The Second Sunday of Epiphany

Here is the transcript of the podcast version of my sermon for the Second Sunday of Epiphany.

The Second Sunday of Epiphany

Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:1-13

In last week’s sermon, we began to look at the importance of baptism in the New Testament and in the early Church as the God-given way for a person to respond to the Gospel. We saw how the New Testament stresses the importance of receiving the Holy Spirit. We also made a distinction between baptism in water and baptism in the Spirit. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the sermon yet, it is still available on YouTube and as a podcast. The transcript of the sermon is also available for those who would like to read what was said.

In our reading this week, St Paul writes:

‘For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. Whether Jews or Greeks or slaves or free, we were all given to drink of the one Spirit.’ (1 Corinthians 12:13)

I want, then, this week to explore in more detail what happens both when a person comes to Christ and is baptized in water and also when they are baptized in the Spirit, and then to look briefly at what St Paul tells us in our reading about the work of the Holy Spirit.

Describing what takes place when a person to comes to Christ is not exactly simple! Firstly, so much happens when a person comes to Christ in faith that it is all too easy to focus on just one or two aspects of what takes place to the exclusion of others. This leads to an incomplete picture of what belonging to Christ and following him means. Some, for example, will focus on how Christ forgives us our sins. Others, on the new life the Spirit enables us to lead. Still others, will focus on the peace and security belonging to Christ brings. We need, however, to see the full picture of all God has done for us in Christ and not only focus on a part of it, even if it is our favourite part!

Secondly, related to this is the problem of understanding the meaning and significance of the language that the New Testament uses to describe what God wants for us and of us. What, for example, does Jesus mean when he tells us that ‘no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit (John 3:5)? What does St Paul mean when he writes that we are ‘justified by faith’ (Romans 5:1)? What does St Peter mean when he writes that we are being protected by God’s power through faith ‘for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time’ (1 Peter 1:5)?

The New Testament writers wrote in Greek. As with any translation from one language to another, when the New Testament is translated into English, the words and phrases used in English may sometimes actually distort the original meaning of the words they translate. It is particularly a problem with the words used in association with coming to Christ. This can, in turn, result in a distorted understanding of what it means to come to Christ and to belong to him.

In translating the New Testament into English, the English word ‘believe’ is often used to translate the Greek word that is used in the New Testament to describe what people must do in response to the preaching of the Gospel. So, for example, in the book of Acts, when the Philippian jailer asks Sts Paul and Silvanus what he must do to be saved, they reply:

‘Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.’ (Acts 16:31)

In Greek, the verb ‘believe’, the noun ‘faith’, the adjective ‘faithful’, and the adverb ‘faithfully’ all belong to the same word group. You can tell the words are related and have a common meaning because they contain a similar sound. In English, you know that the words ‘faith’, ‘faithful’, and ‘faithfully’ are related to each other as soon as you hear them spoken, but the word ‘believe’ sounds completely different.

To complicate things further, the word ‘believe’ in English is often used in the sense of what we think about something intellectually. It refers to my assent to an idea, a creed, or a proposition. So, when someone says ‘I believe in God’ this may mean simply that I think that there is a God. It is all too easy, then, when someone encourages us to ‘believe’ something, to understand what is being asked of us in a predominantly intellectual or theoretical way, that is, as a command to think that what we have heard is true.

Now the way the New Testament writers use the word translated ‘believe’ does require that we think what they have said is true, but there is more to it than that. ‘Believing’ requires a decision and commitment that involves the whole of our being, including our intellect and our emotions. To put it another way, to ‘believe’, in the New Testament sense of the word, is about the heart as well as the head. In many cases, the word ‘trust’ more accurately catches the sense of the New Testament word than the word ‘believe’.

I personally think the intended meaning of the New Testament word, normally translated using the word ‘believe’, is better conveyed in English by translating it using the phrase ‘have faith’. There is nothing wrong with using the word ‘believe’ as long as we realize that it involves trust and commitment and not just intellectual assent.

So, for example, imagine someone lost and in danger. They meet a stranger who, seeing that they are lost, tells them he can help them get to safety. If the stranger says ‘believe in me’, he is not saying that the person who is lost needs to believe in his existence; that is assumed. What the stranger is asking is for the person who is lost to ‘believe in’ him in the sense of trusting in him or, as we may say, in the sense of ‘having faith in him’. The person who is lost is being asked to trust that the stranger can help and do what he claims.

