Jeremy Duncan: Historically, Christians have also seen baptism as a means of grace. Not just a commitment. Not just a turning away. Not just a resting in God. Not just an entry point into the way of love, and not just an identification with Christ.
But also a unique moment in our lives where we experience the grace of God physically in our bodies. First off, let's look back at last week quickly. Because there, Scott walked us through a discussion of the church's mission. Let's be honest. That is a pretty big topic, at least to cover in one Sunday.
Every church and corporation and non profit on the planet loves to talk about their mission statements. To be honest, it can be a little overdone. Here at Commons, we tend to talk a lot about our values. Intellectually honest, spiritually passionate, Jesus at the center. And those values really do drive everything that we do here.
They are the filter for where we invest our energy. And in practice, I think they are a pretty good approximation for how we operate together. Because in the end, I think it is often our values, stated or otherwise, that ends up shaping who we become. See, the thing is the mission of the church, the mission of every church is essentially the same thing. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, son, and holy spirit, teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you.
That's Jesus, Matthew 28. And dress it up however you want. That's what we're here for. The thing is, depending on the values that surround us, how we make sense of that goal, that mission, that same mission has looked at times like conquest or coercion or proselytization, even the politicization of Jesus' kingdom. We're all trying to get to the same ends.
There's really only one mission statement for every church no matter how we word it, but unmoored from the person of Jesus and the values he carried to the world, mission has often ended up in very strange places throughout our shared history. Places perhaps like Scott playing Jesus in street corner evangelistic enterprises, which, by the way, I really do appreciate that honest self disclosure there, friend. But I think that is part of what I appreciated so much from last week. This reminder that mission isn't about convincing or converting anyone. Certainly isn't about imposing ourselves on our neighbors.
Mission, at least as articulated by Jesus, is very simply about noticing resurrection that around us all the time, witnessing the truth of God's goodness in the world surrounding us, and then living as if that good news was actually true. Jesus tells us at one point that because of what we have seen in resurrection, in him standing there with his disciples, that we will now become witness to resurrection in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria to the ends of the earth because Easter changes everything about how we see everything. So what's our mission in the world? It's to change the world. And how does the world change?
It changes when Easter becomes the lens through which we treat our neighbor. Now, maybe that seems a little cliche, a little too easy. Is that really enough? I mean, aren't we going to need an altar call at some point just to seal the deal? But maybe, I would argue, that even this community here is proof itself that together, our witness is far more powerful than we often imagine.
And that the grace of God can find its way into people's lives gently, even unexpectedly, whenever the person of Jesus sits at the center of how we shape our lives. So at Commons, we might say that the creator God is at work to heal and remake the whole world through Jesus, and our mission is to join with God in the renewal of all things. Today, we'll talk about the part that baptism plays in that life together. First, let's pray. Good and gracious God, we have been witness to your work in our lives.
Resurrection at a tangible scale. In our experience of the Easter story, in relationships we thought dead and buried, in dreams abandoned, and in time resuscitated. Help us then not only to witness, but to become witnesses to that same truth. In the ways we live, in how we speak, in the ways that we care and extend the walls of our lives to include another, in the ways that we tell your story over and over again through surprising generosity and scandalous grace. And then, God, may our witness to your story only help to reinforce and redefine ours.
So that we might become more aware of opportunities and moments, surprising chances for your mission to heal the world even through us. To be made concrete in small moments of grace with neighbors and strangers and those who might become future best friends. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Today is all about baptism, which is convenient considering that next week we will celebrate together, all of us, with those who enter the waters of baptism.
And so today, I wanna talk about adjectives, layers, means, and our invitations. But even as we endeavor to talk about the theology, the history of baptism, there is an element to this sacrament that I believe is more about imitation than even intention. This idea that we pick up the significance of baptism perhaps more in being near each other, watching each other, than strictly in how we are taught about it. And as an example, I wanna talk about adjectives because English has a very unique set, specific, actually, quite rigid set of rules around the placement of adjectives, rules that almost no one is ever taught. And that means that while almost none of us know the rules, we are all absolutely living by them all the time.
See, the rule goes like this. When stacking multiple adjectives to describe a noun, the order must go determiner, number, opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose, and then your noun. Now I can almost guarantee none of you have ever been taught this. But unless you're a psychopath, I promise that you follow this rule. Let's look at this.
Determiner is things like yours or mine or that. Number, that's obviously the number of things we're talking about. And then opinion, that's your subjective consideration of an object, something like smelly or heroic or misunderstood. Size, age, shape, and color come next in that order, fairly self explanatory. Origin is something like American, French, Canadian.
