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July 18, 2004
Why Baptism?
Why Baptism?
II Kings 5: 1-14 / Acts 16: 11-15
July 18th, 2004
I have been offering you a series of studies on the book of I Samuel. But this morning we interrupt this series to ask again, “Why Baptism?” Why will Scott and Irina bring little Valentina Marie to the font at the front of the church this morning for me to pour water three times on her little head? Irina was reared in the Russian Orthodox Church and I am glad to include elements of the way a Russian Orthodox priest would offer this Sacrament because this is a Sacrament of the Church and not just of a particular sector of the Church. But still, why Baptism?
At Faith Church we come from many church backgrounds. Some of you are from backgrounds where babies were not baptized but instead dedicated to the Lord publicly. Baptism was offered only when someone was old enough to decide he believed in Jesus. You bear with this difference of view with others here graciously.
Others of you were reared in a staunchly Reformed, or Catholic heritage where infant baptism was unquestionably the duty of Christian parents. Catholics don’t have the same thing in mind that Presbyterians do but both baptize babies. John Calvin taught the necessity of including children in the Covenant God made with believing parents. Did not Peter say at Pentecost after preaching the need for these new believers to be baptized, “This promise is to you and to your children?”
But not everyone is sure that when Peter said, “The promise is to your children,” that he meant they should have their children baptized. Since he said this to a Jewish audience who put on their baby boys the sign God gave to Abraham, the sign of circumcision, many of us believe a pattern was established for the people of God. God makes promises to families.
Spiritual nourishment is as important as physical nourishment. A baby’s physical nourishment begins with her mother’s milk. Her spiritual nourishment begins with baptism. She understands neither how the milk she craves nourishes her nor how this water she does not crave on her head will help her. We are more than bodies, and our children’s connection to us is more than physical. So we presume to think we do right to include our children not only at the dining room table before they understand the value of eating, but also at the table of the Lord, in the community of trust in God. The sign of entering this community is baptism. In the Orthodox Church this is emphasized even more vividly. Babies are fully immersed –– three times. Even baptized babies take Communion.
Whereas we “confirm” our baptism when we are young people, in the Orthodox Church confirmation happens immediately after a baby is baptized. The priest takes special ointment, the chrism, and makes the sign of the cross on several parts of the baby’s body saying, “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.” --on this and that part of your body. It all belongs to God.
After little Valentina is baptized she will receive a cross, a custom in the Orthodox Church that gives her a reminder that she belongs, body and soul, to Jesus. I’m glad to follow this custom today. She will wear it continually as a reminder of her baptism into Christ.
Some think it odd that in our modern day, when we think of ourselves as less superstitious than ancient peoples that we should keep on with these ancient acts, the Sacraments. Indeed, some people who believe in Jesus see little or no value in outward acts like this with symbolic meanings. What’s important is what goes on in your head and how you feel and behave, that’s all, they think. Yet we wear class rings, or wedding rings, and love the American flag, which are symbols with great meaning.
We define the Sacraments as outward signs of interior and invisible grace. The Latin word sacramentum stood for the loyalty oath of a Roman soldier to his superiors, but it came to be used in the Church for mystery. It is because the sacraments are enshrouded with some mystery that so many opinions have evolved about their significance. There are two sacraments we believe, the Eucharist or Lord's Supper, and Baptism.
The Lord’s Supper we take with the outward signs of bread and wine. We receive them with faith in our hearts as a moment of deliberate fellowship with Jesus. When we take the bread and wine we come as physically close to Jesus as it is possible to come, if we receive them by faith.
Baptism we receive with the outward sign of water. Scott and Irina believe in Jesus so that when the water is three times poured on their daughter’s head, they are as physically close to Pentecost as they can come. Pentecost was the day that the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised would come to His disciples, was poured out on them, their children and on those were far off—you and me. At every baptism we stand with Peter and the others at the first Pentecost, accepting the promise of the Holy Spirit. We place ourselves in the footsteps of the earliest Christians.
I chose two passages of Scripture for us to read and ponder this morning that have to do either with washing out of obedience to God or with baptism. The first passage tells of the Syrian general, Naaman, who was a great man in his country. Most recently his stature stood tall because the Lord gave him a win over Israel in battle. It seems odd to think that the Lord, the God of Israel gave him victory over Israel in battle, but this is what the Bible says. When he returned from his victory over Israel he brought with him a little Israeli girl to be his wife’s maid. Maybe this was the whole purpose of winning in battle with Israel, to get this little Israeli girl into his home, so he could come to trust in the Lord of heaven and earth. She was a missionary in Syria.