Now I realize that this may all sound very theoretical, but it does make a very real difference to our understanding of how we should respond to Christ and the Gospel. Protestants, for example, often single out the phrase ‘justification by faith’, which is used especially by St Paul, and see it as expressing the heart of the Gospel and of how we should respond to it. What matters, they argue, are not any ‘good works’ we may do, but that we ‘believe in Jesus’. We are saved, they argue, by faith not by works. This, however, is all too easily understood as meaning that we are saved by ‘believing in’ certain things about Jesus. Worse still, sometimes, the need for us to ‘believe’ will be understood as the need for us to ‘believe in’ certain doctrines and ideas as well as certain things about Jesus himself.

What, though, St Paul is telling us when he uses the phrase ‘justification by faith’ is not even that we should simply ‘believe’ certain things about Jesus, but that we should ‘trust’ in Jesus. Put like this, we can see that the way faith and works are often understood as being in opposition to each other is a false dichotomy.

So, to come back to the stranger and the lost person: suppose the person who is lost says he does ‘believe in’ the stranger, but then ignores what the stranger tells him to do. By not doing what the stranger tells him to do, the lost person is demonstrating that he does not in fact ‘believe in’ the stranger.

Equally, if the person who is lost really does trust in the stranger and does everything that the stranger tells him to do, when he gets to safety and escapes the danger, the person who was lost doesn’t say, ‘I saved myself by what I did.’ He tells people the stranger saved him.

Before we have faith in Jesus in this way, before we trust ourselves to him, we will, of course, want to assure ourselves of the truth of what he claims for himself. We will need to be convinced that the New Testament writers are right when they tell us that there is a God who created us and who loved us by sending his Son to die for us. We will have questions that we will want answering. There will, however, come a point when we will have to make a decision. We will have to decide whether we will have faith in Jesus, that we will both trust him and trust ourselves to him. This is what the New Testament means by ‘believing in Jesus’.

Yes, we are saved by faith and not by works, but we are not saved by faith without works. Our works on their own cannot save us no matter how good or well-intentioned they may be. Nor are we saved by ‘faith and works’, if faith and works are thought of separately and a distinction is made between them. Rather we are saved by a faith that works. This is what St Paul is getting at when he writes in his letter to the Ephesians:

‘For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast. For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand so we may do them.’ (Ephesians 2:8-10)

To put it another way: we are justified without works by a faith that works.

The relevance of all this to baptism is that in the New Testament it is by being baptized that a person declares their faith in Christ and commits themself to Christ. After his resurrection, Jesus gave this commandment to his first disciples:

‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ (Matthew 28:18-20)

By being baptized, a person is making a decision to become a follower of Christ and is committing themself to trusting in Christ and Christ alone for salvation. This is a trust that will be expressed in a life of obedience to Christ and to his teaching. As the old hymn has it:

‘Trust and obey,
for there’s no other way
to be happy in Jesus,
but to trust and obey.’

Baptism is an excellent way for someone to declare that they want to trust and obey Jesus as their Lord because baptism expresses in a physical way what the Gospel requires of us. Baptism isn’t simply a choice we make; it is a command we obey. But no-one baptizes themself; everyone is baptized. We have to decide to be baptized, but baptism itself is something that is done to us. For our baptism to happen, we need to submit and trust as the baptism takes place.

In this way, baptism expresses the truth that the phrase ‘justification by faith’ seeks to convey: it’s not what we do, but whom we have faith in that matters. There is, however, so much more to coming to Christ and becoming Christ’s than can be described using just one phrase or idea. ‘Justification by faith’ is an important metaphor that describes one aspect of the process. Nevertheless, there are other equally important metaphors that describe other equally important aspects.

Part of the problem is that some believers are like Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Sauron wanted ‘one ring to rule them all’; they want one metaphor to rule them all! They seek one idea that is central to what it means to come to Christ and belong to him. St Paul, however, in a letter to believers in the Church at Corinth describes what God has done in their lives using several metaphors and ideas that are all equally significant.  St Paul writes:

‘Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? … But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.’ (1 Corinthians 6:9-11)

Belonging to Christ is a multi-dimensional experience and describing it is like describing a diamond. A diamond has many different facets each beautiful and an essential part of it. While it can’t express all of them, baptism expresses some of these different facets of coming to Christ and becoming his.