Material, something like wood or leather or plastic, and purpose is what you're going to use the thing for. For example, a writing pen. But if you and I were having a conversation and I mentioned my old blue writing pen, you wouldn't blink at that. Yet if I was to mention my writing blue old pen, you might think I'm having a bit of a moment of distress. And it's fascinating how rigid this all is because I can talk to you about your beautiful old brick home, but I absolutely cannot talk about beautiful your brick old home.
It just doesn't work. Even though technically, all of those words are just adjectives. Now why? Well, we actually don't know. There are some theories, but in the end, it just seems to be a pattern that we pick up as we speak to each other.
In other words, there's no reason, there's no grammatical indication that we all follow a very complex rule that we've never been taught. And just for fun though, there is an even more important rule that has also never been taught to you, but it's also one that you follow and can actually override our adjective order rules. And this is called oblate reduplication. Now it relates to the unconscious reordering of certain vowel sounds in speech. Generally, it determines that front vowel sounds like i's and e's take precedence over back vowel sounds like a's and o's.
So, in our adjective rules, opinions always come before sizes, which means we should say things like the bad big wolf, except our oblate reduplication rule overrides that order because the front vowel I in big takes precedence. So we say the big bad wolf instead, even though that doesn't follow our first rule. What this means is that you, right now, have actually got two rules you've never heard of floating around in your head, dictating how you speak all the time, even overruling each other completely outside your conscious intervention. Now, why am I talking about all this? Well, it's because as much as I want to talk today about the history and the theology of baptism, I think it's actually the practice.
The way that we watch each other, the way we listen to each other's stories, the way that the practice of these sacraments slowly sinks into our experience of church. In whatever tradition we've been a part of, that will actually shape how you follow in the footsteps of those who've come before you. And it will likely matter more to you than my articulation of any of it. And by the time we get to the end today, I wanna argue that's actually a good thing. The baptism, perhaps all of our sacraments, are meant to be experienced more than understood.
Still, with that destination in mind, let's look at some history. Because baptism actually has pre Christian roots in something called the Mikvah. Now if you flip all the way back to Leviticus, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, it's right near the start, you will find a whole bunch of rules about when you need to cleanse yourself. Now the term that's used is purity or ritual purity. And we've talked about this many times before, but in the Jewish imagination, ritual purity do not have moral connotation.
In fact, a lot of things that you would normally do in life could make you ritually unclean. That's not a bad thing. It doesn't even necessarily mean that you're supposed to avoid all of those things. As an example, childbirth made a woman unclean. That was absolutely not something that a faithful Jewish woman would ever want to avoid.
And so we have to understand that needing ritual cleansing was not a judgment on a person. Being unclean in the ritual sense did not make you dirty or bad. It was, as the word implies, ritual, simply a part of normal Jewish life. And it was a way of reminding yourself of your commitment to the law, to the way of God within the normal rhythms of life. Now in Leviticus, the specific rules about when to cleanse are there, but they're not particularly well spelled out in the how.
So over time, those rituals became, well, ritualized. And a mikvah was essentially a large public bath that was used for these ritual cleansings. And over time, the rules about what constituted a mikvah, they were standardized. So a mikvah had to hold a minimum of 200 gallons of water. And the water in the mikvah had to be living water.
It meant it was collected naturally from a spring or rainwater or preferably a flowing stream. That actually became really important for the early Christians. There's that document called the Didache. We've brought this up a couple times in the last month now. But in there, it says that for a Christian to be baptized, they must be fully immersed in living water.
Now, what they're referring to here is flowing water, not still water like a pond that you just found somewhere. In both cases, we tend to think that that was primarily for hygienic reasons. Naturally occurring still water is usually less than ideal to dunk yourself in. So mikvahs were generally rock basins, and they've been excavated all over the place near springs and flowing water, often as close as possible or adjacent to places of worship like synagogues. And so for Jewish people, around the time of Jesus, going under the water in the mikvah was a normal regular part of life whenever you needed ritual cleansing.
However, also around the time of Jesus, this very strange dude named John appears on the scene. He wears clothes made of camel hair. That seems to be an aesthetic decision. A camel hair would have been incredibly uncomfortable and itchy to wear. And he eats grasshoppers and any wild honey that he can find.
And he comes along baptizing people, hence the name John the Baptist. Now lucky for him, I didn't meet him. Had I met him at that time, I probably would have called him John the grasshopper guy. So luckily, John the Baptist is what stuck for him in the records. But it appears that John is using some form of what would have happened in a ritual cleansing in a mikvah, but now he is saying that it is for the repentance of sins.
And we don't know if there were other Jewish teachers practicing similar things around this time. Judaism was probably more diverse than we really understand. But what John is doing here in Matthew, Mark, and in Luke is certainly a deviation from the traditional way that Jewish people understood what a mikvah was used for. He's taking an important symbol that put into practice a commitment to God's law, and he is transposing that onto an outward statement to reflect an inward change. A repentance, a turning away that someone has made in their heart to internalize their commitment to God.