Naaman was a leper. Leprosy was a horrible disease. When his wife’s little Israeli maid heard that Naaman had leprosy, she told her mistress of a prophet in Samaria who could help. Samaria was another term for the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
So, Naaman went to his king and asked him to use his influence to secure the help of this Israelite prophet. The king sent Naaman down to Israel with a written document to the king of Israel asking him to heal Naaman. He also brought valuable gifts. The last king mentioned in II Kings just before this is Jehoram, son of the wicked King Ahab. He was just a bit better than his dad. This may explain why the king responded as he did when he got the letter from the King of Syria.
Remember that the king of Syria had just got through drubbing Israel in battle so there was probably not much good will in the mind of Israel’s king towards the king of Syria. King Jehoram was afraid too. This is why Naaman came bearing expensive presents to Israel’s king–– not just to butter him up, but to relieve his fears.
Now the kings of Israel knew there was a lot of power in the hands of the true prophets—like Elijah and his successor, Elisha. So King Jehoram might have thought that here was a chance to kill two birds with one stone. He could have negotiated with the King of Syria, getting him to give back all that he had taken in his raids and make him promise never to bother Israel again. Then he could tell Elisha, “Please do your country a favor and heal Naaman, the Syrian general.”
But King Jehoran wasn’t very swift. Instead, he wrung his hands and said, “I can’t heal anyone. The Syrian king is trying to pick a fight.” Fortunately Elisha the prophet heard about this. He sent to King Jehoram and said, “Send Naaman to me.” So Naaman came with an impressive retinue of horsemen and charioteers to Elisah’s front door. Probably the prophet lived in a humble shack off in the country. The prophet didn’t even bother to come to the door when Naaman showed up. Instead, he told his servant to go to the door and tell the Syrian general, “Go wash in the Jordan seven times and you will get well.”
This was not exactly what Naaman thought Elisha would do. After all, he, Naaman, was the Chief-of-Staff of the mighty Syrian army. He expected Elisha to come humbly to the door, bow, make a religious gesture, mutter some magic words, and heal him. But he said, “Go wash in the Jordan River.” Naaman protested, “There are a lot better rivers at home.” He went away angry.
As he went away his servants asked him to reconsider. “Supposing he’d asked you to do something difficult, wouldn’t you have done it? If he’d told you, ‘Go, climb a high mountain, or cross a wide sea,’ wouldn’t you have done it? Give it a try. Do as he said.” So Naaman did as his servants suggested. He went and dipped seven times in the Jordan River. And wouldn’t you know it, he looked at his skin after the seventh time and saw that it looked perfectly normal.
I’ll leave the rest of the story for you to think about because this is enough to make the point I hope we will see. There was apparently no connection between the muddy waters of the Jordan River and a cure for leprosy. People with leprosy in Israel did not routinely come to the Jordan for a cure the way you might go to French Lick to soak in the hot springs to help your arthritis. But there was a distinct connection between obeying God’s command even in an apparently pointless way like this and receiving God’s touch. In Naaman’s case it was a healing touch.
God was teaching this non-Jewish man a lesson of the mysterious connection between obedience to God and enjoying His blessing. It was humbling to Naaman, a Syrian general to be asked to bathe in the murky water of Israel’s main river. It was humbling to submit to this mysterious command because he, like us, liked his medicine to make sense. But God had in mind more than to heal his leprosy. God taught him to trust in Him as he saw this sign of God’s power and care for him.
The second story we have read is shorter and less complicated. The Apostle Paul went to the Gangas River in the Macedonian city of Philippi on the Sabbath day because there was no synagogue in the city. It was the custom for Jews to gather at the river if there was no synagogue in which to pray on the Sabbath. Only women apparently came that morning. Paul sat and spoke to them of Jesus. One of the women was named Lydia, a "worshipper of God," which probably means she was not a Jew but worshipped God as she learned of Him from the Jews. She was a wealthy merchant from Thyatira in Turkey. Paul must have explained that Jesus had said, “Believe and be baptized and you will be saved.” So she was baptized with her household. She invited Paul to come as a guest to her home. He did so. That’s the full story.
The point we are to notice in this story was that Lydia asked for baptism and she and her household were baptized because Paul thought her faithful to the Lord, that is, that her trust in Jesus, though it began only that morning, was real. We assume all these details of her state of mind and heart because all we know is that she and her household were baptized.
I picture her going back to her house and rounding up her children, and even her servants—because these were all members of her household. Luke doesn't tell us if she had a husband. Perhaps she was a widow and now was head of her household. She said to her household, “Come by the riverside.” They came. We wonder how old the members of the family were. We know so little, and Luke doesn’t seem to care that we know so little. After all the operations of grace on us are mysterious.