When a person was baptized in the early Church, they first took off their old clothes and entered the water. They were fully immersed and soaked in the water. They were then clothed with a new robe. So too, when we come to Christ, we leave aside our old life; we are washed and cleansed from past sin and guilt; we are clothed with Christ himself. The New Testament writers constantly use this imagery to describe our life in Christ. St Paul famously uses the imagery of baptism in his letter to believers in the Church in Rome. St Paul writes:

‘Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.’ (Romans 6:2-4)

Baptism, then, brings together some of the metaphors that the New Testament uses to describe what it means to belong to Christ, but baptism is itself used by St Paul as a metaphor to describe the baptism in the Spirit that a person also experiences when they come to Christ.

So far in this sermon, I have not spoken much about the Holy Spirit. Last week, I spoke briefly about the charismatic movement. The charismatic movement began as a movement that was convinced that not only did the church at the time not talk about the Holy Spirit, the church had, they believed, forgotten there is a Holy Spirit. Those in the charismatic movement not only spoke about the Holy Spirit, they believed the Holy Spirit could be experienced, often in a dramatic way.

The charismatic movement began as a movement that was positive and optimistic. It promised much and hoped for more, but despite the good that came from the movement, the Holy Spirit still remains the unknown person of the Holy Trinity for many in our churches. Whatever we may think of the charismatic movement and movements like it, the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament, is central both to following Christ and to being a member of his body, the Church. St Paul writes in our reading:

‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.’ (1 Corinthians 12:7)

Our Lord likened the Holy Spirit to the wind, which blows where it wills (John 3:8). Jesus said that we can hear the sound the wind makes and know it’s there, but where it came from and where it is going is not something we can grasp. In other words, you cannot pin it down. So, too, how a person experiences the Spirit cannot and should not be stereotyped or limited, and that can all too easily happen amongst those who value experiences of the Spirit. It was happening at Corinth. No one experience or manifestation of the Holy Spirit should be treated as normative. The Holy Spirit cannot be limited in that way. What is clear in the New Testament, however, is that the Holy Spirit is real and that we need to know his reality in our lives and in our churches.

Jesus said to his disciples that the Holy Spirit dwelt with them and would be in them (John 14:17). John Calvin, the sixteenth century theologian, wrote:

‘First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and dwell within us.’ (Institutes III.1.1)

The way Christ ‘becomes ours and dwells within us’ is by the Holy Spirit. For St Paul, whether a person has the Holy Spirit living in them is what defines whether that person belongs to Christ or not. St Paul wrote to believers in the Church in Rome:

‘… you are in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.’ (Romans 8:9)

Baptism in water expresses an individual’s faith in Christ and their desire to become his follower as a member of the community of faith. But how is someone to know their application to become a follower of Christ and join the community of faith has been accepted? Nowadays, we largely expect them to take it on trust. We point to the promises of God in the Bible and to our understanding of God as someone who would in any case never reject anyone. But this is not good enough.

In answer to the question, ‘How do I know that I belong to Christ?’ We would answer, ‘By whether you have faith’. The New Testament answer is, ‘By whether you have the Holy Spirit’. As far as St Paul is concerned, for example, a person would know that God had accepted them by the experienced presence of the Holy Spirit in their life. St Paul describes believers as having been ‘sealed’ with the Holy Spirit who acts as a ‘guarantee’ (2 Corinthians 1:22; 5:5; Ephesians 1:13-14; 4:30).

Something I have done for many years now is to put my signature in any book I buy together with the date I bought it. By giving us the Holy Spirit to live in us, God is putting his signature on us to show we are his. Equally, the fact that we have the Holy Spirit living in us is God’s guarantee to us that one day he will bring his work in us to completion and fulfil his promises to us. The New Testament writers all attribute the benefits we receive in Christ to the work of the Holy Spirit. What is promised to us in baptism, they see as being made real and given to us by the Holy Spirit.

The problem is that God giving us his Holy Spirit as a guarantee only works as a guarantee if, like any guarantee, we know we possess it. But most people don’t know they possess the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit may be written on them, but if he is, he is written in invisible ink! This is not to be unkind, quite the reverse.

The unkindness lies in the way so many are missing out on the reality of the Holy Spirit and remain ignorant of who he is and what he wants to do in our lives both individually in us who have faith in Christ and corporately in us as the community of faith. In our reading, St Paul writes of how the Holy Spirit gives gifts to enable us to serve one another and build up the body of Christ. While we, as individuals, continue to remain largely ignorant of the Holy Spirit’s work, we all, as a Church, suffer as a result.