Now, for the word the record, the the word baptize here, at least at this point in the story, just simply meant to plunge something under the water. You can go all the way back in Greek to Homer and find this word baptizo being used to describe a blacksmith plunging an axe into the water to cool it. So at this point in the story, John the Baptist is literally just a description of what this guy is doing. John, that guy who keeps dunking people in the water. That's all it means.
But already, we're starting to see the layering of meaning that's being added onto this practice. We have the mikvah, the place of commitment to the practice of the way of God. We have the baptism of John, a display of repentance and inward change. And now we have Jesus show up on the scene. And this gets interesting because although we can readily assume that Jesus as a Jewish person would have practiced the baptizing in a mikvah, would have done this regularly throughout his life, John's baptism is for the repentance of sins.
And that seems an odd fit for the son of God. Right? What is Jesus repenting for here? And so now we get another layer added. At the end of Matthew three, Jesus comes down to see his cousin John wanting to be baptized.
But John tries to deter him saying, it doesn't make any sense. You don't need to repent. I need to be baptized by you. Get out of here. Jesus, though, replies, look.
Let's do this. It's proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness. And so John relents. However, as soon as Jesus was baptized, he comes up out of the water. And at that moment, heaven was opened, and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove alighting on him.
And a voice from heaven said, this is my son whom I love. With him, I'm well pleased. So, we have a commitment to the law of God in the mikvah. We have the repentance of sins in John's baptism. Now we have in Jesus' baptism this point of identification with the father.
And personally, one of my favorite gospel moments, I think one of our tendencies is to imagine that our lives are really just all about working our way back to God. And, certainly, there's truth to that. Right? All of us are in some way broken or wounded. We have injured each other.
We've sinned. And there is a discovering of our way back to God that happens throughout the course of our lives. True. But in baptism, there was also this very simple sinking into our identity as beloved children before anything else. Like, Jesus hasn't done anything in the story yet.
This is chapter three in Mark. This happens in chapter one. There's no miracles, no disciples, no teaching, nothing yet. Just Jesus' realization that to fulfill all righteousness, he needs first to fall into the loving arms of his father before anything else. And I love that.
And yet, we're still not done. Because after Easter, after Jesus is resurrected, after he appears to his disciples, he calls them to be witnesses to this resurrection, to resurrection all around them all the time, and he charges them to change the world by pointing out that good news. Everything we talked about last week. But then in Matthew 28, Jesus says, therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them. In the name of the father and the son, the holy spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
This right here is where baptism actually now officially becomes part of Christian practice. A commitment not only to the law, but to the way of love that is embodied in the person of Jesus. And yet, even here, now that we finally arrived in Christianity, baptism still isn't done. It gets yet another layer of meaning. Paul picks this up in Romans, and he adds, don't you know that all of us who are baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
We were therefore buried with him through baptism in order that just as Christ Jesus was raised from the dead, we may begin a new life as well. So Paul takes this image that starts with the mikvah, a practice to the commitment of the way of God that John uses to symbolize a turning away from sin, that Jesus uses to demonstrate his resting God's grace that Christ sees as an entry point into the way of love, Paul now says, well, look, in looking back, maybe we can add another layer here as well. Because going down under the water, well, that looks a lot like death. Maybe we can symbolize our identification with Christ's death, everything our eyes are open to on the cross. And coming back up out of the water, that can connect us with that same resurrected life that now infects the world and transforms our experience of everything in the light of Easter.
And so, in the Christian tradition, baptism is all of this. And yet, maybe even more. Because historically, Christians have also seen baptism as what we would call in our tradition a means of grace. So not just a commitment, not just a turning away, not just a resting in God, not just an entry point into the way of love, and not just an identification with Christ, but also a unique moment in our lives where we experience the grace of God physically in our bodies. Here at Commons, much like we do when we talk about the Eucharist, we would use language that would affirm baptism as more than just a symbol, more than just a personal decision that we've made toward God, as if all the important parts of faith are happening on our side of the equation.
No. We would choose to trust that God is actually somehow present, meeting with us there in that moment that we are experiencing something of divine welcome as we choose to follow Jesus into and through the water of baptism. And I think in part, what we're trying to say with this language, at least half of faith, maybe even the most important half of faith, is somehow actually happening on the other side, on God's side of the equation, in the universe's ongoing invitation for us to discover grace all around us. And all this means that in baptism, you are making a commitment. You're turning from your sin.
You're resting in God. You're following Jesus' way. You're identifying with Christ, and you are trusting that grace will meet you somewhere in the water. And it may be that for you, one or two, maybe even remarkably all of those images are where you will encounter the divine. Because in the technical theological language, what we say is that baptism is a means of grace, not a source of grace.