Lydia knew about circumcision, a sign that was placed on little Jewish boys at eight days of age. And she would have known of the Jewish custom of washing in the mikvah, the little pool attached to a synagogue where women and men went for ceremonial cleansing. But the very idea of baptism must have been totally new to her.
Indeed, it was new from what we can tell since the days of John the Baptist who used water as a sign of cleansing of past sin to begin the process of repentance. Baptism became the sign of repentance and believing the Gospel. When Paul told her of Jesus, her heart was touched, and she didn’t ask that there be a perfectly reasonable explanation of the meaning of Baptism. She submitted to it as part of the mystery of receiving the grace of God.
Can you picture the Apostle Paul dipping her three times in the Gangas River. A well to do woman, she probably was neatly dressed, her hair well coifed. She came out dripping wet, her hair a mess, but with the wonderful sense that she’d done something that was like opening herself up with a funnel for the Holy Spirit of God to come into her.
Probably her home became the place where the growing body of baptized people, Jews and God-fearing Gentiles, first met to take the Lord’s Supper each week in Philippi.
Soon after this Paul and Silas aroused antagonism in the city that resulted in their being beaten badly and thrown in a dungeon. After the Lord wonderfully prompted their release and the conversion of the jailor, they resumed their visit in this newly-born community of faith.
After Paul’s trying and painful episode with the authorities of Philippi was over, he probably took someone from this new fellowship and taught him all that was needful to know about Jesus and how to live for Him. He then appointed this person as pastor. This new Christian would offer Communion on Sunday morning, remind everyone of the basic facts of Jesus for them to share with others, and baptize new believers. And thus the church was planted at Philippi.
But we come back to the question, why was Baptism essential to becoming a follower of Jesus? At Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the little band of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem, Peter passed along Jesus’ message to those who heard and responded to his long address to the Jewish people who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate this second feast in their sacred calendar. Jesus had told His disciples to baptize and teach those who received the Gospel and took it to heart.
It would seem that Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, had “made up” baptism as an object lesson to drive home the message he preached. John told the many people who came to hear him talk to turn from their wicked ways and live righteous lives. The sign of giving up their past ways of life that John used was to wash them publicly.
Paul taught us that “if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation, the old is gone, the new has come.” So baptism was a fit sign of getting rid of the old and starting anew.
But Baptism also tied into details of God’s ways in the past. Baptism is always done with water. Water not only reminds us of cleansing, it also reminds us of how God "washed away" sin with water and saved His people using water in the past. In the days of Noah God got rid of a sinful generation of people by "washing them" away in the Great Flood. When Israel came out of Egypt he rescued them by opening the water for them to pass through the Red Sea, and then delivered them by having the water drown the soldiers who were chasing them. And God healed the Syrian general, Naaman, you remember, by having him dip seven times in the Jordan River.
Water is the most essential element needed by the body. We can get along without eating much longer than we can get along without drinking water. Perhaps it is because of this elemental importance of water to our physical bodies that God chose water as the sign of bringing health to us spiritually. Even though we don’t understand it, we accept this teaching God offers us the way a child accepts what mother and dad teach her. You take your little girl to wash her hands before lunch and she can’t figure out why, but she trusts you, and thus, after doing this mysterious hand-wetting she can eat her lunch. And thus we do as God tells us. We baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Jesus did not command us specifically to do many things. He told us to trust in Him, to love, to forgive, and to serve. And He told us to take Communion and to Baptize new believers. Equipped with these general commands we have all we need if our hearts are fixed on Jesus. If our hearts are not fixed on Jesus then these general commands won’t be important to us. But if we have come to Jesus in faith and realize that this faith takes in all of life for us, then Jesus’ wish becomes our command. When we are determined to obey Jesus, following His sometimes practical and sometimes mysterious commands is all we need to know.
We will give to God’s servant, Valentina Marie, the sacred sign of welcome into the faith of her parents and of this community. Let us then surround her with reminders of faithfulness, so that she will cherish the day in which she was baptized. And she will become one with us as a community that will welcome others too to follow Jesus and enjoy His salvation. Your faithfulness and mine is important for her to experience what Jesus has in mind in calling her to follow Him even before she knows the word, “Jesus.”
Valentina is baptized today. After today we will teach her by word and example how to follow Jesus. Let's do it well.
Let us pray: O Lord, we thank you for the mysterious kindness of your ways, blessing us physically and in our depths, our hearts. Help us to receive your grace with thankful hearts and to live richly in your ways. Through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at July 18, 2004 09:30 AM