There is much more that needs to be said about how belonging to Christ unites us in a community of faith with all those who also have faith in Christ and belong to Christ. In this community, we are called to unity without uniformity, diversity without division, and equality without the elimination of difference. It is a community in which by the Spirit every member has a part to play and a contribution to make.

As followers of Christ, what we believe, how we live, and the way we organize as a church all matter. They are all important. But all too often, we become so focused on different aspects of our life as his followers that we forget that what matters most is our relationship with him and our commitment to him. This is not entirely surprising given our neglect of the Holy Spirit, for it is the Holy Spirit who makes Christ real to us both as individuals and as a community.

As Christ’s followers, we face many challenges to our faith from an increasingly hostile world. We will only be able to meet these challenges by the renewing power and guidance of the Holy Spirit. The biggest challenge to us, then, turns out to be coming not from the world around us, but from our own spiritual poverty and the church’s failure to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.’ We each need to share what the Spirit gives us to help build up the community of faith, so that together we will have the strength to witness to Christ and bring people to know him. But for this to happen, the Holy Spirit needs to become real to each of us and to be allowed to move freely among us.

There is today a resistance in churches to the idea of conversion. We prefer process to crisis, that is, we see coming to faith as something that happens gradually over time, even over a lifetime, rather than suddenly in a moment of time. We distrust dramatic stories of people finding faith and prefer not to use the language of decision.

It is right that we should see following Christ as something that is far more than a one-off commitment to him. Following Christ involves a constant giving of ourselves to him. We need continually to be renewed by his grace, and change is something that should happen in us moment by moment as the Spirit enables us to become more Christ-like in our outlook, character, attitudes, and behaviour.

But this process needs to begin somewhere, and the emphasis on process rather than crisis can mean that the process never starts. Baptism originally was the way a person committed to this process. It was a moment of personal decision and a declaration of commitment to a lifetime of service. For some, the change that came about as a result was immediate and clear for all to see; for others, it was outwardly slower and less obvious. But for all who were baptized the actual change was equally real and dramatic as, in that moment of decision, they died to self and drank of the lifegiving Spirit whom God gave to them.

Years of history and the different social and church contexts in which now we find ourselves mean that baptism is no longer like it was at the beginning. Very often, it no longer represents a time of decision and a declaration of faith.

Furthermore, in the New Testament church, while the giving of the Spirit was distinct from baptism, it usually took place at baptism. As many rightly point out, the teaching of the New Testament is that everyone who belongs to Christ has the Holy Spirit living in them. Receiving the Holy Spirit, in New Testament terms, is not a second blessing, or an event or experience subsequent to coming to Christ and becoming his. A person receives the Holy Spirit when they come to Christ in faith and are accepted by him.

The reality is, however, that, as with baptism, the way we now do things means that we experience the Holy Spirit very differently to how the Spirit was received and experienced in the early Church.

As I have said, we cannot limit how the Holy Spirit works. The Holy Spirit will work in each age and time as he sees fit. Like the wind, he blows when and where he wills. The question is, however, whether we are letting him work or are resisting and rebelling against his working.

We may not be able to be baptized in the way people were baptized in the New Testament era, but we can all make the same decision and declaration of faith. We will not experience the Holy Spirit in exactly the same way as the first believers experienced him, but we can still experience the Holy Spirit.

Much has changed, and will continue to change, but the challenge to each one of us remains the same: personally to decide for Christ and to receive the Holy Spirit.

Veni Sancte Spiritus.
Come Holy Spirit.

Amen.

The Baptism of Christ

Here is the transcript of my podcast for the Baptism of Christ.

The Baptism of Christ

Reading: Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Today in the Church’s calendar we think of the Baptism of Christ and of how Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the river Jordan. Last year, for the Baptism of Christ, we read St Mark’s account of our Lord’s baptism. In the sermon, which is still available on both YouTube and as a podcast, I looked at the significance of our Lord’s baptism in the context of his own ministry. This year, I want to look at how today we approach baptism itself as we seek to follow our Lord’s example.

After Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, baptism in water became the means by which people professed their faith in Jesus and joined the Church. Simply put, the apostles and evangelists would proclaim the Gospel and those who wanted to respond in faith would be baptized in water and join the local community of believers.