And, what we're saying with this is that the sacraments being baptized, these moments can't create or manufacture. They can't bestow grace on anyone ever. But, they are liminal moments in which we encounter, experience, we offer ourselves to be touched by something divine. But, the question that often comes out of that statement is then, well, does that mean that if you're baptized, you get a jet out of jail free card? You're automatically saved now.
Or does that mean to be saved, you have to be baptized? Personally, not a particularly big fan of those questions or even that language in general, really. I have found that putting people into categories of saved or unsaved is not all that helpful in real life. I think we are all of us in the process of being saved every single day as grace weaves its way throughout our world. Some of us, we're just lucky enough to be aware of it as it happens.
But generally, no. Christians have not believed that baptism in and of itself can save anyone. However, almost all Christians, almost all Christian traditions do see baptism as an important part of a faithful response to Jesus' teaching and invitation. Mean, he tells us to be baptized, so we should probably do it eventually. The question then is, well, then when is eventually?
And that actually gets a little complicated. In the early church, there are some indications that baptism was held back, reserved for a period of learning and discernment. In the early third century, Hippolytus suggests that a minimum of three years must go by before a new convert is baptized. And this was likely done for the protection of that person. This was in the period where Christianity would probably not leave you in good standing with the Roman authorities.
And so it seems that the early church in those first few centuries was intent on protecting people from making rash decisions. Are you sure you wanna do this? It could have consequences for you. Maybe slow down, take your time, learn before you figuratively and, well, literally jump in. That's it.
In the scriptures themselves, we actually find a much more open posture to who should be baptized. For example, in the book of Acts chapter eight, Philip, one of the disciples, meets this Ethiopian man who happens to be riding by in a chariot, and Philip notices that he's reading the Hebrew prophets. So Philip runs after the chariot, tracks him down, says, hey. Do you know what's going on there? That that book is talking about Jesus.
This Ethiopian man is intrigued, so they walk together. And Philip explains things to him. And then in verse 36, the man says to him, look. Here's some water. What can stand in the way of me being baptized?
Philip says, nothing. Let's go for it. In another example, Paul is locked in this jail in Philippi, and there's this huge earthquake. It literally shakes the door off its hinges. And the jailer thinks, look.
I'm done for. Prisoners are gonna escape. My life will be on the hook for theirs. He's actually about to off himself when Paul calls out and says, don't hurt yourself. Don't harm yourself.
We're all still here. We're not going to let our good luck turn into your misfortune. And the jailer is mystified at this generosity. So Paul tells him the story of Jesus. And that night, the jailer and all of his household, which would have included not only his wife and children, but any slaves he might have had in his house, all of them were baptized.
And so, again, there's this very broad imagination for who deserves this kind of encounter with grace. Not even just those who've come to faith maybe, but maybe even anyone connected to them as well. Which is why in some traditions, children are not just dedicated, but baptized into the church. Trusting that grace is not just something we choose for ourselves, but something that comes to find us even through those that love us. And children or otherwise, I think that is undoubtedly true in my experience of God.
This is why if you've been around commons any length of time, you'll notice that we welcome all of it. We welcome families that choose to baptize their infants. We welcome families that choose to wait for when their children will decide for themselves to be baptized. All of it is grace. All of it has precedence in scripture.
And maybe like all of our sacraments, a little bit of open handed mystery is good for us to hang on to, which is what brings me now all the way back around to where we started today. This idea that perhaps like the adjectives we pile along to describe a thing, baptism is less about the rules we're taught, less about what you can articulate theologically or ecclesiologically, less even about the history behind it, and more about that long, slow, gentle way that even these practices weave themselves into our lives. Sometimes even in contradictory and yet still profoundly beautiful ways. See, it's good to talk about these things. And I think it's fun.
It's wonderful even to learn about the history and the images that undergird our practices. We even offer a baptism class to prepare you for what you're about to experience. But at some very important level, the meaning of your baptism will only begin to take shape as you start to play with the language that surrounds it. And you layer your own meanings, and you uncover the rules of grace that in the end don't really seem like rules at all. And if that sounds like where your story might be headed, then perhaps baptism is worth exploring.
Because maybe the rules that no one can teach you are actually starting to become part of your vocabulary now, and that is grace. Let's pray. God, thank you for these gifts. These sacraments where the distance between the spirit and our physical bodies seems very thin. Where things like grapes and bread, like water can become a means through which your grace and love that founded and created the universe actually comes down to touch us.
Thank you for these moments that really can't be taught, but are somehow experienced in our life together as community. May the mystery and the profound beauty of everything that you offer us in these practices connect us more deeply to your heart and the way of love that shapes our steps through the world. May that cause us to be more kind, more generous, more open to the stories that surround us each day. And, in that, might grace actually become the path that we walk. Not just here in church in these moments, but through each of our steps in this life.
In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Jeremy Duncan: Hey, Jeremy here and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.