1 Ps. 29
1 Epiphany (Year C) Acts 8:14-17
Sunday 10 January 2010 Lk. 3:15-17,21-2

Baptism with the Holy Spirit
"Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove” (Lk. 3).

Preaching

Baptism with the Holy Spirit