This much, at least, everyone can agree on. After this, however, there are a whole host of questions about baptism over which there is anything but agreement. Three questions, in particular, stand out.

1. Did the early Church baptize young children?

Arguments about whether the early Church baptized infants divide both scholars and ordinary church members. The arguments at times get quite heated affecting as they do how we raise and regard our children. There are references to household baptisms in the New Testament, but no unambiguous statements that these households included children, even though supporters of infant baptism argue that logically they must have done so (see: Acts 16:16; 16:33; 18:8; 1 Corinthians 1:16; 16:15).

Why does it matter so much? It matters because for many baptism is about an individual’s own personal faith. Those who focus on the importance of an individual’s own faith argue that a person must believe for themselves if they are to be baptized in a Biblical way. Infants, by definition, are not able to exercise such faith. Others, however, argue that it is sufficient for the child’s parents to have faith, or even that the faith of the Church makes the baptism valid.

2. What happens in baptism?

Arguments about the relationship of faith and baptism lead to a related and even more fundamental question about what it is that is actually happening when a person is baptized. Is baptism primarily about someone professing their faith or is it something more? Is baptism solely about an individual’s own faith or is the community of faith, the Church, also involved?

Furthermore, is something happening spiritually to a person in baptism apart from what is happening to them physically with water? And if something is happening to them spiritually, what is the relationship, if any, between what happens to a person in baptism and the person’s faith? To put it another way: does what happens in baptism happen regardless of whether a person has their own faith?

3. What is the relationship between baptism in water and baptism in the Spirit?

In our Gospel reading, John the Baptist, in answer to people’s speculation that he is the Messiah, says:

‘I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.’ (Luke 3:16)

Following on from the question of what, if anything, happens in baptism is the question of what the relationship is between baptism with or in water and baptism with or in the Spirit. Is baptism in the Spirit same as water baptism? Or are they two distinguishable things, but which happen at the same time? Or are they two separate things so that, even if normally they happen at the same time, a person may, nevertheless, be baptized in water, but not be baptized in the Spirit? Many argue, for example, that our second reading this week suggests that water baptism and Spirit baptism are two different and separable things. The Samaritan believers had been baptized, St Luke tells us, but they had not yet received the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:16).

Well, there are many more questions surrounding baptism, but these should at least give an indication of how difficult the subject is. There is no end of possible answers and combinations of answers, and different positions are held between the churches and within the churches.

To put it very basically, what I have been saying so far can be expressed in another three simple questions:

1. Is it OK to baptize babies?

2. Does baptism work regardless of whether a person has faith or not?

3. Is baptism with the Holy Spirit the same as baptism with water?

The questions themselves may be simple but answering them is not. The various answers to these questions touch on many wider issues, and what you think and believe about the wider issues will in turn affect how you answer the questions and vice versa! Some, perhaps most, are content to follow the practice of whichever church they happen to be in and leave the questions to those who take an interest in such things. For others, however, these questions and others like them cause a great deal of personal angst and heart-searching. These are questions that are anything but theoretical, and they simply cannot be ignored.

It was questions like these that kept me when I was young from becoming an Anglican and nearly prevented me from seeking ordination in the Anglican Church. So, when it comes to baptism, as the saying goes, ‘This time it’s personal!’ I hope, then, you will forgive me talking a bit about my own personal experience.

I was born at a time in the UK when most children were baptized as babies. Large numbers of people may have stopped going to Church regularly, but most people, nevertheless, thought of themselves as ‘Christians’, even if they had little idea as to what that meant. The phrase’ cultural Christian’ perhaps best describes them. They considered themselves Christians because they were born into what was still seen as a Christian country. It followed, or so they reasoned, that anyone born in a Christian country should be baptized. Baptism, then, was as much a cultural practice as a religious one, and most babies experienced it. I was myself baptized when I was just under two months old.

The UK was, however, in common with many western nations, going through a process of secularisation, a process which was only to accelerate in the years following my baptism. Not only did people no longer go to church, they were in the coming years increasingly to abandon Christian morality and to question the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith. This abandoning and questioning was happening, it has to be said, within the Church as well as outside of it.

All this, in turn, led to many in the Church asking what it meant to be a Christian and whether it was right to baptize babies of parents who clearly had no intention of bringing them up as Christians ‘within the family of the Church’. It led some to ask whether we should be baptizing children at all.

To add to the confusion, many, especially many who had themselves been baptized as children, claimed to have experienced a baptism in the Spirit. This was an experience which had changed their lives and transformed how they now looked on the Christian faith and belonging to the Church. A movement known as the ‘charismatic movement ‘was now underway.

Many who joined the movement stayed within the traditional mainline denominations. They believed that they should stay and work for renewal from within. Others disgusted by what they saw as the formality, traditionalism, and lifelessness of the established churches left to form new ones.

As someone who was part of all this, I can say that it was both a confusing and exciting time. It was also strangely a time of hope as those caught up in the charismatic movement sincerely believed that renewal was coming to the Church and to the nation.

There were those in the Church who believed that it was still possible to reverse the tide of secularism and win the nation back for Christ. Those who thought like this could not have been more wrong. There are still believers in the United States who think they can achieve there what their fellow believers were unable to achieve in Europe. The sooner they wake up to the reality of what has happened already in the West and to what is happening there, the better for everyone. But that is a subject for another day.

The point is that what someone believed about baptism came to take on symbolic significance. Those who insisted on faith for baptism to take place, even if it was the parents’ faith, saw themselves as standing for Biblical truth against those who were only interested in tradition or outward show. When I first went to theological college believing myself called to the ministry, I went as one who believed firmly in the need for faith before a person could be baptized. As priests in the Church of England are expected to baptize babies, it meant that I had real problems when it came to being ordained in the Church of England.

Well to cut an already too long story short, I eventually overcame my opposition to baptizing babies and reconciled myself to working in a branch of the Church that I had severe doubts about. But again, that is another subject for yet another day.

My experience, however, does mean that I am sensitive to the issues and problems surrounding water baptism. Hong Kong today may seem a world away from the UK I grew up in, but the questions about baptism remain the same and the issues surprisingly similar.

Because of the past influence of the Church of England in Hong Kong and given the Anglican Church’s involvement here in schools and education, many have grown up seeing themselves as Christians because they were educated in Christian schools. Many parents want their children to be baptized because they were themselves baptized or because they want their child to go to a Christian school - or both.

Yes, of course, there are those who get baptized because they have come to a deep and real faith in Christ. There are those who get their babies baptized because they genuinely want their child to grow up knowing Christ as a committed member of the Church. Others come to faith as a result of getting baptized, whatever their reasons may have been for getting baptized in the first place.

The numbers, however, speak for themselves. For the purposes of this sermon, I did a rough count of how many baptisms I have conducted since becoming the Vicar of Christ Church (2,267 to date). If only 10% of those who I have baptized in this time still came to Church, we would have real problems fitting everyone in! The vast majority of those I have baptized, however, don’t come to church as that was not why they got baptized or had their children baptized.

I am not suggesting that it is wrong to baptize people, whatever their age or reason for getting baptized may be. I do, however, want to be realistic and honest about the context in which we, as a church, minister and serve. We also need to appreciate the present social and cultural background to the questions that we have to answer concerning baptism.

So where does all this leave us as we think this week of the Baptism of Christ? As I have talked in this sermon about my own experience, perhaps I can conclude by describing where it leaves me.

Fundamentally, in describing what I personally believe now about baptism, I find myself where I was when I first began this journey. This may seem a strange thing for me to say given that I nearly didn’t get ordained because of what I believed back then. I am not, however, talking now about ordination, but baptism. When it comes to what I believe about baptism, I am still convinced of two fundamental points.

1. Faith and baptism belong together.

The New Testament simply does not allow either for the possibility of an unbaptized believer or for someone being baptized who does not believe. Both ideas are completely foreign to the New Testament. To believe is to be baptized; to be baptized is to believe. So close is the association between faith and baptism in the New Testament that what can be said about one can be said of the other. To put it another way: baptism is the outward sign of an inward reality, but the sign and the reality belong firmly together.

The social situation and circumstances of the New Testament writers was, however, very different to ours. The Church of the New Testament was a new movement starting from scratch. To grow, it had to convince pagans that it was worth them abandoning their religious, cultural, and historical customs and traditions while risking unpopularity, exclusion, and persecution in the process. In a context such as that of the early Church, you would only risk getting baptized if you did believe and took baptism seriously.

The New Testament writers may not have been able to envisage a separation of faith and baptism, they do, however, know of a separation of faith and works. John the Baptist had to warn those who came to him for baptism to bring ‘fruits worthy of repentance’ (Luke 3:8). St James, the brother of Jesus, warns his readers that ‘faith without works is dead’ (James 2:17, 20). So, too, we may say, baptism without works is dead.

Leaving aside, then, what ideally should or should not be the case when someone is baptized, what is clear in the New Testament is what should be the case once a person hasbeen baptized. The baptized believer should have a living faith that shows itself in obedience, action, and commitment.

Just because a person has been baptized or claims to believe will not save them. Neither baptism nor faith will work on their own. Baptism and faith belong together, and both should lead to a life of faith and faithful commitment.

On a practical note: if someone didn’t have faith when they were baptized or isn’t living a life of faith, the remedy is simple: to have faith now and start living a life of faith. Make what should have been the case when you were baptized becomes the reality in your life now!

Now I would prefer to leave for another day the question of infant baptism, but I imagine that this would be seen as me dodging the question, so a few words about it here!

What we should do with the children of baptized believers is a problem whatever your view of infant baptism. Those who think that a child’s baptism should be delayed until the child is old enough to decide for themself also have to decide how the child is going to be brought up in the meantime. As I have said, from a New Testament perspective, there is no such thing as unbaptized believer. Does then this mean that our children are not fully part of the Church until such time that they are old enough to make the decision that they want to be baptized? Given how positive our Lord was in his welcome of children, I personally find this hard to accept.

But equally, those who do baptize children regardless of their age need to recognize that, again from a New Testament perspective, we should always look for faith when someone is baptized and for a life of faith afterwards. The idea that a child can be baptized (for whatever reason) and then not participate in the life of the Church is utterly foreign to the New Testament, and it should be to us.

Given that we do baptize children of any age at Christ Church, we need as the community of faith to take a child’s baptism seriously. A child’s baptism is also a commitment on our part to the child to do what we can to support both the child and their family as the child grows up, so that they grow up to know, love, and serve Christ as a full member of Christ’s body, the Church.

2. Baptism with or in the Spirit is not the same as baptism with or in water.

In the New Testament, baptism with water and baptism with the Spirit are closely related, but different. The liturgies we use assume that baptism and a person’s receiving of the Holy Spirit happen at the same time. Ideally, they should, but clearly this is not the case in practice.

In the New Testament, when a person is baptized with the Spirit, they know it. What is more, anyone who is with them at the time they are baptized with the Spirit also knows it. In the same way that there can be no doubt when someone is baptized with water, so too there should be no doubt when a person is baptized with the Holy Spirit.

This is why the apostles knew that the Samaritans had not received the Spirit. It is why St Paul can ask disciples at Ephesus whether they received the Spirit when they believed (Acts 19:2).

John the Baptist said that he baptized people with water, but One was coming who would baptize them with the Holy Spirit and fire. Clearly water baptism and Spirit baptism are separate events for John. It is true that John’s baptism is not the same as Jesus’ baptism, but there are similarities and connections.

When the crowd on the Day of Pentecost asked St Peter what they needed to do, St Peter replied:

‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’ (Acts 2:38)

Throughout the book of Acts there are four elements to how people should respond to the Gospel. They need to repent, believe, be baptized, and receive the Holy Spirit. St Peter wanted all these to happen together there and then, but the different elements to their response could be distinguished conceptually. As we have seen, they could even be separated chronologically.

St Paul wrote to the believers at Corinth that he was thankful that he had only baptized a few of them because, he tells them, Christ did not send him to baptize but to preach the Gospel (1 Corinthians 1:14-17). God did not send Christ to baptize with water either. St John specifically tells us in his Gospel that Jesus did not baptize people. This is not because Jesus disapproved of water baptism. He encouraged his disciples to baptize people during his earthly ministry (John 3:22; 4:1-2) and commanded them to do so after his ascension to heaven (Matthew 28:19). It is rather because Jesus’ role is to baptize people not with water, but with the Holy Spirit. It is only when we are baptized with the Spirt that we have received the gift that faith makes possible and which baptism expresses.

The message to us then as we think about the Baptism of Christ is that we need to take seriously our response to the Gospel. While the questions about baptism are important, what matters most is our response to the Gospel and our receiving of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus is the One who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. On this the Baptism of Christ, we pray that Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit those of us who have not yet been baptized with the Spirit and renew the baptism of those of us who have.

Amen.